No Priors Ep. 73 | With Airtable co-founder and CEO Howie Liu

(instrumental music plays) Hi, listeners. Welcome to No Priors. Today, we're talking to Howie Lu, the co-founder and CEO of Airtable, which now serves a half million organizations around the world, including folks such as Scale, Benchling, Adobe, Riot Games, Amazon, and Pottery Barn. Recently, Airtable launched a suite of AI features. We're really excited to have Howie on to discuss the state of low code and no code AI tools, how he's transformed the business over the last few years, and what's happening generally in enterprise AI. Welcome, Howie.

Thank you. Excited to be here.

Most of our users know what Airtable is, but for anybody who's a new, uh, what does Airtable do and where'd the idea come from?

You know, Airtable's been around for a little over 10 years, and we launched in 2015, uh, spent two and a half years building the product before then. But for the people who, who knew of Airtable back then, I think, you know, you, you probably would say Airtable is like a spreadsheet on steroids or a really awesome productivity tool, and I think those were, were true statements. But what we've always been underneath the hood is a true app platform that just happened to be really, really easy to use. So, we kind of cut across different categories. Um, you know, there's the low code app platform category that preexisted us, filled with pretty complicated platforms, um, required actually a fair amount of technical expertise. You had collaboration tools like Trello and then later like Asana and so on, um, that were very easy to use, but were more project management centric. And so we kind of came in and did something in between, which is give people the ability to build real apps with a real relational data structure, you know, logic and, uh, automations and then interfaces, um, but did it in a way that was so much easier to use that it doesn't look like your traditional app platforms. And, um, I got the idea basically by working at Salesforce. Um, I, you know, had a, a very small company before then, a startup that was acquired by Salesforce, and working within, um, their company, you know, just all the power of the platform model, right? Um, you know, realized that Salesforce didn't win all these CRM use cases because they had just built all the features for CRM, but really because they had created a platform that could be customized for every customer's needs. And so, you know, coming out of that, I really wanted to apply that concept but democratize it and, and sort of make a, a much more accessible app platform that could really open up apps to many more people, citizen developers, um, and use cases than, you know, had been possible before.

So, very strong conventional wisdom, uh, in Silicon Valley will say, like, "Build a killer app, not a platform."

(laughs)