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

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/9df1ce7c6d8fa9a6

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 find a buyer and then if you really care about this mission, like go and start the next carnation of it. Or 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 that 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.
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 Lu.
Howie is the co founder and CEO of Airtable.
I'm having a bunch of conversations on this podcast.
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 COs 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 allowed 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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Howie, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.
I'm so excited. Thank you, Loney. I've I've uh been a listener from afar for a while now.
I'm I'm really flattered to hear that. I'm also very excited.
You've been on quite a journey over the last uh is it thirteen years? Is it is it longer? Like right yeah, right about thirteen.
Thirteen years.
Imagine there have been a lot of ups and a lot of downs.
Uh, I wanna talk about all those things. I wanna talk about a lot of the lessons that you've learned along the way.
I want to start with what I imagine was a 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.
Uh, I feel other people maybe feel this way, is there's this tweet that went super viral uh maybe a couple of years ago at this point.
Where someone just
share all his 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 on from un underwater.
Yeah. RAP.
Uh
What happened there? How much of that was true? How did that get?
So very I mean, basically none of it was true. Uh, and um I mean it w the the surprising thing to me was how viral this tweet went when
Frankly, like I I actually look back at this person's uh other tweets. I think they they um they worked at CB Insights, uh and the irony is like that 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 of of strong multiple
on like what our revenue scale was, what our growth rate was, like, you know, and 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 like kind of take down tweet. They they had like oh Flexport's dead. And like
You know, their their um you know their valuation is is um you know too high and 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 like this particular tweet went super viral and
That was the perplexing part to me. Um and then I think actually I think what what uh really gave it legs was um
on the all in podcast, which is like obviously super popular.
Uh, you know, and I listened to it. Like, you know, they they commented. They were like, Oh, like, you know, latest on on uh this week's news, like, you know, this tweet about Airtable, what do we think about this? And it almost I think became like um
A way to talk about a broader theme of what happens to this last generation of
highly valued companies, maybe decorn companies.
in this new and at that point it was like kind of the recent moment for both public and private markets.
Um they did also issue a correction though. Um all in uh did a uh a follow up episode a few few uh I think weeks later saying like
Hey, like, you know, we got the numbers wrong.
Like um, you know
We we're revising our case and and kind of uh uh view on air table.
What's that line about how uh a lie gets around the world some number of times before truth has even has time to get out of bed?
Yeah. Yeah. Well
Yeah, I I think I learned about um uh memes and morality very quickly in uh in that experience. Not a very good social media person, but uh I think I learned a little more.
Yeah, it's tough. Twitter's such an ins the incentives are so misaligned. It's just I need I tweet something people want to share, not truth.
Well, I mean especially like I mean I I there's a lot to like. I would say net net I like the post-Eon Twitter more than the pre-Eon Twitter because it's it's just bolder and like
I you know, I guess I I really admire
bold product execution where you're not just kind of stuck to like
The current laurels.
And they made so many changes, but
Like 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
You know, but it it does I think it does result in
Like this kind of content, like really spreading.
Yeah. Now Nikita writing the show. I don't 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 dot com logo watermarked in the top right.
Yeah, 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'm gonna go in a completely different direction. Something that I'm really excited to talk to you about.
Which is this very uh emerging trend that I've noticed that I feel like you're at the forefront of.
Of COs.
Becoming
I Cs again. It's kind of this move of uh I C COs
CO's getting their hands dirty again, building again, getting in the weeds.
Coding again.
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 the 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.
Um and
You know
I would argue that like in that founding moment
Like the initial product market fit.
Finding.
Um, 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, uh where the tech is only an afterthought, like
The tech was the product, right? Um, and in a very nice sense, like Airtable is the platform for other people to build their own apps, right? So like it's all about the the tech.
Like
The
very intimate design decisions.
Um again, both architecturally and and uh on the front end and the product UX choice is like
That is the product's value prop, 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 and really be able to like be at the bleeding edge of what's possible both in the browser and with like, you know, kind of the the real time data architecture.
Um, that made the product what it was, right?
Uh, I think the same is true for Figma, which um 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. Um
Like hands on, uh in 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 SaaS overall and air table specifically where
You know, as you scale up and you kinda 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 kinda 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 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?
Um and using what I would call like more blunt instruments.
Uh 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 we're entering this moment where like every
But 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 a 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 uh continuously relevant
and kind of refined 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 ten thousand foot view and saying, Oh, we're just gonna 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. Um and the right, you know, everything else.
To support that engine.
to take advantage of the capabilities in our product domain.
You have this phrase somewhere where you
You talk about being the chief taste maker. Yeah. 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, like this this feels right or not, or like it feels like we're being bold enough and we're we're properly
You know, productising these new capabilities.
Um
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 pre recorded video.
of like a a new product feature, like AI is stuff 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 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 kinda get comfortable with them.
to put them into a new dish.
I we had um Dan Shipper on the podcast. He runs uh this newsletter and podcast put out a company called Every
And he they work with companies to help them become more AI
uh successful and adopt AI and all that stuff.
And he I asked him what's the s 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 hourly.
You could even like have a measure of like inference
uh like cost, right? Like the equivalent underlying like inference compute cycle of right. How many tokens they use. Yeah. I mean
I I'm proud to say like I am uh I'm I I'm pretty sure I'm still the um I I just checked this recently, but like uh
I take pride in being the number one
Most expensive
in inference cost user of air table AI.
Uh, not just within our own company, but I think for a long time I was globally across all
customers as well. Like I'm just I'm I'm like well I mean like I'm extremely intentionally wasteful.
Uh 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 L L M 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.
Um, and we we also have now a capability that's basically like an LOM map reduce. So effectively, even if you can't fit
Like
you know, the entire corpus of content into one LLM call because the the context window uh 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 extensive model against a lot of data and then running it again on the aggregates of that. But like
For me, you know.
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 to in red
Every single sales call.
Like transcript that we've had in the past year.
And giving me like
You know, you know, kind of very uh astute product insights, marketing insights, like, you know, kind of
Positioning insights and segmentation insights.
Um 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 it's 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 eating uh costing the company so much on on AI compute and you guys are gonna be underwater. Just kidding. Like how we have personally taken down um the uh the cash flow uh profile of the business like
So okay, so COs, founders hearing this, they're probably like, Okay, I I I 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 like how do you actually how you changed your day to day to do this?
Yeah, so I actually cut my one on one roster um by default. Uh and the idea is I'm not
It's not that I don't want to spend time one on one with people.
But rather that I found that the um 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 um
You know, the best types of meetings as like
very um urgency driven.
And like you know, there's some timely topic, like
You know, you've you've discovered some insight. Maybe I talked to some
New startup, right? Um, and uh, you know, I learned something from from their product or their approach.
And I wanna bring that into how we're thinking about like a new feature at our table. We're even just like
plant the seed with like, you know, some different like pro you know, EPD people within air table. Like I wanna make most meetings
uh very timely and very informed by like real alpha, right? There's gotta be some kind of value and insight.
uh to seed that with.
Now, in addition to that, I'll supplement with like
You know, when I'm in person, uh, you know, with someone like
I wanna carve out time for like a you know a proper like ketchup 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 comedy it's almost a barbell approach where it's like
You know, if you're gonna spend time with somebody in a freeform way, like actually do it in a high quality, not like forced
weekly ritual way, like
go for a longer lunch or coffee walk or whatever.
Um in person when you can.
Uh maybe that's like a once every month or two kind of thing.
And then like
The the in betweens are either
Topical so we do have standing meetings.
For
You know, like now um we have a a weekly
Basically um sprint check in on all of our AI execution stuff, which now is like half the company or half the um
E P D 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 windserf, 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, uh for me.
What's a change you've made to help the company move faster and and match that sort of pace?
Yeah, so w I mean we did do a reorg uh of
uh 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
Yeah, you 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
You know.
Uh coordinate.
you know, dramatic changes across a wider set of of uh surface areas instead of just like
Each one kind of incrementally uh improving.
And so we reorged.
um initially to basically different um business units, effectively, right? So uh I know Airbnb has done like kind of the 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 ten thousand seats or twenty thousand seats for product operations, right?
Um so a lot of architecture, a lot of scale.
Not gonna work. We would have a
uh what we call the Teams pillar, which is more about self serve, like kind of the product UX, like how easy it is to to adopt the product on board.
Share, do all the kind of like
Basic functionality.
An AI pillar, solutions pillar, and uh and basically infra.
And
What we found though with that approach is that
There was still
Um you know there 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 where like really think about NUS.
You know, in a way that touch multiple parts of the product.
Um, but it still felt like it wasn't, especially as as we start to execute more on AI stuff, like
It wasn't, you know, allowing us to aggressively and quickly.
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
you know, kinda roadmap for enterprise. We have this roadmap for for uh this group and
Yeah, it just feels like
one um one cohesive product that's shipping at a breakneck pace.
So we did this uh recent reorg where now we have
The what I call like the fast thinking.
uh group which officially is called AI platform.
Uh but it really means like
We wanna just ship a bunch of new
uh capabilities on a near weekly basis.
Um, 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 inner table.
And then separately we have the slow thinking group.
That's not meant meant to be like better or worse. Like it's it's literally like you need fast and slow thinking in the common sense uh to operate, right? Like as a human being. I have that book behind me. Yeah, I love that book. Um
But uh but slow thinking is like it's just a different mode of
planning and executing, right? It's like more deliberate bets that
require more premeditation, right? Like we can't just like
Ship a new piece of infrastructure.
That has a lot of like uh data complexity.
uh like you know our our uh data store hyperb that um
now can handle like multi hundred million record data sets. Like that's not something you ship in a week, right? In a hacky prototype. So
We now have these two separate parts of the company.
And I actually think what's what's really cool is like
They they actually complement each other very well, right?'Cause like the the fast execution, the AI stuff.
You know, that creates the top of funnel excitement. That that also, you know, kind of inspires
new use cases and new users coming to air table.
including in large enterprise, right? Like you know enterprises can use this stuff too. It's not just like a S B 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 could have like a very wide top of funnel, like
Get all of this AI tourist traffic.
you know, a lot of interest, a lot of like kind of like
you know, early usage, but then you know, sometimes the the challenge is how do you like turn that into more durable
you know, growth and 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's 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 we have a mix. So you know, we brought in uh I mean we're we're always hiring, right? Like there was never a point in um in the company's life where we stop hiring and not.
Yeah, candidly, even when we had to do uh two riffs, right, that that significantly
You know, kind of reduced our headcount. You know, we just
like way too quickly grown and overscale the business at a certain point. Um, but even when we did our rips.
We were still actively recruiting and hiring.
Um, you know, in I mean every major department, but especially in uh in ETD.
I cause
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 in the uh roster's day, right? Like we're always gonna need to find new, fresh perspectives, new skill sets, et cetera.
Um
And so you know we we've continued to hire
Um, I think we've learned as as we've gone along of like
you know, what is the ideal type of hire and you know, we've done some Aqua hires and learned from that as well.
Um, but I think the fast thinking part
It really just requires a a lot of like
Um, 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 Riplink, for instance, does a lot of actual acquisitions and gets actual founders into the company. Like we found that.
You know, that that's great, and we've done some of that as well.
But like also there's 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 the technical layers of the problem, but like also like
What is the wow factor we're trying to create, right?
Um so tangibly like
You know, um we're we're doing this new thing that's about to ship.
Where you know, not only can you
describe the app you want to build and then iterate on it with
you know, kind of our conversational agent omni.
But um and it builds it with like the existing airtable 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 uh visuals, right? So you could say like, hey, 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
Like that's a capability that like
There's so much ambiguity.
And some of the design decisions around it. Like
You know, um and 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 like design decisions.
And you need somebody who can like really think full stack about that kind of product and is not
overwhelmed by that, you know, kind of open endedness, but like relishes in it.
I was actually playing with it, uh before we started chatting. I made a really cute startup CRM.
Oh, that's awesome. Yeah. Started talking omnibur here. It's like it the colors are beautiful. That was that's what's standing out to me right now.
I will say like just as a as a note, um
Yeah, I consider myself like at my

like a product UX person, right? Like that that's my like passion.
And
You know, everything else I've had to learn to to kind of run this
Company.
Uh it's almost like
what was a necessary, you know, part of the the journey, like
You know, but but like my real passion
is thinking about product UX, right? And I you know
I I think of UX in a deeper sense than just like
the cosmetic like design, like you know, what you could put into a framer.
You know, kind of prototype like I think of it as like 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?
Um, 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, um
What's
under uh executed today in the world of AI products.
Yeah.
Like there's so many awesome capabilities of AI.
And most of them are really under merchandise, and there's like very poor actually visual or otherwise metaphors or affordances.
given to users to help represent or understand.
Like what those under underlying capabilities are, right? Like
I mean Chachu T, obviously
Like, you know, extremely successful product. So not knocking it at all. But like you come in and you just be get this like completely blank.
chat box, right? By default. And now they have suggestions underneath it and 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.
Uh
A web interface.
to and and all the richness um you know of interaction you create there to better represent or or show
All the different things that you can do.
with uh you know with with the underlying model, right? Um and so that's something we've tried to do with air table is like
show like all of the different states and like use colors even to play those up.
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
Uh 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? Is the if this is important, what would allow us to move faster? Yeah. And I love that that's one of the themes that's coming up as you talk is just this creating this very clear.
speed and and you even call it the fast thinking team. Like you're gonna move fast.
Yeah.
And then the other one is just this
I insight that with AI, you often don't know what peop what ac 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 I couldn't agree more with with both of those and and particularly on the second point.
No, I think it's interesting, like clearly
There have been companies um that have both both been successful in PLG and like kind of more sales led, you know, kind of distribution for AI products. Like
You know, the the most notable ones I could think of are like Palantir with their EIP deployments. Like that's obviously very sales led. You're not PLGing into a uh Palantir deployment, but even you know, like companies like Harvey and and uh and so on, like
you know, they're doing very well and like it's primarily from what I understand like sales lat, right? You're not
self serving into a Harvey instance at a law firm.
Um and yet.
Light to me the best way
to get AI value out there.
is experientially, right? And so 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 ten, 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 Chat G T
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 now seven hundred million like MA uh is it MAUs or we uh I think weekly active users ten percent 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 and so like I mean, literally that 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 and you know.
Kind of as a little bit of a rebuttal of the point I made earlier where
Like I think Chach BT doesn't do a ton right now.
Uh and and even earlier, like they they did even less to like 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, like, you know, people in the early days tried to stump it and showed like, oh look, see, it's not that smart. Like it doesn't answer this this hard question really well. But like clear
The magical
Like you know kind of nature of it still
appeal to you enough, you're like you everybody used it. And so
I think um
You know, I 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 the kind of PLG darlings of
Of our era.
And
And kinda started moving up market and like doing more
uh sales execution, although that was still always on top of like usually PLG within an enterprise.
Uh, but we started doing more and more sales.
uh execution we still have that that's still really unri uh 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.
Um experientially not telling
In like a Dak.
the value that you can get from from AI and air table, right? Like I think that's so key. And
It's it's but you know, it's nuts, 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 our table. And like, you know, it's like now the
the air table app as you know it is almost like an artifact.
That's manipulated by
Um, you know, and 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 it looks like basically all the other AI app building sites. Now just tell me which you want to build.
Thoughts on that as just like a thing everyone's starting to do is there
What do you think comes next? Is this
Does is it working well?
There's clearly a
in incredible magic to
uh vibe coding and and app building with AI, right? And
Um, this is actually, you know, like a a prime illustration, uh, in my view, of of uh that that concept we talked about a second ago, which is
You know, as capabilities of these underlying models evolve.
The form factor in the product UX.
Also
needs to evolve with it, right? And so
Like the earliest models.
like the kind of original chat chip tea like GT three point five.
uh you know kind of era models.
We're we're not nearly as smart as the current models, right? Um and so
Like you couldn't really ask it to one shot a more complicated chunk of code or or certainly not like a full stack app and expect it to work.
Um, and so the right form factor for leveraging
those models in a self creation context was
GitHub co pilot, right? It's like auto complete.
A few lines of code at a time, right?
But you know, you you couldn't chat to it and tell it like build me this entire app from scratch, right?
And I think that like
As the models got better and better, you saw the the new form factors emerge. Like I think Cursor did a great job of like being an early pioneer.
of this more agentic way of leveraging the models to to
do more complex things and generate more
you know, kinda 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 three D shooter game from scratch and just
watch it go and like create all the files and re you know fill out each file and then like, you know
Like the thing actually runs some of the time.
And so
To me
This is, you know, where the world is going. The models are clearly getting smarter. And
You know, if you think about the original
vision of air table. It was always about democratizing self creation. Like we just strongly believed
That
You know
The number of people who use
Ups.
uh far outweighs the number of people who can actually like
build their own or or manipulate apps and like
Harness like
Custom software to their advantage. That sounds very familiar. Very familiar these days. Yeah, exactly. 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 air table today.
Like this is what we would be all in on.
No, I think that the advantage that that we have, um and
Like I do think you have to be realistic to yourself, um, especially as as a uh as a company that
predates Gen AI and now has to kind of find your new footing in the AI landscape.
Like you can't fool yourself and just say, like, okay, I'm gonna throw in some AI stuff on the landing on the marketing site, you know, put in a couple of AI features and call out a day. Like I think you actually have to take a clean slate
uh approach to saying like
How would our mission thus 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 I and and and then by the way, like
Do you have useful building blocks?
um, you know, that you can leverage from your existing product uh 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 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 I I really
Yeah, thought about this and like 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? Meaning
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 a lawyer trying to build like a case management system,
Like
That's what we've always been been uh focused on.
And I think in this uh AI native world.
Clearly you should be able to generate those apps agentially.
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
Well 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. And by the way, here's all these other view types and a layout engine.
For a custom interface.
you know, uh a layout, right? Or automations and business logic.
And so it's almost like um in programming terms
Like the air table
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 like the SQL and HTML and JavaScript.
To build every part of that app from scratch. And so
Like if we can combine the best of both worlds, like
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
you know, kind of way for the non technical user to still understand and participate in what's going on.
Whereas
If you're not technical
You can't inspect the code.
underneath a V0 or lovable or Revlant 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 kinda stuck.
Um
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 IE.
to add it and and manipulate it to the final, you know, kind of production ready state. So
Like that's that's kind of the the play that we're making. And if I didn't fully and truly believe like
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 works 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?
Like 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
Uh, just like creating a sense of urgency and pace and getting people
Uh.
To understand this is how things move in AI. And we need to create this fast thinking team. I love that metaphor and 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 I C CO talking to AI, working with AI regularly.
Just on that note a little bit more. What
Just to give people a sense of what this looks like day to day. So you're talking to Omni all day trying to underto
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. Um
And both literally for the novelty factor and just like
you know, some new cool demo comes out, like uh runway released their like immersive world.
uh in a kinda engine, right? And um
And so like I'm gonna go try try it out, right? Like
When uh Sesame AI put out their like cool like kind of interactive voice
voice chat um, you know, uh uh, you know, 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 uh 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 and like get a feel for everything that's out there, right? And I try to invent little like
kind of almost like side projects of my own to have a a real
That is.
reason to use these products. Like, you know, oh cool. What if I
Or to take like
A what what if I were to like try to create like a funny little like um you know like a a short a funny video short, right? Using a combination of like Hey Jen avatars 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 Chach PT and pull together the results, having composed like, you know, kind of amazing. That's literally an example of something like a just, you know, a fun weekend project. And like to be honest, like these things only take you like an hour, right? If you're if you become kind of pre 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 twenty minutes. Okay, like let me let me prompt it to like generate me some dialogue.
Uh it's a little bit like what Notebook L M.
does for you out of the box, but sometimes I like to just like do it myself, right? And then okay, let me take the script and like cut it up and like
you know, turn it into a Heygen avatar and then download the video and and like play it, right? Like and just for fun, right? I'm not like trying to make
make that into an actual like, you know, kind of YouTube.
Like video business. But
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 what it gives me is like
A, like it's not just understanding the models, which is also very, very important, right? Like GPT five came out yesterday, and like playing around with it a bunch, uh, just on like a variety of different like personal use cases.
Um
Yeah, but like
There's a difference between just understanding the model, but then also understanding like the product form factors.
in which they can be placed, right? Meaning like
You know, when you apply the model in a more structured way, right? Um, you know, when you apply the model with different
tool calling than maybe what Chach P has
In its kind of like out of the box form.
You know, you when you apply it with like
You know, kind of a more agentic workflow. Again, that might be different from like what Chachi T gives you out of the box, like
That's when you kinda learn
Like
you know, you you really get to inspire yourself on like what are the product form factors that these new models can take. So
Like and and plus, by the way, like I find it to be really fun. Like
There is a to me like a delight and entertainment value.
to just using AI period because
Like A, it's it's it's not
It's not like perfectly predictable. So I think the element of like you're not quite sure what you're gonna get.
You know, it's like a box of chocolates, uh you know. Uh 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 there's some like
Basically very advanced.
You know, kind of regressions that we could run with with AI, but like it looked nothing like this, right? In its in 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 that uh that come out. So
I think that is a big part of it. Um
Yeah, because
On the point about like the pace of the world moving so much faster in AI than any other landscape, it it's like
You know, in SAS.
You know, in the mature Sasera
Like it was important to study
your competition, right? Like if you were building a SaaS company, you'd be crazy not to
Follow
Salesforce, right? Um, every like year and see what the you know, the major releases they're putting out are or ServiceNow or
You know, so one
Like
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.
uh 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 or you know even a tweet.
about like a new capability, like you kinda have to try it to really get a sense of
Like what it is.
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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 the stuff.
And I mean, when I say play, I really mean play like in 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 know 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?
And so like I've really tried to stress the value of play with these AI products and
I kind of, you know, try to lead by example by like literally going and like
sharing out links or or uh screenshots like
you know, of the things that I'm doing in these various products. So like
You know, as an example
You know, like I
Uh we'll go into um you know, like what one of the um
uh prototyping tools and show like hey like
You know, uh I built a marketing landing page for
You know, this new
uh 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 gonna write a doc about it and then share the doc.
I'm just gonna show you like an actual landing page with like visuals and everything in there, right?
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.
uh 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.
Yeah, 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 um have the ultimate
Uh excuse. Like you can use
Like you know, you you could 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 air table.
Go do it. Like period. Um so
I think that's the most important thing is like this this play, this experimentation.
I think there's also a lot of other
You know, kinda shifts in how we execute.
uh prototypes over decks. Um, you know, like I I wanna see like actual interactive demos because like
Again, like it's hard to to you know
in a deck or in a PRD, you could say like, okay, well we're gonna make Omni really good at handling this kind of app building.
Okay, those are just words.
The real proof is in the putting of like
Okay, let me try it out on a few like realistic prompts that I can imagine.
And in a demo in a real prototype.
You can
Like instantly
You know, try it out on unrealistic rather than golden pathy scenarios.
Um and see how it feels too. Like is it
Does it feel too slow? Like do we need to expose more of the the reasoning or steps
you know, kind of um you know, that 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
prototype that really does
In an open end way.
you know, like use the the AI to to do whatever um you know you put in. So
You know, I think it's it's more like a
Um
like experimentation playground, it feels like.
uh how we need to execute versus
I think in the past it's 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 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 MPM, 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 um
you know, polymathism, like y you know, there's a strong
uh advantage to
Any of those
Three roles who can kind of cross over into the other two, right? Like kind of the the hybrid unicorn types, right? So if you're a designer.
Ку
can be just technical enough to kind of be dangerous and and understand a little bit of like how these models work and, you know, um like how does tool calling work and
Uh and all of this stuff. Like
then you can actually design
a concept or even prototype a concept in including in these prototyping tools.
Um that that's much more
interesting and maybe realistic then
If you're just stuck in kind of the flat like
Let me put something in a
static design, right? Um concept, right? Because
Uh I think
You know, designs have to be more interactive. Like the the whole
the the the value of the product
Um and the product functionality is
in the interaction of it, right? Like you know, think about the design of ChatGPT. Again, it's like
Yeah, 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 quarries, right?
And what happens after you fire off a prompt, right?
Um so
You know, I think like
I found that there are people within each of these functions, like
There are engineers who are very
good at thinking about product and experience and like you know kind of can can go and prototype out like the whole thing.
their designers who can kind of do 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 uh I don't know, being more
in trouble than others, just like you need fewer of the 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
s like make the team smaller, but rather like
Like the really cool thing for for uh 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 tenth of the people.
I mean you could do that.
In a lot of cases, but
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.
Right, the apps themselves leverage AI capabilities at runtime, whether it's to generate imagery for a create a production workflow.
Or, you know, kind of leveraging deep research, um, or AI based
like um 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 different 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
You know, kind of almost infinite
Like 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 got literally like massive watermelons like literally sitting on the ground, right? And all you have to do is like kind of walk over twenty feet and pick it up instead of having to climb the really tall coconut tree to grab like a hard coconut from like fifty 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
Um 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 I I really like to believe in like the
Like
The growth potential of
Like any human, right? Like and and uh any individual like
I think
If you really have a growth mindset.
That's why one of our like most important core values is
His growth mindset, right? Like
If you really have that growth mindset, I think like
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 uh 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 leverage and fast way, right? So
I like to think like
You know, people who are willing to jump on the train.
are just gonna become more and more effective. And it's not like oh like
as a PM, my role is becoming in in 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
NGPM 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 they could understand the engineering
you 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 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?
Um, and so I think it's just a
reminder that
you know, like designers as well, like the you know, some of the best designers if you're designer to Apple, like
you know, including hardware designer, like you have to understand
Some of the technical capabilities of how this stuff works, right? Um 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, like, you know, on any given product group.
Uh, at Shite, my understanding is that like
You know, the DRI isn't always the PM, right? Um
Like as is traditionally the case in in kind of that that triangle, it's like
Yeah, sometimes it's actually the engineer who's taking the product lead and saying, like, this is what we need to build.

Essentially if you wanna like the trend across product engineering and design is each of those functions
needs to get good at one of the other functions at least. Yeah. Ideally you can do them all. But if if you can just do one additional. So a PM becomes better at design and engineer becomes better at
Product management. Well, I would actually go further and say, like I think you need like
decently good at all three. Like there's just a minimum baseline of like
Yes.
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? Like
You know, you could be a desig who's really good at thinking about UX and interaction design.
And then just
like good enough to be dangerous on thinking about like what's technically possible.
And like what is the product?
You know, kind of
you know, kind of story around this this uh feature.
I love that. And to do that.
one piece of advice that comes up again again in what you're what you've been describing is use the use the tools
Constantly.
And
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 wanted to be a great industrial designer.
And let's say like I mean the chair is kind of the ultimate like hello world of like industrial design, right? It's like the the like canonical design object.
Like
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?
Like you should go and first do a study of like all of the best chairs out there today. Like go
Look at an ease chair, sit in it, like try to examine it to kind of reverse engineer how it was made, right? And
Like you know, and and um just look at the prior art.
for that type of product.
Like 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 like you can't just only go
And look at other people's shirts. Like eventually you have to go and like 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 sensibility is like
I never
Like I mean, you know, and at that time like that I was in in uh school and then 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.
you know, college classes to learn product US. I mean even C S was like very
academic in nature at that time. It wasn't applied.
Software engineering like build an app or whatever.
Um, maybe now at like some of the schools like Stanford, MIT, they have like actually UX y type courses, but it's 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 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
Not 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 will 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 um uh group, especially like look, like
You know, in that that low hanging fruit metaphor, it's like
I'm not being prescriptive with you on like which watermelons you should pick.
But like you should go and like and and we do have different like pods within that group, but one of them, for instance, is uh 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
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 purity or from like a future idea.
Uh and
You know
I'm telling them like look like
There is a almost
infinite number of things you could like superpowers you can give these field agents.
I'm not gonna 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 the like a a few different directions we could go. Like what if you prototyped what it would look like to have a
deep research implementation and 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 Ch Ch Chi PT's own deep research.
on each of the speakers and have them all laid out side by side.
in this table, right? Like
Go 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 listically to go and build AI.
functionality.
I actually tried to do exactly that. The problem I ran into, I wonder if it's in changed is there's no uh API for uh op for chat GPT deep research yet.
There is now. There is now. There is. There we go. It ends up being uh 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 a deal. I mean to again, exactly. I mean, some people would say, Oh my God, that's so expensive. And you rack up fifty of those, you you've cost fifty dollars a month.
I think it's like well
It just saved you like
Hours of research by human.
Not only that, I I actually have a researcher that I pay to
He'll give me background on guests.
That was like four or five hundred bucks.
And the dollar sounds great. And I've been.
Can't you do this manually? You'd be using deeper search. They might be. They might just be.

Oh man. Okay. There's one more uh 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, um and I listened to your your uh your episodes with uh with and and Mike uh who talk about this. I think it's like interesting that like um
you know, the both heads of opening eye and anthropic uh you know have converged on on this point.
I mean look, I think um
I I would add like a a slightly different or additive take though, which is like
I think um
For a completely novel product experience or form factor.
You should actually not start with evals.
And you start with vibes, right? Meaning like
You know
It you 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 in kind of like a broad sense. So
Like as an example
For our custom
A code generation capability.
Like instead of defining
evals that get repeatedly tested.
You know, as you vary
like the prompt or the model or like the the agentic workflow used to generate the 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 if your product market fit finding
either for an entirely new company
Or for like a new a pretty
dramatically newer bold new capability that doesn't really have like it's not an incremental improvement of something that exists in our table 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 we're implementing this new capability.
that can use uh basically a long running
AI
Crawler agent.
That goes and researches the web.
you know, for a specific type of object or entity, right? So
It's a little bit different from deep research. It's similar to deep research.
But what it actually does is instead of outputting like
a you know kind of a report.
It's actually going and compiling a list of things.
The things could be companies or people.
Um or or anything else, right? Like find me every Marvel movie, right, ever made. Find me every
Like um you know, kind of DC comics like uh spin-off, right? Like uh series, right?
Um literally anything.
And
You know.
You have to go in and 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, right? And then you get back some results and you're like, okay, well, like
It's clear that like
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 um d like um
uh programmatically
Like measuring
the changes that you're making to improve
Like the the uh the the the output for that, right?
Um, but like by that point, you've probably already scoped the product and maybe the way we would merchandise it in the the uh in air table.
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 uh 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 to search for that thing, right? But I kind of think it's it's more useful as a way to iterate.
Your way to improvement.
Um and you can start
you know, really testing stuff like empirically, right? You can A B test, especially if you have the scale.
of a really large product like if Robert High you can like
just test everything and and see like, oh, this model actually performs better than this one. This prop performs better than this one.
Um, but I think early on, like you don't have that luxury.
And you're in a much more open ended discovery process.
That is very wise. Evals can constrain you too early.
I think about just the double diamond, I don't know, IDO kind of framework of like be conver uh divergent first and then converge and then maybe the start you know. Exactly. Uh I hadn't heard that before, but um
That that uh 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 like 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.
Mm-hmm.
Um
Forcing people almost I don't know, forcing is the right word, but encouraging people to play with the blade of stuff.
And like giving him chance to take days off to
Or block out calendars, cancel meetings, just like stay on top of the stuff. Yeah.
Uh
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.

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, describe.
Yeah, multiple times an hour, multiple times an hour. Um, is there anything else that I missed there that you're like this is you need to do this too, to be really
To have a chance.
I think just to really
really try to break down role silos. Like, and I think that's true certainly for EPND.
um in the typical like um you know E P D triangle. But I also think it's it's probably true
Even for like non
product roles, right? Like I think um it's true in marketing, right? Like I'm seeing
You know, something uh you know something I'm really pushing for in marketing, I think our marketing team is like
you know, really leading into actually is um
Is like
You know, if you can just do
All of
the thing yourself. Like traditionally
you know, 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 uh part of a campaign, right? Like they literally go into the Google AdWords interface and they're like tweaking the parameters of targeting and
Yeah, budget and like you know kind of uh conversion.
uh tracking, et cetera.
And 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 like the seed content or positioning
you know, guide like written by a PMM that feeds into the ad creative and
You know, so on and so forth, right? Like maybe they're promoting some like new demo asset, right? Uh that somebody else yet created.
And I just think that like, you know, in the same way that you can collapse
the roles in E P D and like
The ideal person
Maybe they're they're very specially uh you know, specialized in deep in one.
Dimension like engineering.
Um, but they're well rounded enough to kind of like
be dangerous on the other two, like
I think that's kind of true.
It holds every other function, right? Like
you know, like sales as well. Like I think you should
Yeah, start to be able to play more of an S E role. Like traditionally salespeople
um didn't necessarily know the product that well and like, you know, kind of relied on the SE to come in and be the product experts. Like I think it's really hard.
to sell any kind of the I product now without actually being fluent in
the product and be able to demo the product, right? So like
You know, in the a uh A E's need to be
Like
S E 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
Shoomers
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, you know, an SC to help you demo.
Like can you collapse more of those dependencies so that if you had to, you could do it all yourself, right?
Um, and I just think that's a new way
Like it's a new operatity overall.
For every
AI native.
company or company that wants to compete in this new arena.
That is 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. We're just doing stuff.
Needs to be done.
Only.
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 the as you describe the minimum
of being good at engineering design or and S E by the way, sales engineering, imagine is what that stands for.
Um that you just like they're the 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
What's the most counterintuitive lesson you've learned?
about building air table building and company building teams that maybe goes against common startup wisdom.
You know I I heard um
Uh
You know, you're
interview with with Brian Chestia and then later he talked about founder mode um in in that kind of Y C retreat.
And the points there really, really resonated with me.
Um
You know, and I I feel like
Uh, maybe less eloquently I kind of like deduced
You 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 gonna be like? And like, you know, how are we gonna 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, kinda each of these things separately, like you they're all intertwined, right? And you have a very small tight knit meme 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 that magical product market fit.
In the first place.
And then I think as you scale up
You know, the default
guidance that you often get from
you know, like operational experts and and you know, kind of like larger scale, you know, kind of uh uh company investors.
is like, okay, you gotta kind of industrialize the process of all of this stuff, right? It's kind of
Kind of like going from like a bespoke artisanal like one person made an entire
you know, item of clothing to like we gotta 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, you know, 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 that you got sales kind of executing on its own thing, marketing's executing on its own thing, products executing on its own thing.
Rather at evil within product, there's different product groups and surface areas that are each kind of executing.

And you know
Yeah, using the factory metaphor like
There's 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 kinda operate
You know, like in a in a uh 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 gonna, you know, go and ship, ship, ship more stuff to improve surge.
And
You know, so th they're they're it's not completely crazy, like, you know, why why people give this advice.
But I think what you lose
Is
The magical integrative value.
Of holistic thinking, right? And and making the bigger picture bets, right? And I think Brian talked a lot
about this on his uh episode with you, which is like
Look, like in in a company
that is really serious about product, first of all, like
You know, uh I really liked his his point about like the CEO has to play
A CPO role.
Right. Um 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 in the product.
And by the way, the best way to iterate on the product
Is
Not incrementally split over all these different you know, different little service areas.
But actually
to have like a bigger
You know, 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 uh either act of the product or new capability of the product.
Uh 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 refining new product market fit on a regular basis.
Like 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 refining a fit.
Uh so
Like could not agree more with with that concept of
You know, kinda 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 you know, maybe the meta learning I had from all of the above is that like
You know.
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.
Um, you know, they they had some reason for getting it and in certain contexts it that is the right thing to do.
But I think like
My meta learning is
You know, it's it's not
uh enough to just like trust the
recommendation like here's the action you should take.
From a lot of people'cause
Everybody has different priors.
And it's almost like we're all our own LMs, right? And like
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 service now or the, you know, kind of a Oracle, you know, kind of um, you know, training corpus, right? And
You know, this person's 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
advise from smart people. Like obviously that's not the right answer.
But like to kind of take their
It's almost like um in an LM
Uh, you can now like with a reasoning model, like actually inspect the chain of thought, right? Like and and uh see how it's thinking. Why did it come up with this answer, right?
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
You know, at
So and so company
This is how
We eliminated the PM role entirely, right? For for Brian, like at R B B like made sense, like 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,'cause 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, okay, like
How would I apply that and maybe it yields a different outcome?
But the reasoning
Actually is very uh informative.
It's interesting how this idea of founder mode is it's not so different from this I C C O
Yeah. Trend that you're following and it's it's yeah. Yeah. It's like being in the weeds, being the details.
Trying things yourself, not delegating to execs. Yeah.
You know, and and like um
I think anything taken to 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 you're you're kind of creating like you know kind of the e euphemism for that. And that's not really what founder mode is about, right? Like that's not like the the Brian conception of founder mode is to like micromanage everything and like not trust anyone.
Um, 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
It's just optimizing within their own domain, right? But you'll never get to the global maxima or the global breakthrough.
Um
And
You know, I think um
Like
The really cool thing about uh, you know, CEOs as I Cs, 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 it's actually more fun that way, right? Like I mean, to be honest, like for me
Like I the times where I felt most
Um
Disintermediated from like
What I felt was like the substance of
This company.
was when
I thought that I 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 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 the everything underneath it is going smoothly, then like 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
A proctory gamble.
You wouldn't want to have a CEO who's 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
Um, as well as like how it's being experienced on the shelves and so on, like
So
I don't know, I I guess uh
Like I guess I'm just more and more skeptical that that
Like hands off.
you know, pure delegation.
uh you know, and process management role ever works as a CEO.
Like maybe maybe you're just like
You go through a long enough period of like where the business is coasting that like nobody notices.
But
I gotta say, like for me
Like it's just much more invigorating to get to play that role. And I think for for the
Um types of operating leaders that I most admire, like
It's it's like that's what makes the job interesting. Like they don't wanna 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 n the last decade.
What would that be?
Don't step away from the details that both you love. Like I mean first of all, like
If your passion
Yeah.
Like
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 um
Yeah, kind of uh
you know, need to to do things and manage and
Like there there there becomes a new job invented just to like manage a larger group of people.
Right. Um
And
Like, you know, obviously you're gonna have to do some of that. You can't just completely eskew
all your responsibility as like a at scale CEO.
Uh but
Like, don't lose
the like the the essence of
Like the thing that you love doing.
And that you know had like really made
This product happen.
Uh and gives
You know, this company as many companies that like were were founded on like a
You know, kind of a magical product market finding insight.
Don't like step too far away from that, right? And always make sure that is still
You're 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 a 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.
It's so important'cause that's the only way to keep doing this for for a long time.
I I 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.
Oh building.
A product or you know, the business too.
Versus those
who saw a
Yeah, just purely business or financial opportunity that
They felt like they couldn't
Pass up.
exploiting or or going after and look, no knock on people who are more of 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 the private equity business and and so on.
Um and it's just purely it's it's rationally about like how do I find the alpha?
And
I think that like
You know, the some of the best
Companies, um product central companies at least, in in my opinion, are like
You 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 you could spend a hundred percent of the time on like
just being close to the AI and the research. I mean he wouldn't he's even said as much, right? Like
Um you know, but but raging to like the Bryans but 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. Yeah. Well that that and like I think they loved the the product, and I think all they also love 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 and that's what gives you like the continued joy of of uh 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 I just want to reiterate, um, you know, especially for for listeners here who who uh are in
you know, in E, T 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 it or you don't like in terms of the skill set needed to be relevant and the I need it.
But I do think
Like it's a call to action to go and and bolster
Your skill sets where where uh you know, where 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 great writers are never gonna be like, you know, a uh a published author, right? Or like, you know, the the Hemingway, right?
Uh but
Like everyone can gain a good enough proficiency of software engineering if they really wanted to. You could take that bootcamp, you could do like
Some like you know, coding.
Uh, you know, kind of exercises on other side.
Um, et cetera.
And the point there is that like
You know, sometimes I think we treat these disciplines
Like
You know, 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.
And there's a lot of great curriculum out there to learn and and you know, a lot of it, like I said, just comes down to also like trial and error and like
building projects, maybe nights and weekends projects, uh, even um to learn
Uh, this stuff, but like
Everyone can learn.
How to be a versatile
you know, 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 I just to double down on that, it's never been easier to learn these things. Like there are super intelligences
That you can talk to that do a lot of like as they're building can help you under learn. I mean I d like I literally I mean I go into Chachika T sometimes and I ask it like
Yeah, 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 the agent uh 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 like there's no dumb question.
They have infinite patience. They're literally on.
Awake like twenty four seven.
Like it is the most incredible time to
Like learn this off 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
You know
To your point, like
It you know.
When I think back to
The earliest era that I experienced of building
Apps.
Like, you know, first I learned C plus plus, 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 oh eight, you know, through twenty ten, 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 cut that 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 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?
Uh
It's like to create like the line stuff you just go around. Yeah, remember. Invisible one pixel thing that you just stick in places. Yeah, yeah, no, I Oh my God. What a time to be alive.
Uh, 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 recommending most to other people?
You know, I I've um I've been trying to read fiction more, um, partly because I think it's just like a really nice mental reset.
Uh, I will say like three body problem, like for anyone who hasn't read it, like
It's it it's a mind expanding book. Like I like sci fi and and fiction that like
kind of opens your brain. So maybe this is my cheat card, but uh you know, it's a three book series. So those are those are three great books.
I love that series and my tip there is
It gets good. Uh
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. Um but I do like
It
I felt like it was like inception where every book
Every subsequent book was like you dropped into another
Like you you incept it into like another layer, right?
Awesome. Okay. What's a favorite recent movie or TV show you've really enjoyed?
T D show, I just started watching the studio. Um the it's like uh the Seth Rogen uh Rogan Rogan. Yeah, so stressful.
Yeah, it is very stressful.
And you know, I I just kinda like I mean
Silicon Valley was like too close to home, um when it came out. So like I watched it, but it was like just cringy.
The studio is kinda fun to watch'cause like
It's it's it's a little bit of that like inside baseball of uh of Hollywood.
Uh, and yet like I'm not in Hollywood, so it's like entertaining to watch and
Uh it's just you know it's a it's a I thought smart and uh funny
Show um and because I split time between L and SF like
I also feel like it's
Uh it's very real to me. I see a lot of the like literal characters out there in the world that that uh it's characterizing.
Do you have a favorite product you recently discovered they really love? Could be an app, could be gadget, could be
Uh clothing.
So okay, so I'll I'll give uh two
Uh'cause I feel like I have to I have to say some kind of software product, right? Uh
I mean
I um 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.
uh that gives even more
Like controls and refinement on
like creating exactly the video scene that you want. And so
Like I think just the photo realism um in in what you can generate now and
Like they also built this like cool demo thing that's like an immersive world generator I mentioned before. I think um it's just cool to see
Uh, I also like the underdog story. I'm like clearly like Google's gunning gunning in the space, uh, has VO3 and so on and like, you know, has this opening 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
you know, uh video experiences, right? So that's the software one.
And then a very, very uh kind of nerdy.
Um uh real world uh answer on product is I kinda just recently got into
Like this whole um cottage industry of artisanally produced
Uh you know, basically clothing
You know, I 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 or the old fashioned industrial way, right? Like
They have these like loop wheeler machines and they spin the the cloth and like
a very slow pace, so it's completely impractical.
From like uh
production scale standpoint.
Um, but you know I just like I've gotten like some of these T shirts and the
Like I just love the um No, I guess Ed, you know, in a world where
It feels like everything is becoming so much uh faster moving and like, you know.
Even tech from five years ago is obsolete.
Uh 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? Uh so
Like maybe that makes me a hipster, but like I I love the um
You know, the uh the vintage, the retro, uh increasingly these.
I feel like anything that starts with artisanal small batch Japanese is gonna be really good stuff. Is there is there a brand you wanna share that is that or is this like you wanna keep it in the right or um actually so Self Edge, which uh actually has a uh a storefront, like the main storefront is uh on Valencia Street in SF. Um they carry a lot of these items 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 Dartzan. Um, another one's called uh actually it's cool.
There's this company uh called uh I think the the um
Umbrella company is actually just Toyota
T O Y O
Manufacturing.
Uh, 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
uh Japanese um you know kind of like vintage
uh manufacturer of clothing
And but they have a few sub brands. They actually bought the rights to this um like American post war brand that was kind of like Haynes.
Like one of the like
Big like four or five like
you know, kind of um uh men's wear like you know kind of undershirts and athletic wear
Uh brands called Whitesville. I don't know where the name came from, but um
You know, it it uh it basically it's a bunch of like
Basic
Clothing, like T shirts, et cetera.
And uh and they the this Japanese
Indy company because we bought the like defunct
You 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 uh T's.
Um, but like, you know, today, right? So I just think there's something really funny and ironic about like
You know, they've taken like an American post war
aesthetic and literal brand.
But like it's actually like a in the
You know, small scale Japanese
manufacturing uh approach to to uh debate about closed. I feel like we just tapped into what could be a whole other podcast conversation about
clothing and craftsmanship but let's I'm gonna pull us out of that the next uh franchise or just Howie and Lenny talking about clothing. Um okay two more questions. Yeah do you have uh
Life motto that you often find useful in work or life, share with friends or family.
I I stumbled on this uh this this guy, um, Paul Conti, who I think uh is an MD but also like a psychologist.
And um he has a book
Uh you know, but also like he did this long form
podcast with uh with Andrew Huberman.
And um 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
Um and and cognitive science
uh basis and
You know, I found one particular point really, really powerful it's with me, which is like
You know, if you live your life in a way that's, you know, foundationally built around humility and gratitude, right?
Um and look, like
You know
Everybody has different circumstances, like, you know, I think
Like
I I fully
own that like, you know, even though
You know, I didn't come for money like my family was was very, very financially modest, like growing up.
Like I still had an incredible
resources and opportunities ad you know afforded to me.
uh even just by virtue of growing up in the US, right? Being born in and growing up in the US, like, you know, uh, but also like having access to a computer and the internet and like even all the free resources I could then access and and learn about
From there.
But um
You know, like
I I still feel like you know whatever you have or don't have
To start with, like
If you kind of approach the world and and you know, kind of
The future with
A spirit of humility and gratitude rather than I guess the opposite of that.
Um
You know, it just I think
I've felt like it it makes
Like it kind of like becomes a self fulfilling prophecy, right? Like you know, you're
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 and you know, and other people and like you're kind of attracting like
you know, good opportunities and and good people and good things.
Uh but I you know, I 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 it's just like how do I approach each day? Even if like
I'm going through a tough moment and
You know, maybe we had to like, you know, I had to fire somebody today, or maybe like, you know, I got disappointed because we lost a customer deal or something broke or whatever.
You know, um
You know, but like to still try to look at the entire situation.
From overall.
You know, uh feeling of of humility and gratitude, I think just
Really does
Shift your your like
You know, it it spills over into everything else, um, for that day and maybe even for like
Yeah, the the the whole uh lifetime.
That uh super resonates. That is
Really powerful advice. That's hard to internalize, but important. Yeah. Um easily said, hard to uh practice. Yeah.
Uh, where can folks find you? What should they know about Airtable? And how can listeners be useful to you?
Okay, so uh I am on Twitter, Howie TL. Um
I don't post that much, uh, but I am a I'm a lurker, so
I listen uh and and watch, and you can always DM me there. Um you can also email me directly how we at airtable.com anytime if you have ideas, feedback, et cetera.
Um you know, on air table, like just go try it. Like the whole point is
We want to make this an experiential
product, right? Like, you know, that's why we're 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. Like it starts building.
And so use the product, give me feedback. Um and
Yeah, if you have ideas of your own and and you wanna rip on them, like I I love
Because my passion is thinking about product and like product UX, especially in the AI era.
If you're working on or in sh you know, thinking about something interesting in that space, like
And even if just purely to like
riff on a concept like
That's that's something I enjoy doing and maybe I get to learn and and sharpen my own skill set from. So
Feel free to reach out.
Um and uh and yeah, I mean
You know, tell your friends and family to to try irritable as well. Like that's that's the uh main thing.
Sounds you're looking for people to nerd snipe you and
Yes.
Howie, thank you so much for being here.
Awesome. Thank you, Lenny.
Everyone.
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