Airtable

“I invested in Airtable when it was three people and really going back to the conviction and how we build conviction. Yeah, I met Howie, I met the team and I just fell in love with them and immediately and knew that they're going to build a very, very big compa…”

“The investment thesis that we got excited about was this concept of the unbundling of Excel, and we felt like Airtable could become the all-in-one collaboration platform that could kind of redefine how consumers think about productivity software.”

“And now, nearly five years later, we've invested in more than a hundred companies as a group, and those companies include Bird, Cameo, Gusto, Carta, Airtable, Lambda School, Carrot Fertility, Modern Fertility, Vector Space, and countless more.”

“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 …”

“And yet I still found it extremely valuable to talk to the folks that I could write 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 m…”

“What really then becomes the bottleneck in success is, I think, ensuring that everybody has the right strategic context, not just given the specific tactical instruction of do this very narrow problem, but really has the broader framework of understanding why …”

“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.”

“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…”

“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. And namely, I think to offer more layers of customization into the platform itself so that when it…”

“I think the biggest source of inefficiency or failure It tends to be for us at least rework or work that was well done, but for the wrong problem.”

“I'm pretty sure it was Ray Tonzing, and in fact, Ray had even told me before 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 com…”

“We certainly have plans from a platform standpoint to enable even more extensibility of our product and create an ecosystem of application developers on top of Airtable that help add that kind of final mile of solution specific functionality to Airtable so tha…”

“And so I think like, especially since in SAS and these productivity or utility oriented areas, 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 ti…”

“I think a lot of it comes down to process that happens outside of the tools as much as the tools.”

“Airtable for me is a great example of a grand simplification of the database.”

“One of the leading seed-focused firms of the last decade, with a portfolio including the likes of Airtable, Glossier, Pillpack, Plaid, and many more incredible companies.”

“If your product has a social collaboration, network effect, that kind of thing, think about Slack, LinkedIn, right, or anything like, or Airtable, Figma, hiring for growth early on, a little bit earlier, will allow you to engineering those growth loops into th…”

“I think Airtable's onboarding is very good. I also think linear's onboarding is very good.”

“One mistake I've seen is assuming that best growth practices and experience in consumer will translate to SaaS and the other way around. That risk was taken on me when I started at Airtable. I actually came from Meta, and so I was jumping from consumer to SaaS…”

“Something that I think we did really well at Airtable is thinking of PLG, or that product-led motion, and the sales-led motion or sales-assisted motion as being part of one engine. For the business. I find that commonly businesses will say, well, I need to pic…”

“Yeah, so we do monthly post-mortems. They're somewhat structured. We actually have a, you know, air table system where we track all of our experiments. We score them, et cetera, in terms of impact.”

“AirTable took two and a half years to build the product before we even launched.”

“Some enterprises I've talked to, they literally have thousands of SaaS products, and they're trying to consolidate down you know, 50 different collaboration tools into three, right?”

“I think it happened fairly early for us. I would, I think probably 2019 roughly. So maybe a year after we got our unicorn valuation you know, that was four years after launch admittedly, and we had gotten a lot of PLD adoption. We were well at the, you know, m…”

“I think we went from, you know, one to ten million in revenue in a little over a year.”

“If we do well at executing on the durable growth playbook, we figure out, you know, how to sell differentiated value into the enterprise and do it repeatedly you know, there will, you know, for sure be a breakeven point where we are worth our previous valuatio…”

“In hindsight, we didn't think enough about go to market model in the early days of the company, we just focused on building a good product and, you know, happily and luckily that was good enough to get us to the next phase where we did start thinking about go …”

“I think with Gen AI, we're gonna see more and more use cases get you know, get powered by AI, right? And it's gonna attack all these different functions, industries, et cetera piece by piece, and so the total amount of disruption in that is, I think, just a lo…”

“I think any company sub one billion in revenue is, is is an upstart compared to the enterprise type, you know, whether you're Salesforce or service now, or obviously you know, the big thing companies, we're just still operating at a much smaller, leaner scale …”

“Personally, I don't know if there's anything particularly special about next year. I mean, I think every month, That goes by enterprises are getting more savvy about AI. You know, I'm seeing it in my conversations with enterprises, you know, today versus three…”

“In my mind you know, in, in my crash course on enterprise that I've gained over the past 10 years of you know, of, you know, doing the PLG thing and then shifting into an enterprise centric model, I think a million dollar logo is really the threshold of being …”

“Save for Atlassian, I think every great enterprise product eventually has to, you know, be sold to a senior, a strategic buyer, right? In the enterprise”

“So, Harry, I promise you, I imagine a lot of your time is like, oh, think about that fund, think about that partner, to the point that over 15 years we've operationalized this. Like our software, I don't care if you use Monday, Airtable, we use Airtable. But o…”

“I'm in it for the game as it was, and I do think, you know, these kind of compounders like Airtable you know, like there's companies I'm in where I'm like, okay, I can see this being a fifty billion dollar company, and if I just stick with it for, you know, ma…”

“I think I have more Airtable than anyone at eleven billion dollars because they've acquired about four of my companies.”

“What I think might happen is this is the one where people capitulate both founders and investors where they say, look, folks have already had marked down since 2021, but they're not consistent. This deal in many ways was everyone capitulated. The late stage go…”

“The company was doing four hundred and eighty five million ARR, growing 20% year on year, ultimately at a 1.285 billion dollar acquisition price.”

“I bet you two years from now it's doing 600, not 900, but I bet you it's three hundred million of free cash flow.”