Airtable co-founder and CEO Howie Liu discusses how software companies founded before generative AI must evaluate whether their legacy architecture is an asset or liability.
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Liu: Viral 'Airtable is dead' tweet used completely false revenue metrics
“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…”
Insight
Liu: Every software product has to be refounded for AI
“Regardless, I think that now we're entering this moment where like every, I mean, certainly every software product, in my opinion, has to be refounded because like AI is such a paradigm shift It's not even like, just like the shift from desktop to mobile or on…”
Insight
Liu: Many AI-native startups struggle to turn tourist traffic into durable retention
“A lot of the challenge for many of the AI native companies I've seen Is that they could have, like, a very wide top of funnel, like, get all of this AI tourist traffic, you know, a lot of interest, a lot of, like, kind of, like, you know, early usage, but then…”
Insight
Liu: Generating full business apps from code causes bugs and context collapse
“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…”
Opinion
Liu: Post-Elon Twitter Is Better Due to Bolder Product Execution
“I would say net net, I like The post-Elon Twitter more than the pre-Elon Twitter because it's just bolder, and like, I, you know, I guess I really admire bold product execution where you're not just kind of stuck to, like, the current laurels, and they've made…”
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Liu: Half of Airtable's engineering, product, and design org works on AI
“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.”