How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO)

"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 incarnation of it."

""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. And, you know, I would argue that 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 an operationally heavy business, like a dog walking marketplace where the tech is only an afterthought. Like, the tech was the product, right?""

""I think the same is true for Figma, which, you know, actually like had a very parallel timeline to us. Like 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. It's all about the tech, like 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 prop, right? Like you can't separate those two.""

""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... And in a very net of sense, like Airtable is the platform for other people to build their own apps, right? So it's all about the tech, like 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 prop.""

""I think now we're entering this moment where like every, certainly every software product in my opinion has to be refounded because like AI is such a paradigm shift. It's not even like just like the shift from desktop to mobile or on-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.""

"This is something that we call the ICCO. CEOs almost becoming individual contributors again, getting into the code, building things, leading initiatives themselves."

""You have this phrase somewhere where you, 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?""

""Does the CEO use ChatGPT or Claw daily? Yeah. And I feel like you're describing exactly hourly. Literally hourly, like, or, you know, you could even like have a measure of like inference, like costs, right? Like the equivalent underlying like inference compute cycles, right? How many tokens they use? Yeah. I mean, I'm proud to say like I am, I'm pretty sure I'm still the, I just checked this recently, but like I take pride in being the number one most expensive in inference cost user of Airtable AI,""

""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 map reduce.""

""We also have now a capability that's basically like an LLM map reduce. 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?""

""So I actually cut my one-on-one roster by default and the idea is not that I don't want to spend time one-on-one with people, but rather that I found that 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.""

""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 seed 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 like timely and just more of like, you know, building a relationship with a human.""

"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 that you think could be relevant to Airtable, go do it."

""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.""

""We did do a reorg of the EPD org. So before we had, we've gone through a few different kind of reorgs over the past, call it four years... 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 obviously 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 know, you tend to think incrementally when everyone's remit is actually like a feature that they incrementally improve by definition...""