if you were literally founding a new company from scratch with the same mission, how would you execute on that mission using a fully AI native approach?
If you can't, then you should find a buyer.
And then if you really care about this mission, like go and start the next carnation of it.
For people that work for you, how have you adjusted what you expect of them to help them be successful?
If you want to cancel all your meetings for like a day or for an entire week and just go play around with every AI product you think could be relevant to Airtable, Go do it.
Of the different functions on a product team, PM, engineering, design, who has had the most success being more productive with these tools?
It really does become more about individual attitude.
There's a strong advantage to... any of those three roles who can kind of cross over into the other two.
As a PM, you need to start looking more like a hybrid PM prototyper who has some good design sensibilities.
Do you see one of these roles being more in trouble than others?
Today, my guest is Howie Liu. Howie is the co-founder and CEO of Airtable.
I'm having a With founders who are reinventing their decade plus old business in this AI era, to help you navigate this existential transition that every company and product is going through right now.
Howie and Airtable's journey is an incredible example of this and there's so much to learn from what Howie shares in this conversation.
We talk about a very interesting trend that I've noticed that Howie is very much an example of, of CEOs almost becoming individual contributors again, Getting into the code, building things, leading initiatives themselves.
There's something that we call the ICCO.
We also talk about the very specific skills that he believes product managers and product leaders, also engineers and designers, need to build to do well in this new world that we're in.
Also, how he restructured his company into two groups, a fast thinking group and a slow thinking group. which allow their AI investments to significantly accelerate.
If you're struggling to figure out how to be successful in this new AI era, this episode is for you.
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That's getdx.com. Howie, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.
I'm so excited. Thank you, Lenny. I've been a listener from afar for a while now.
I'm really flattered to hear that. I'm also very excited.
You've been on quite a journey over the last, is it 13 years?
Is it longer? Yeah, right about 13. 13 years.
Imagine there have been a lot of ups and a lot of downs.
I want to talk about all those things. I want to talk about a lot of the lessons that you've learned along the way.
I want to start with what I imagine was a very surprising down moment in the history of Airtable.
This is something that unfortunately is something I think about when I think of Airtable.
I feel other people maybe feel this way is there's this tweet that went super viral maybe a couple of years ago at this point. where someone just shared all this data and they're like, Airtable is dead.
They've raised way more money than they're worth.
They're not making enough to get from underwater.
Airtable RIP. Uh, what happened there? How much of that was true?
How did that go? So very, I mean, basically none of it was true.
Uh, and, um, I mean, the surprising thing to me was how viral this tweet went. when, frankly, like I actually look back at this person's other tweets.
I think they they they worked at CB Insights.
And the irony is like the whole point of that business is to have like good data good data quality around private company data and they just like literally had incorrect numbers by like a strong multiple on like what our revenue scale was, what our growth rate was like, you know, and if it gave me some consolation, I look back and like,
This person had also tweeted about other companies like Flexport was the last kind of takedown tweet.
They had like, oh, Flexport's dead. their valuation is too high and blah, blah, blah.
And so I think that the more surprising thing was just like, This person has been tweeting a bunch of like spicy takes that are not substantiated by real data or correct data.
And yet this particular tweet went super viral.
And that was the perplexing part to me. And then actually, I think what really gave it legs was on the All In podcast, which is, like, obviously super popular, you know, and I listen to it, like... you know, they covered it.
They were like, oh, like, you know, latest on this week's news, like, you know, this tweet about Airtable.
What do we think about this? And it almost, I think, became like... a way to talk about a broader theme of what happens to this last generation of highly valued companies, maybe decacorn companies, in this new and at that point, it was like kind of the recent moment for both public and private markets.
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, So we're revising our case and kind of a view on Airtable.
What's that line about how a lie gets around the world some number of times before truth has even this time to get out of bed?
Yeah, well, I think I learned about memes and morality very quickly in that experience.
Not a very good social media person, but I think I learned a little more.
Yeah, it's tough. Twitter's such an, the incentives are so misaligned.
It's just, I tweet something people want to share, not truth.
Well, I mean, especially like, I mean, I there's a lot to like, 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 guess I really admire bold product execution where you're not just kind of stuck to the current laurels.
And they've made so many changes. But I do feel like...
I get injected into my feed, very sensational content all the time.
And I mean, it works on me. I'm like, you know, like I can't help but to like click on it and engage with it and like, But I think it does result in this kind of content really spreading.
Yeah, now Nikita running the show. I don't know if you saw this.
There's a new, we don't need to keep talking about Twitter, but there's a new feature where you take a screenshot of a tweet and it has like a huge x.com logo watermarked on the top right.
Yeah. And just to like, you know, people are sharing these tweets all the time.
Yeah. Yeah. Oh, man. Never a dull moment over there.
For sure. Okay, I want to go in a completely different direction, something that I'm really excited to talk to you about, which is this very emerging trend that I've noticed that I feel like you're at the forefront of. of CEOs becoming ICs again.
It's kind of this move of I see CEOs CEOs getting their hands dirty again, building again, getting in the weeds, coding again.
I feel like you're, again, at the forefront of this.
Talk about just why you've done this, why you think this is important and just what that looks like day to day to you versus what your life was like a few years ago.
The underlying reason for this shift, at least for me, is that as we started the company, I was very much in this mode, right?
Like I was literally writing code. both on the back end, thinking about the real-time data architecture of our platform, also the front end, the UX.
You know, I would argue that like in that founding moment, like the initial product market fit finding And especially for a product that is like pure software, right?
Like we weren't building like a operationally heavy business, like a dog walking marketplace where the tech is only an afterthought. the tech was the product, right?
And in a very meta sense, like Airtable is the platform for other people to build their own apps, right?
It's all about the attack. The very intimate design decisions Again, both architecturally and on the front end and the product UX choices, like that is the product's value problem.
Right. Like you can't separate those two.
You can't say like, okay, like I researched the jobs to be done.
Here's the workflow. Here's the process.
And then like, okay, some engineer can just build it as an afterthought.
Like it's those like little decisions. and really be able to be at the bleeding edge of what's possible, both in the browser and with the real-time data architecture, that made the product what it was.
I think the same is true for Figma, which actually had a very parallel timeline to us.
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.
And, you know, when I think now to like, both the era in between, that founding moment and then now as well as like now the the new kind of gen ai moment like i think there was a maturing era of both sass overall and air table specifically where know as you scale up and you kind of learn how to build you know teams and organizations and like you have to kind of like scale up stuff that's not actually those intimate details, but process and people and so on, you kind of get, you know, by default further and further away from those details.
Right. And maybe for some businesses, that's fine because like no longer is it about finding like the details that make for a magical new product market fit.
And it is really just about scaling up an existing thing that works, right?
And using what I would call more blunt instruments to kind of scale it up, right?
Like a more blunt roadmap, a more blunt, you know, kind of go to market execution strategy Regardless, I think that now we're entering this moment where certainly every software product, in my opinion, has to be refounded because AI is such a... paradigm shift, it's not even like just like the shift from desktop to mobile or on-prem to cloud, where that was more like a very, one time and somewhat predictable change in form factor.
Like I think AI is so rapidly evolving that with every evolution, like every new model release and every new type of like capability that's released, it actually implies novel form factors and novel like UX patterns. to be invented, to fully capitalize on those capabilities.
And so like to be continuous, continuously relevant and kind of refine product market fit in this era, I think you have to be in the details.
Like there is no like, you know, looking at it from 10,000 foot view and saying, oh, we're just going to throw a bunch of people at this problem.
It's actually understanding like what is the right product experience and the right business model that backs it up and everything else to support that engine to take advantage of the capabilities in our product domain.
You have this phrase somewhere where you talk about being the chief tastemaker.
And to do that, you have to do exactly what you're describing.
That's right. I mean, I think that and like I would also say, like, it's actually now also hard to taste the soup without participating in like at least some part of creating the soup.
Right. And like meeting with AI, you can kind of look at the final product and say, okay, this feels right or not, or it feels like we're being bold enough and we're properly productizing these new capabilities.
But I think like to really understand, you know, the solution space of what's possible, you kinda have to be in the details, right?
I mean, literally like you can't just look at, you know, kind of screenshots or like a prerecorded video of like a new product feature, like AI is something you have to play with.
And ideally you're playing with both the like kind of packaged up, you know, app or solution that you've built with it but you're also playing around directly with the underlying primitives.
You're using the models either via API or via like a chat interface, like you're really pushing them to the boundaries.
And like, because that's the only way that you really understand what these new ingredients, it's like as a chef, you just gained access to like amazing new ingredients, but you have to like... actually kind of get comfortable with them to put them into a new dish.
We had Dan Schipper on the podcast. He runs this newsletter and podcast about a company called Every.
And they work with companies to help them become more AI-focused. successful and adopt AI and all that stuff.
I asked him, what's the signal that a company will have success adopting AI and seeing huge productivity gains?
And he said, it's, does the CEO use chat GPT or Claude daily?
Yeah. And I feel like you're describing exactly.
Right. Hourly. Really hourly. Like, or, you know, You could even have a measure of inference costs, right?
Like the equivalent underlying inference compute cycles, right? how many tokens they use.
Yeah. I mean, I'm proud to say like, I am, uh, I'm, I'm pretty sure I'm still the, um, I just checked this recently, but like, uh, I take pride in being the number one most expensive in 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 as well.
I'm extremely intentionally wasteful wasteful in the sense of like, you know, I'll do something that costs like maybe hundreds of dollars of like actual inference cost, right?
Like for instance, you know, doing a lot of LLM calls against like long, you know, kind of transcripts of let's say sales calls to extract different types of insights.
Like here's the product apps identify or here's summaries, et cetera.
And we also have now a capability that's basically like an LLM MapReduce.
So effectively, even if you can't fit like you know, the entire corpus of content into one LLM call because the context window limitations will map through like all of this content and break it up into chunks and then like perform an LLM call on each one and then perform an aggregation LLM call on those chunks very expensive right because you're basically running like a highly expensive model against a lot of data and then running it again on the aggregates of that but like For me, like hundreds of dollars spent on this exercise is trivial compared to the potential strategic value of like having better insights.
It's as if like a really, really smart chief of staff has gone through and read every single sales call like transcript that we've had in the past year and giving me like, you know, kind of very astute product insights, marketing insights, like, you know, kind of positioning insights and segmentation insights, like that's invaluable, right?
Like you could pay a consulting firm like literally millions of dollars to get that quality of work.
So like to me, I still think the like the value versus the actual cost of AI when applied greedily but smartly.
Like it's just it's a crazy ratio and like more people should be like aggressively throwing compute cycles at these very high value problems.
Until somebody tweets how you're costing the company so much on AI compute and you guys are going to be underwater.
I'm just kidding. It's like how we have personally taken down the cash flow of the business.
So, okay, so CEOs, founders hearing this, they're probably like, okay, I should probably start doing this.
What does this actually look like? I imagine you still have a lot of other stuff.
You got one-on-ones, you got all these. How have you changed your day-to-day to do this?
Yeah, so I actually cut my one on one roster by default.
And the idea is not is not that I don't want to spend time one on one with people.
But rather that I found that the just like having more standing one on ones actually precludes me from you know, engaging in more timely topics, right?
Like I like to think of the best types of meetings as like very urgency driven.
And like, you know, there's some timely topic, like, you know, you've discovered some insight, maybe I talked to some new startup, right?
And I learned something from their product or their approach.
And I want to bring that into how we're thinking about a new feature at Airtable, or even just plant the seed with some different EPD people within Airtable.
Like I want to make most meetings very timely and very informed by like real alpha, right?
There's got to be some kind of value and insight to see that with.
Now, in addition to that, I'll supplement with like, you know, when I'm in person, you know, with someone like I want to carve out time for like a, you know, a proper like catch up and like, less structured less less like timely and just more of like you know building a relationship with a human but i actually find that like you know having that com it's almost a barbell approach where it's like If you're going to spend time with somebody in a freeform way, actually do it in a high quality, not forced weekly ritual way.
Go for a longer lunch or coffee walk or whatever. in person when you can.
Maybe that's like a once every month or two kind of thing.
And then like the in-betweens are either topical.
So we do have standing meetings for you know, like 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.
We're trying to ship very quickly. Like, you know, I basically want to always ask the question, like, how would an AI native company like a cursor or windsurf, et cetera, like how would they execute right and are we executing as fast as them and taking advantage of like all the new stuff as well as them so like bringing that level of like kind of intensity and urgency to like how I spend my time within, that's been the main, the biggest shift for me.
What's a change you've made to help the company move faster and match that sort of pace?
Yeah, so I mean, we did do a reorg of the EP org.
So before we had, we've gone through a few different um kind of reorgs over the past call it four years the the you know kind of original state as we just kind of proliferated I think by default or incrementally was that we had a bunch of groups that were each responsible for like a feature or a surface area.
So there was a group responsible for search within our table and there was a group responsible for like mobile experience and you know so on and so forth right and you know, that has its benefits.
Like, you know, obviously like that team can go and like, you know, get really ramped up on that part of the code base, that part of the product, but it has the disadvantage of 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, coordinate dramatic changes across a wider set of surface areas instead of just each one incrementally improving.
And so we reordered initially to basically different business units effectively.
Right. So I know Airbnb has done like kind of the functional to GM, you know, back, et cetera.
This was more like saying, look, we have an enterprise business and the MO there is more about like scalability?
Can we support like the larger scale data sets and use cases?
Do you have the core capabilities needed to be able to like push out an app to maybe 10,000 seats or 20,000 seats for product operations, right?
So a lot of architecture, a lot of scale.
That kind of work. We would have a what we call the team's pillar, which is more about self-serve, like kind of the product UX, like how easy it is to adopt the product on board, share, do all the kind of like basic functionality, an AI pillar, solutions pillar, and basically infra.
And what we found, though, with that approach is that there was still um you know there was more kind of uh holistic bets being made so like you know the team's pillar could think not just about one feature But like the overall onboarding experience, we're like really think about Nux in a way that touched multiple parts of the product.
But it still felt like it wasn't, especially as we started to execute more on AI stuff, it wasn't allowing us to aggressively and quickly move as a ai native company would right like i mean when you look at you know the cursors of the world they're shipping like major new stuff every week and like you know it's not like oh well we have like this separate know kind of roadmap for enterprise we have this roadmap for for uh this group and you know it just feels like one um one cohesive product that's shipping at a breakneck pace So we did this recent reorg where now we have the what I call like the fast thinking group, which officially is called AI platform.
But it really means like we wanna just ship a bunch of new capabilities on a near weekly basis.
And each of them should be like truly awesome value, right?
Like you should drop your jaw like, how awesome it is to use this new capability in Inertable.
And then separately, we have the slow thinking group, And that's not meant to be better or worse.
It's literally like you need fast and slow thinking in the Kahneman sense to operate as a human.
I have that book behind me. Yeah, I love that book.
But slow thinking is like, it's just a different mode of planning and executing, right?
It's like more deliberate. That's that. require more premeditation, right?
Like we can't just like ship a new piece of infrastructure that has a lot of like data complexity like our data store, HyperDB, that now can handle multi-hundred million record data sets.
That's not something you ship in a week in a hacky prototype.
So we now have these two separate parts of the company.
And I actually think what's really cool is they actually compliment each other very well, right?
Because like the fast execution, the AI stuff, you know, that creates the top of funnel excitement that also, you know, kind of inspires new use cases and new users coming to Airtable. including in large enterprise, right?
Like, you know, enterprises can use this stuff too.
It's not just like a SMB thing, but like the slow thinking basically allows those initial seeds of adoption to sprout and grow into much larger deployments.
Whereas I think a lot of the challenge for many of the AI native companies I've seen is that they have a very wide top of funnel.
Get all of this AI tourist traffic, a lot of interest, a lot of early usage.
But then, you know, sometimes the challenge is how do you like turn that into more durable growth and get each of those adoption seeds to retain and expand over time?
That is super cool. I've never heard of this way of structuring teams, the fast thinking, thinking fast, thinking slow, the Kahneman.
It's so interesting. For the fast thinking team, do you find there specific archetypes of people that are successful there?
Is it a lot of like bringing in new people that are not just used to the way of working at our table?
What do you find? we have a mix. So, you know, we've run in, I mean, we're always hiring, right?
Like there was never a point in the company's life where we stopped hiring.
And that You know, candidly, even when we had to do two riffs, right, that significantly, you know, kind of reduced our headcount, you know, we just like way too quickly grown and overscaled the business at a certain point.
But even when we did our reps, we were still actively recruiting and hiring um you know in i mean every major department but especially in uh in epd because you know it's always been my belief that like you you all like It would be arrogant to say that we have all the people we ever need already in the roster today.
Like, we're always going to need to find new, fresh perspectives, new skill sets, et cetera.
And so we've continued to hire. I think we've learned as we've gone along of like, You know, what is the ideal type of hire?
And we've done some acqui hires and learned from that as well.
But I think the fast thinking part it really just requires a lot of like somebody who's able to operate with a lot of autonomy, right?
Like, you know, who's entrepreneurial in nature, Now, it doesn't mean like they have to literally be a former founder.
I know some companies are, you know, like Ripley, for instance, does a lot of of actual acquisitions and gets actual founders into the company.
We found that that's great. And we've done some of that as well.
But like also there are some really, really capable people who like we didn't literally have to like acquire in and yet they're just able to like think full stack about the problem and like the user experience problem, not just meaning like you know, the technical layers of the problem, but like also like what is the wow factor we're trying to create, right?
So tangibly like, we're doing this new thing that's about to ship where not only can you describe the app you wanna build and then iterate on it with kind of our conversational agent Omni, but um and it builds it with like the existing air table platform capabilities but um we're also giving it the ability to actually do code gen to extend those apps with like really final mile, very bespoke functionality or like visuals, right?
So you could say like, they generate me a very very specific type of map view with like this kind of like uh heat mapping and this kind of like you know icons and when you click it do this and That's a capability that there's so much ambiguity in some of the design decisions around it.
And you have to blend that design thinking with some of the technical constraints of like, what can the AI models actually one-shot effectively?
And if not, like how do you add in like the right human workflow for approval and review and then reprompting and so on.
So just so many different design decisions.
And you need somebody who can really think full stack about that kind of product and design. overwhelmed by that you know kind of open-endedness but like relishes in it I was actually playing with it before we started chatting.
I made a really cute startup CRM. Oh, that's awesome.
Yeah, started talking Omni over here. It's like the colors are beautiful.
That's what's standing out to me right now.
I will say just as a note, I consider myself at my... core a product UX person.
That's my passion. And everything else I've had to learn to run this company is almost like what was a necessary part of the journey.
But my real passion is thinking about product UX, right?
And I think of UX in a deeper sense than just like, the cosmetic design, what you could put into a framer kind of prototype.
I think of it as literally Like what should this product do and how should it represent that and behave for the user?
That is the product in my opinion, right?
And of course, then you have to figure out like technically what's possible and how to implement it.
But like, I think to me, what's under uh executed today in the world of ai products is Like there's so many awesome capabilities of AI and most of them are really under-merchandised and there's like very poor actually visual or otherwise metaphors or affordances given to users to help represent or understand like what those underlying capabilities are, right?
Like, I mean, Chachaputi, obviously, like, you know, extremely successful product.
So not knocking it at all. But like you come in and you just get this like completely blank, chat box right by default.
Now they have suggestions underneath it and so on.
But like, you know, the product UX part of me It's just like craving more visual metaphors or colors or some kind of like use the canvas of a web interface and all the richness of interaction you create there to better represent or show all the different things that you can do with the underlying model.
And so that's something we've tried to do with Airtable is show all of the different states and use colors even to play those off.
It's interesting how much of this connects with, I just had Nick Turley on the podcast.
He's head of chat GPT at OpenAI. And he had these two really interesting insights that resonate directly with what you're describing.
One is he has this concept of whenever something is being worked on, he's always asking, is this maximally accelerated? how do we move faster?
If this is important, what would allow us to move faster?
And I love that that's one of the themes that's coming up as you talk is just creating this very clear sense of speed and you even call it the fast thinking team.
Like you're going to move fast. Yeah. And then the other one is just this insight that with AI, you often don't know what it can do and what people want to do with it until it's out.
So there's this need to get it out. And that'll tell you what it should be.
I couldn't agree more with, with both of those.
And particularly on the second point, I think it's interesting, like clearly there have been companies, um, that have both been successful in PLG and like kind of more sales led, you know, kind of distribution for AI products like The most notable ones I could think of are Palantir with their AIP deployments.
That's obviously very sales-led. You're not PLGing into a Palantir deployment.
But even, you know, like companies like Harvey and so on, like, you know, they're doing very well.
And like, it's primarily, from what I understand, like sales-led, right?
You're not self-serving into a Harvey instance at a law firm.
And yet, to me, the best way to get AI value out there is experientially, right? like you can kind of get that in a sales motion.
You can like, you know, show a demo, maybe you can get do a POC, but like it's so much more powerful when you just open up the doors and say anyone who wants to come and sign up and trial this product, like can, right.
And, uh, I think, you know, it's, to me, it's like, you know, kind of a, a real proof point that like ChachiBT is arguably like the most successful, uh, you know, kind of PLG product of all time.
Right. Just in terms of like sheer scale of users, like they announced 700 million like Emma is Emma user.
Weekly active users, 10% of humans on earth use it weekly.
That's insane. In like how many years, right?
Like a few years. Three years, under three years.
Yeah. And so, like, I mean, literally, that is just like the most insane ramp curve.
And I don't think they would have gotten there if like you couldn't just come in and literally tried the product out.
Like, and, you know, kind of as a little bit of a rebuttal of the point I made earlier where, like, I think ChatGPT doesn't do a ton right now And even earlier, they did even less to expose all the different ways you could use it.
But they just made it so frictionless to just try it for yourself. that you as a user could come in and just literally ask it anything and see how it did.
And of course, people in the early days tried to stump it and showed like, oh, look, see, it's not that smart.
It doesn't answer this hard question really well.
But clearly, the magical nature of it still appealed to you enough.
Everybody used it. I think, you know, I do have a view like we've gone through that whole, you know, kind of arc of we started PLG.
I'd like to think Airtable was one of the kind of PLG darlings of, of our era.
And I know I kind of started moving up market and like doing more sales execution, although that was still always on top of like usually PLG within an enterprise.
But we started doing more and more sales execution, we still have that.
That's still really important for our business.
But I also think like me personally, like one of my goals is to shift my attention back into that kind of like you know, builder led adoption and like literally showing in the product experientially, not telling in like a deck the value that you can get from AI and Airtable, right?
Like I think that's so key and it's, you know, it's Nux, but it's also more than that.
It's not just like literally how do you onboard somebody into the product?
It's like literally thinking about the entire product experience itself.
Right. 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 way of doing everything in Airtable.
Now the Airtable app as you know it is almost like an artifact. that's manipulated by and kind of like can be tool used by the agent.
Let me follow that thread. So if you go to Airtable.com today, it looks like basically all the other AI app building sites.
Now it's just tell me which you want to build.
Thoughts on that as just like a thing everyone's starting to do?
What do you think comes next? Is it working well?
There's clearly an incredible magic to vibe coding and app building with AI, right?
This is actually a prime illustration, in my view, of that concept we talked about a second ago, which is as capabilities of these underlying models evolve, the form factor in the product UX also needs to evolve with it, right?
And so the earliest models, like the kind of original ChatGPT, like GPT 3.5 era models, were not nearly as smart as the current models, right?
And so like you couldn't really ask it to one shot a more complicated chunk of code or certainly not like a full stack app and expect it to work.
And so the right form factor for leveraging those models in a software creation context was GitHub Copilot, right?
It's like autocomplete. a few lines of code at a time.
But you couldn't chat to it and tell it, build me this entire app from scratch.
I think that as the models got better and better, you saw that the new form factors emerged.
I think Cursor did a great job of being an early pioneer of this more agentic way of leveraging the models to do more complex things and generate more, you know, kind of larger chunks of code.
And now with composer, you can literally just go into cursor and build an app from scratch, like build me a 3d shooter game from scratch and just watch it go and create all the files and fill out each file.
And then the thing actually runs some of the time.
And so to me, This is where the world is going.
The models are clearly getting smarter. And if you think about the original vision of Airtable.
It was always about democratizing self-creation.
We just strongly believed that the number of people who use apps far outweighs the number of people who can actually like build their own or manipulate apps and harness custom software to their advantage. sounds very familiar very familiar these days yeah exactly and and so like i think this is like it's a different means to the same end and so like it's almost like we have to lean into this because If we started Airtable today, like this is what we would be all in on.
Now, I think that the advantage that we have and I do think you have to be realistic to yourself, especially as a company that predates Gen EI and now has to kind of find your new footing in the AI landscape, you can't fool yourself and just say, OK, I'm going to throw in some AI stuff on the marketing site, put in a couple of AI features, and call it a day.
Like, I think you actually have to take a clean slate approach to saying like, how would our mission best be expressed?
Like if you were literally founding a new company from scratch with the same mission, how would you execute on that mission using a fully AI native approach, right?
And like and then by the way, like, do you have useful building blocks that you can leverage from your existing product and your existing business?
Or are you literally worse off having this legacy asset versus starting something from scratch?
And Like, I don't think the answer is always yes or no.
I think it just depends on the product. 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, you know, if you really care about this mission, like go and start the next carnation of it.
Right. In my case, like I really I thought about this and really feel strongly that the building blocks that we have, like these no-code components, actually do allow us to execute better on this vision than if I had to start from scratch, right?
Like the problem with vibe coding, especially for building business apps.
So I should clarify that like, you know, we want to democratize software creation, but specifically we are focused on business apps right we're not trying to be the platform where you create like a cool viral consumer game this is for like your crm right or if you want to build an inventory management system as a small restaurant or a lawyer trying to build a case management system.
That's what we've always been focused on.
And I think in this AI native world, clearly you should be able to generate those apps agentically.
And yet, if you have an agent that has to generate every single bit of that app from scratch, from code, It's gonna be very unreliable.
There's gonna be bugs. There's gonna be data and security issues.
And then you're also gonna have a context collapse as it just cannot manage all of the code that it's written basically as the app gets more and more complex, right?
And What we actually have are basically these primitives that the agent can manipulate and use without having to like literally write the code from scratch. to represent like here's a beautiful CRUD interface on top of the data layer, right?
Like ours is real time and collaborative and really rich and has collaboration on it.
By the way, here's all these other view types and a layout engine for a custom interface layout or automations and business logic.
And so it's almost like, in programming terms, the Airtable pieces in our LEGO kit today can be used by this agent as almost like a more expressive DSL, like a domain specific language to build business apps. instead of literally having to write everything down to the SQL and HTML and JavaScript to build every part of that app from scratch.
If we can combine the best of both worlds, we have these very reliable, high quality Lego pieces.
Now an agent can go and like assemble them for you instead of you just using the GUI to do that.
And by the way, if you do want to fall back to the GUI, there's a really great kind of way for the non-technical user to still understand and participate in what's going on.
If you're not technical, you can't inspect the code underneath a v0 or level or app, right?
Like it's just kind of opaque to you. And if you can't reprompt it to get what you want, you're kind of stuck. you know, this is much more akin to like a developer using cursor can generate lots of code, but then can still drop back to the IDE. to edit and manipulate it to the final kind of production ready state.
So that's kind of the play that we're making.
And if I didn't fully and truly believe, you know, we have a better shot at doing it with our existing product.
Like I wouldn't be running this company in its form today.
I'm talking to a lot of founders that are going through the journey you're going on, which is we've had a business for a decade, AI emerged, and wow, we got a figure out something that could work even better.
And so I'm trying to pull out the threads that are consistently working across these journeys, because I think a lot of companies are trying to figure this out.
So one that you just touched on is just if you were to start today, what will you do?
What would that business be? Plus, how can How can do we have an unfair advantage with the thing we've done in the past?
That feels like an important ingredient.
And then the other circling back to stuff you've shared already, there's just Just like creating a sense of urgency and pace and getting people to understand this is how things move in AI.
And we need to create this fast thinking team.
I love that metaphor in framing. And then there's the point you made about just talking to AI regularly as the founder feels like an important element, just like to truly be this ICO talking to AI, working with AI regularly.
Just on that note, a little bit more, just to give people a sense of what this looks like day to day.
So you're talking to Omni all day, trying to under flex the power of what you can do and iterate on it.
Is there anything else you're doing day to day that helps you figure out what to do for the business?
One, I try to use as many different AI products, including not Airtable, right?
Like as I can. And both literally for the novelty factor and just like, you know, some new cool demo comes out, like a runway release, they're like immersive world, you know, kind of engine.
Right. And yeah, I'm going to go try it out.
When Sesame AI put out their cool interactive voice chat demo, Like I tried that out because like, even though we don't have a direct and near term, like, um, you know, kind of a need for like really, um, realistic and and interruptible like kind of voice mode where it's not as core to our capabilities like I just want to understand and get a feel for everything that's out there.
I try to invent little side projects of my own to have a real reason to use these products.
Like, oh, cool, what if I or to take like a, what if I were to like, try to create like a funny little like, you know, like a short, a funny video short, right?
Using a combination of like, hey, Jen Autar's, with like a script, like a comical script generated by AI.
Right. And maybe it'll be on like an interesting topic.
So I'll do like deep research on the topic with Chachapati and pull together the results, have it composed like, you know, kind of a little... Did you actually do this?
Is there... That's literally an example of a fun weekend project.
To be honest, these things only take you an hour if you become pretty proficient with using the products.
Like they're all so easy to use. Like you can literally do the deep research thing, you know, kick off query, make a coffee, come back in 20 minutes.
Okay, like let me let me prompt it to like generate me some dialog.
It's a little bit like what notebook LM does for you out of the box.
But sometimes I like to just like do it myself, right?
And then, OK, let me take the script and like cut it up and like, you know, turn it into an agent avatar and then download the video. like play it, right?
Like, and just for fun, right? I'm not like trying to make that into an actual like, you know, kind of YouTube, like video business.
But I think like, coming up with like these different like fun weekend projects is a really useful construct to like force myself to actually try these products in a more than just like a Twitch click way.
And, you know, what it gives me is, like, A, like, it's not just understanding the models, which is also very, very important, right?
Like, GPD 5 came out yesterday. been playing around with it a bunch, just on a variety of different personal use cases.
But there's a difference between just understanding the model, but then also understanding the product form factors in which they can be placed, right?
Meaning like, when you apply the model in a more structured way, right?
When you apply the model with different tool calling than maybe what Chachi has in its kind of like out of the box form.
You know, when you apply it with like you know, kind of a more agentic workflow.
Again, that might be different from like what Chachapati gives you out of the box.
Like that's when you kind of learn like, you really get to inspire yourself on what are the product form factors that these new models can take.
And plus, by the way, I find it to be really fun. there is a, to me, like a delight and entertainment value to just using AI, period, because like, A, it's not... it's not like perfectly predictable.
So I think the element of like, you're not quite sure what you're going to get.
It's like a box of chocolates, you know, and and be like, it always blows my mind just to think about like, wow, like, you know, five years ago, we didn't have any of this stuff, right?
Like, you know, AI was like, okay, like it's like, we can do predictive analytics it's like you know there's some like basically very advanced you know kind of regressions that we can run with with ai but like it looked nothing like this right and it's in its current form and it's just like actually super fun in my opinion to get to play around with all the different types of products that come out.
So I think that is a big part of it. You know, because...
On the point about the pace of the world moving so much faster in AI than any other landscape, in SaaS, In the mature SaaS era, it was important to study your competition.
If you were building a SaaS company, you'd be crazy not to follow Salesforce. like year and see what the major releases they're putting out are or ServiceNow or so on. this is the equivalent of that but like there's major new releases and products and and so on like every week right not like every year And so I just think you have to stay abreast of all of it all.
And combining this with our point earlier of like, a lot of this has to be experienced, not just like read.
Like you can't, just read like the write-up on TechCrunch or, you know, even a tweet about like a new capability.
Like you kind of have to try it to really get a sense of like what it is.
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That's claude.ai slash lenny. For people that work for you across their table, say the product team, PMs, maybe engineers, designers, how have you adjusted what you expect of them to help them be successful in this new world?
One is... you know, really, really, really stressing this idea of like, go play with this stuff.
And I mean, when I say play, I really mean play like in the psychological sense of like, You know, it's there's a difference when like you go in and you're kind of just trying to check the box and like get a job done.
Right. There's a difference when like you come in with a curiosity and like you're kind of like exploring. right?
And it's both more fun and energizing, but also I think like you learn more through that, right?
I've really tried to stress the value of play with these AI products.
I try to lead by example by literally going and sharing out links or screenshots of the things that I'm doing in these various products.
So as an example, you know, like I will go into, you know, like one of the prototyping tools and show like, hey, like, I built a marketing landing page for this new capability we're launching.
I kind of created like a landing page for it in Replit, let's say, and now I'm sharing that link instead of, you know, what typically like we would have done in the past is like, okay, we're going to write a doc about it and then share the doc.
I'm just going to show you like an actual landing page with like visuals and everything in there. um or like i'll share like uh you know the actual link to my deep research reports or like instead of me writing a perfect memo on a topic like I'll actually just like prompt my way into getting like a chat thread or a chat output that basically covers all the content that I care about and maybe even like ask it to like okay summarize this all into like a final you know kind of like memo output and then intentionally share that rather than expose the fact that like i'm using ai in this way and here's literally how i'm prompting it so you can follow along as well you know but really trying to encourage everyone to like go and just play with these products and i've even said Look, if anyone wants to just literally block out a day or frankly, even a week and like like have the ultimate uh 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 entire week and just go play around with every product, AI product that you can find that you think could be relevant to Airtable. go do it, period.
So I think that's the most important thing is this play, this experimentation.
I think there's also a lot of other kind of shifts in how we execute. prototypes over decks.
You know, like I want to see like actual interactive demos because like, again, like it's hard to, you know, in a deck or in a PRD, you could say like, OK, well, we're going to make Omni really good at handling this kind of app building. okay, those are just words.
The real proof is in the pudding of like, okay, let me try it out on a few like realistic prompts that I can imagine.
And in a demo and a real prototype, you can instantly try it out on unrealistic rather than golden pathy scenarios and see how it feels too.
Does it feel too slow? Like, do we need to expose more of the reasoning or steps, you know, kind of... you know, that are happening behind the scenes, create a progress bar or something like that.
But like, it's really hard to get that feel of the product with anything but like a functional product. prototype that really does, in an open-ended way, use the AI to do whatever you put in.
You know, I think it's it's more like a like experimentation playground, it feels like how we need to execute versus I think in the past it sometimes felt like a more like. deterministic resourcing and and like kind of timelines view of execution, right?
Like, We're gonna put this many people on this problem.
And this is the eight week timeline to this milestone.
And then we're gonna ship in a quarter from now.
And like, I think now the whole thing is just like a lot more. experimentation and iteration driven.
Of the different functions on a product team, PM, engineering, design, who has had the most success being more productive with these tools and how do you think this will impact each of these three functions over time?
What I found is that it really does become more about individual attitude and maybe some like, you know, polymathism.
Like, you know, 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 bit of like how these models work and you know, like how does tool calling work and and all of this stuff, like then you can actually design a concept or even prototype a concept, including in these prototyping tools That's much more interesting and maybe realistic than if you're just stuck in kind of the flat, like, let me put something in a... static design concept, right?
Because I think, you know, designs have to be more interactive, like the whole The value of the product and the product functionality is in the interaction of it, right?
Think about the design of Chatupati. Again, it's the most basic design you could possibly imagine.
The real design actually is happening underneath the hood in how it responds to different queries, right?
And what happens after you fire off a prompt, right?
You know, I think like I found that there are people within each of these functions, like they're engineers who are very, good at thinking about product and experience and can go and prototype out the whole thing.
There are designers who can do the same, even if they can't literally code. they can prototype something out, like literally using a prototyping tool.
And I think that's where like AI tooling is also giving more advantage to people who can think in this way by equipping them with an alternative to actually having to go through the long hoops of learning CS, right?
And then PMs as well. I think like there are some PMs who are like really getting into the technical details and studying up on like, you know, how does this stuff work and actually getting hands-on rather than seeing the role as, you know, kind of writing documents, writing PRDs.
Do you see one of these roles, I don't know, being more in trouble than others, just like you need fewer of these people in the future potentially?
I think overall you can get more done with fewer people.
And that's not to say like, you know, we want to go and like, like make the team smaller, but rather like like the really cool thing for for us and I think a lot of other companies is it's not like you have a finite set of things you need to do and execute on from a product standpoint.
And okay, like now I can do that with a 10th of the people.
I mean, you could do that in a lot of cases, but yeah, Like for us, maybe it's also because we're a very meta product, right?
Like we are the app platform with which you can build now any AI app with AI.
The apps themselves leverage AI capabilities at runtime, whether it's to generate imagery for a creative production workflow, or, you know, kind of leveraging deep research or AI based like, you know, kind of crawling of the web to search for companies that match a certain criteria for your deal flow app. right, or something like that, like we can effectively leverage all of these over AI capabilities in this this kind of like app platform, because by definition, we're enabling our customers to build apps that have this wide range of AI capabilities.
But because of that, it's like we have a kind of almost infinite set of possible AI capabilities that we could execute on.
Right. And I'm always telling the team, like, look, like the great news is Like we have, it's like we have all these fruit trees and like there's so many crazy low hanging fruit, right?
Like, and you've got literally like massive watermelons like literally sitting on the ground, right?
And all you have to do is like kind of walk over 20 feet and pick it up instead of having to climb the really tall coconut tree to grab like a hard coconut from like 50 feet up.
And so like, there's so many watermelons on the ground, just go out and like start finding the biggest ones and attacking those.
Right. And like, and what that means is that like, if we can build this culture and I do think like it's a learnable way of operating, like I really like to believe in like the, like the growth potential of any human and any individual.
I think if you really have a growth mindset, And that's why one of our most important core values is growth mindset, right?
If you really have that growth mindset, I think especially if... you're willing to put in the nights and weekends hours, or in my case, like I'm literally telling people like, take a full day off, take a full week off and learn this stuff.
Like you can... you know, become more fluent in this way.
And I think then what we get is like a team that can just go and work on more things in a much more leveraged and fast way, right?
So I like to think like, you know, people who are willing to jump on the train are just going to become more and more effective.
And it's not like, oh, like as a PM, my role is becoming entirely irrelevant, right?
Like, no, it means that as a PM, you need to start looking more like a hybrid PM prototyper who has some good design sensibilities.
And by the way, like, I think some of the best engPM and design cultures, respectively, over the past even few decades have always been multidisciplinary in nature, right?
Like the original PM stack at Google required the PMs to actually be somewhat technical so they could understand that engineering, know, kind of, um, limitations of, of like the product, you know, designs they wanted to make.
And they had to be kind of designy, right?
Like, um, I remember my co-founder andrew when he was in the apm program was like always reading books about like design like even down to like visual design and color theory and that kind of thing, right?
And so I think it's just a reminder that you know, like designers as well, like, you know, some of the best designers, if you're a designer at Apple, like, you know, including hardware designer, like you have to understand some of the technical capabilities of how this stuff works.
Right. And if you're an engineer, like I think some of the best engineers and maybe Stripe always had a very good engineering culture. of engineers who could think about the product and business requirements.
In fact, on any given product group, uh at stripe my understanding is that like you know the dri isn't always the pm right um like as is traditionally the case in kind of that that triangle it's like You know, sometimes it's actually the engineer who's taking the product lead and saying like, this is what we need to build.
So what I'm hearing is essentially if you want, like the trend across product engineering design is each of those functions needs to get good at one of the other functions at least.
Ideally, you can do them all. But if you can just do one additional, so a PM becomes better design and engineer becomes better at product management.
Well, I would actually go further and say, like, I think you need to get, like, decently good at all three like there's just a minimum baseline of like it's you're any one of those roles, you need to be like minimally good at the other two.
And then you can go deeper into your own kind of specialty, right?
You could be a designer who's really good at thinking about UX and interaction design, and then just good enough to be dangerous on thinking about what's technically possible.
And what is the product story around this feature?
I love that. And to do that, one piece of advice that comes up again and again in what you've been describing is use the tools constantly to see what's possible. that will teach you a lot of these things.
I think use well, use the tools gives you exposure to what's possible, right?
It's kind of like if you want it to be a great industrial designer, And let's say, I mean, the chair is kind of the ultimate hella world of industrial design, right?
It's the canonical design object. You wouldn't just sit there in a vacuum and with no familiarity with like the materials that you can use, plywood, steel, whatever, or like existing form factors of chairs trying to invent the world's best chair in a vacuum, right?
You should go and first do a study of all of the best chairs out there today.
Go look at an Eames chair, sit in it, try to examine it to reverse engineer how it was made.
And just look at the prior art for that type of product.
That's how I see the go out and play with these products.
And also I think like actually going and designing or implementing or executing is the best practice.
So you can't just only go and look at other people's shares.
Eventually, you have to go and actually try building your own and then try building another one and another one and another one.
And so I think that's where, like, you know, when I think about how I hone my own product UX sensibilities, like, I never like, I mean, you know, and at that time, like that I was in school and kind of learning about this stuff, like, there wasn't really any good curriculum for UX, right?
It's not like there were like great college classes to learn product UX.
I mean, even CS was like very, academic in nature at that time it wasn't applied software engineering like build an app or whatever uh maybe now at like some of the schools like stanford mit they have like actually uxc type courses But it's still a rarity for most people to have access to that.
And so like the way I learned, like, all of my product sensibilities was just like trial and error and like also using and studying other products.
Right. And then going and trying to build like my own weekend project ideas, right?
Oh, I wanna build like a Yelp style app with a map view and then also a list view.
And I want it so that when you pan around in the map, for it to automatically update the list view.
And maybe there's some UX improvements I can make on top of that, but I can also like test my technical skills to figure out like, which parts of this are hard to implement and like, how do you make it work?
And what are some of the design changes or affordances that you can use to kind of like map to like the technical possibilities.
To do that, I loved your piece of advice, which I forgot to double down on, which I also find really powerful. the best tip there is find something to actually build that is useful to you and fun.
Like pick a project that's like, oh yeah, this would be fun to do.
Have like a problem you're solving that forces you to actually do this thing.
For sure. And look, I think that can be like night and weekend projects.
It can also be like the daytime job projects, right?
I mean, like I am basically telling our teams on the AI platform group, especially like, look, like you know, in that low hanging fruit metaphor, it's like, I'm not being prescriptive with you on like which watermelons you should pick.
But you should go and we do have different pods within that group.
But one of them, for instance, is what we call the field agents team.
And they are responsible for the agents that work within your app.
So this is not the agent that builds your app, but these agents that run on a customer's behalf. to do like web research on your customers or they can you know go and analyze a document um and like in the future maybe do things like actually generate a like prototype like of of a uh of a feature you know from a prd or from like a future idea And, you know, I'm telling them like, look, like there's a almost infinite number of things you could like superpowers you can give these field agents.
I'm not going to tell you which specifically to do.
Now you can ask me to weigh in for sure, but like you should go and like, you know, just experiment and prototype like a few different versions of it, like a few different directions we could go.
Like what if you prototyped what it would look like to have a deep research implementation in field agents so that Like for any given row of data, let's say in your case, it's podcast guests.
You can just click a button or click a button on mass across the entire like every speaker you have lined up to do deep research, like powered by ChatGPT's own deep research on each of the speakers and have them all laid out side by side in this table, right? prototype that and see how like you know see how it feels and looks like and so i think some of the stuff can also be like in your daytime job especially if that daytime job is literally to go and build ai functionality I actually tried to do exactly that.
The problem I ran into, I wonder if it's changed, is there's no API for chat GPT deep research yet.
There is now. There is now. There is. There we go.
And I think they only recently exposed it.
It ends up being like something on the order of like a dollar plus per research call, which...
I mean, again, exactly. I mean, some people would say, oh my God, that's so expensive.
And you rack up 50 of those, you've cost $50 a month.
I think it's like, well... It just saved you like hours of research by human.
Not only that, I actually have a researcher that I pay to.
He'll give me background on guests. That was like four or 500 bucks.
And the dollar sounds great. And I've been doing this.
He'll be using deep research and then just collecting the R1.
They might just be. Oh, man. Okay, there's one more skill I wanted to talk about real quick.
This comes up a lot in these conversations is evals.
Okay. The power of getting good at evals.
I know that's something you value highly.
Talk about just why you think this is something people need to get good at.
Yeah, I mean, and I listened to your your your episodes with with and Mike, who talked about this, I think it's like, yep.
Interesting that both heads of OpenAI and Anthropic have converged on this point.
I mean, look, I think... I would add like a slightly different or additive take, though, which is like, I think... for a completely novel product experience or form factor, you should actually not start with evals and you should start with vibes, right?
Meaning like, you know, you need to go and just kind of test in a much more open ended way.
Like, like, does this even work like, you know, in kind of like a broad sense?
So like as an example, for our custom code generation capability, like instead of defining evals that get repeatedly tested as you vary the prompt or the model or the agentic workflow used to generate these outputs. and you have to define like, you know, what does good look like, right?
By definition for the eval, like I would first start with a much more open ended and like ad hoc style of like just throw stuff against the wall, like try different props and see how well it does.
And to me, evals are more useful a once you've converged on the kind of like basic scaffold of the form factor.
And you kind of know what are the use cases you want it to work well for and what you want to test against it.
Whereas in the early days, especially if your product market fit finding either for an entirely new company or for a pretty dramatically new or bold new capability that doesn't really have like it's not an incremental improvement of something that exists in Airtable today.
Like, I think you have to just be a little bit more creative initially and like throwing stuff at it, seeing what works to understand, okay, like let's use an example. you know, we're implementing this new capability that can use basically a long running AI crawler agent that goes and researches the web for a specific type of object or entity, right?
It's a little bit different from deep research, similar to deep research.
But what it actually does is instead of outputting like a kind of a report, it's actually going and compiling a list of things.
The things could be companies or people. or anything else, right?
Like find me every Marvel movie, right? Ever made.
Find me every like, you know, kind of DC comics, like a spinoff, right?
Like a series, right? literally anything.
And, you know, you have to go in at first, like just try out a bunch of random, like, you know, use your own brain to think of like, what are all the like, What's the range of use cases I can test this against?
Then you get back some results and you're like, well, it's clear that where it does really well, are these types of searches, right?
Like people and companies with this kind of parameter.
And I think to me, like evals are useful once you have like a sense of like What is that cluster of useful use cases?
You can start then more like programmatically like measuring the changes that you're making to improve your like the output for that, right?
But like by that point, you've probably already scoped the product and maybe the way we would merchandise it in Airtable is not like a completely open ended capability, but like, hey, like here is a specific capability that can research one of these X number of entity types, including people and companies.
And here's even like the filter conditions or criteria that are more explicit that you can define to give it the prompting to search for that thing.
But I kind of think it's more useful as a way to iterate your way to improvement.
And you can start... you know, really testing stuff like empirically, right?
You can AB test, especially if you have the scale of a really large product like Anthropic or OpenAI, you can like just test everything and see, oh, this model actually performs better than this one.
This prop performs better than this one.
But I think early on, you don't have that luxury and you're in a much more open-ended discovery process.
That is very wise. Evals could constrain you too early.
I think about just the double diamond, I don't know, IDEO kind of framework of like... be divergent first and then convergent.
Yeah, exactly. I hadn't heard that before, but that completely resonates.
Okay, let me try to reflect back some of the advice I've been hearing about how to shift a company to be successful in this new world.
And let me see if I'm missing anything that you think is really important.
So one is there's this sense of just reset the expectations on pace and urgency. and help people understand in AI, things move incredibly fast.
This is how we need to operate. And then there's also a piece of get stuff out, so that you can learn how people use it and what it's capable of versus polishing it endlessly.
Forcing people almost, I don't know, forcing is the right word, but encouraging people to play with the latest stuff and like giving them a chance to take days off or block out calendars, cancel meetings, just like stay on top of the stuff. to play as you talked about it and then sharing things they've learned, get the vibes of what's possible.
There's also this idea of just rethink, okay, if we were to start today in this world, what would we do to achieve the same mission we have achieved, we are trying to achieve?
And ideally it leverages this unfair advantage we have with things we've been working on for a long time.
And then there's just like talk to AI constantly every hour as you described.
Yeah. Multiple times an hour. Multiple times an hour.
It keeps going up. Is there anything else that I missed there that you're like, you need to do this too to have a chance?
I think just to really, really try to break down role silos.
And I think that's true certainly for EPMD. um in the typical like um you know ept triangle but i also think it's it's probably true even for like non product roles, right?
Like I think it's true in marketing, right?
Like I'm seeing, you know, something, you know, something I'm really pushing for in marketing.
I think our marketing team is like, you know, really leaning into actually is is like if you can just do all of the thing yourself, like traditionally, how a marketing team might operate is like, okay, you have one person who's kind of responsible for executing the performance marketing, you know, kind of part of a campaign, right?
Like they literally go into the Google AdWords interface and they're like tweaking the parameters of targeting and, you know, budget and like, you know, kind of conversion. tracking, et cetera.
And then somebody else is actually responsible for like coming up with the specific ad copy, right?
And somebody else yet, was responsible for coming up with the seed content or positioning guide written by a PMM that feeds into the ad creative. you know, so on and so forth, right?
Like maybe they're promoting some like new demo asset, right?
That somebody else created. And I just think that like, In the same way that you can collapse the roles in EPD and the ideal person, maybe they're very specialized and deep in one dimension like engineering, but they're well rounded enough to kind of like be dangerous on the other two.
Like, I think that's kind of true in almost every other function, right? you know, like sales as well.
Like I think you should, you know, start to be able to play more of an SE role, like traditionally salespeople, um, didn't necessarily know the product that well and relied on the SE to come in and be the product experts.
I think it's really hard. to sell any kind of AI product now without actually being fluent in the product and be able to demo the product, right?
So like, you know, AEs need to be like SE fluent as well.
So I just think that that concept of like collapsing roles Um, you know, everybody needs to like become more full stack to do the thing, like being more outcome oriented, right?
Like. your outcome as an AE is to like show customers, you know, convince customers of the value of your product. and close deals, right?
Okay, well, in order to do that, like you used to have dependencies on having assets created by marketing and like, an SE to help you demo, can you collapse more of those dependencies so that if you had to, you could do it all yourself?
Um, and I just think that's a new way, like it's a new operating mentality overall for every AI native company or company that wants to compete in this new arena.
That is a great addition. It almost feels like you go back to startup times when everyone's doing a bunch of stuff.
There's no like, here's the head of... product.
There's that of engineers. We're just doing stuff totally to be done.
Totally. Yeah, I'm kind of seeing it as this is like upside down T where there's like the thing you're really strong at.
And then you just have to, as you described, the minimum of being good at engineering design or And SC, by the way, sales engineering, imagine, is what that stands for.
They're adjacent roles. You need to start having a baseline The baseline is increasing of how much you need to understand that.
Everyone's Venn diagrams are kind of converging.
Exactly. Amazing. Okay, let me take a step back and kind of zoom out and think about the broader journey you've been on over the past decade plus.
Let me just ask you this. What's the most counterintuitive lesson you've learned about building Airtable, building a company, building teams that maybe goes against common startup wisdom?
You know, I heard, you know, your interview with with Brian Chesky and then later you talk about founder mode in that kind of YC retreat.
And the points there really, really resonated with me, you know, and I feel like maybe less eloquently, I kind of like deduced know some of the same principles just just in my own experience which is like i think um when you're scaling up and this relates also to what we talked about before around like the early days of building a company, you're like in the details, you're finding product market fit.
You kind of have to be like, you know, pretty versatile, right?
Like, you know, all these decisions from a technical standpoint to design to even commercial and like, what's the freemium model going to be like and like, you know, how are we going to market this product?
What does the website look like? like they're all very intertwined, right?
You can't like compartmentalize and then like, you know, almost like, factory produce, you know, kind of each of these things separately, like they're all intertwined.
Right. And you have a very small, tight knit mean that's like a tight knit team that's thinking full stack about all of this combined.
And, you know, obviously like that's the only way in my opinion to create like that magical product market fit in the first place.
And then I think as you scale up, the default guidance that you often get from... you know, like operational experts and, you know, kind of like larger scale, you know, kind of company investors. is like, okay, you got to kind of industrialize the process of all of this stuff, right?
It's kind of like going from like a bespoke artisanal, like one person made an entire... you know, item of clothing to like, we got to like factory produce this thing.
Right. And You know what that means in a organizational context is like you then create these different fiefdoms, you hire all these execs and like, Each exec kind of like just manages their own swim lane.
And there's relatively looser coupling between all of those different groups, right?
So then you've got sales kind of executing on its own thing, marketing is executing on its own thing, product's executing on its own thing, Rather, and even within product, there's different product groups and surface areas that are each kind of executing on their own thing.
And, you know, using the factory metaphor of like, There's an argument that that's actually kind of an efficient way to scale up production for each of these different swim lanes, right?
Like each one can kind of operate, you know, like in a more autonomous and like, you know, purely like scale up, you know, focus kind of wait, how do we produce more of this thing?
If the thing happens to be within one product group improving search, That's our main focus.
We're just going to go and ship, ship, ship more stuff to improve search.
And so it's not completely crazy why people give this advice.
But I think what you lose is the magical integrative value of holistic thinking.
Right. And making the bigger picture bets.
Right. And I think Brian talked a lot about this on his episode with you, which is like, look, like in a company that is really serious about product, first of all, like you know, I really liked his point about like the CEO has to play a CPO role, right?
You have to care about the product. Like ultimately, like the product is the thing, right?
And you can't just coast on scaling up go-to-market around the product forever.
Like you gotta keep innovating on the product.
And by the way, the best way to innovate on the product is not incrementally split over all these different little surface areas, but actually to have like a bigger, kind of more step function vision of how this product needs to make a leap, right?
Or what's the next big, like, you know, kind of either act of the product or new capability of the product or reinvention of the product, right?
And so Like I think if you really care about doing that from a product execution standpoint and almost like refinding new product market fit on a regular basis, I think it necessitates a completely different operating and leadership model throughout the organization.
And all of the stuff we just talked about in terms of how to operate in the AI native era, I think it's actually... exactly the same as how you need to operate in this like constant product market, refinding a fit. state so like could not agree more with with that concept of you know kind of you gotta you know think ambitiously and move the organization holistically towards these bigger outcomes, but also like ship and learn and experiment a lot more in this era.
And then maybe the meta learning I had from all of the above is that the specific advice obviously was like, okay, go scale up in this way or go hire these types of people, experience operators, et cetera.
Obviously, there's some truth to that, right?
Like, you know, the people giving this advice are not incompetent.
You know, they had some reason for getting it.
And in certain contexts, it's is the right thing to do.
But I think like my meta learning is, you know, it's not... uh enough to just like trust the recommendation like here's the action you should take from a lot of people because Everybody has different priors.
And it's almost like we're all our own LLabs, right?
And we all have different training. from a different corpus of data informed by our own experiences.
And maybe you're trained on like the like, you know, kind of ServiceNow or the, you know, kind of Oracle, you know, kind of, you know, training corpus.
Right. And, you know, this person is trained on the Facebook corpus and I'm trained on like, you know, the air table one.
Right. And I think what I've tried to do more and more is like not just like ignore advice from smart people, like obviously that's not the right answer, but like to kind of take their It's almost like in an LLM, you can now, with a reasoning model, actually inspect the chain of thought and see how it's thinking.
Why did it come up with this answer? And to me, that like chain of thought, like why did you recommend this is actually more informative than the actual like just do this recommendation, right?
So the answer might be like, hey, like, at so and so company, this is how we eliminated the PM role entirely.
For Brian at Airbnb, it made sense. We're no longer having PMs in their traditional form.
Now we have program managers and product marketers and But like more than the actual decision, because I don't think it's a one size fits all, like everybody should do the same.
Why did you do that? Right. And the why actually was very informative and then be able to take that and say, like, OK, like How would I apply that?
And maybe it yields a different outcome, but the reasoning actually is very informative.
It's interesting how this idea founder mode is not so different from this ICCO trend that you're following.
For sure. Yeah, it's like being in the weeds, being in the details, trying things yourself, not delegating to execs.
Yeah. You know, and like... I think anything taken to an extreme can be problematic, right?
So like there is a world where like, you know, You are so in the details and in every detail that you're basically just micromanaging and you're kind of creating like...
You know, kind of the euphemism for that.
And that's not really what founder mode is about, right?
Like that's not like the Brian conception of founder mode is to like, micromanage everything and like not trust anyone.
But I think it's more about like finding that right balance of being unabashed about caring about the details that do matter and where The tying together of details across different groups or departments actually is the only way to yield a non incremental outcome, because otherwise, each person is just optimizing within their own domain, right?
But you'll never get to the global maxima or the global breakthrough.
And, you know, I think like The really cool thing about CEOs as ICs, and frankly, any leader playing more of an IC-like role, being in the details, is I think for the right type of person It's actually more fun that way, right?
I mean, to be honest, for me, the times where I felt most... disintermediated from like what I felt was like the substance of this company was when I thought that I was almost like you know, forcing myself to step away from the details because I thought that's like what, you know, a at scale CEO was supposed to do, right?
Like, I mean, there's, you know, some like, you know, famous CEOs who have talked about like the less decisions I can make, the better, right?
Like the less details I'm exposed to, the better, right?
Like I just want to inspect at the topmost layer how this business is running.
And if everything underneath it is going smoothly, then I'm able to do that, right?
And everything looks good. And I just think that's a... maybe again, it works in a certain type of very mature type of business.
Like, you know, even then though, like I can't imagine that like at a CPG company, like, in Procter & Gamble, you wouldn't want to have a CEO who still actually goes and tastes the soup and like tries the products and sees like literally the details of like what the new product innovation pipeline looks like, as well as how it's being experienced on the shelves and so on.
I don't know, I guess like I guess I'm just more and more skeptical that that like hands off, you know, pure delegation uh, you know, in process management role ever works as a CEO, like maybe, maybe you just like, you go through a long enough period of like where the business is coasting that like nobody notices, but I got to say, like for me, like it's just much more invigorating to get to play that role.
And I think for the types of operators and leaders that I most admire, like it's it's like that's what makes the job interesting like they don't want to have like a automated away you know kind of role as a leader If you could go back in time and whisper something in a decade ago, Howie's ear, that would have saved you a lot of pain and suffering over the last decade, what would that be?
Don't step away from the details that both you love.
I mean, first of all, if your passion is building product and product design, even if it feels like at times the company needs to do all this other stuff like scale up you know go to market and operations and like just have like a large people organization that itself creates a lot of, you know, kind of, you need to do things and manage and like there becomes a new job invented just to like manage a larger group of people, right?
And Obviously, you're going to have to do some of that.
You can't just completely eschew all your responsibility as an at-scale CEO. like don't lose the like the essence of like the thing that you love doing and that, you know, like really made this product happen and gives, you know, this company as many companies that like were founded on like a, you know, kind of of a magical product market finding insight, don't like step too far away from that.
Right. And always make sure that is still your like number one, even if like other stuff has to also add to your plate?
I think people don't talk enough about this, how if someone starts a company, it's an idea they have they're excited about.
It takes off and then you're stuck on that for a long time.
And then even if things are pushed in the direction you're not as excited about, And so this point about just remembering what you actually love about it and coming back to that is so important because that's the only way to keep doing this for a long time.
I think that's so true. And to me, that's why there's always been a difference between... entrepreneurs who love the the act of building a product or the business to versus those who saw a just purely business or financial opportunity that they felt like they couldn't pass up. exploiting or going after.
And look, no knock on people who are more the latter.
And like there's entire industries where like it's all just about alpha generation, right?
Like, you know, you could go into private equity business and so on.
And it's just purely it's rationally about like, how do I find the alpha?
And I think that like, you know, the some of the best companies, product central companies, at least in my opinion, are like, know run by those people who like actually just love the product right i think you get a feel for that from some of the ai companies like sam like i think genuinely just loves like working on ai right like if he could spend 100 of his time on like just being close to the ai and the research i mean he won and he's even said as much right like um you know but but ranging to like the bryans with airbnb like like it's pretty clear you know uh that you know, people like this are not motivated like Airbnb was not founded because like, oh, my God, we would want to make a lot of money off this like arbitrage opportunity against hotels.
They just needed to pay their rent. well that that and like i think they loved the the product and i think they also loved the way in which they built the product right like you know the design centric nature of that product and company and culture like You know, and that's what gives you like the continued joy of of working on, you know, what could be the same company for a very long time.
Howie, is there anything else that you wanted to touch on or leave listeners with before we get to our very exciting lightning round?
I just want to reiterate, you know, especially for listeners here who are in, you know, an E, P or D role, and especially in the P role, like, You know, I really do believe that this is not a like you either have or you don't like in terms of the skill set needed to be relevant.
And I need it. But I do think it's a call to action to go and bolster your skill sets where they may be you know, less refined right now, right?
Like I think everyone, like even programming, I really believe like everyone could learn how to be a software engineer if they wanted to.
Now, like obviously like Some people just as with like writers are never going to be like, you know, a published author, right?
Or like, you know, the Hemingway, right?
But like everyone can gain a good enough proficiency of software engineering if they really wanted to.
You could take that boot camp, you could do like some like, you know, coding. uh you know kind of exercises on the side um etc and the point there is that like Sometimes I think we treat these disciplines like hard, hard skills that Like if you're not already, if you're already halfway into your career and you're not already an engineer, if you're not already a designer, like, okay, well you can never be one.
And I just think like, you know, our brains are malleable.
I think there's a lot of great curriculum out there to learn.
And a lot of it, like I said, just comes down to also trial and error and building projects, maybe nights and weekends projects. even to learn this stuff.
But like everyone can learn how to be a versatile kind of unicorn, like product engineer designer hybrid in the AI native era.
And, and like the only thing stopping you is like just going out and doing it.
That is a really empowering way to end it.
And just to double down on that, it's never been easier to learn these things. super intelligences that you can talk to that do a lot, like as they're building can help you learn.
I mean, I literally, I mean, I go into Chatipati sometimes and I ask it like, you know, just like, hey, like, how would you build this app?
Like, or, you know, like, I'm just curious.
I'm like, Like, how would you build Manus, right?
Like the agent, open-ended agent. Like, literally, how would you build it?
You can ask it questions, and it's like having, like, an amazing... brilliant software architect, software engineer, product manager, designer, expert, tutor, that you can literally... There's no dumb question.
They have infinite patience. They're literally on and awake like 24 seven.
Like it is the most incredible time to like learn this up to your point.
And then of course, like, the interactive tools to go and actually build stuff like anyone can download cursor and just start like asking composer to generate some code for you and then looking at the code and trying to figure out what it does and To your point, when I think back to the earliest era that I experienced of building apps,
Like, you know, first I learned C++, then I learned PHP and JavaScript and like, even like building, you know, kind of JavaScript, like single page apps in the early days, like 08, you know, through 2010, like it was a dark, dark art.
I mean, there were some like, you just have to like go and like, learn some of these things.
There wasn't great like, you know, tutorials for it.
You know, you had to reverse engineer certain things like there were just like weird Things like if you wanted rounded corners in your UI, you literally took Photoshop, opened it up, created like a rounded corner and pixels and then pixel up into an image that you dropped onto the page. at exactly the right position to be at the edge of like a box like crazy stuff right i mean everything was like so much more arcane at the time And now it's just it feels so much more fluid and accessible and like the gap between the arcane tech that you have to wade through to build something. has just been minimized so much.
It's like the effort and like abstraction between you and like the magical, delightful, actual building of the thing that you want has been so minimized.
So it's never been a more exciting time to be a builder.
You remember spacer.gif? it's like to create like to align stuff you just have this invisible one pixel thing that you just stick in places oh my god What a time to be alive.
Howie, with that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round.
I've got five questions for you. Are you ready?
Yes. Here we go. What are two or three books you find yourself argumenting most to other people?
You know, I've been trying to read fiction more, partly because I think it's just a really nice mental reset.
I will say like Free Body Problem, like for anyone who hasn't read it, like...
It's a mind-expanding book. I like sci-fi and fiction that kind of opens your brain.
So maybe this is my cheat card, but it's a three-book series.
Those are three great books. I love that series.
And my tip there is it gets good. One and a half books in is my tip.
So just keep reading. That's where it's like, okay, now I'm in.
I liked even the first one. I felt like it was like Inception where every book Every subsequent book was like you dropped into another, like you incepted into like another layer, right?
Yeah. Awesome. OK, what's a favorite recent movie or TV show you've really enjoyed?
TV show. I just started watching the studio.
It's like the Seth Rogen, Rogen, Rogen. yeah so stressful yeah it is very stressful and you know I just kind of like I mean Silicon Valley was like too close to home when it came out.
So like I watched it, but it was like just cringy. the studio is kind of fun to watch because like, it's it's a little bit about like inside baseball of Hollywood.
And yet, like, I'm not in Hollywood. So it's like entertaining to watch and uh it's just you know it's it's a i thought smart and uh funny show um and because i split time between la and sf like i also feel like it's It's very real to me.
I see a lot of the literal characters out there in the world that it's characterizing.
Do you have a favorite product you recently discovered that you really love?
Could be an app, could be a gadget, could be a clothing.
Okay, so I'll give two because I feel like I have to say some kind of software product, right?
I mean, I'm a really big fan of Runway... uh the product and the company um i just think like you know every like new model uh they come out with uh they just came out with with a new one just i think like two days ago that gives even more controls and refinement on creating exactly the video scene that you want.
I think just the photo realism in what you can generate now and They also built this cool demo thing that's an immersive world generator I mentioned before.
I think it's just cool to see I also like the underdog story.
I'm like, clearly like Google's gunning, gunning in the space, has VO3 and so on.
And like, you know, as is opening the eye.
But like, I love the underdog story of this like sub hundred person company still punching above their weight and building like really awesome, know uh video experiences right so that's the software one and then a very very uh kind of nerdy um real world uh answer on product is i kind of just recently got into like this whole um cottage industry of artisanally produced, you know, basically clothing you know, by like small scale, like Japanese manufacturers that use like, like literally like hundred year old looms to, to make clothes like the old fashioned way. like, you know, or the old fashioned industrial way, right?
Like they have these like loopwheeler machines and they spin that the cloth and like a very slow pace.
So it's completely impractical from like production scale standpoint um but you know it's like I've gotten like some of these t-shirts and they like I just love the um no I guess Ed you know in a world where it feels like everything is becoming so much faster moving and like, you know, even tech from five years ago is obsolete.
Like, I love a little bit of the throwback to like, you know, old things sometimes can be even more cherishable in this new era, right?
So maybe that makes me a hipster, but I love the vintage, the retro increasingly these days.
I feel like anything that starts with artisanal small batch Japanese is going to be really good stuff.
Is there a brand you want to share that is that?
Or is this like, you want to keep it under the radar?
Actually, so Self Edge, which actually is a storefront, like the main storefront is on Valencia Street in Assaf.
Um, they carry a lot of these items and kind of like, that's kind of their whole MO and they have like jeans and like t-shirts.
So I've gotten a lot of, I mean, they, they basically curate a really good selection of different. actual makers.
Like one of them is called Studio Darzan.
Um, another one's called, uh, actually it's cool.
There's this company called, uh, I think that the, um, Umbrella Company is actually just Toyo, T-O-Y-O manufacturing, which sounds like it's a big, like, you know, kind of, like, large-scale... conglomerate, but it's anything but.
It's like a really small scale Japanese kind of like vintage manufacturer of clothing.
And but they have a few sub brands. They actually bought the rights to this like American post-war brand that was kind of like Hanes, like one of the like big four or five kind of menswear undershirts and athletic wear brands called Whitesville.
I don't know where the name came from. basically it's a bunch of basic clothing, like t-shirts, etc.
And this Japanese indie company bought the defunct know basically name um you know and and now like is reproducing clothes almost made to the exact shape and stack and even with like the exact recreation of like the graphic packaging on these teas.
But like, you know, today, right? So I just think there's something really funny and ironic about like, they've taken like an American post-war aesthetic and literal brand, but it's actually an indie, small-scale Japanese manufacturing approach to making those clothes.
I feel like we just tapped into what could be a whole other podcast conversation about clothing and craftsmanship, but I'm going to pull us out of that.
The next podcast franchise. Or just Howie and Lenny talking about clothing.
Okay, two more questions. Do you have a life motto that you often find useful in working in life, share with friends or family?
I stumbled on this guy, Paul Conti, who I think is an MD, but also like a psychologist.
And he has a book. you know, but also like he did this long form podcast with with Andrew Huberman.
And, you know, he actually ends up talking a lot about like just how to think about like your life outlook and like kind of your framework for thinking about life, but grounded in a kind of like scientific and like, you know, kind of neurological and cognitive science basis.
And, you know, I found one particular point really, really powerful.
It's with me, which is like, If you live your life in a way that's foundationally built around humility and gratitude, right?
And look, like, you know, everybody has different circumstances.
Like, you know, I think like I fully own that, like, you know, even though, you know, I didn't come from money like my family was was very, very financially modest, like growing up, like I still had an incredible resources and opportunities, you know, afforded to me, uh, even just by virtue of growing up in the U S where I'd be born in and growing up in the U S like, you know, but also like having access to a computer and the internet and like even all the free resources I could then access and learn about from there.
But you know, like I still feel like whatever you have or don't have to start with, if you kind of approach the world and the future with a spirit of humility and gratitude rather than I guess the opposite of that.
You know, it just I think I felt like it it makes like it kind of like becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, right?
Like, you know, you're You're open-minded, you're kind of grateful, and then like more opportunities actually come your way, right?
And maybe it's because of the energy you're putting out into the world. you know, and other people.
And like, you're kind of attracting like, you know, good opportunities and good people and good things.
But I, you know, I think like, you know there's a lot of other parts of like his framework but like the one that you know is easiest to remember is just like how do i approach each day even if like i'm going through a tough moment and I mean, I had to fire somebody today or maybe I got disappointed because we lost a customer deal or something broke or whatever. you know, but like to still try to look at the entire situation from an overall you know, feeling of humility and gratitude, I think just really does shift your your like, you know, it spills over into everything else for that day and maybe even for like the whole lifetime.
That super resonates. That is really powerful advice.
That's hard to internalize, but important.
Yeah. Easily said, hard to practice. Yeah.
Where can folks find you? What should they know about Airtable?
And how can listeners be useful to you? Okay, so I am on Twitter, HowieTL.
I don't post that much, but I am I'm a lurker.
So I listen and watch and you can always DM me there.
You can also email me directly howie at airtable.com anytime you can have ideas, feedback, et cetera.
On Airtable, just go try it. The whole point is we wanna make this an experiential, product, right?
Like, you know, that's why we're really leaning into the PLG roots.
We talked about like the homepage literally says like, Just start building right now.
What do you want to build? Go. It starts building.
And so use the product. Give me feedback.
And if you have ideas of your own and you want to rip on them, I love... because my passion is thinking of a product and like product UX, especially in the era, if you're working on or thinking about something interesting in that space, like And even if it's just purely to riff on a concept, that's something I enjoy doing and maybe I get to learn and sharpen my own skillset from.
So feel free to reach out. And yeah, I mean, tell your friends and family to try Airtable as well.
That's the main thing. Sounds like you're looking for people to nerd snipe you.
Yes. Howie, thank you so much for being here.
Awesome. Thank you, Lenny. Bye, everyone.
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