Lessons from Howie Liu

Howie Liu is the co-founder and CEO of Airtable.

On Vision and Mission

"We wanted to democratize software creation." [1]
- Learning: Liu's foundational vision for Airtable was to empower a new generation of builders within every company by breaking down powerful business apps into accessible building blocks. [1]
"You should be able to have control over your own software and make it work the way you want." [2]
- Learning: The core belief driving Airtable is that software should be adaptable to the user's specific needs, not the other way around. [2]
"This is a $100 billion-plus revenue opportunity." [3]
- Learning: Liu believes that becoming the central repository for operational business data creates a massive opportunity to build an ecosystem and become a major platform, similar to how app stores function. [3]
"We weren't just replicating existing products, but creating something new and truly original. That required us to value open-ended, imaginative thinking." [4]
- Learning: Airtable's success is rooted in its commitment to innovation and creating a new category of software, rather than just improving on existing solutions. [4]

On Product and Strategy

"The devil was completely in the details here." [1]
- Learning: For a product as ambitious as Airtable, flawless execution and attention to detail in the product's development were paramount from the very beginning. [1]
"I think of the answer on time horizons... if you're really good at holding this pace and just having this deliberate focus on being a horizontal platform... I think in the long term you have more durable advantages." [2]
- Learning: While being a horizontal platform presents initial challenges, it offers greater long-term durability and a larger market to grow into compared to a niche product. [2]
"The starting thesis that you have for a product then often creates a self-fulfilling prophecy." [5][6]
- Learning: The initial design and functionality of a product will naturally attract users who find it suitable for those purposes, reinforcing the product's direction. [5][6]
"It was really really important that Airtable felt as easy to use as a spreadsheet." [7]
- Learning: To encourage adoption, Airtable was intentionally designed to be as approachable and familiar as a spreadsheet, including features like copy-pasting data directly from Excel or Google Sheets. [7]
"We're not just a shallow kind of layer of collaboration. We're not just kind of a narrow point solution. We're really kind of a platform that is serving these pretty important use cases, often powering the very operations that matter most to these companies or teams." [1]
- Learning: Airtable's value lies in its depth and its ability to become a system of record for critical business operations. [1]
"Move Slow and Make Things." [3]
- Learning: In contrast to the "move fast and break things" mantra, Liu and Airtable took a deliberate, multi-year approach to building their product before launching, emphasizing substance over speed. [3][8]
"It was a good thing that we took three years to build the product and launch it. We're very intentional about our early days, product-market fit finding before we turned on the gas of let's scale this up." [5][6]
- Learning: Patiently and methodically finding product-market fit before scaling is a crucial strategy for long-term success. [5][6]

On AI and the Future

"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?" [9][10]
- Learning: In the age of AI, companies must be willing to fundamentally rethink their products and strategies from the ground up, rather than simply adding AI features to existing structures. [9][10]
"The humans who harness AI will outperform humans who don't use it." [11]
- Learning: Liu predicts that AI will be a transformative tool, and those who adopt it will have a significant advantage. [11]
"If you're not using Claude/ChatGPT multiple times per hour, you're already behind." [9]
- Learning: As a leader, deep, hands-on engagement with AI is non-negotiable to understand its capabilities and lead effectively. [9]
"You have to be in the details... it's actually understanding like what is the right product experience and the right business model that backs it up... to take advantage of the capabilities." [10]
- Learning: To succeed with AI, leaders can't just have a high-level view; they must be deeply involved in shaping the product and business model to leverage the new technology. [10]
"I think you need to get decently good at all three [product, engineering, design]." [9]
- Learning: The rise of AI is causing product roles to converge, requiring individuals to become more multidisciplinary. [9]

On Leadership and Entrepreneurship

"I think you have to have this perfect balance of naivety... yet pragmatism." [5][6]
- Learning: Founders need the audacity to believe they can challenge giants, combined with a strategic and realistic approach to finding and exploiting market weaknesses. [5][6]
"Entrepreneurship by its very nature is anything but linear. If it was so linear, everybody else would be doing it." [12]
- Learning: The entrepreneurial journey is about navigating uncertainty and finding hidden opportunities through constant experimentation, much like playing Jenga. [12]
"If your passion is building product, don't let anyone convince you that being a 'real' CEO means stopping that." [9]
- Learning: Liu learned that delegating the work he was most passionate about made him and the company less effective. Founder-CEOs should lean into their unique strengths. [9]
"I'm always very direct about the work." [1]
- Learning: Liu advocates for "radical candor" or "brutal directness" focused on the work itself, not as a personal attack, to foster a high-performing culture. [1][8]
"The job I've played has changed at every phase because the need of the company has changed." [1]
- Learning: A CEO's role must evolve with the company's needs, from focusing on product-market fit to growth marketing and team building. [1]
"It's a constant learning exercise." [1]
- Learning: Liu views the evolution of his skills as a CEO, from product development to management, not as innate talents but as a continuous process of learning and adaptation. [1]
"Going public isn't the ultimate success marker; it's about building a solid operation and product first." [8]
- Learning: The primary focus should be on creating a fundamentally strong business and product, not on external validation like an IPO. [8]

On Company Culture and Growth

"We started with a lot more conviction of here's the opportunity almost like create effectively a business plan and a road map." [13]
- Learning: Applying the lessons from his first startup, Liu approached Airtable with a more deliberate and strategic plan from the outset. [13]
"We've always raised an abundance of money... We see the dilution as a form of buying insurance." [3]
- Learning: Liu's fundraising strategy has been to secure ample capital to ensure the company's long-term viability and ability to weather challenges. [3]
"Successful companies don't just see sales and product development as two tracks running parallel; they're intertwined, each feeding into and boosting the other to create a more substantial business." [8]
- Learning: Product-led growth and sales are not mutually exclusive but should be integrated to drive overall business success. [8]
"When you implement AI, you need to build a culture that embraces it internally." [11]
- Learning: Successful AI adoption requires fostering a culture of experimentation and learning, which at Airtable has included internal hackathons and appointing "AI ambassadors." [11]
"You have to develop a value proposition that's more than just 'people like it.'" [11]
- Learning: As a company scales, its sales strategy must evolve from fulfilling existing demand to strategically positioning the product as a critical solution for executives. [11]
"There is a mindset that people in the middle of the country don't have the desire or the intelligence to use technology—it's so patronizing." [3]
- Learning: Liu strongly believes in the universal potential for people to use technology to solve their own problems, a belief that counters Silicon Valley elitism. [3]
"We have a very clear point of view of what layer of the AI stack we want to play in." [14]
- Learning: Airtable's AI strategy is focused on application and user experience, leveraging existing AI models rather than building their own from scratch. [14]
"Being able to learn very quickly and scale up that process... becomes one of the most important core competencies as the landscape evolves." [5][13]
- Learning: In a rapidly changing world, the ability to learn and adapt quickly is more important than just scaling revenue. [5][13]
"I think to me, it's not like there's something more innate about a founder who understands product versus a founder who then has to figure out how to like, recruit and manage people. I think they're all learnable skills." [1]
- Learning: The different skills required at various stages of a company's growth are all learnable, and a founder's role is to continuously learn and adapt. [1]
"We have to think about that way of integrating AI into our own product experience and changing kind of the the user experience around it but separately... the biggest thing that we're excited about is our opportunity to make it possible for our customers to build AI apps." [7]
- Learning: Airtable's AI strategy is two-fold: enhancing its own product with AI and, more importantly, empowering its users to build their own AI-powered applications. [7]
"Cancel all your meetings for a week and just play with AI tools. Tell them I said to do it." [9]
- Learning: Liu encourages his team to engage in unstructured, curiosity-driven exploration of new AI tools as a primary way to learn and understand what's possible. [9]
"Product market fit always... comes from identifying real customer pain or opportunity and delivering real value to customers." [1]
- Learning: The foundation of any sustainable business is a deep understanding of customer problems and delivering tangible value. [1]
"It's not about being inhumane, it's not about like insulting someone. Like, I never want to come from a place of like wanting to negatively impact the person. I'm always very direct about the work, right." [1]
- Learning: Effective direct feedback is about critically evaluating the work, not the person, with the goal of improvement. [1]
"We've deputized people across the company to be what we're calling AI ambassadors." [11]
- Learning: To drive AI adoption internally, Airtable identifies and empowers the most AI-savvy individuals in each department to lead the charge. [11]
"You have to find something that is big enough and where you have some differentiated ability to to win that space." [15]
- Learning: A successful startup idea needs to address a large market and have a unique advantage or approach that allows it to succeed. [15]
"We're in a really great position to execute with the long-term game in mind." [15]
- Learning: Having a strong financial position allows the company to make disciplined, long-term investments to win its category, rather than optimizing for short-term results. [15]
"We restructured Airtable into 'fast thinking' and 'slow thinking' teams." [9]
- Learning: Inspired by Daniel Kahneman, this organizational structure allows Airtable to ship new AI features weekly ("fast thinking") while also making deliberate, long-term infrastructure bets ("slow thinking"). [9]
"The software serves as a blank canvas for whatever a company needs. That's extremely powerful." [3]
- Learning: The power of a platform like Airtable lies in its flexibility and adaptability, allowing users to create solutions for a vast array of needs. [3]
"Anything sustainable always comes from identifying real customer pain or opportunity and delivering real value to customers." [1]
- Learning: Sustainable business success is fundamentally rooted in solving genuine customer problems. [1]
"It's not enough to have a great product; you've got to communicate its necessity and uniqueness in the marketplace." [8]
- Learning: Strong market positioning and clear communication of a product's value are as important as the product itself. [8]
"We have more than enough cash to take us to profitability. And so we can be in control of our destiny." [15]
- Learning: Financial discipline and a strong balance sheet provide the autonomy to navigate market downturns and control the company's future without being dependent on external factors. [15]
"I think you actually have to take a clean slate approach to saying like how would our mission best be expressed." [10]
- Learning: True innovation, especially in the AI era, requires a willingness to start from scratch and question all existing assumptions about your product and mission. [10]
"It's really a rapid application development platform." [16]
- Learning: This is how Liu positions Airtable today, emphasizing its evolution from a "spreadsheet on steroids" to a complete and easy-to-use app builder. [16]
"We're really focused on raising the ceiling." [16]
- Learning: While maintaining ease of use for individuals, Airtable's strategic focus is on increasing the platform's power and scalability to serve the largest enterprises. [16]
"Our unique approach has always been having a really really low floor like very easy to get started... and also a very high ceiling." [17]
- Learning: Airtable's core design philosophy is to be accessible for simple tasks while also being powerful enough to scale into production-level applications. [17]
"We will be a winner in this new world order. If I didn't believe that, I would probably have explored options for a sale." [14]
- Learning: Liu's conviction in Airtable's ability to succeed in the AI era is the driving force behind its continued independence and ambitious product development. [14]
"At that time Microsoft was the company, and Bill Gates was the richest person in the world. I probably read four biographies about him." [3]
- Learning: Early inspiration from figures like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, instilled by his mother, played a significant role in shaping Liu's entrepreneurial ambitions from a young age. [3]

Learn more:

Lessons from Howie Liu

On Vision and Mission

On Product and Strategy

On AI and the Future

On Leadership and Entrepreneurship

On Company Culture and Growth

Written by Antoine Buteau

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