Low-Code in the Age of AI and Going Enterprise, with Howie Liu from Airtable

**Sarah Guo** (0:05)
Hi, listeners, welcome to No Priors. Today we're talking to Howie Liu, 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 Powdery Bar.
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.

**Howie Liu** (0:31)
Thank you. Excited to be here.

**Sarah Guo** (0:33)
Most of our users know what Airtable is, but for anybody who's new, what does Airtable do and where'd the idea come from?

**Howie Liu** (0:40)
You know, Airtable's been around for a little over 10 years, and we launched in 2015, spent two and a half years building the product before then. But for the people who knew of Airtable back then, I think you probably would say Airtable is like a spreadsheet on steroids or a really awesome productivity tool.
And I think those 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. You know, there's the low-code app platform category that pre-existed us, filled with pretty complicated platforms and required actually a fair amount of technical expertise. You had collaboration tools like Trello and then later like Asana and so on 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, logic and automations and then interfaces, but did it in a way that was so much easier to use that it doesn't look like your traditional app platforms. And I got the idea basically by working at Salesforce.
I had a very small company before then at startup that was acquired by Salesforce and working within their company, just all the power of the platform model, right? 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 coming out of that, I really wanted to apply that concept, but democratize it and sort of make a much more accessible app platform that could really open up apps to many more people, citizen developers and use cases than had been possible before.

**Sarah Guo** (2:19)
So very strong conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley will say like build a killer app, not a platform.
So like, you know, why doesn't it apply here? Why did Airtable work as a platform from the beginning?

**Elad Gil** (2:29)
And I hate to interrupt by the way, but I've known Howie from his first company. And when he was starting Airtable, we met and he walked me through this and all the applications and the ability to have different verticalized applications and to build apps. And I remember thinking that's crazy. This is gonna be so hard. It's impossible to do as a startup. And of course he pulled it off, which is amazing.
So I think to Sarah's point, you really beat conventional wisdom and you did something really outstanding in terms of building out this broader, this broader platform.

**Sarah Guo** (3:01)
You know, actually now I'm just gonna interrupt you one more time because it is, we want the answer by the way, but it is quite funny. I was on a blow up a friend in common that I'm sure Elad knows too, Eric from Open Door.
And he was also, we were talking about Angel Messaging at some point. And he was just like, I really didn't think this thing was gonna work. Like it was so poorly scoped, but like how he seemed good. And so, you know, it's a little bit unbelievable.

**Howie Liu** (3:33)
I don't think, you know, it turned out, you know, you weren't wrong. Anyway, like it did turn out to be hard in many ways.
I think a few things that we had going for us. One is, you know, we did have an existing product and paradigm to sort of compare ourselves to, which is spreadsheets, right? So everybody has used spreadsheets at this point. I mean, it's like the most prolific app building platform out there.
And I think the fact that now we're how many decades in, like four decades in to, you know, the usage of spreadsheets, I mean, they were one of the first core applications for all computers. And maybe at that time, it was like kind of a mind blowing paradigm, like, oh, wow, you have like all these cells, you can do whatever you want, you can model any data, but, you know, four decades in, I think the spreadsheet products have paid the cost of going through that steady march of kind of, you know, creating a new category, right? And getting people to be familiar with it, such that by the time we came in, you know, we made a really intentional set of design choices to make Airtable as approachable and sometimes like literally feel like a spreadsheet. So that was super important because a lot of the no-code app builders before us or even alongside us had, you know, a different layout, right? They would make you go and like define the database schema in one interface that would look more like a data modeling thing or maybe like define form-based layouts and that kind of thing.