Keep pulling the thread on Howie Liu.
Airtable CEO Howie Liu believes the company must be "radically refounded" and change its core operations to succeed in the AI era.
Airtable reached a valuation of approximately $12 billion during the COVID-era funding boom.
Airtable conducted two rounds of layoffs that reduced its headcount from a peak of 1,280 employees to approximately 600.
Howie Liu believes the rise of agentic AI that can build applications poses a potential existential threat to the traditional no-code market.
Airtable has redesigned its product to make a conversational, chat-based interface the default and primary method of user interaction.
Airtable has launched a new, comprehensive AI agent named "Omni" that is central to its new conversational product experience.
Airtable is used by over 500,000 organizations globally.
Howie Liu's first company was acqui-hired by Salesforce after growing to a team of four people.
Howie Liu personally made a low seven-figure amount from the Salesforce acqui-hire of his first company.
Both Airtable and Figma took over two years to develop their initial products before launching publicly.
Howie Liu identifies "vibe coding" products like Replit, V0, and Lovable as the most interesting companies to watch in the current AI-native development space.
Howie Liu predicts an eventual convergence between agentic app-building experiences and the structured application capabilities provided by Airtable.