How the Founder of Airtable Discovered Possible
Feb 24, 2022
Airtable was founded in 2012 by Howie Liu, and today it has over 750 Million users and is valued at over $11 Billion.
How did Liu come up with the idea and finally decide to bring it to life?
While at school Liu knew who he was and what he wanted, in an interview with Stanford Liu said, “I wanted to find an idea that I could drop out of school to work on.’
But, he was stuck in the “Getting Infected with Ideas” phase. This is the stage where most people get stuck. I can’t even begin to tell you all the people I’ve spoken to that are stuck in this growth phase.
Through high school and college (Duke University) he pivoted and iterated through a lot of ideas, but never found one that he felt very high conviction he could not only build a product around, but also build a business around.
He speculated in real estate, finding apartments, apps that were consumer and social. If he was going to drop out, he wanted it to be for something he had high conviction for that could be a viable long-term business.
“I would think a few chess moves ahead, thinking how can you get scale with this? What would the revenue model be? Are there any reasons why it could get shut down early on? For me It came down to finding an idea and validating it enough where the risk reward ratio was worthwhile” said Liu.
Since he didn’t find his idea, he got a proper degree and headed out after college and was about to take a job doing consulting for tech companies, but at the last minute he finally landed on which idea he would bring to life. He decided to go full force to start his first company.
Liu founded his first startup, Etacts, in 2010. It was a CRM for email contact management. He got into Y Combinator, raised $700K and sold it to Salesforce in less than one year. One of the reasons why he sold to Marc Benioff was because he wanted to learn more from him. One of the individuals who led the investments and acquisitions team at Salesforce said this about Liu, “It was obvious at the time that he was a special person,” said Iltchev. “I saw that he was a unicorn in that he was a brilliant engineer, designer, and business person in one package. I told him I would invest in whatever he was going to do next. It did not matter.”
While at Salesforce, Liu gets infected with another idea. He saw how people were using spreadsheets as purely organizational tools. “Spreadsheets are really optimized for numerical analysis and financial calculations. But almost 90% of spreadsheets don’t have formulas. Most are used for organizing purposes.” — Howie Liu, founder, Airtable
Liu stayed at Salesforce for only one year, and then he left to pursue his idea, Airtable. Liu didn’t want to just improve the spreadsheet, he wanted to create a new product that empowered users to create simple applications that would be intuitive.
Liu followed what I call the “Cycle of Creation”. He gathered the materials he needed, which at first might have only been a high level analysis, and then built his team so he could clearly demonstrate his idea to his first audience, his investors who helped define the value of the product.
Liu joined forces with a former Googler, Andrew Ofstad, and created their first prototype, and showed it to Ashton Kutcher at the Warner Bros. lot where they secured their first investment. “Even in my own world, I could see hundreds of different use-cases. They have spreadsheets tracking all these different stuff, it’s one giant organizational problem.” Said Ashton Kutcher in a Business Insider interview.
Now he had more materials, the funding he needed to go through his second round of the “Cycle of Creation”.
Airtable was officially founded in 2012 but development took place behind closed doors for two years. It was launched in 2014 with an invite-only beta in 2014 and shortly thereafter, he demonstrated enough growth to land his seed round of funding.
The “Cycle of Creation” continued, and it continues even to this day.
Like Liu, ask yourself, what ideas have infected you? Or what stage in the Cycle of Creation are you in?
At Discover Possible, we help people and companies master how ideas can infect you and how the Cycle of Creation can work for you to discover what’s possible.
The Discover Possible Blue Book is a multi-volume eBook series of books that will take you through the lives of some of the most accomplished individuals that have lived.
