MOVE SLOW AND MAKE THINGS
Airtable’s Howie liu has quietly built a software giant by emphasizing substance over speed. but can a tech tortoise win the data race?
Airtable’s Howie Liu has quietly built a software giant by emphasizing substance over speed. But can a tech tortoise win the data race?
In the frenetic world of tech, where the ruling ethos is to move fast and break things, Howie Liu moves at a glacial pace. With Andrew Ofstad and Emmett Nicholas, he launched Airtable in 2013. They wanted to create a spreadsheet with the power of a database. Then they spent three years building a prototype.
The trio pored over academic papers on collaborative software theory, agonized about the Node.js architecture and obsessed over the speed at which windows popped open. After reading Kenya Hara’s design book White, Liu spent months focusing on the interplay of color and empty space.
Liu, 30, is sitting in his San Francisco headquarters dressed in a black leather jacket and` black shirt, slacks and shoes. It’s a minimalist uniform à la Steve Jobs, the guy who would fuss for-
ever over the shade of white of an iPod: “Instead of trying to rush a new product out the door, we introduce a period of forced delay, so people have a chance to sleep on an idea,” he says. “It’s a concept we call the simmer.”
Now Airtable is coming to a boil. Liu’s cloudbased software has taken hold in 80,000 organizations, from Netflix to small nonprofits. Revenue is on track to jump 400% to $20 million in 2018, mostly on word of mouth.
Investors have noticed. In March, Airtable raised $59 million from CRV, Caffeinated Capital and Slow Ventures. Last month it snagged another $100 million from Benchmark, Thrive Capital and Coatue Management at a post-money valuation of $1.1 billion.
Airtable has attached an approachable drag-anddrop experience to a powerful database, much as Windows replaced tedious text-based commands with a graphic interface or AOL offered a welcoming portal to the Web. “It’s an intuitive and fun way to build on data in a way you can’t with clunky products like Microsoft Access and Excel,” says Ray Tonsing of Caffeinated Capital. “It’s a joyful product to use.”
At first glance, Airtable looks like a souped-up Google Sheet. It’s a collaborative spreadsheet that can store images, documents, videos and URLs. All of these can be dragged into cells and opened with a click. And while Google Sheets is fine for projects with a team of ten or so, Airtable has the relational database underneath to run businesses with thousands of far-flung employees simultaneously accessing the system via computers, smartphones and tablets. The several million of lines of code, written in open-source Node.js, encrypt the data and back it up with restorable snapshots.
Pricing is on the usual freemium model. You get basic services gratis. Subscriptions, which cost $10 or $20 for a month per user, offer advanced features and generous storage space. (Enterprise packages start at $60 a head.) One in six users is a paying customer.
Airtable’s defining feature is a buffet of apps and functions, called “blocks.” With these you can overlay data sets on a Google map, apply rules and formulas, send alerts and messages to colleagues, share files via SMS messages or emails, integrate with services like Slack and Dropbox, aggregate surveys and forms, and push content onto a live website.
It adds up to a powerful tool kit that lets anyone create custom applications (sales pipelines, client reports, project management flows, editorial calendars, inventory management) that previously required code writers or pricey consultants.
Airtable isn’t the only software vendor to talk about code-free programming; Quick Base, a spin-off of Intuit, makes a similar pitch. That doesn’t stop Liu from imagining how his firm can capture a wide swath of the world’s data processing. “People think we’re building an Excel or Google Sheets replacement, but we’re out to build the next Microsoft or Apple,” he says. “This is a $100 billion-plus revenue opportunity.”
That’s an ambitious statement—even in an industry that plows millions into immortality research and launches electric cars into orbit. After all, the opportunity to expand from a narrow product line into the full suite of business software doesn’t belong only to Airtable. Liu might find a way to snatch some of Microsoft’s $110 billion in sales; Microsoft might snatch some of his.
But Liu is convinced Airtable can win by being software’s version of Lego, providing blocks to let any business build do-it-yourself custom software cheaply and quickly. “America’s most valuable data is still stored in people’s heads and on Excel sheets,” says Sam Lessin of Slow Ventures, which joined in Airtable’s fundraising in March. “If you can become the place where all the data that operates most businesses goes, the opportunity to build an ecosystem and be the next great platform becomes obvious.”
Liu is betting he’ll get more traction once outside entrepreneurs build programs for Airtable as they do now for the App Store and Google Play. “The software serves as a blank canvas for whatever a company needs,” says Thrive Capital founder Joshua Kushner. “That’s extremely powerful.”
Airtable has illustrious acolytes. Netflix uses it to run its postproduction pipeline. Atlantic Records built an Airtable program to manage communication between producers, songwriters and performers. WeWork, an early adopter, has thousands of employees on the software to manage and plan construction projects.
For Calvin Klein, an Airtable database ironed out its fabric-sourcing operations—once a complex juggle of thousands of emails and offline spreadsheets between designers, project managers
“People think we’re building an Excel or Google Sheets replacement, but we’re out to build the next microsoft.”