Full Transcript

Darren [00:00:01]:
Hi everyone. Welcome to another episode of One of One. My guest today is Howie Liu, Founder and CEO of Airtable. In our conversation, Howie talks about his initial mission at the founding of Airtable to democratize software creation. He shares his journey over the past 12 years and how each phase of that journey required an evolution in his leadership. We discuss the importance of being in the details as a CEO and the outsized role that a founder CEO in particular has in shaping and driving a high performing culture. I hope you enjoy my rich conversation with Howie Liu. Howie, so good to be with you. Thanks so much for being on the show and I’m really excited about this conversation.

Howie Liu [00:00:54]:
Yeah, likewise. Thank you, Darren.

Darren [00:00:55]:
I was reflecting on Airtable. It’s such a great company as we’re a business user of it and a big fan. But one of the things I find really challenging as a CEO is just describing who you are as a company and I thought you might just start there. Particularly for people that haven’t yet had the experience of your product. How do you describe Airtable to customers, to investors, to employees?

Howie Liu [00:01:18]:
So when we started the company, we had a very clear vision and that’s still relevant today. And it was. We wanted to democratize software creation. We wanted to take really powerful business apps and build them, break them down into building blocks, the database, the logic layer, the interface layer, and make that really accessible to a new generation of app builders within every company. We started out product led growth, it was entirely bottoms up growth, driven by people finding the product, loving it, adopting it, and eventually paying for it. And over especially the past five years, we’ve been marching further and further upmarket into really strategic use cases, including at some of the largest companies. So a lot of what we’ve done more recently is about supporting larger scale, more critical use cases.

Darren [00:01:58]:
Yeah. I loved the first time you shared with me your original mission of democratizing software creation. It really resonated and I think in some ways you’ve done a lot to do that and bring that reality to life. This whole notion of low code, no code that now people take for granted. You founded the company 12 years ago. That was a vision of yours, certainly at that point and probably a little bit before then. But yeah, I’d love to go back to that origin story a little and tell us a little bit about what was animating you to start the company. What were your hopes and how have they come to life to the extent they have?

Howie Liu [00:02:32]:
Yeah. I mean, really was the convergence of a few factors. One is from a pragmatic and a Business standpoint, I had worked at Salesforce for about a year and a half after I basically sold a prior smaller startup to them. And in this timeframe, like 2011 12, there was this like excitement happening around low code in general. But typically low code was like a very complicated, powerful technology that was still only in the realm of professional IT developers or very advanced users, right? And nonetheless, I saw the value of if you could build apps without having to go through all of the traditional process of coding, there’s a lot of value there. And in fact, every one of Salesforce’s use cases is basically a customization of their platform and it’s a giant low code platform, right? And so they were winning CRM use cases not because they had built every feature under the sun into the product, but because it was a platform ultimately. And so seeing the value of that platform concept and how it could be applied to many different business problems was one factor. The other factor was, I think, just a personal passion I had for creating software myself, right? And so in high school and college, I learned how to program. I was building different apps. A lot of those apps ended up being some form of what’s called a CRUD app, right? So create, read, update, destroy on some set of database records. And in college, for instance, I actually had a few internships, one of which I built exactly this, a CRUD app for a company. It was like an ad tech startup. And my entire main contribution for the summer, which actually turned out to be pretty impactful, was building from scratch with code, a database where they could keep track of their different creative assets. And it was kind of a lightweight CRM use case as well. But in hindsight, it was like crazy that I had to go and write raw code and build all of these pieces from scratch when a lot of that functionality could have been generalizable to many other types of business applications, right? And so I think I had this like, excitement around this idea of like making that power really accessible to more people and kind of thinking about how to take these complicated software building concepts, the database, the logic layer, the interface layer, and distill them into to really intuitive, really kind of visual and kind of graphical interface metaphors, right? Sort of like the way that the, the GUI operating system took powerful computing concepts that were previously accessible only through a terminal green screen, blinking cursor, and knowing all these arcane commands into something that anyone could use, right? You can just point and click and drag and now like tap to be able to manipulate an operating system. So that passion for taking the power of software creation and really thinking through the design problem of making that very accessible.

Darren [00:05:07]:
So for those of us include myself that aren’t really deep into computer science, bring that to life through the. Through a use case. For somebody that has a passion for creating something, an application, a business application, what does Airtable allow them to do that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to do?

Howie Liu [00:05:25]:
Yeah. So, I mean, a lot of our customers don’t realize they need to build an application in the first place. Right. So a lot of times they’re trying to solve a problem. If you’re a small business owner and this. This was very prevalent early on, maybe you need to track your inventory or your customers or you’re a nonprofit and you want to track your donations. Right. Or program initiatives. And traditionally you have a few options. One is just don’t track it systematically. Have everything scattered in different spreadsheets and emails and documents. And every time you want to find something, there’s no central source of truth. Right. So it’ a huge kind of overhead to go and coordinate and figure out what’s going on. Your alternate option is to look for something that’s off the shelf. Right. So maybe there’s a very bespoke piece of software built by probably a niche software vendor that’s specific to donor tracking. Right. For nonprofits, the problem with that is it’s not very flexible. It doesn’t really suit your needs. Maybe it’s overcomplicated. And rarely do you get actually the exact experience that you want. And so most people kind of end up compromising in between one of these two. Right. Or they just have spreadsheets they’ve kind of kluded together into a makeshift app effectively where, you know, they’re tracking data, they’re putting customers, they’re putting items into a spreadsheet, but because it’s not a structured application, they can’t do really basic things like report on it in a easy way. Right. To have some structured data types so that they can make sure that there’s consistency in how people are entering data, and then perhaps most importantly, to have, like, a really great way to build workflow around that. So instead of just looking at a sea of cells, to be able to go and actually create a pipeline view, for instance, or a calendar view, or otherwise create some kind of workflow around that data. So enter Airtable, where especially early on, our key wedge was it was as simple to use as a spreadsheet. Right. So the interface was kind of intentionally very similar to that of a spreadsheet. There’s a grid view, but unlike a spreadsheet, we had data types, right? So you can come in, you can define field types. So here’s a dropdown, here’s a number field, here’s a checkbox field. And then anybody else coming into the app knows, okay, I have to put a number in this one, I have to put a checkbox in this one. And then you could compose different views on top of that. So once you have the data in there, it looks great. On mobile you could create a calendar view, create like a Kanban or a trello like view on top of that data and ultimately connect different data sets together. So if you have customers and contacts, you can connect those together, or nonprofit donors and volunteers, you can connect those together. So you know, you start to layer in all of these different more powerful app building concepts, enabling the customer to ultimately build a pretty comprehensive way to run their operations, starting from something very simple and accessible.

Darren [00:08:06]:
So that could be a passionate sort of individual contributor or leader. You’ve talked about going up market to enterprise. What would be a typical use case of a large scale application of Airtable?

Howie Liu [00:08:17]:
Yeah, so we have a lot of presence in media, in tech and retail, increasingly in finserve and even like other industries like oil and gas for instance. But often what happens to is there’s a line of business person, right? So it could be at a really large retail company, maybe somebody in the marketing department and they realize they need to have a better way of tracking their global campaigns and how they plan them. So they’ll actually build a use case on Airtable for that. But eventually it’ll expand out to adjacent teams and adjacent workflows that ultimately comprise some of the most important value chains of these enterprises. So you know, at retail companies often it’s marketing and creative and merchandising operations. At media companies it’ll be actually end to end content production operations from pre production and resourcing to production to post production rights management, even things like release marketing that are attached to it. But really you start building these end to end use cases on top of the platform. In tech companies, often it’s digital product operations, so tracking your product roadmap and all the releases, but also being able to see the the entire life cycle of then once you release those features, how are they doing and what customer feedback are you getting and how do you learn from that to go and execute on the next thing? So we’ve really kind of seen these pretty large use cases or strategic use cases emerge in each of the Top industries that, that we’ve gotten a lot of growth in.

Darren [00:09:38]:
Yeah. Okay. So great job, I think very efficiently and quickly bringing to life Airtable. It’s a. It’s an amazing company. I’ve got so many other questions like what about AI and where do you see this company going over the next 10 years? But maybe we can hold those for a moment because I’m really mostly interested in you.

Howie Liu [00:09:55]:
Okay.

Darren [00:09:55]:
And you as founder and CEO specifically. And I’d love to hear your journey from. Okay. I founded a small company, I sold it to Salesforce. I’m in Salesforce. I found this company and I’d love you to walk us through the journey in whatever way you want. Maybe it’s chapters of your own journey, but I know that your own journey has gone through stages of evolution. So how do you describe that?

Howie Liu [00:10:21]:
Yeah, I mean, I think the job I’ve played has changed at every phase because the need of the company has changed. Right. And so I think when you’re first founding a company, the only thing that matters is finding product market fit. And I like to think of that as really an exercise in understanding a problem that the world has. Right. Like product market fit always. I mean, anything sustainable always comes from identifying real customer pain or opportunity and delivering real value to customers. Right. And hopefully doing it in a way, way that scales quite well. And so early on, it was really about not just coming up with the premise of Airtable, but going and building the product. Because ultimately this was. This was a. An idea that could only come to life with really good product execution. Right. Like the devil was completely in the details here. So first two and a half years of the company were really myself and my co founders and our early founding team going and just working nonstop to build and kind of refine that MVP to the point where we could get more feedback on it, we could get more kind of customers actually using it and then eventually launching it to the public in 2015. But that was almost more like a just a product centric team playing a mix of like product engineering, backend engineering, and also like PM and kind of makeshift designer roles, as we all did during that time. I think once we launched and we had a product that was out there and it was getting some traction and customers were actually starting to use it, I think my role had to shift into one of figuring out how to scale even that initial product market fit. Right. So I think of it as you have like this spark of a flame that you’ve kind of rubbed two sticks together to create. But of course, you have to like, blow on it very gently to be able to turn it into a real sustainable fire. And so a lot of the. The next phase was really about understanding what were the kind of patterns of repeatable fit. Right. So, you know, talking to lots of customers, I actually had an email campaign go out from my email saying, hey, I’m the CEO and founder of the company, wanted to check, hear your feedback, and actually got like, I think thousands, if not tens of thousands of replies from real humans telling me what, what they were doing with Airtable. And a lot of my time in that time was really spent on reading through all of that, sometimes getting on a, you know, zoom call or just corresponding back and forth with these customers to understand what they were doing with Airtable and then to figure out what is the next most impactful thing we can build into the product to unlock or better serve their use case. Right. Because often we would hit and run into performance limitations or feature gaps that were keeping some of these customers from fully using Airtable. Right. In other cases, it was figuring out, okay, for the ones that we have done a good job of serving already, how do we go and get more of them? Right. So how do we go and create templates around that use case and better expose that to new prospective customers? So next phase was really kind of almost playing like a growth product and growth marketing person within the company and doing some light management because we still had a small team, like probably 10, 15 people max at that time, but starting to shift into like recruiting talent for the company. Right.

Darren [00:13:25]:
So can I interrupt you there just so it sounds like those first two phases, let’s call them four or five years.

Howie Liu [00:13:31]:
Yeah.

Darren [00:13:32]:
Played naturally to your existing strengths. Right. Your product technology, it’s obvious you have a passion for understanding what customers really want and how to be responsive to those needs. Does the next phase shift into something that calls forth different skills that may be less natural for you, or what is that next stage?

Howie Liu [00:13:53]:
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. And it’s not like I was born immediately knowing how to build product. Right. It’s just something that I grew an interest in and then, you know, honed my skills both during this early period of Airtable as well as before. So I actually think of it as more. More a constant learning exercise. Right. I think switching gears even from that initial product building phase to then like kind of the growth marketer growth product and like really kind of understanding product market fit and how to scale it phase, that even that transition was more of an evolution and just kind of leaning into intuitively what I felt like was most important to unblock the success of the company at that time. Right. And then as you’re alluding to, I think layering in then the added responsibility of managing a small team, of hiring and kind of recruiting is obviously always a really important duty for any scaling company CEO, but it never really felt like those were completely kind of step function or sharp changes to the, the way I had to operate or the skillset I needed because I think it was so obvious and it was such an evolution to get there that I think it felt more like a continuous learning exercise.

Darren [00:15:14]:
Yeah. Okay, so keep going. We’re now what, six years in and I know it doesn’t.

Howie Liu [00:15:18]:
Yeah, maybe a little less, maybe like call it like three, four years at this point. And at some point we turn on pretty early on monetization and it does really well, right. I think because we’re solving a pretty deep problem for customers, right? We are a system of record often when we get deployed or when we get adopted. And 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. And so when we turn on monetization, we’re able to actually grow our revenue very quickly, right? So we go from basically zero to a million in revenue in I think just basically a few months and then from a million to well over 10 million in probably less than a year and a half. And so during this phase it’s kind of figuring out how to now be a business, right? I mean at least the beginnings of a real business and thinking about revenue, not just hiring and scaling the team on venture capital dollars, but really thinking about how to scale revenue further. And this is when we start thinking about how do we, how do we build up our go to market strategy. Right? And of course like at the same time we’re growing the organization as we go from 10, 15 people to 20, 30, 40 people. We have now the need for management, right? Like we have, you can’t just have like a flat organization. You need to add in managers for different parts of the org. So I think that was probably another big transition is learning to go from directly Managing the team and kind of knowing everything at an intimate level that’s going on across the entire company to now having to at least to some extent delegate some amount of authority, accountability, and importantly like hire the right people to do that across the company.

Darren [00:17:02]:
Yeah. So as you go through this, I’m curious about key moments where you were particularly challenged or big lessons that you learned along the way. So as you keep going just to draw those out, anything that you’d reflect on?

Howie Liu [00:17:18]:
I mean, certainly hiring and managing managers is a very different thing from hiring and managing ICs. Right. And I would say that transition actually felt more abrupt than the transition from just being an ice building product to then hiring ICs. Right. Because in a way, I think if you’re a good IC product, if you know engineering, I think it’s pretty intuitive to like go and both hire and manage other people who have a similar skill set. Right. And in this next phase, for the first time, you’re, you’re hiring managers which, especially if you yourself are not a very experienced manager, like you’re kind of trying to assess somebody for a skill set that you haven’t cultivated fully yourself.

Darren [00:17:59]:
Right.

Howie Liu [00:18:00]:
So I think that’s definitely a challenge. And I also think you’re often now hiring for roles that you have never played yourself. Right. So if you’re hiring your first HR hires, if you’re hiring your first marketing hires or sales hires, and you’ve never been a full time salesperson, that is a bigger leap in terms of figuring out like, how do you hire somebody really good for those roles. So definitely kind of a, this feels like the phase where we’ve kind of really entered a whole new world. Like I’ve entered a whole new role world in terms of my, the demands on my role and skill set. And I think you, you try your best, you kind of operate both on intuition. In my case, like, I certainly leaned a lot on advisors, on investors, on other operators who had been through this or kind of further in their journey to get advice. But I think you also learn by trial and error. Right. We certainly made hiring mistakes during that time. I certainly learned by trial and error how to become a manager. And if you kind of look at the arc of the next few years, when we then started hyperscaling, it took us probably six years to go from zero to 50 people. It took us only a few years to then get from 50 to call it a thousand people. Right. And so just immense growth, adding multiple layers of management, adding much more organizational complexity. And I think this is really the part where it’s very easy to fall into the trap of overcorrecting from in the early days, you’re in the details, you’re micromanaging in a good way, all the details to now not being able to do that and getting disintermediated from both like direct from customer insights. So that’s the probably biggest risk is like you actually get distracted away from customer, real customers, real customer details and also real execution details that are customer facing. Whether it’s marketing, like what is literally the marketing message you’re putting out in front of literally whom. Right. Like what’s the exact targeting you’re doing, whether it’s in product or in email or doing outbound from a product standpoint. Like you also get abstracted away from the specific details of what you’re shipping. Right. And so I think this is one of the most challenging scaling phases because as you’re trying to delegate and scale up and kind of level up in terms of management team and how you run the org, it also becomes the riskiest in terms of you lose all the fidelity that is actually turns out that’s the devil’s still in the details. Right. Just like in the early days, but you may just be more removed from those details by default.

Darren [00:20:31]:
Yeah. So I hear this story, it’s been repeated multiple times, which is you’re going through a period of hyperscaling. You hire are quite senior leaders who have been in similar scaling situations. So bring a level of experience that if as a first time CEO, founder, you don’t have, you do get abstracted away. Because the conventional wisdom is you hire great people, you empower them, you get out of their way.

Howie Liu [00:20:58]:
Right.

Darren [00:20:59]:
You don’t get in their way. And what I’m hearing you say is you get too far abstracted from the business, you’re losing a massive amount of fidelity. Would you do it differently if you were to do it over again? And if so, like what’s the big lesson for you having gone through that?

Howie Liu [00:21:14]:
Yeah, I mean I think my mental model of a company in this scaling phase has gone from it’s like this big patch of farmland and you can like hire different leaders who each get their own patch and they can like go and till it and grow it and kind of harvest great at great crops on their own, given enough autonomy and resources. Right. So you give them the water, you give them the supplies and tractors and they go and like create like a beautiful bounty. Each of them kind of owns their own patch. That was kind of my old mental Model, per your point about like basically hire great people, empower them and then kind of get out of their way. And I think now instead my mental model, especially for high growth companies in quickly evolving markets with, with potentially rapidly growing competition, is it’s much more like you’re trying to launch a rocket ship, right? And I mean the irony is like SpaceX is a great example of this where it requires incredible attention to detail. But even metaphorically, like when you’re trying to launch a spaceship, you don’t just give like 10 different people complete autonomy and hope that they build their parts and you just put them all together at the end and they all work. Right? I mean it, it, there’s too much risk that those parts don’t actually work together, right? Or that there’s some unanticipated issue, you know, with one part and you have to change its configuration and then that requires a change in the whole rest of the part parts, right? They all have to come together in a really intricately kind of interwoven way, right? And in some sense it requires a great concentrated alignment of effort or else by default it’s not going to work, right? So rather than it being like a, okay, everybody kind of goes and like tills their own land and maybe they generate 5% better crop, maybe they generate 10% better crop, it’s much more like, okay, if we don’t rigorously, you know, work together, we’re not going to launch this rocket ship. Like, it’s just, it’s not going to work. Right? And obviously the answer is probably somewhere in between. Like some companies, especially software businesses like ours, don’t instantly go kaput if you don’t like, work really well together. But I do think the outcome is disproportionately high for the companies that are able to pull together in kind of that, that ladder model. And so to me, it’s really about being involved in the details. Not because of a lack of trust in the leaders you’ve hired, but really because only the CEO, by definition, if you know that the CEO is the junction point at which all these different functional leaders are reporting, engineering, product marketing, sales, hr, et cetera, you’re the one junction point that can actually make sure the interlock between the parts is working. And as each part evolves in spec and requirements that you’re evolving kind of all of the other parts as well, right? And so, so I think it just requires, you have to be like close enough to the shape of those parts or in this case like what you’re Actually doing from a marketing standpoint, learning from that and using that to kind of reinforce some of the work that is being done in product and sales and vice versa. Right. Leaning into sales and hearing from real customers. Right. Or post sales and seeing actual customer deployments and gaining a certain level of alpha from that you wouldn’t be able to get if you just got the abstracted version of the report. Right. It’d be like if you had a physical product that you retailed, but you never actually went to individual customers and saw how they experienced the product, bought it, used it. Like you would lose so much valuable insight into how to improve that product, how to build the next product, and how to better sell the product.

Darren [00:24:43]:
Yeah, I seen you have this realization and shift into a very different gear of leadership. And so I wanted to make sure we don’t skip past this point because I think it’s a really important one. So I’m curious to understand when it was that. I know it’s not a moment in time. Right. That you begin to adjust your mental model.

Howie Liu [00:25:03]:
Sure.

Darren [00:25:03]:
And what did it look like? Like, what were these specific actions, behaviors, ways of leading that you experimented with and where have you settled? What does it look like to be a senior account exec at Airtable or a senior product manager? Like, what does that. How would they describe who Howie is as a CEO?

Howie Liu [00:25:23]:
Sure. Yeah. I mean, I think the. The catalyst for this change was in part the macro environmental change. Right. And not because the macro change immediately impacted our business in a significant way. Like, we were actually relatively less impacted than many other companies that like, were instantly hit by interest rates. Right. If you were in the lending business, for instance, or in the used car sales business, you saw a much more immediate impact. Whereas for us, it was more that the changing of the times. And I think the kind of new sentiment across the tech industry was a really good forcing function for us to revisit our own practices and for me to deeply introspect on how are we running this company. Does it make sense in this new kind of era where it’s not just about hiring at all or growing at all costs and hiring lots of people and really just kind of doing a lot of different things without a ton of checks and balances? Right. That was kind of the sentiment of the previous time. And it felt like that was starting to just intuitively be very. Feel very inappropriate for this new era where there could be a tightening of economic purse strings across the. Across the enterprise landscape. Right. So that could impact our customer spend on our product and more importantly, it could impact like just the culture and the sentiment of how great companies should be run. Right. So I think it was a healthy kind of moment to pause and reflect and kind of really decide like how do we want to operate in this new phase? Both for us as a company, we had also reached a certain level of maturity and multi hundred million revenue scale. Like getting to the point where we had to start thinking about, you know, what does it mean to be a mature, maturing business that should be public ready. Right. Whether or not we’re going to go public right now, we need, we want to be a public ready business. And so, so as I thought about that, it became obvious there are a few specific changes we needed to make. One is I wanted to get personally much more in the details for exactly the reasons we kind of hinted at, right. It’s impossible to make much leaner bets with your company and to know how to work smarter, not necessarily just harder or with more people unless you’re in the details, right. Like I like to use this term now, alpha meaning investor alpha, where it’s like every great kind of public market investor is always looking for alpha and that’s like proprietary insight, often from proprietary knowledge or research or something they’ve done. And I think the equivalent for an operator in this context is you can’t make great decisions as a business whether they’re bigger strategic bets, like what’s the acquisition we can make, what are the, like what’s the big, you know, kind of product bet we should make or even like little incremental bets, you know, unless you have alpha and you don’t get alpha, unless you go and like get the primary source evidence that then you can, you know, kind of develop your own intuition around. Right. So the first step was I wanted to plug in to anything especially that was particularly important in terms of product market fit or like our go to market repeatability. Right. Like ultimately those are the growth drivers for us as a business. So I really wanted to get closer to, I really wanted to get closer to like what the, how we were thinking about developing product to create more customer value and to acquire, you know, make it easier to acquire new customers and also to sales and marketing because that’s also a form of product market fit, right? Like sales is literally how you go and articulate your value to customers, especially in, on the high end and see what resonates, right. And as you go and implement with them, see how well the product actually delivers on that promise. So, so spending a lot more time in the details there. And also I think being a lot more explicit about the not just high level goals. I mean, if you get too high level with goal setting as a company, you end up with something like, okay, we want to grow, we want to deliver value to the world, but it’s super generic. Right. Like you could say like every company has ultimately the same goal of like growing and making revenue and profit and whatever. And so I actually think, think in this much more involved mode of running the company, you also need to care about tactics. Right. So from a sales standpoint, it’s not just hit your number and what number is that? But it’s also how do we think we, we need to sell. Right. In our case, we have this opportunity to go in and do a much more consultative strategic sale for our largest customers where we actually go in and deeply understand their business and we understand what are the operations challenges that they have that are most meaningful and most solvable with our platform. Right. And finding the sweet spot of intersection between those is actually how we land our biggest customer deals. Whether it’s a completely new kind of top down sale or it’s an expansion play within an existing account that has already seen a lot of organic adoption and proliferation of Airtable. But that’s an example of being more intentional and having a stronger opinion about the specific tactics we need to employ to win based on an understanding of our product market fit and like how we actually create the most value for our customers.

Darren [00:30:32]:
Yeah. I’m imagining you’re also really upping the ante in terms of what you’re asking of the organization. And one thing I’ve heard and seen you do is get, and I mean this in the best sense of the word, like brutally direct in ways that maybe may have been a shift for you. Is that fair? And give us some color around. Because I think everybody talks about a high performance culture and then they get stuck. Right. Because they want people to feel valued, they want people to feel engaged. And how do you manage that tension? Which is, I think very real.

Howie Liu [00:31:07]:
Yeah, I mean, I think to some extent it’s something that’s like hard to set into motion if, if you haven’t done it consistently or well before. Yeah, it’s like radical candor, brutal directness, however you want to put it. But once it’s, you know, once it starts going in motion, I think it actually becomes easier and easier to kind of reinforce. Right. Both because, you know, when you’re direct with someone, 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. And so if there’s a project that’s not going on track, the direct feedback on it might be, hey, this is slipping. I feel like we’re behind. Let’s diagnose why that is. But this progress is not good enough, right? Like we can do better or it could be on the quality of the work. Like this wasn’t thought out enough because we’re not considering this and this. It’s never about the person and saying, hey, you’re incapable, you’re bad at doing this. It’s more like this particular time and this particular output, we can do better, right? And in fact, and I think it’s almost worse to sugarcoat it and say like, oh, there’s the whole concept of the shit sandwich, right? Where you like, compliment and then you give the critique and then the compliment. But I’ve always felt like it’s a little transparently obvious and the person receiving it kind of transparently knows. And so you may as well just be honest and direct and say, like, look like this particular thing, you know, didn’t cut it. And here’s why specifically, and here’s the next action I would like you to take. At the same time, like, I think being. Also acknowledging like when great impact is created or great work is done is also important. Right? But I think over time it becomes like almost a, a normalized expectation that, you know, you get direct feedback, you give direct feedback. There’s obviously cultures like Bridgewater that are even more kind of intense about it, where you’re getting like ratings on your performance and how well it’s being received. But I think a lot of it comes down to like people understanding where the feedback is coming from, why it’s being given. And ultimately it’s in the aim of better realizing our mission as a company. Right. Like we have important purpose as a business and as a company and we’re all trying to row in that same direction together. Our purpose is not about making everybody feel patted on the back. It’s really about delivering incredible value to our customers and innovating to be able to deliver even more value. Right. And so, so I think the underlying motivation behind the feedback is also important because we’re all ultimately aligned around a shared cause.

Darren [00:33:40]:
Yeah, we haven’t talked at all about culture and the culture at Airtable. I’m a firm believer, particularly in founder led breakthrough companies. I think I’ve Heard you use that distinction. Breakthrough companies, which I think Airtable is very much that the culture is merely a reflection of the founders clear and consistent and visible behaviors. First of all, would you agree with that? And second of all, how would you then describe the culture and is it a reflection of how you want to lead and how you’re leading?

Howie Liu [00:34:10]:
Yeah, I mean, I think I definitely agree that organizations reflect the values and behavior of like, I think it’s very innate in us that we look to each other and to our leaders to like know what’s, what’s valued and what’s not. Right. And there are value systems within every organization. Like the things that we care about, the things that we model for, for other teammates and the things that we reward. Right. With, with promotions or with like congratulations. Like the things that we really say, hey, this is great. Is it effort? Is it impact? Right. Is it kind of being nice or is it like being right? Right. I think there are all these trade offs that you can make organizationally around what your value system is and the behaviors that help reinforce those values or that ultimately manifest because of those values. And, and I think ultimately that’s only lived through people. Right. Like, values can never be kind of realized through like documents or something that’s abstract from people and behavior. So I definitely think it’s a little bit of a two way street. I see. Because I think you can, I do think leaders can intentionally shape their own behaviors and values over time in an authentic way. Right, right. Where you actually like, you grow as a leader. Right. Like I feel like I’ve grown a ton every year for the past 12 years and even before that, but especially in the most kind of intensive years of greatest change, like that’s when I’ve learned the most and I’ve grown the most. And I’d like to think that I, every time I feel like I introspect and realize I could have done a better job or shown up in a different way, I like to shape how I think about my role and the way that I lead going forward to reflect it. So I think it’s really two way where leaders obviously shape the organization and the culture and the values with their own behaviors. But then also over time they are themselves shaped by the ideal that they aspire to and that the organization hopefully aspires to.

Darren [00:36:10]:
So how would somebody at Airtable describe the culture and is there a gap between what you want it to be and where it is today?

Howie Liu [00:36:17]:
I think one word that is really representative of probably the change that I’m happy with over the past few years is focused and more intensive. Meaning I think there was a time where we were never intentionally a slow moving or soft culture, but I think it was easy to as a matter of fact be somewhat slower moving and be somewhat softer when we didn’t have a sense of urgency. Right. And maybe that was because during the ZIRP years we didn’t really have a sense of scarcity. Right. It felt like growth and venture capital dollars were very plentiful and so there wasn’t this sense of scarcity which I think actually breeds a lot more urgency. Right. I think part of it was also the shift towards being focused and having more intensity was also driven by, you know, kind of me personally leaning in and caring more about the details. Right. Like when you put the spotlight on more parts of the business, I think you can have more focus versus in the kind of more arm’s length delegation approach, it’s harder to carry forward all of that focus and urgency throughout the organization. So those are two concepts I would use to describe a major shift we’ve made. Maybe the third that I think was very present in the early phases of the company and I’d like to think has been still present throughout and I want to breed even more of is innovative. Right. Because I think we’ve always been a company that values doing things on first principles when it matters. Right now it doesn’t mean like I don’t want us to reinvent the wheel every single time when it comes to figuring out what’s the best way to engineer a feature if it’s a very straightforward thing. Right. Or we don’t want to forego the best practices of sales comp. You know, if there’s just some good frameworks in place. So it’s not about kind of thumbing our nose to like good prior practices, but it’s really about saying to be a breakthrough product, which Airtable in its founding was one. Right. We didn’t just build something the same way that everybody else did. We took a concept of no code, low code app platforms and really kind of through our own first principles, design and engineering built a much better product. Right. That didn’t exist prior. Right. And there were no kind of one for one products that we could copy from or directly just be inspired by. So we kind of have to do it on our own. And a lot of the subsequent innovations we’ve introduced are also like that, where we’ve made some breakthroughs in how we think about introducing AI into the product. We’ve made breakthroughs at earlier points of the company in terms of thinking about how to add kind of additional layers of functionality into the product, whether it’s data scale capabilities or how you can integrate data into the product, etc. Etc. So I think we need to keep also this innovative spirit and this creative spirit alive, which means we have to be focused, we have to have this urgency. And yet we can’t just do everything linearly, right. We can’t just execute on a very obvious deterministic playbook. We have to also manufacture innovation. Right. We have to think about like, okay, what’s the next big leap for us in terms of AI product value? Right. We currently already have the beginnings of our AI roadmap already in place and in ga and customers are using it. But we need to keep thinking ahead of the curve and come up with more intuitive ways to deliver AI value into our product. Right. So I think that innovative, the creative, the out of the box thinking, the energy around it is also a really important dimension of culture for us.

Darren [00:39:54]:
Yeah. I don’t think you quite explicitly said this, but I will say, at least as I’ve observed at the, the evolution in culture has been pretty remarkable over the last few years. And again, although you didn’t say, and I want to test it with you, I think your role in that it was outsized. And I’d say that not to praise you, but to point to a fundamental notion of high leverage in an organization that I don’t think gets enough attention, which is. And it’s a responsibility too. So founder, CEO has both opportunity and responsibility as the highest point of leverage in an organization would be my assertion, and can move an organization and accelerate change faster than anything. Do you agree with that? Would you allow yourself some of that credit?

Howie Liu [00:40:40]:
Well, yeah, I think in a way it’s true for a number of reasons. One is I think every leader sets the pace and the tone for their organization. Right. Like any kind of organization. Right. And so I think, whether intentional or not. Yeah, exactly. And so I think being intense and focused and innovative as a leader shows everybody else that’s what we should all be trying to do. Right. I think too some of these things are easy to theorize and strategize about. So like innovate on product capabilities or generate breakthrough outcomes, even if it’s quantitative, like get sales productivity from this number to that number. You know, it sounds simple in the abstract, but actually it’s really quite hard to do unless you’re in the details. Right. And so I think rather than have a Model where at the top level leaders are just setting high level goals and outcomes, which in a way like, that’s kind of, I think what the, a lot of the company planning frameworks, OKRs, et cetera, maybe weren’t intended to do, but have kind of implicitly ended up encouraging is a very arm’s length kind of approach to saying, okay, like there’s a black box of how each group and each function operates. And all I care about are the inputs and the outputs and I want the output to be up here. Right. And I think in practice, like, it’s what happens in the black box that actually matters. Right. That’s how you get the incredible leverage. That’s how you get breakthrough outcomes. And so I think showing that as a leader, you care about the black box, the inner workings, the tactics, and figuring out what tactics are working, what insights can be exploited to kind of drive more success that actually yields better outcomes than just being at arm’s length and saying, hey everybody, figure it out on your own and get us this better outcome.

Darren [00:42:34]:
Yeah. Let’s talk a little bit about your journey. Overall 12 year journey. It sounds, when you look back like a, a pretty straight line. Right. Maybe with a little bit of bumps here and there.

Howie Liu [00:42:46]:
I feel like it’s been much more.

Darren [00:42:47]:
Of a. Yeah, the reality is very different and I’ve heard it often described as a pretty turbulent emotional journey. I don’t think I’ve yet met a founder who didn’t at one point question like, should I be even doing this? Certainly. Do I even want to be doing the CEO role? Like those first three or four years? Definitely. How has this been for you emotionally? And did that, that question ever arise for you? And I think it’s a very normal and natural one. How did you wrestle with it?

Howie Liu [00:43:13]:
So for me, the role of founder and CEO are, are two different roles. Right. And I do think when you can combine both into one person, you get something, you know, even more valuable because you have the benefit of continuity, of context and also probably of agency. Right. Like the founder mentality is like, I can make something from nothing. Right. Like, nothing is impossible. Right. And a CEO mindset is how do I take what I have here organizationally? People wise, P and L wise and scale it and figure out how to build on top of it. Right. And so obviously there’s sometimes a natural sequencing of things where, you know, I think it’s fine. I don’t think we should have any. There shouldn’t be any shame about like a founder at some point saying, look Like, I was the right founder for this company and I helped run the company up until a certain point. But we need a different skill set, which is a CEO skill set to come in at this point. Right. So to me, it’s never been like kind of a given that I deserve to be CEO of the company at any given point in time or at any later point in time. And so I think with that kind of like almost healthy. I think it’s a healthy mindset of constant self evaluation. Like, how do I think I’m doing as a CEO, Right. If I’m really honest with myself? And I do think, like being the founder, you do get some extra advantages as a CEO versus a hired one. Right. Because you have that incredible context. Right. You have the ability perhaps to like get deeper into some of the details and some of the areas because maybe you played those roles in the past. Right. Maybe you helped do some of the foundational work, whether it’s engineering or product or so on, or even marketing. And maybe you did founder led sales in the early days of the company. So you have some intuition for it that coming in and ramping from scratch, even if you have a lot of management experience, you don’t necessarily have right away. Right. And so I do think there have been times where, you know, my. I certainly have had shortcomings and still do as a professional CEO. Right. Do I have the level of experience in terms of kind of running an operating cadence for the business as many external CEOs? Absolutely not. Right. But do I have like, maybe some level of intuition and context and now like agency to go in deep anywhere? And also like, like a certain level of gravitas, like when it comes to getting access to customers or senior people within our customers, like, there is something special about me coming in and saying, look, like I can tell you the whole story of how we built this company and product and I want to hear from you what your feedback is. I’m always trying to see where my own gaps are, but also lean into the kind of special, kind of advantages that I do have as a founder to play as good of a role as I can.

Darren [00:45:52]:
Yeah. So last year was a big life event for you. You became a father.

Howie Liu [00:45:56]:
Yep.

Darren [00:45:56]:
So congratulations. First of all, how has that been? How has it been juggling the responsibilities of founder, CEO and now father?

Howie Liu [00:46:04]:
I think in some sense there’s actually a lot of similar similarities between founding a company and for some people, like the company you would describe as your baby and actually having a real living human child in that I think they both evolve remarkably quickly, and they don’t always. You can’t predict exactly how they’re going to turn out. Right. So our baby’s only around four months now, and it’s our first, but it’s like every week she is a little bit different. Right. And she’s a little bit more interactive, and it’s. There’s an excitement and kind of like, anticipation of, like, each week how she’s going to show up differently. And some things, you know. Right. Like, just like some things, you know, in the company arc, right, you’re gonna have to hire people, you’re gonna have to scale up and add management, et cetera. And of course, like, people, like, grow from, like, baby to toddler at certain. At some time range between, like, let’s say, six and 12 months, they’re gonna start, like, crawling and then eventually walking and so on. But, like, the exact details of it are kind of a little bit serendipitous. And so I think I am appreciating that. That very organic journey where you can’t control it, you can’t predict all of it. And. And also, like, all you can hope to do is, like, show up as well as you can. And in this case, like, I think it’s not even like the founder journey where, like, sometimes you can say, well, hey, look, we need a better external CEO. Like, usually that’s not a socially acceptable option. Right. For. For being a parent. Right. Like, you just have to be the best parent you can be. And so I think it’s also kind of like a constant learning, introspection, like, what can I be doing better? How can I learn? You certainly read all the books. You, like, take advice from other people as much as you can, and then you learn by experience. Experience as well. So, yeah, it’s. Yeah. I mean, I would say it’s like, in some ways it feels like a familiar experience because of those parallels, but also it’s totally different and delightful in very new ways.

Darren [00:47:53]:
Yeah. Well, to extend the metaphor, Airtable is approaching its teenage years, so I don’t know what’s in store for you over there.

Howie Liu [00:48:00]:
Well, bad acne and the driver’s permit suit.

Darren [00:48:02]:
Right. And the rebellious behavior.

Howie Liu [00:48:04]:
Yeah.

Darren [00:48:04]:
Well, as we bring this to a close, I wanted to just create some space for anything that you might want to add that we haven’t covered anything you’d want to put a finer point on that we have covered.

Howie Liu [00:48:14]:
I’d be curious from you, Darren. What are the most common pieces of advice that founders who are let’s say a decade into the journey, either on one company or on multiple companies wish they could tell themselves in their early days. I certainly have my own thoughts on that. What I would tell my younger self. But I’m also curious to hear you’ve gotten to work with such great founders and operators across the board with many different life experiences than myself. Like what do you think are the common patterns and some of the surprising, sometimes off the beaten path insights from those people?

Darren [00:48:47]:
Yeah, there are probably a few themes and let’s see if they match what yours are. And I imagine they do in some Part one is there’s no playbook. So I often hear from founders. How is this done? Let me go talk to the following three companies and the reality is it’s almost always purpose fit to the company that they’re leading, the situation and the particular founder that they are. So this idea of developing an operating model from first principles I think is a really important one. And it doesn’t mean there aren’t certain things that you can pull off the shelf, but most things, I mean, Jeff Bezos I think was sort of masterful at really dedicating a big part of his leadership with his technical advisor to figuring that out and really innovating. So it’s yes, innovating at the company level. It’s innovating at the company operating model level as well. That would be one second. I think it’s over time.

Howie Liu [00:49:36]:
Yeah.

Darren [00:49:37]:
Getting enough maturity to own who you are and be unapologetic about it. And I say that first part importantly because if you do that too quickly and too rashly and sometimes you just don’t know who you are yet, but once you do, to really lean in and be very clear about who you are, what company you want to build. I had Max Levchin on the show just a few weeks ago, I think, and he’s a multiple founder, an experienced founder, but I think he’s done that very well. And so I think that would be certainly a piece of advice. And then the third that I think some share, some don’t, is the high point of leverage that I have to continue to work on myself and show up as an impeccable example of what I want to see in the organization and really relish in that because it is such an advantage to realize how much leverage you have and how to yield it for good. And I think people miss that oftentimes in a really well intended interest of trying to disperse responsibility and give people credit. And that’s all incredibly important. But they also Miss the leverage that they possess.

Howie Liu [00:50:43]:
Yeah, well, those all resonate. I think the. The there is no playbook first point really resonates, and I think it ties really closely together for me with number two, which is, you know, figure out who you are and then own it. And obviously, like, like doesn’t mean, like, own your own or lean too much into, like, your unproductive tendencies, but really, like appreciating what’s your best operating style and value system as a leader. And once you figure that out, kind of being very clear about it, right? Cause I think not being clear about it means that nobody really knows what your playbook is. What’s the playbook for the company? What’s the value system of the company that’s rewarded? And so ambiguity, I think, is far worse than clarity, even if that means trade offs. Right. Like directness over softness and maybe gentleness Right. At times. And I do think that’s a big one. And if there was a way that you could magically accelerate learning your own leadership style and not have to go through some of the trials and errors and over corrections, which, that was solvable or at least packageable. But maybe the closest thing to it is working with a great coach, perhaps.

Darren [00:51:50]:
I think in some ways there’s no way to get around it, and there’s some things to accelerate it as well, but you’ve inspired a lot of that thinking too. So thank you for your example and thank you for this wonderful conversation. It’s been an absolute delight.

Howie Liu [00:52:01]:
Yeah, likewise.

Darren [00:52:02]:
Yeah. Wonderful.

Howie Liu [00:52:04]:
Awesome.

Darren [00:52:08]:
Howie, in many ways, is the quintessential technology founder of our current era. He’s a great example of applying the same spirit of innovation that sits at the core of Airtable success to his own evolution as a CEO. I look forward to being with you on the next episode of One on One. And until then, I hope you lead with courage, wisdom, and above all, with love.

One of One is produced by Erica Gerard and Podkit Productions. Music by John LaSala.