![]() For instance, we can just scale up not only in terms of sheer record capacity … but also the complexity of implementation,” said Liu. “Because we have a relational database foundation, we’re more scalable. Instead, Liu wants to turn Airtable into an application development platform that can serve large-scale enterprises, and compete with the likes of Salesforce and ServiceNow.Īirtable’s ability to land enterprise clients, where other productivity software has struggled, is due to the company's database, said Liu. Today, Airtable has landed a number of large enterprise customers, from Netflix and Shopify to Intuit and Autodesk.īut Liu isn’t satisfied with just being viewed as a productivity software company. From the beginning, Liu said he and his co-founders designed the product with scalability and complexity in mind. As of late last year, Airtable reached more than 300,000 customers and more than $100 million in annual recurring revenue.ĭespite notable success in the consumer world, Liu always had dreams of serving large enterprises. The company quickly found rapid adoption among designers and developers, building an almost cult following amongst productivity enthusiasts for its 21st century take on the spreadsheet. Alongside a few friends from college, Liu set out to build Airtable as a super-powered spreadsheet on top of a relational database, much like Salesforce. That spin came in the form of startup Airtable, which Liu left Salesforce to build in 2013, just two years after joining the company. “Building a platform to make apps, or software to make other software, is a really pretty interesting problem, and I think I can put my own spin on it,” he said. ![]() “That was the unlock for me … it's like the software that can make any other software,” he said.īut Liu also recognized that Salesforce’s user interface wasn’t the best, and he felt he could do better. In other words, because everything in Salesforce could be changed, companies and individuals could build their own applications, which is why Liu saw Salesforce as more of an application platform than a CRM giant. “It was a metadata-driven platform, meaning instead of hardcoding their business objects to be one shape, every customer could define their own relational data structure and all of their functionality worked regardless of how the customer defined their business objects,” said Liu. While working at Salesforce, Liu realized its underlying data model wasn’t as rigid as other CRM systems, which gave customers a lot of flexibility around how they customized the software. That was the unlock for me … it's like the software that can make any other software. By the age of 22, he had sold that company to Salesforce. By the age of 13 Liu taught himself to code with his father’s old textbook, and shortly after college he built his first company, a CRM system called Etacts. Howie Liu has always been interested in the power of software. But to do that, Airtable will have to prove to enterprises, investors and analysts that it's much more than a productivity company. These days, Liu wants Airtable to shift from collaboration and productivity tools to an application development platform that enterprises select as the backbone of their business workflows. “We always intended to become an app builder,” he said. “We are trying to position ourselves more against ServiceNow or Salesforce, not from a CRM standpoint, but from a platform standpoint,” said Liu. Instead, he wants people to draw comparisons between Airtable and enterprise software giants like his former employer Salesforce, or even ServiceNow. To this day, Liu eschews the comparisons to productivity apps like Asana, Trello, Notion or. Years ago, when Airtable was referenced as a “spreadsheet on steroids” in the press, CEO Howie Liu wasn’t exactly enthusiastic, because he felt the company offered much more than that. In fact, it may not be a productivity company at all. To many, the company remains shrouded in mystery, a cult classic among designers and developers but relatively unknown to the mainstream.Īirtable is clearly not your average productivity company. “I cover the collaboration space and Airtable wasn't really on my radar screen in any significant way,” said Futurum Research analyst Shelly Kramer. Some analysts and investors Protocol spoke to didn’t even have the productivity tool-maker on their radar, despite the company raising a massive $735 million at an $11 billion valuation last December. Airtable has always been somewhat misunderstood, even within its own market.
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