Howie Liu - Building Airtable

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
This episode is brought to you by Tegus, where we're changing the game in investment research. Step away from outdated, inefficient methods and into the future with our platform, proudly hosting over 100,000 transcripts with over 25,000 transcripts added just this year alone.
What sets Tegus apart? It's not just the sheer volume, it's the unmatched speed at which our library expands, consistently outstripping competitors. Our platform grows eight times faster and adds twice as much monthly content as our competitors, putting us at the forefront of the industry. Our collection is investor led, ensuring unparalleled quality and giving you access to questions and topics investors care most about. Plus with 75% of private market transcripts available exclusively on Tegus, we offer insights you can't find elsewhere. Forget the traditional way of doing things, with Tegus you have the most comprehensive, insightful and rapidly growing transcript library at your fingertips. See the difference that a vast, quality driven transcript library makes. Unlock your free trial at tegus.com/patrick.
You may have heard me reference the idea of maniacs on a mission and how much that idea excites me. Well, David Senra is my favorite maniac on one of my favorite missions with his weekly crafting of the Founders Podcast. Through studying the lives of legends, he weaves together insights across history to distill ideas that you can use in your work.
Founders reveals tried and true tactics, battle tested by the world's icons and has David's infectious energy to accompany them. With well over 300 episodes, your heroes are surely in the lineup and his recent episode on Oprah is particularly great. Founders is a movement that you don't want to miss. It's part of the Colossus Network and you can find your way to David's great podcast in the show notes.
Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. Invest Like the Best is part of the Colossus family of podcasts and you can access all our podcasts, including edited transcripts, show notes and other resources to keep learning at joincolossus.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:07)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of PositiveSum. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of PositiveSum. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of PositiveSum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit PSUMVC.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:36)
My guest today is Howie Liu. Howie is the co-founder and CEO of Airtable, a no-code app platform that allows teams to build on top of their shared data and create productive workflows. The business began in 2013 and now has use cases built out for over 300,000 organizations. As Airtable begins to integrate AI and the latest LLMs into its product, Howie has maintained a focus on an intuitive building experience, allowing anyone to build out their workflow within minutes or hours. We discussed the future of the platform in the era of AI, perspective on horizontal versus vertical software solutions, and his crucial moments as a leader. Please enjoy this discussion with Howie Liu.
You have this really interesting perspective in that you're an established large company, but you're not some massive fang stock. So you can move very fast still, but you also have a good amount of distribution and a brand and a workflow tool that's been used for a long time. How are you approaching both, I guess, the risk and the opportunity of this insane new technology into an established startup that when you started it, this stuff didn't exist, you couldn't use it. Now you can.
What is your strategy and thinking for using this rather than getting killed by it?

**Howie Liu** (3:49)
Yeah, well, I think you're exactly right. We have to be as scrappy as the smallest startups. If you're a big, big, big company like the Fangs, if you're Microsoft, you make these multi-year bets on this. You can afford to be a few years late, but you're going to have such a distribution advantage by the end of it that even if you build not that great of a product and it's a little late, you'll still be able to win a lot of market share. I think for us, we're somewhere in between. And I think we do have an existing distribution base. I would say that's a big advantage. We have more than half the Fortune 500 as paying customers of some kind. We have around 100,000 total paid customers when you include the SMB self-serve stuff and probably hundreds of thousands more organizations that use Airtable for free. So that's a pretty sizable distribution base versus a net new startup coming into the space. I would also say for us, the advantage of having actually a platform.