Airtable

“I was also mentioned, I was also thinking about Howie Lu. From Airtable. Effectively just did the same thing with Hyperagent, except that he didn't run it in parallel that much. He basically had already sold the company and was just kind of doubleheading for a…”

“Benning Spoon's added eleven billion in market cap after announcing the Airtable acquisition.”

“Airtable spun out its AI agent business, which is known as Hyper Agent. Into a separate independent company prior to this acquisition.”

“We passed on this in the last three funding rounds, right? Which I think we're at 2,000,000,005 1,000,000,011 billion.”

“So I put a three million dollar check into Airtable at a 90 post in between rounds early on, because this is now probably in 2012 ish, maybe that era.”

“The reason this never happens is because big fancy investors, not us lowly seed investors, but big fancy ones, have no interest in the write down, right? It's a massive write down, right, for them. And they'd rather just stick it on their books and pretend lik…”

“The reality of Airtable and tools like it Is that AI has made it, you know, there's like other businesses that were really, really flying, like in the Airtable days, like Retool and these kind of lightweight UI layers that made it easier to interact with datab…”

“These things have big enterprise contracts. They're going to like milk those. They're going to Like, hack the CS, the customer support teams to zero because they can consolidate it.”

“Because they're thinking, because they type A on their keyboard, and it auto completes to Airtable.com, and so they will keep using it.”

“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.”

“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…”

“All of these companies are building agents, intelligent systems that are performing specialized tasks for whatever use cases they have, and so all of them build evals that reflect how their systems are expected to behave in production. They're all following si…”

“Like it's funny, like one of our recent board memos that I wrote and sent out to our entire board and kind of major investor list. Like, you know, a lot of it was researched and crafted by hyper agent, right? Obviously with like my, you know, kind of instincts…”

“Within air table, which is a half billion revenue business. We're going to generate a hundred million of free cash flow. You know, this year, like we have over a billion dollars on our balance sheet.”

“When I look at the most valuable companies that, products that I admire, Figma, Notion, Airtable, Coda, all of these were three and a half to five years to launch.”

“So with OpenAI, with Slack, many other, Airtable, Figma, New Relic, there's tons of companies out there that all started with this model of full salary, and it's a, you know, a normal living salary like you would give to any other product manager, marketer, en…”

“My mum still won't build an app even though you can use something like Lovable. It's, because I think it's still, you've got to want to do the building bit. Like, that's still the issue. It's either someone like my mother wants the app built, doesn't want to s…”

“Basically none of it was true. And I mean, the surprising thing to me was how viral this tweet went when, frankly, like I actually looked back at this person's other tweets. I think they worked at CB insights. And the irony is like the whole point of that busi…”

“They did also issue a correction though all in did a follow-up episode a few, few I think weeks later saying like, hey, like, you know, we got the numbers wrong, like you know, we were revising our case and kind of a view on Airtable.”

“I think the same is true for Figma, which you know, actually like had a very parallel timeline to us. Like we both were founded around the same time, both spent two and a half years building the product like hands on you know, that early team before launching.”

“I'm pretty sure I'm still the I just checked this recently, but like I take pride in being the number one most expensive An inference cost user of Airtable AI not just within our own company, but I think for a long time I was globally across all our customers …”

“Now we have a weekly, Basically sprint check in on all of our AI execution stuff, which now is like half the company or half the EPD org is working on AI capabilities.”

“You tend to think incrementally when everyone's remit is actually like a feature that they incrementally improve by definition, as opposed to thinking about like a mission or like a outcome goal, right? That might need to, you know coordinate, you know, dramat…”

“Our data store, HyperDB, that now can handle, like, multi-hundred million record data sets.”

“Even when we had to do, ah, two riffs, right, that, that significantly, you know, kind of reduced our head count, you know, we had just, like, way too quickly grown and overscaled the business at a certain point but even when we did our riffs, we were still ac…”

“We're doing this new thing that's about to ship where, you know, not only can you describe the app you want to build and then iterate on it with, you know, kind of our conversational agent Omni, but and it builds it with like the existing air table platform ca…”

“And in our case, like we just like made the entire product experience AI centric, right? Like it used to be that like, you know, we had kind of this like secondary thing that you could ask questions to the assistant sidebar. We now made our agent the default w…”

“And if you can't really introspect and say like, look, I think I'm better off doing this with the pieces that I have for my existing business and product, then I think you should sell, right? Like you should find a buyer. For that company and then go and like,…”

“And yet if you have an agent that has to generate every single bit of that app from scratch from code, it's going to be very unreliable. There's going to be bugs. There's going to be data and security issues. And then you're also going to have a context collap…”

“If anyone wants to just literally block out a day or frankly, even a week and like have the ultimate excuse, like you can use, like, you know, you can say that I told you to do it, right? Like if you want to cancel all your meetings for like a day or for an en…”

“There's a strong advantage to any of those Three roles who can kind of cross over into the other two, right? Like kind of the hybrid unicorn types, right? So if you're a designer who. Can be just technical enough to kind of be dangerous and understand a little…”

“We're implementing this new capability that can use basically a long running AI crawler agent that goes and researches the web, you know, for a specific type of object or entity. So it's a little bit different from deep research, similar to deep research, but …”

“I guess I'm just more and more skeptical that that, like, hands off, you know, pure delegation you know, and process management role ever works as a CEO.”

“We've funded a handful, and I don't know the exact numbers, but it's five or less Of no code, code bases. No code apps, I guess I would call them, you know, that are built in air table, bubble, that kind of stuff. And all of them have been rewritten or will ne…”

“We did this at Slack, Webflow, OpenAI, and I know many other greats have done it like Calendly, New Relic, and Airtable.”

“We actually have a setup internally where we can now generate an avatar video powered by HeyGen automatically from content in a row of Airtable.”

“Every single business Should be creating apps this way and probably replacing is, you know over the next few years, like old legacy software with this.”

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

“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…”

“And I think product market fit, when you start with the market first, it's accelerated, but I will say this, I think that it's also capped on the upside. Because you're starting with the market. Versus the Airtable and the Figma, which started with the technic…”

“We are a no-code platform letting you build your own AI agents easily. So you can think of, we are to Langchain as Airtable to MySQL. Like you can just pin up AI agents super easily by clicking around and no code required. You didn't have to be an engineer and…”

“I think the no-code tinkerers is the community. Yeah. It is going to be the same sort of community as what, yeah, Webflow, Zapier, Airtable, Notion, to some extent.”

“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…”

“Zapier was our first user, and then Coda and Airtable quickly followed, and there was just no chance they would be able to use the product unless the data stayed in their cloud.”

“I invested in Notion, Airtable, and Retool within, I don't know, two years of each other, whatever the time frame was. But at the time, there was no low code, no code. Kind of thesis. It was just, these are really interesting founders working in interesting ar…”

“Everybody has used spreadsheets at this point. I mean, it's like the most prolific app building platform out there.”

“And a lot of use cases of spreadsheets really should be databases or apps, right? Anytime you're dealing with something that's not like number crunching and instead is some kind of tabular data, a workflow, like a database like thing of customers, or it could …”

“Had we tried to go really hard into enterprise in the first couple of years, it would have been difficult because some of the bigger, larger scale use cases Would have just broken the product.”

“What we've learned is that, you know, this is gonna be a really difficult product to just kind of release out there in a horizontal way and hope that everyone just figures it out, right? Even though there are so many different applications, you can apply it to…”

“I think that, that, you know, you'll have some use cases addressed through solution companies that can be very big you know each individually. And yet, you know, I still think even if you added all of them up, they're still tapping into such a small fraction o…”

“We've actually found that creating a pipeline where, you know, the first AI step generates a first effort at translating, you know, whatever it is. And then the second step actually critiques itself and finds potential errors. You have a third step where eithe…”

“I'm just very strongly of the belief that short of AGI, I think we're gonna have a really hard time having fully automated you know, Cogen agents that replace the need for no code, because You actually want to generate the outputs in no code because for a long…”

“That is a much better way To create content, then have a huge prompt that tries to do everything, because it tends to fail when you do that. And so we try to break it down, we store the data in Airtable, and then we feedback the data from Airtable into the fin…”

“500,000 organizations use Airtable.”

“50% of the Fortune 500 are paid customers.”

“We're in the hundreds of millions of revenue, and we would have ended last year as a top decile grower amongst public SaaS companies.”

“We also are forecasting a next 12 month revenue growth rate of also top decile growth.”

“And as of Q four of this past year, and now we just completed Q one, we are cashflow positive as a business.”

“I use Airtable for instance, to track, you know, a lot of earnings calls of our customers. So, you know, I kind of have my own super CRM of customers that I'm directly engaging with”