The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 38 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Akhund: Airtable can reach a $50 billion valuation within 15 years
“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…”
Howie Liu: Airtable Will Grow to Surpass Its Peak $11B Valuation
“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…”
Howie Liu: $1M ARR Is the True Threshold for Real Enterprise Accounts
“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 …”
Howie Liu: Except Atlassian, Every Enterprise Product Eventually Needs Top-Down Sales
“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”
Isford: Consumer growth expertise does not translate directly to B2B SaaS
“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…”
Howie Liu: No-code market will be as big or bigger than cloud computing
“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.”
Lemkin: Airtable's low-price acquisition will trigger a wave of SaaS capitulation sales
“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…”
Stebbings: Holds significant Airtable equity after four portfolio company acquisitions
“I think I have more Airtable than anyone at eleven billion dollars because they've acquired about four of my companies.”
Howie Liu: Software Companies Under $1B Revenue Are Still Upstarts
“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 …”
Isford: SaaS firms wrongly view PLG and sales as mutually exclusive
“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…”
Liu: Airtable Will Evolve Beyond Spreadsheets Into Full Custom App Platform
“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…”
Liu: Airtable plans to build a third-party developer ecosystem
“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…”
Howie Liu: Utility SaaS tools have no upper bound and can coexist
“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…”
CRV's early Airtable investment thesis was the unbundling of Microsoft Excel
“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.”
Stebbings: Airtable acquired by Bending Spoons for $1.285B at $485M ARR
“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.”
O'Driscoll: Airtable will reach $300M in free cash flow in two years
“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.”
Howie Liu: Enterprises Are Consolidating 50 Collaboration Tools Down to Three
“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?”
Howie Liu: Airtable Signed Its First $1M ARR Contract in 2019
“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…”
Howie Liu: Airtable Scaled From $1M to $10M Revenue in Under a Year
“I think we went from, you know, one to ten million in revenue in a little over a year.”
Howie Liu: Generative AI Will Be More Disruptive Than Cloud Computing
“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…”
Howie Liu: Enterprise AI Adoption Will Be Iterative, Not a Massive Wave
“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…”
Lauryn Isford praises Airtable and Linear for market-leading onboarding
“I think Airtable's onboarding is very good. I also think linear's onboarding is very good.”
Startups with network effects should hire growth talent earlier to engineer loops
“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…”
Liu: Tackling massive opportunities requires deliberate upfront investment over quick wins
“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 …”
Howie Liu: Treat advice meetings as open-ended exploration, not confirmation
“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…”
Liu: Airtable serves users ranging from dentists and cattle farmers to Nike
“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…”
Howie Liu: Solving the wrong problem is Airtable's biggest source of inefficiency
“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.”
Howie Liu: Remote work relies on management processes, not just software tools
“I think a lot of it comes down to process that happens outside of the tools as much as the tools.”
Max Gazor invested in Airtable when the company had three employees
“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…”
Frankel: Founder Collective built dedicated systems and staff for partner matchmaking
“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…”
Howie Liu: Airtable Spent 2.5 Years Building Its Product Prior to Launch
“AirTable took two and a half years to build the product before we even launched.”
Howie Liu: Airtable Neglected Go-To-Market Strategy in Its Early Days
“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 …”
Batchu: Ramp tracks and scores all growth experiments monthly using Airtable
“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.”
Fenton: Airtable is a grand simplification of the database
“Airtable for me is a great example of a grand simplification of the database.”
Howie Liu: Providing strategic context is the hardest and most vital leadership duty
“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 …”
Liu: Ray Tonzing Was Airtable's First Investor Before Company Founded
“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…”
Messerschmidt: #Angels syndicate has invested in over 100 startups
“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.”