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Howie Liu
CEO, Airtable
Howie Liu is the co-founder and CEO of Airtable, a low-code platform designed for building collaborative applications. He graduated from Duke University in 2009 with degrees in mechanical engineering and public policy. Prior to founding Airtable in 2013, Liu co-founded Etacts, a CRM startup that was acquired by Salesforce shortly after its launch in 2010. His vision for Airtable was to create a user-friendly tool that combines the functionality of a spreadsheet with the capabilities of a database, facilitating easier collaboration among teams.12
Under Liu's leadership, Airtable has grown significantly, serving over 450,000 organizations, including major companies like Amazon, Netflix, and Nike. The platform has been recognized for its versatility and has achieved a valuation of approximately $6 billion as of 2024, reflecting its status as a leading tool in the enterprise software landscape.123 Liu's entrepreneurial journey has also included angel investing in various startups, showcasing his commitment to fostering innovation in the tech industry.14
Liu's approach to building Airtable emphasizes a gradual, thoughtful growth strategy, focusing on understanding customer needs and adapting to market demands. This philosophy has been instrumental in establishing Airtable as a critical platform for many businesses, particularly in the enterprise sector.23
Highlights
Introducing Airtable HyperDB.
Airtable can now scale up to 100M+ records to serve the largest enterprise use cases in the AI era. As we’ve journeyed upmarket, we’ve been pulled into digital operations use cases revolving around high-value, large-scale datasets (e.g., product SKUs, media content assets, marketing performance data). Airtable can now directly house those datasets, or connect to Databricks/Snowflake/systems of record, and run end-to-end processes like content production, product lifecycle management, or marketing operations.
We also launched App Library, which enables enterprises to standardize processes with centrally-managed, AI-enabled components and apps that can be forked and adapted by groups within the enterprise, while receiving live updates when needed.
All this adds up to Airtable enabling enterprises to rapidly stand up and deploy LLMs into the enterprise operations that enable winning execution in the AI era. https://t.co/8ZfycxRNQr
Really excited to launch this today!!
This represents the second of two ways in which we're disrupting ourselves with AI. The first, which we launched in March, was about making Airtable the easiest way to deploy the leading LLMs into departmental data and workflows.
The second, today's launch, is about using AI to build apps.
AI app-building will radically tilt the "build custom app vs buy prebuilt solution" equation in favor of the former.
Traditional enterprise software development is expensive and slow, but its even greater problem is the disconnect that results between the software developers building an app and the business stakeholders who need the app.
The entire founding premise of Airtable and the no code category we pioneered is to enable the people closest to their own business context and requirements to build the apps they need, and to easily change them as the requirements evolve. Especially in industries and functions undergoing a high rate of transformation (eg media, tech, retail, finserv), this approach is critical for companies to stand up the operations they need to adapt and execute on this new era. For instance, retailers spinning up digital commerce operations and the resultant omnichannel approach marketing. Or media companies building up their streaming operations and overall accelerating their pace and volume of content production, as well as marketing operations.
The magic of applying AI to the app building problem is that modern LLMs already come pretrained with an understanding of these industry dynamics and the rough shape of the operations needed to execute in this era. And can be guided to combine that context with the more specific requirements of a business unit owner to instantly generate a useful, highly specific app.
Best of all, when the app is generated as a no code app, all of its data, logic, and interface structure are made easily understood and directly manipulable by the customer. Unlike with AI-generated software code, which is understandable/inspectable/editable only by developers.
That's why we're calling it Cobuilder. The best way to leverage LLMs to build applications for a business use case is to bring the AI generation and human user as close together as possible, with no code as the common language between them.
My cofounder @aofstad will remember my decade-ago ruminations about a future in which you could “talk to Airtable to have it build your app.” A decade and 50M+ Airtable apps later… this is by far the biggest accelerant to deliver on that mission.
To the entire community of team members, customers, and Airtable builders that have gotten us here, thank you. And I couldn't be more excited to join together on the next decade ahead!
Try it here! We even allow you to generate an app pre-signup : ) https://t.co/iTKSCgoW0q
