Howie Liu: Building Airtable to Feel Magical

**Howie Liu** (0:00)
We made Airtable into an extra colorful product. You know, the colors were embedded into the functionality, like the rich field types, like the colorful drop downs. Like we use that to really visually show, like this is different from what you get.

**Mike Maples** (0:15)
That's Howie Liu, best known as the founder of Airtable, the platform that made databases feel like apps that anybody could use. Long before product-led growth became a buzzword, Howie and his co-founders poured themselves into creating a product so intuitive and distinct that users didn't ask what's different about this. They just felt the magic instantly and wanted to share it with others. This is Mike Maples Jr of Floodgate, and it's go time with Howie Liu. This is Mike Maples Jr, and welcome to the Pattern Breakers podcast, where we explore why some founders radically change the future and how they stand apart. Together we'll learn about the counter-intuitive mindsets and actions behind their remarkable success. Brace yourself for a world where chaos is welcome, naysayers are often a positive signal, and movements galvanize misfits who transform the impossible to the inevitable.
Beneath the surface of the simple and highly intuitive Airtable user experience was a deeper insight. Spreadsheets were originally designed for finance people. Yet millions of people now were tweaking them in thousands of different ways to do just about everything else, from project management to content calendars to recipes, even travel itineraries. So Howie Liu and his co-founders spent two years designing a product that made the transition from a spreadsheet to a hybrid database feel obviously valuable in less than 30 seconds. And it worked. In the crowded world, especially now in this AI era, where every new product fights for attention, showing your insight, your real difference with real product and quickly has become vital for achieving breakthrough success. If you want to stand alone, it helps if your difference is viscerally felt instantly. Let's talk to them. Howie Liu, welcome to the podcast.

**Howie Liu** (2:33)
Excited to be here.

**Mike Maples** (2:34)
You know, Airtable wasn't your first rodeo. Why don't we start there? Let's start before the beginning. How did you get into startups, and what did you learn from your early startup experiences leading up to Airtable?

**Howie Liu** (2:47)
I mean, I think I just always really loved computers, the internet, the idea of like, wow, there's just so much out there. And anyone could go and participate, right? The fan sites at the time was into Pokemon, and so on, and like anyone could go and make stuff and like put it out there and even like, you know, monetize it. Like, I built like a first website, I think in junior high or so, LearnHTML, and like, I mean, it was a silly like fan site, probably for Pokemon. I just remember those early experiences feeling so empowering that like, you know, here I was, I didn't have like a ton of resources, didn't have capital, and yeah, I could create something of value. And like, it just all you had, all you needed was an idea and time. And like, I had both of those. And then fast forward into like, you know, high school, college, taught myself how to do real programming, you know, 5 through like 2009 That's when I was in college. And I would call that kind of maybe like, either right before Web 2 or right in the like early innings of Web 2.0. And it just felt very exciting because like there, you know, it was like a new form of product value that you could create with like an emerging technology. And like at that point I was like, okay, I think I'm going to learn the skills to go and build value like this. I have the time still and sweat, like still no capital.
But then the bottleneck became like finding a good idea, right? And it turns out when you're in college, like, you know, most of the problems that are proximal to you are college student problems, right? Like, how do I find a sublet? How do I find roommates? And like, in hindsight, like, these were like fairly small problems. And so I think early on in this journey, I kind of realized like a big part of, you know, entrepreneurship has to be like finding a good problem to work on that's like worthy of like your time and frankly, like the employees or VCs that you'll eventually attract. It wasn't until after I graduated that I landed on the first problem that I kind of felt was actually worthy of going full time on. And that was the idea for eTax, Contacts with an E. And it was basically like a CRM like product that would pull in your emails. And we even like built a scraper for AT&T and Verizon and T-Mobile to like grab your like phone calls and text history and automatically show you this kind of evergreen dashboard of everyone you had talked to. So if you're a VC, for instance, you could say like, oh, like, when's that last time I caught up with so-and-so entrepreneur or like, what are my notes from the last time we talked? You know, that felt like a big enough problem and something that like I had experienced firsthand moving out to the Bay Area and like interning briefly at a, you know, a different tech startup, like seeing firsthand like maybe there's a need for professionals to have a tool like that. Okay.