Insight
Liu: Fully autonomous agentic AI approaches are fundamentally challenged
“And the key here is you can't automate end to end things with AI, right? And that's why I think like the agentic auto GPT like approach is really challenged because, you know, there's, it's just too hard for AI to kind of reason about every single step, break …”
Insight
Howie Liu: UX is now the main bottleneck to enterprise AI adoption
“And I actually think now the bottleneck to their to their application is UX. It's actually giving people the tools to very easily deploy those models into not just a few Very central core use cases within a large company, but actually into the fractal of every…”
Insight
Howie Liu: No-code remains necessary because non-technical users can inspect AI output
“The fact that no code by definition means that the output of the Turing bot, the AI builder, Is actually in a form that a non-technical user can understand. So the very person who's asking the AI to generate the app can then understand fully its outputs.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Howie Liu: AI won't fully automate complex app development before AGI
“So as long as we haven't had AGI, I don't think we will have Turing bots or AI code writers that are able to fully automate in a satisfactory way, the building of a complex app”
Insight
Liu: Existing AI models hold 10,000x untapped enterprise value without further upgrades
“In fact, my thesis is you could freeze all model development in its current state and say, you know what? GBD five is never going to come out. Like there's not going to be any better models. The models we have are all we're going to get for the next 10 years. …”
Insight
Howie Liu: Every PLG company eventually hits a growth asymptote
“You know, which is not to say you have to be PLG to start with, but I think every PLG company, and this is true, whether you started in Zerp or after I don't think it's going away, but I think if you start with PLG, you will eventually run into an asymptote of…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Howie Liu: 90% of spreadsheets are used as makeshift databases
“90% of spreadsheets are not used for kind of their intended purpose of numerical analysis, but really, you know, they're used as a makeshift database.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Liu: Airtable forecasts top-decile revenue growth over the next 12 months
“We also are forecasting a next 12 month revenue growth rate of also top decile growth.”
Insight
Howie Liu: AI models are effective at critiquing AI output
“You would think that AI would be biased to like be soft on AI output, but it actually isn't like, it's actually very good at critiquing its own output.”
Opinion
Howie Liu: Training an in-house foundation model is not viable for Airtable
“I think it's very difficult to create anything relevant if we were to train our own foundation model.”
Opinion
Liu: Pegasystems addresses complex processes in a brittle, heavyweight manner
“Think like old school companies like Pegasystems, right. That are really tackling very complex business processes. But in a very brittle way, right? Like once you implement something on Pega, you're not iterating on that, like on a daily or even monthly or eve…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Howie Liu: Airtable has grown revenue every single month since launch
“We've been growing revenue every single month, like of our existence”
Insight
Liu: Most software is just a CRUD interface over relational databases
“The vast majority of software out there in the world is not going towards some exciting new technology or, you know, not some, you know, innovative new consumer product, but really it's a reinvention of the same wheel again and again. And that is a create, rea…”
Assertion Contradicted
Liu: Airtable built the first real-time synchronized relational database engine
“In Airtable, we spent a lot of time up front investing in the first real-time synchronized relational database engine out there.”
Insight
Liu: Long-tail verticals are too small for dedicated software companies
“So there are many different long tail categories that we believe are too small of a market for any, you know, single dedicated company to really build a great vertical product around.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Liu: 50% of Fortune 500 companies are paid Airtable customers
“50% of the Fortune 500 are paid customers.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Liu: Airtable has hundreds of millions in revenue and top-decile SaaS growth
“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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Airtable achieved positive cash flow in Q4 2023 and Q1 2024
“And as of Q four of this past year, and now we just completed Q one, we are cashflow positive as a business.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Howie Liu: Airtable has nearly $1B on balance sheet and is profitable
“We have, you know, still a billion of capital nearly in, in the balance sheet and like, you know, we're now profitable.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Howie Liu: Enterprise expansion drove as much PLG as SMBs for Airtable
“We got more virality driven by expansion within enterprises, real large companies. Right. And you know, seeing like that initial user go to five to 10 to 50 to hundreds to thousands that actually drove a lot of our PLG. So PLG actually for us happened as much …”
Insight
Howie Liu: Founders should only seek advice for their immediate next phase
“What I wish I knew at the time of each of these phases is to take advice from people who are as close to the next phase, the next immediate phase of the company and the problems that we need to solve as possible versus taking advice from people who are too far…”
Insight
Liu: Collaborative undo is harder in relational databases than document editors
“In a relational data context, however, it's a much harder problem to solve, and you have to deal with things like, what if, you know, one person changes a column type from a linked field to a text field, and then somebody else was making edits to that field at…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Liu: 500,000 organizations use Airtable
“500,000 organizations use Airtable.”
Disclosure
Liu: Airtable aims to provide software Lego blocks for non-technical users
“The intent here for us is to create kind of a Lego block of, ah, you know, of software or of databases That allows any non-technical end user to go and create the perfect data schema that maps to their business over time.”
