20VC: Airtable's Howie Liu on Potential Consolidation In The Collaboration Tools Market, The Transition From Peacetime To Wartime CEO & How To Make The Move To Remote Work Successful; The Process Beyond The Tools

Howie Liu is the Founder & CEO @ Airtable, the all in one collaboration platform that has taken so much of our ecosystem by storm. To date, Howie has raised over $170M from some of the best in the business including Benchmark, Thrive, Coatue, Caffeinated Capital, Founder Collective, CRV and Freestyle to name a few. Prior to founding Airtable, Howie was the Co-Founder @ Etacts, an automated intelligent CRM that was acquired by Salesforce just 9 months after creation. Howie then led the social CRM product at Salesforce. Fun fact, Howie started his career as an intern at Freestyle Ventures. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Howie made his way from founding Etacts to changing the way we think about databases and spreadsheets today with Airtable? How did Salesforce acquiring Etacts impact Howie's operating mentality with Airtable? 2.) With the rise of remote work, what have been Howie's core observations from the last month of the world going WFH? What does it take to succeed? What mistakes have Airtable made in their process of work from home? Why did it not work? What lessons did Howie take from that? 3.) How does Howie think about Airtable's transition from an application to a platform? What does he perceive as the core challenges in making the transition? What lessons has he learned from studying others who have done it? Why did Howie choose Peter Fenton @ Benchmark to work with? 4.) How has Howie seen himself evolve and scale as a leader over the last few years? What have been the most challenging elements? How does Howie think about which individuals he would like as mentors? How does he determine which advice to ingest vs to reject? 5.) How does Howie analyse the remote work/collaboration tools environment today? Does Howie believe we will enter a period of consolidation with the proliferation of new tools created? Does Howie believe we will see an unbundling in collaboration tools? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Howie’s Fave Book: Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire, Spying on Whales As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Harry Stebbings?

  Welcome back to the 20 minute VC with me, Harry Stebbings. And if you'd like to suggest questions or guests for future episodes, you can do on Instagram at H Stebbings 1996 with two Bs. I always love to see you there. However, to our episode today, and over the last few years, this company has really changed so much of how we work. And I've wanted to do this episode for a long time. And so I'm very excited to welcome Howie Liu, founder and CEO at Airtable, the all in one collaboration platform that's taken this ecosystem by storm. To date, Howie's raised over $170 million from some of the best in the business, including, check this out, Benchmark, Thrive, Co2, Caffeinated, Founder Collective, CRV, and Freestyle, to name a few. And prior to founding Airtable, Howie was the co-founder at eTax, an automated intelligence CRM that was acquired by Salesforce just nine months after creation.

• 0:45Harry Stebbings?

  Howie then led the social CRM product at Salesforce. And I'd also need to say a huge thank you to a raft of incredible people who helped me put the schedules together today. So David Freestyle, Dan and Karen at Co2, Max at CRV, Josh at Thrive, Ray at Caffeinated, and Vili at Two Sigma. Thank you so much for some awesome questions, suggestions today. I really do appreciate that. But before we move into the show today, I wanted to take a moment to mention HelloSign, a great example of a company that found success in building a product focused on user experience. HelloSign is an effortless e-signature solution used by millions to securely send and request legally valid digital signatures and agreements. They raised a total of $16 million in funding and recently got acquired by Dropbox for an impressive $230 million.

• 1:28Harry Stebbings?

  Check out hellosign.com/20vc to join the thousands of companies and founders who value fast, secure, and simple e-signatures. And speaking of signatures and getting deals done there, you really need to build that relationship. And there's nothing like meeting face to face. And there's nothing like Zoom to make that happen. Zoom lets you connect and do business across town or around the world. Zoom ties together all of your communication needs into one easy platform for video conferencing, phone calls, group chat, webinars, and your conference rooms. And connect easily from anywhere, your mobile phone, your laptop, or conference room. Zoom is how business gets done. Get your free account at zoom.com today. Meet happy with Zoom. And finally, I've always been a big his-

• 2:10Harry Stebbings?

  History man. And so I want to talk about Cooley, the global law firm built around startups and venture capital. Since forming the first venture fund in Silicon Valley, Cooley has formed more venture capital funds than any other law firm in the world, with fifty plus years working with VCs. They help VCs form and manage funds, make investments, and handle the myriad of issues that arise through a fund's lifetime. So to learn more about the number one most active law firm representing VC-backed companies going public, head over to Cooley.com and also check out Cooleygo.com. That's quite enough from me, though. So now I'm very excited to hand over to Howie Liu, co-founder and CEO at Airtable.

• 2:51Speaker 01

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 2:54Harry Stebbings?

  Howie, my word, I've wanted to do this one for such a long time. I've heard so many good things from Ray Tonsing, Matt Oco, Karen at Co2, Dan Rose. I mean, really, the whole Airtable family in many respects, but thank you so much for joining me today.

• 3:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, of course. Thank you for having me.

• 3:07Harry Stebbings?

  Not at all, but I want to kick off today with a little bit on you. So tell me, how did you make your way into the world of startups? And really, how did you come to found the game changer that impact is definitely my life and so many more in the form of Airtable?

• 3:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I grew up in a family that had immigrated to the US. I'm actually Korean, but both my parents were born in China. And rather than for some reason instructing me to, to a doctor or an engineer, et cetera, my parents, and especially my mom, really encouraged me to think about entrepreneurship, brought me books about Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. You know, Apple and Microsoft were kind of obviously the big companies when I was growing up in tech. And I just became enamored with this idea of creating technology that would kind of enable people and ultimately become a large business. And so that was always kind of my obsession growing up. And then throughout college, I learned how to build web apps and learned more about this new genre of web companies and ultimately decided to start a company right after college, went through YC for that one called eTAX, very briefly kind of experienced that entrepreneurship experience. And then eventually was acquired by Salesforce after about a year.

• 4:00Speaker 02

  And I think that thereafter, I really kind of was able to go back and do it the second time around and think long and hard about the type of company I wanted to build for Airtable.

• 4:07Harry Stebbings?

  I'm so pleased you said that about that first experience because I spoke to Ilya Sukhar at Matrix Now and he asked the question, how did that experience with eTax and the acquisition with Salesforce, how did it influence the way you run and operate Airtable today?

• 4:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was such an interesting experience. I think I was 20 at the time that we started eTax and this was ultimately the definition of the company that's always looking just a few feet ahead of itself and struggling to or looking for the next milestone to get to, to really stay alive and get to the next point. eTax was a company that was literally founded in a matter of days. We applied to Y Combinator with a demo that I think we built in weeks throughout YC. We basically continued building the product and launched the production version of our product in less than 10 weeks during the course of the program and raised funding in just a month after that. So this was a company that was just really on a very accelerated course of existence and ultimately its entire lifespan was just sort of a year before we were acquired. And I think that there are some merits to taking this fast and iterative approach to building a company.

• 5:04Speaker 02

  I think certainly speed was one of our only advantages or one of our only kind of operating capabilities at the time. We didn't really have much collective experience in anything else. But I think that time and then later going to Salesforce and seeing how methodically Salesforce itself thought about building its platform opportunity, seeing the way that it was really kind of tackling some of these really, really large opportunity spaces. And one that I got excited about was actually low code, which Salesforce was directly going after with their platform product. And so coming out of that experience, really for me, it was eye opening to kind of see this other way to build a company, which is to really think about first, what is the massive opportunity that you want to go after? And then be a little bit more deliberate in terms of how you get there, right? Which is not to say you want to go slow, but sometimes you have to go and invest more upfront

• 5:47Speaker 02

  into kind of being able to tackle that bigger opportunity instead of getting stuck in a smaller, more short term one.

• 5:52Harry Stebbings?

  I totally agree with you, especially in terms of that transformation. I mean, speaking of transformations, and one off schedule, but I have to ask you, you know, the transformation for everyone is the rise of work from home and so many people embracing it for the first time. I guess my question for you is like, what key operational changes have you made that have worked?

• 6:08Speaker 02

  You know, I think truthfully, we've been pretty fortunate as a company insofar as we've already had multiple offices and we've had some teams that are entirely distributed, our support team. For instance, is entirely distributed already. And so I think we came into this environment with some good practices already. I think a lot of it comes down to process that happens outside of the tools as much as the tools. So I think a lot of people talk about Zoom, Slack, Airtable as being really useful tools to make this transition. But I think also a lot of it comes down to power managers, making sure that their team members feel empowered, engaged and have the right context to go work on the right things the right way. When you're not kind of physically there and you can't tap somebody on the shoulder. What are the best practices that you can instill using the tools that you have? And then I think I would be remiss if I didn't mention that.

• 6:50Speaker 02

  I think that Airtable as a product for ourselves actually plays a really important role in this as well. Airtable to me is kind of this structured digitization of a lot of the work that was previously done in ad hoc ways. Right? So you have a marketing workflow where you're taking different campaigns and launching them. And you need to check up on their approvals or product management standpoint, keeping track of all of the roadmap items you have. Airtable, actually, we use it for everything internally, as you can imagine. And I think it's actually been a really powerful structured tool that complements these unstructured communication tools like Zoom or Slack during this time. And obviously, it's all very collaborative in real time. And so it's pretty well suited for this environment.

• 7:25Harry Stebbings?

  Listen, I tweeted before the show, longtime user and product lover. And so I'm totally with you.

• 7:29Speaker 02

  That's so great to hear. We owe you a swag kit.

• 7:31Harry Stebbings?

  I will gratefully accept and receive. I do have to also say, if that's kind of what works in terms of the process outside of the tools, there are challenges always. Are there initiatives that if you've had that haven't worked out so well in terms of really building that process and ops machine? And why do you think they didn't work?

• 7:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think the biggest source of inefficiency or failure tends to be for us at least rework or work that was well done, but for the wrong problem. And I'll give examples like, you know, it might be that we built the first version of a product feature that didn't actually solve the problem that it was intended to for users, right? It could be from a marketing standpoint, you know, we created an awesome blog post or some kind of launch piece that didn't actually communicate the key points that it needed to, to achieve our strategic goals as a company. I think we have an incredibly motivated and talented team across the board. Everybody's working really passionately to do their best job. What really then becomes the bottleneck in success is I think ensuring that everybody has the right strategic context, not just given.

• 8:27Speaker 02

  The specific tactical instruction of do this very narrow problem, but really has the broader framework of understanding why we're doing this thing, how it connects to the bigger goals of the company, where we sit in the competitive landscape and in terms of the journey ahead over the next few years. And getting that in the military world, what you might call the commander's intent, you know, imbued in everything we do so that everybody understands not just the specific next five feet of what they're doing, but why they're doing it and what to do if things change. I think that's the hardest part and also the most important part.

• 8:54Harry Stebbings?

  I mean, you mentioned that strategic lens and the commander element there. I have to ask in that completely flunking the schedule, which is always a sign of the best conversation, but how have you seen yourself change and evolve as a leader over the last years?

• 9:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think every year I feel embarrassed to look back at myself from a year or two years ago, just because I've grown so much and I've learned so much. It's almost like looking back, it's how could I even have conceived of trying to run a company with so little that I knew at that point? And then also knowing that that probably extrapolates recursively to my current state. So I think in a way it's a very humbling thing, you know, I think for me especially, Airtable is the biggest company certainly that I've led and aside from Salesforce that I've ever worked in. And so like at every moment in a company as we're growing as kind of the complexity of the organization and also the strategic opportunity becomes more interesting and more sharpened. This is all new territory for me and I think the only thing I can do is constantly try to learn as quickly as possible,

• 9:49Speaker 02

  make mistakes, but try to make them in ways that have less downside than they could. There's this Netflix show that keeps popping up, you know, as a recommendation for me called World War Two in Color. And so I've been watching that a little bit and one of the fascinating things you learn is just that even in like things that are literally life and death stakes like World War Two, there are so many mistakes of human judgment, human error that were made during that period. People made mistakes, people were fallible and drove the results of a battle or of a period. And so I think that's at least a heartening reminder that I'm not in it alone. And everybody else out there trying to build a company is also going through the same, right? I think we're all trying to figure it out. We can't be perfect. We can't avoid mistakes entirely, but we can certainly try to minimize them.

• 10:27Harry Stebbings?

  It's so interesting you said about your learning mindset there because I spoke to Karen at Co2 before the show and she mentioned you and Zuckerberg are both world-class listeners and learners, quite some company to keep there. So tell me. In terms of your learning process, what is the process here? And how do you seek out those experts and people that you look to learn from?

• 10:44Speaker 02

  Now, in hindsight, it's almost like this unspoken virtuous feedback cycle for one to become increasingly capable and able to build a company. I think in the sense that success begets opportunities to learn more and at a faster rate. And then that obviously feeds back into be able to build more company success. And so I think a little bit of it is, in the beginning, I think like rewind five, six years. I didn't have access to nearly the sorts of mentors or people just to pick the brains up as I do now. And yet I still found it extremely valuable to talk to the folks that I could, right? And always treat every introduction, every learning opportunity as a chance to not just kind of go and confirm something I already believed in or knew, but really treat it as more like this open-ended exploration. And I think that like almost everybody that you talk to who has some experience,

• 11:29Speaker 02

  there's something to learn from them, right? And so going in with this optimistic mindset, trying to learn what you can and take the conversation in interesting ways where the focus is education, not confirmation. And then as you build the company, I think you get access to more and more great people over time. And I think that's been a really, really important cycle for me.

• 11:45Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask, is there a challenge for you? Because I also spoke to Dan Rose before and he said that, you know, the amount of people that want to speak to you and give you advice also is actually huge. Is there a challenge for you in distilling which advice to take and which not to you? And how do you think about that determination process?

• 12:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think a lot of it is about looking at the advice or trying to extract not a simple rule or a best practice. I mean, let's take an example, like in the SaaS world, there's lots of blog posts, lots of people who will give advice about how to do sales or how to think about go to market in a SaaS context, right? Or what the right magical ratio of X or Y, you know, reps to CSMs or dollars of earned versus dollars acquired. And you know, there's certainly some basis to these best practices. But I think looking at them as part of a system rather than as a catch-all rule, I think is the key. And so saying, well, this approach might have worked for a different company, right? Like, you know, I've spent some time trying to learn from other great platform and SaaS companies like Twilio or Shopify, Atlassian, et cetera. And rather than just saying, well, Atlassian charged $7 per user per month for their product

• 12:45Speaker 02

  and they hired no salespeople, trying to understand why were they able? To get away with not hiring salespeople. Well, it's the combination of the lower price point and the fact that they had a developer oriented market. And the fact that they came into this space so early on and got such early mindshare leadership and saturation. And the fact that they eventually were going to layer in additional products to cross-sell or upsell to get more ARPU from each of those seats. Like if you just kind of take any one of those pieces out of the system and take that as as kind of advice to apply to your own company, I don't think it'll work, right? So I think it's really trying to be systems thinking oriented in this learning process.

• 13:19Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask, you mentioned the World War Two in color and thinking about kind of systems thinking as a leader. This is quite a binary question, so you can tell me if it's complete shit. Ben Horus has written before about wartime versus peacetime CEOs and leaders. And now is an interesting time for sure. I guess my question is, what would you say you are? And are you making a transition to wartime leadership today in the context?

• 13:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it's not yes, but it's a reduction, right? And I think the unreduced version of it is it's more like there's maybe two different axes that you care about. One is the urgency of the environment, right? Like, is this a time when you can be a lot more complacent, where you can take your time to do things? Or do you have to be fast and do you sometimes have to make decisions with imperfect information and risk being wrong? To avoid the greater risk or greater downside of not making a decision? That's one axis. And I think the other one is how much of a zero sum game is this opportunity? And especially insofar as does competition have to lose for you to win? And is your success really then more about beating your competition?

• 14:19Speaker 02

  And to the point of even like sometimes trying to undercut them directly as you see with the ride sharing wars between Lyft and Uber and the other international players? Or is this one where you should instead be more customer obsessed, right? Or product obsessed and really focused on building a breakthrough new product or unlocking new value for customers? And in doing so, really playing on a different entire field than the so-called competition. And so for us, I think that the urgency has certainly heightened over the past year. I think the COVID environment and the recessionary factors around us, the maybe shrinking availability of capital and also revenue opportunities. But also because competition is going to heat up for us, right? And I think that the real competition for us is from the

• 14:57Speaker 02

  Bigger companies, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, kind of recognizing that this is a huge opportunity to basically go and create the next abstraction over cloud computing, which is you shouldn't even have to write code to build a large class of useful applications. You should be able to do it with point and click and businesses should be able to do that. So urgency has certainly heightened up and to some extent, like there is a little bit of a competitive environment ahead, but I still think that the green field opportunity is so, so large. We think that this category could be worth literally tens of billions, if not hundreds of billions of dollars in the future. Right. This is going to be as big or bigger than cloud computing as a market. And in that regard, it's less about us constantly paranoid obsessing over what our competition is doing, what low end competition is doing, what these big three companies are doing,

• 15:39Speaker 02

  and more about just us being obsessed about customers and the product that we're building and making sure that we're unlocking completely new value, unprecedented value for the world through some of the stuff we're working on with product and platform and getting that out to more and more people. Because right now we don't have to compete against anyone else for getting people to use and experience this new type of product.

• 15:58Harry Stebbings?

  You mentioned the differing competition levels there from startup to large, large incumbents. Can I ask, with the massive rise in the amount of people building tools oriented maybe towards collaboration, remote work and work from home, do you think we'll enter this kind of consolidatory period where incumbents buy up a generation of those companies? Do you think we'll see a graveyard of them? How do you think this rise will play out?

• 16:18Speaker 02

  I think there's two tensions. One is that optimistically, I do think this is just an overall area that is seeing a secular trend upwards. Right. I think it's a massive growth opportunity and it's not just everyone zero sum game fighting over a small amount of, you know, kind of users who are either going to use one for another, but a lot of these tools are actually quite additive in nature. I think you see not just tools trying to go and replace Office 365 or Word documents, but also like tools that are doing completely new things, right? Like Guru is this really interesting product, I think, that's really more about knowledge management and kind of in some parts like a wiki, but also like knowledge discovery. And so I think like especially since in SaaS and these productivity or utility oriented areas,

• 17:00Speaker 02

  like there's no upper bound to how many new services can come out and create additive value. Like with consumer social, for instance, there was a finite amount of time. eyeballs, et cetera, that ultimately all of the companies were competing for between the peaches and the pads and the vines of the world. You only have so much time as a consumer to spread around to these products. And ultimately, only somebody advertising dollars will go to the platforms. But I think with this space of like utility oriented products, I think there's no upper bound. And I think we can actually see a lot of these different companies coexist. On the other hand, and more cynically, I think that for some of these companies, the go to market model, the scalability of the business may be challenging, especially if it's a product that has unproven or unclear value proposition to customers.

• 17:40Speaker 02

  And so I think that's going to be part of the challenge for a lot of these companies is to really prove that this is not just a novel way of doing things, but actually a better way of doing things and one that you can ascribe a real dollar amount of willingness to pay to.

• 17:52Harry Stebbings?

  Now, obviously, as a VC, I wouldn't be any kind of VC without some form of thesis, which makes me sound relatively intelligent. So it's not actually such an intelligent. But I do believe that we're going to see kind of this unbundling of the collaboration tool space into a much more specialized vertically specific way. Do you think we will see this unbundling of the collaboration remote work tool space into remote work tools for accountants, for dentists? Probably not dentists, because it's probably pretty for accountants, for lawyers, for designers, name your profession. Do you think we'll see the unbundling and do you agree with my thesis?

• 18:23Speaker 02

  Well, you know, I have to disagree because in part Airtable's own thesis is that we can actually consolidate a lot of vertical solutions into our platform, right? And basically dentists are using Airtable today to manage their operations. I mean, we see lawyers using Airtable for case mapping. We see cattle farmers using Airtable to actually like keep track of literal cattle and inventory. And then all the way up to large enterprises like Nike or other companies like that that are actually using Airtable to power a lot of agile and value driving workflows and enabling their most innovative knowledge workers to really create their own workflows. And so I think there is going to be some amount of consolidation that hopefully we help impact.

• 19:02Speaker 02

  Because ultimately, I think a lot of the components of what a dentist needs versus what a lawyer needs versus what a marketing team needs is not that different. And I think that we certainly have plans from a platform standpoint to enable even more extensibility of our product and create an ecosystem of. developers on top of Airtable that help add that kind of final mile of solution-specific functionality to Airtable so that you really get the best of both the kind of universal platform underpinnings, but then also the specificity of an add-on that works specifically for dentists.

• 19:32Harry Stebbings?

  Totally agree with you, shit thesis.

• 19:34Speaker 02

  No, no, no.

• 19:34Harry Stebbings?

  You mentioned the platform play there and it totally is like this endless opportunities in terms of the Airtable platform, but it's what every startup pitches and presents the platform itself. What are the core considerations for you when thinking about building out the platform? And the potential challenges and bottlenecks that you will face as the platform builds out?

• 19:51Speaker 02

  I've been actually reading a lot of Ben Thompson's strategy right now. I think he does a great job of really tearing down a lot of the contemporary platforms, from Apple to Shopify to Microsoft, to even companies like Uber, Amazon, et cetera, that are maybe more like partly aggregators, partly platforms. And I think one of the interesting things here is that like the hard part of building a platform is not even necessarily the actual technical or the product aspects of the platform, right? And in fact, like we've been working on that part of our platform for the past couple of years. We're going to launch a lot of new stuff around that in the very near future. That basically allows you to actually build on top of Airtable and even write extensions or build extensions of Airtable that sit natively within the product. But it turns out like that's hard, but it's not the hardest part. And I think that the really strategic part is figuring out how to use those platform affordances

• 20:35Speaker 02

  to create the right type of virtuous flywheel effects, scale advantages, ultimately create like an ecosystem that's sort of self-perpetuating instead of one that's just kind of linear. And so that's something that we're thinking a lot about and I don't think we have a very clean or compact answer to how we're going to do it yet. But I think certainly studying a lot of the other companies, what they've done well or not.

• 20:55Harry Stebbings?

  Listen, I'm so pleased you said about studying the other companies that have kind of done it well in terms of building out that ecosystem. One person who's done that from the sidelines, but as a VC many times is Peter at Benchmark. I spoke to Ray before the show at Caffeinated and he said, obviously, one of the best is Peter here. Why did you choose Peter over every other VC, he asked? And then he asked how he strategically helped you scale.

• 21:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, what makes Peter special as an investor and more importantly as a thought partner to, I think, the CEOs, the portfolio companies that he gets involved with as a helpful partner is he's basically on one hand very Much a systems thinker, right? There are a lot of VCs, I think, who are more what I would call domain specialists. They kind of come in and they just build up the playbook or really pattern match against like one type of company. And Peter actually has like this eclectic diversity of different types of companies that he's worked with, right? Both directly as well as through bench work, as well as through just having personal relationships as a friend. And maybe sometimes like friend advisor to companies he didn't invest in. But, you know, he's experienced like open source, SaaS, platform companies, consumer companies. Obviously, you know, companies like Uber and Snap with really interesting network effects or marketplace effects, also like true platforms.

• 22:01Speaker 02

  And so on the one hand, like he really takes the systematic way of thinking about those companies. And as I was saying earlier, I think that's really important versus just saying like, oh, well, this company did this. And so you should do it as well to instead say this worked for this company, but it was part of that broader system. And let's try to understand that system. And then on the second side, I think he's also, for somebody who thinks so much about systems, he's incredibly appreciative of the fact that like, you know, we're all humans, right? And companies are run by humans and are worked on by humans. And there's such an important soft element to success. Human motivation, human belief in the possibility of success, right? Both for founders as well as all operators out there. And so I think the fact that he kind of like marries this very structured systematic way of thinking.

• 22:42Speaker 02

  But then also this kind of soft appreciation for like the humanities, the liberal arts, the very people, the soft and fuzzy side of what it takes to build a company. I think is one of the things that I've really come to appreciate.

• 22:52Harry Stebbings?

  I do have to ask, you mentioned his incredible wisdom. I totally see it when I had him on the show. It was just incredible. But it's your job as the founder to pull out that wisdom and to really extract that value. How do you advise founders when it comes to investor value extraction?

• 23:05Speaker 02

  I think it comes down to getting valuable context rather than a specific answer. You know, I think the, the best investors or thought partners in general are really those who, if you were to ask them, well, how much should we charge for a product? Or should we do this or that? Rather than yes, the answer is, well, like, you know, let, let's talk about it. And here's the questions that are more important than the answer itself, right? Like, well, like, do you think that there are massive positive externalities to usage of the product, right? That build up the network effects around the platform that aren't priced into just the revenue captured per seat? Or have you talked to these people that I can introduce you? That can basically give you their own rich perspective as a first hand operator on analogous type of business. And so I think it really comes down to knowing what you want, what you're trying to get out of an investor ask or ask of any advisor,

• 23:49Speaker 02

  which is very rarely is a simple answer, the right thing to ask for.

• 23:54Harry Stebbings?

  Totally with you there. I do wanna touch a little bit in terms of the quick fire answer. I say a short statement, Howie. You mention your immediate thoughts. Are you ready to dive in?

• 24:02Speaker 02

  Sure, yeah.

• 24:03Harry Stebbings?

  Favorite book and why? I promised myself I'd read more, especially in a pandemic, but even in a pandemic, I'm failing. So help me out. What should I read?

• 24:11Speaker 02

  Well, because it is a stay at home environment, I'm gonna cheat here and give two because I'm reading 10 times more than I would ordinarily. The first is Hard Drive, which is basically a account of the early founding history of Microsoft. I just think it's so fascinating to kind of go back in time and see all the strategic decisions that the team there made that ultimately led into the almost unexpected rise of such a large and successful platform company. And the other one, on a more lighthearted note, is Spying on Wales. I just think it's almost like this complete antithesis to all the tech and software and platform stuff that I think about all the time. Just like reading about this account of the study of how whales have evolved, what they do all day, how they kind of gracefully coast through the oceans is almost this like serene contrast of a flurry of building a company.

• 24:54Harry Stebbings?

  What is your superpower and then your weakness in company building? 30 seconds on each.

• 24:59Speaker 02

  The only power I have is really the ability to learn quickly. And I think asking the right types of questions and thinking systematically about the answers to really absorb as much as I can from it. On the weakness side, I would just say bluntly, I haven't done this before, right? And Airtable is the kind of first company, or is the largest company that I've ever operated in this way, and it will be as we continue to grow. So I think that the huge weakness is I'm coming in with completely fresh eyes and without any prior experience of having done it before.

• 25:27Harry Stebbings?

  Who was the first check into Airtable and how did it come about?

• 25:30Speaker 02

  I'm pretty sure it was Ray Tonsing. And in fact, Ray had even told me before I officially started working on Airtable that since we had known each other through my prior company, that he was eager and excited to invest. And I think he even verbally committed a check into that next round without even there being a company to invest in. And then subsequently, when we did raise a round, he was true to his word and ultimately did become an official investor in the company.

• 25:53Harry Stebbings?

  What's the hardest role to hire for today and why do you think that is?

• 25:57Speaker 02

  I think for the CEO of a company, it's interesting because you're always hiring for roles that you haven't hired for before or for a new variation of that role, right? And namely, like as you hire leaders, you don't get the benefit with like an icy role that you have like, you know, many hires of. You get to repeat that muscle, right? And once you've hired 10 great engineers, it becomes a little bit more kind of straightforward to hire the 11. I think as a CEO, you're constantly building the leadership team or kind of leaning into some of the roles that are one offs. And I think it's hard to go and try to basically construct a role from thin air using inspiration from prior arc, but also not being beholden to it. And then trying to figure out when you've never done it before, how you go and meet people and assess them against this like benchmark that you're also not familiar with.

• 26:41Speaker 02

  So there's just so many unknowns on all sides that I think hiring for new roles is the hardest.

• 26:46Harry Stebbings?

  And then the final one and the most exciting for me, definitely. What do the next five years hold for you and for Airtable? Can you paint that vision for us?

• 26:53Speaker 02

  Airtable is really trying to be a software creation platform. And when we first launched, I think a lot of people looked at it and said, hey, this thing looks like a spreadsheet or maybe even like a database, you know, Microsoft Access or FileMaker that's been modernized and now is web and collaborative based. But really, we've always been driving towards being this true application building platform. And the way that people use Airtable today even is more app like. I mean, they're building really complex, robust use cases on top of Airtable with like sometimes thousands of fields, many dozens of tables and lots of like sophisticated collaboration on it. And I think the next five years are really about us taking that starting point and really further bolstering and extending what you can build on top of Airtable.

• 27:35Speaker 02

  And namely, I think to offer more layers of customization into the platform itself. So that when it's all said and done in five years, you're able to build apps that no longer just look like a spreadsheet and no longer just behave like a spreadsheet. There's going to be a lot more integrations built in or ways to build integrations into Airtable and customize even the interface and do all these other things that kind of make it a lot more dynamic. And then on the personal side, I think for me, like, you know, so much of my passion in mindshare is totally, you know, kind of imbued in Airtable and it's hard for me To kind of extract the two, but if anything, I'd certainly hope to continue growing as a leader and as an operator. And the only thing I can hope for is that in five years from now, as much as I'm embarrassed to think about how I could even have possibly tried to lead a company a year, two years ago with the kind of paltry knowledge that I had then,

• 28:20Speaker 02

  to feel exactly the same way in hindsight to today, because I've learned so much more during that five years.

• 28:25Harry Stebbings?

  Howie, as I said, completely fun the schedule, but I've just loved this conversation. So thank you so much for joining me today and it's been fantastic.

• 28:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, likewise. Thank you so, so much, Harry.

• 28:36Harry Stebbings?

  I really did just love that discussion with Howie and a huge thank you, Tim, for giving up the time and for being so open and honest there. It was such a pleasure. And if you'd like to see more from us, you can do that on Instagram at H Stebbings 1996 with two Bs. I always love to see you there. But before we leave you today, I want to take a moment to mention HelloSign, a great example of a company that found success in building a product focused on user experience. HelloSign is an effortless e-signature solution used by millions to securely send and request legally valid digital signatures and agreements. They raised a total of $16 million in funding and recently got acquired by Dropbox for an impressive $230 million. Check out hellosign.com/20vc to join the thousands of companies and founders who value fast, secure and simple e-signatures.

• 29:21Harry Stebbings?

  And speaking of signatures and getting deals done there, you really need to build that relationship and there's nothing like meeting face to face. And there's nothing like Zoom to make that happen. Zoom lets you connect and do business across town or around the world. Zoom ties together all of your communication needs into one easy platform for video conferencing, phone calls, group chat, webinars and your conference rooms and connect easily from anywhere, your mobile phone, your laptop or conference room. Zoom is how business gets done. Get your free account at zoom.com today. Meet happy with Zoom. And finally, I've always been a big history man, and so I want to talk about Cooley, the global law firm built around startups and venture capital. Since forming the first venture fund in Silicon Valley, Cooley has formed more venture capital funds than any other law firm in the world

• 30:05Harry Stebbings?

  with 50 plus years working with VCs. They help VCs form and manage funds, make investments and handle the myriad of issues that arise through a fund's lifetime. So to learn more about the number one most active law firm representing VC-backed companies going public, head over to Cooley.com and also check out Cooleygo.com. As always, I so appreciate all your support and I can't wait to bring you a fantastic episode with Andrew Wilkinson on Friday.