How we restructured Airtable's entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO)

If you were literally founding a new company from scratch with the same mission, how would you execute on that mission using a fully AI native approach? If you can't, then just find a buyer. And then if you really care about this mission, like, go and start the next incarnation of it.

For people that work for you, how have you adjusted what you expect of them to help them be successful?

If you wanna cancel all your meetings for, like, a day or for an entire week and just go play around with every AI product that you think could be relevant to Airtable, go do it.

Of the different functions on a product team, PM, engineering, design, who has had the most success being more productive with these tools?

It really does become more about individual attitude. There's a strong advantage to any of those three roles who can kind of cross over into the other two. As a PM, you need to start looking more like a hybrid PM prototyper who has some good design sensibilities.

Do you see one of these roles being more in trouble than others? Today, my guest is Howie Liu. Howie is the co-founder and CEO of Airtable. I'm having a bunch of conversations on this podcast with founders who are reinventing their decade-plus-old business in this AI era to help you navigate this existential transition that every company and product is going through right now. Howie and Airtable's journey is an incredible example of this, and there's so much to learn from what Howie shares in this conversation. We talk about a very interesting trend that I've noticed that Howie is very much an example of, of CEOs almost becoming individual contributors again, getting into the code, building things, leading initiatives themselves. There's something that we call the ICCEO. We also talk about the very specific skills that he believes product managers and product leaders, also engineers and designers, need to build to do well in this new world that we're in. Also, how he restructured his company into two groups, a fast-thinking group and a slow-thinking group, which allowed their AI investments to significantly accelerate. If you're struggling to figure out how to be successful in this new AI era, this episode is for you. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. Also, if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of 15 incredible products, including Lovable, Replit, Bolt, n8n, Linear, Superhuman, Descript, Whisperflow, Gamma, Perplexity, Warp, Granola, Magic Patterns, Raycast, ChatBRD, and Mobit. Check it out, lennysnewsletter.com and click Product Pass. With that, I bring you Howie Liu. This episode is brought to you by Lucidlink, the storage collaboration platform. You've built a great product, but how you show it through video, design, and storytelling is what brings it to life. If your team works with large media files, videos, design assets, layered project files, you know how painful it can be to stay organized across locations. Files live in different places. You're constantly asking, "Is this the latest version?" Creative work slows down while people wait for files to transfer. Lucidlink fixes this. It gives your team a shared space in the cloud that works like a local drive. Files are instantly accessible from anywhere. No downloading, no syncing, and always up-to-date. That means producers, editors, designers, and marketers can open massive files in their native apps, work directly from the cloud, and stay aligned wherever they are. Teams at Adobe, Shopify, and top creative agencies use Lucidlink to keep their content engine running fast and smooth. Try it for free at lucidlink.com/lenny. That's L-U-C-I-D-L-I-N-k.com/lenny. Today's episode is brought to you by DX, the developer intelligence platform designed by leading researchers. To thrive in the AI era, organizations need to adapt quickly. But many organization leaders struggle to answer pressing questions like, which tools are working? How are they being used? What's actually driving value? DX provides the data and insights that leaders need to navigate this shift. With DX, companies like Dropbox, Booking.com, Adyen, and Intercom get a deep understanding of how AI is providing value to their developers and what impact AI is having on engineering productivity. To learn more, visit DX's website at getdx.com/lenny. That's getdx.com/lenny. Howie, thank you so much for being here, and welcome to the podcast.