YouSaid · the spoken record

Howie Liu

lines on the record: 105
first: 2025-08-31
most recent: 2025-08-31
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Okay, so I am on Twitter. Howie TL, I don't post that much, but I'm a lurker. So I listen and watch, and you can always DM me there. You can also email me directly howie at airtable.com anytime. You can have ideas, feedback, et cetera. On Airtable, just go try it. The whole point is we want to make this an experiential product, right? Like, you know, that's why we're really leaning into the PLG roots. We talked about 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. And if you have ideas of your own and you want to rip on them, like I love because my passion is thinking of a product and like product UX, especially in the AI era, if you're working on or thinking about something interesting in that space. And even if it's just purely to like riff on a concept, that's something I enjoy doing. And maybe I get to learn and sharpen my own skill set from. So feel free to reach out.”
2025-08-31 · Lenny's Podcast · How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a lot of other parts of like his framework, but like the one that is easiest to remember is just like, how do I approach each day, even if I'm going through a tough moment and we had to like, 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. But to still try to look at the entire situation from an overall feeling of humility and gratitude, I think just really does shift your like, you know, it spills over into everything else for that day and maybe even for the whole lifetime.”
2025-08-31 · Lenny's Podcast · How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, I fully own that, even though I didn't come for money, like my family was very, very financially modest, like growing up, I still had an incredible resources and opportunities afforded to me, even just by virtue of growing up in the US, right? Being born in and growing up in the US, like, you know, but also having access to a computer and the internet and like even all the free resources that could then access and learn about from there. But I still feel like whatever you have or don't have to start with, like if you kind of approach the world and kind of the future with a spirit of humility and gratitude rather than, I guess, the opposite of that, you know, it just, I think I felt like it makes, like, it kind of like becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? Like, you know, you're open-minded, you're kind of great.”
2025-08-31 · Lenny's Podcast · How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I stumbled on this guy, Paul Conti, who I think is an MD, but also a psychologist. And he has a book, but also he did this long-form podcast with Andrew Huberman. He actually ends up talking a lot about just how to think about your life outlook and like kind of your framework for thinking about life, but grounded in a kind of like scientific and kind of neurological and cognitive science basis. And I found one particular point really, really powerful 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? And look, everybody has different circumstances. Like, you know, I think”
2025-08-31 · Lenny's Podcast · How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Men's wear, like, you know, kind of undershirts and athletic wear brands called Whitesville. I don't know where the name came from, but basically it's a bunch of basic clothing, like t-shirts, et cetera. And this Japanese indie company McSleep bought the defunct, you know, basically name, you know, and now is reproducing clothes almost made to the exact shape and spec. And even with the exact recreation of like the graphic packaging on these teas, but like today, right? So I just think there's something really funny and ironic about like, you know, they've taken an American post-war aesthetic and literal brand, but like it's actually like in the small scale Japanese manufacturing approach to make it as close.”
2025-08-31 · Lenny's Podcast · How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, actually, so self edge, which actually has a storefront, like the main storefront is on Valencia Street in SF. They carry a lot of these items. That's kind of their whole MO and they have like jeans and t-shirts. So I've gotten a lot of, I mean, they basically curate a really good selection of different actual makers. One of them is called Studio Dartazan. Another one's called, actually it's cool. There's this company called, I think the umbrella company is actually just Toyo T-O-Y-O manufacturing, which sounds like it's a big, like, you know, kind of like large scale conglomerate, but it's anything but it's like a really small scale Japanese, you know, kind of like vintage manufacturer of clothing, but they have a few sub brands. They actually bought the rights to this American post-war brand that was kind of like Haynes, like one of the big, like four or five, like, you know, kind of.”
2025-08-31 · Lenny's Podcast · How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Obsolete, I love a little bit of the throwback to old things sometimes can be even more cherishable in this new era, right? So maybe that makes me a hipster, but like I love the, you know, the vintage, the retro increasingly these days.”
2025-08-31 · Lenny's Podcast · How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, so that's the software one. And then a very, very kind of nerdy real world answer on product is I kind of just recently got into like this whole cottage industry of artisanally produced, you know, basically clothing by like small scale like Japanese manufacturers that use like literally like 100 year old looms to make clothes like the old fashioned way like you know or the old fashioned industrial way right like they have these like loop wheeler machines and they spin the cloth in like a very slow pace so it's completely impractical from like production scale standpoint but you know like I've gotten like some of these t-shirts and they like I just love the no I guess you know in a world where it feels like everything is becoming so much faster moving and like you know even tech from five years ago is”
2025-08-31 · Lenny's Podcast · How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, okay, so I'll give two because I feel like I have to take some kind of software product, right? I mean, I'm a really big fan of runway, the product and the company. I just think like, you know, every new model they come out with, they just came out with a new one just, I think like two days ago that gives even more controls and refinement on creating exactly the video scene that you want. And so I think just the photo realism in what you can generate now. And they also built this cool demo thing that's an immersive world generator I mentioned before. It's just cool to see. I also like the underdog story. I'm like clearly like Google's gunning gunning in the space has VO3 and so on. And like, you know, as is OpenAI, but like, I love the underdog story of this sub 100 person company still punching above their weight and building really awesome, you know, video experiences.”
2025-08-31 · Lenny's Podcast · How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“TV show. I just started watching the studio. It's like the Seth Roden Rogan. Yeah. So stressful. Yeah, it is very stressful. And, you know, I just kind of like, I mean, Silicon Valley was like too close to home when it came out. So I watched it, but it was just cringy. The studio was kind of fun to watch because it's a little bit of that inside baseball of Hollywood. And yet, like, I'm not in Hollywood. So it's entertaining to watch. I thought smart and funny show. And because I split time between Ellie and SF, I also feel like it's very real to me. I see a lot of the like literal characters out there in the world that it's characterizing.”
2025-08-31 · Lenny's Podcast · How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I liked even the first one, but I do like it, I felt like it was like inception where every book, every subsequent book was like you dropped into another, you incepted into like another layer, right?”
2025-08-31 · Lenny's Podcast · How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know I've been trying to read fiction more, partly because I think it's just like a really nice mental reset. I will say like free body problem, like for anyone who hasn't read it, it's a mind expanding book. Like I like sci-fi and fiction that kind of opens your brain. So this is my cheek card, but it's a three book series. Those are three great books.”
2025-08-31 · Lenny's Podcast · How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Has just been minimized so much. It's like the effort and abstraction between you and 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.”
2025-08-31 · Lenny's Podcast · How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of building apps. Like, you know, first, I learned C, then I learned PHP and JavaScript. And even building JavaScript, like single-page apps in the early days, like 08, through 2010, it was a dark, dark art. I mean, there were some like, you just have to go and learn some of these things. There wasn't great tutorials for it. You had to reverse engineer certain things. 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 in 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. 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.”
2025-08-31 · Lenny's Podcast · How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Learn. I mean, like, I literally go into ChatGPT sometimes and I ask it, you know, just like, hey, like, how would you build this app? Or, you know, like I'm just curious. I'm like, like, how would you build Manus, right? Like the agent, open-ended agent, like literally how would you build it? And you can ask you questions. And it's like having 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 and awake like 24 7 like it is the most incredible time to like learn this stuff 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've”
2025-08-31 · Lenny's Podcast · How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the point there is that sometimes I think we treat these disciplines like hard, hard skills that 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 our brains are malleable. I think there's a lot of great curriculum out there to learn. 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, even to learn this stuff. But everyone can learn how to be a versatile kind of unicorn product engineer, designer hybrid in the AI native era. And like the only thing stopping you is like just going out and doing it.”
2025-08-31 · Lenny's Podcast · How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I just want to reiterate, especially for listeners here who are in an EEP or D role and especially in the P role, I really do believe that this is not a, like you either had or you don't, like in terms of the skill set needed to be relevant in AI native. But I do think it's a call to action to go and bolster your skill sets where they may be 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 going to be like you know a published author, right? Or like, you know, the Hemingway, right? But like everyone can gain a good enough proficiency of software engineering if they really wanted to, you could take that boot camp. You could do like some coding, you know, kind of exercises on the side, et cetera.”
2025-08-31 · Lenny's Podcast · How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, that, and like, I think they loved the product, and I think they also loved the way in which they built the product, right? Like the design-centric nature of that product and company and culture. And that's what gives you like the continued joy of working on what could be the same company for a very long time.”
2025-08-31 · Lenny's Podcast · How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Genuinely just loves working on AI, right? Like if you could spend 100% of his time on just being close to the AI and the research, I mean, he won and he's even said as much, right? But ranging to like the Bryans with Airbnb, like it's pretty clear, you know, 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 arbitrage opportunity against hotels.”
2025-08-31 · Lenny's Podcast · How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's so true. And to me, that's why there's always been a difference between entrepreneurs who love the act of building a product or the business too versus those who saw just purely business or financial opportunity that they felt like they couldn't pass up exploiting or going after. And look, no knock on people who are more the latter. And like there's entire industries where like it's all just about alpha generation, right? Like, you know, you could go into the private equity business and so on. And it's just purely, it's rationally about like, how do I find the alpha? And I think that like, you know, some of the best companies, product central companies at least, in my opinion, are like, you know, run by those people who actually just love the product, right? I think you get a feel for that from some of the AI companies like Sam. I think.”
2025-08-31 · Lenny's Podcast · How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, you know, obviously, you're gonna have to do some of that. You can't just completely eschew all your responsibility as an outscale CEO. But don't lose the essence of the thing that you love doing and that really made this product happen and gives this company as many companies that were founded on like a 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 your like number one even if like other stuff has to also add to your plate”
2025-08-31 · Lenny's Podcast · How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't step away from the details that both you love. Like, I mean, first of all, if your passion is 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 a large people organization that itself creates a lot of need to do.”
2025-08-31 · Lenny's Podcast · How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a certain type of very mature type of business. Like, you know, even then, though, I can't imagine that at a CPG company, in Procter& Gamble, you wouldn't want to have a CEO who still actually goes and tastes the soup and like tries the products and sees literally the details of what the new product innovation pipeline looks like, as well as how it's being experienced on the shelves and so on. I don't know, I guess I'm just more and more skeptical that that like hands off you know pure delegation and process management role ever works as a CEO maybe you just like you go through a long enough period of like where the business is coasting that like nobody notices but I got to say like for me like it's just much more invigorating to get to play that role and I think for the types of operators and leaders that I most admire like it's it's like that's what makes the job interesting like they don't”
2025-08-31 · Lenny's Podcast · How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really cool thing about CEOs as ICs, and frankly, any leader playing more of an IC like role and being in the details is I think for the right type of person, it's actually more fun that way, right? Like, I mean, to be honest, like for me, the times where I felt most disintermediated from what I felt was the substance of this company was when I thought that I was almost like, you know, forcing myself to step away from the details because I thought that's like what, you know, a at scale CEO was supposed to do, right? Like, I mean, there's, you know, some like, you know, famous CEOs who have talked about the less decisions I could make, the better, right? Like the less details I'm exposed to, the better, right? Like, I just want to inspect at the topmost layer how this business is running. And if everything underneath it is going smoothly, then I'm able to do that, right? And everything looks good. And I just think that's a maybe, again, it works.”
2025-08-31 · Lenny's Podcast · How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. You know, and like, I think anything taken to an extreme can be problematic, right? So there is a world where you are so in the details and in every detail that you're basically just micromanaging and you're kind of creating like a euphemism for that. And that's not really what Founder Mode is about, right? Like that's not like the Brian conceptual founder mode is to like micromanage everything and like not trust anyone. But I think it's more about like finding that right balance of being unabashed about caring about the details that do matter and where the time together of details across different groups or departments actually is the only way to yield a non-incremental outcome because otherwise each person is just optimizing within their own domain, right? But you'll never get to the global maxima or the global breakthrough. And I think like.”
2025-08-31 · Lenny's Podcast · How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“LLM, you can now with reasoning model actually inspect the chain of thought, right? And see how it's thinking, why did it come up with this answer? And to me, that 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, you know, so-and-so company, this is how we eliminated the PM role entirely, right? For Brian, like at Airbnb, like made sense. Like we're no longer having PMs in their traditional form. Now we have program managers and product marketers. But like more than the actual decision, because I don't think it's a one size fits all, like everybody should do the same. Why did you do that? Right. And the why actually was very informative and then be able to take that and say like, okay, like how would I apply that and maybe it yields a different outcome? But the reasoning actually is very informative.”
2025-08-31 · Lenny's Podcast · How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Truth to that, right? Like, you know, the people giving this advice are not incompetent. They had some reason for giving it. And in certain contexts, that is the right thing to do. But I think my meta learning is not enough to just trust the recommendation like here's the action you should take from a lot of people because everybody has different priors. And it's almost like we're all our own 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 kind of service now or the, you know, kind of an Oracle kind of training corpus, right? And this person's trained on the Facebook corpus and I'm trained on like, you know, the airtable one, right? And I think what I've tried to do more and more is like not to ignore advice from smart people. Like, obviously, that's not the right answer, but to kind of take their, it's almost like in an”
2025-08-31 · Lenny's Podcast · How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, I think if you really care about doing that from a product execution standpoint, it almost like refinding 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 is actually exactly the same as how you need to operate in this like constant product market refinding of fit state. So I could not agree more with that concept of you got to 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, etc. Obviously, there's”
2025-08-31 · Lenny's Podcast · How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Their own swim lane, and there's relatively looser coupling between all of those different groups, right? So you've got sales kind of executing on its own thing. Marketing is executing on its own thing, products executing on its own thing. Rather, any within product, there's different product groups and surface areas that are each kind of executing on their own thing. And using the factory metaphor, like there's an argument that that's actually kind of an efficient way to scale up production for each of these different swim lanes, right? Like each one can kind of operate, you know, like in a more autonomous and like, you know, purely scale up, you know, focus kind of wait. How do we produce more of this thing if the thing happens to be within one product group improving search, that's our main focus? We're just going to.”
2025-08-31 · Lenny's Podcast · How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Factory produce each of these things separately. 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 obviously that's the only way, in my opinion, to create that magical product market fit in the first place. And then I think as you scale up, the default guidance that you often get from operational experts and larger scale company investors is like, okay, you got to kind of industrialize the process of all of this stuff, right? It's kind of like going from like a bespoke artisanal, like one person made an entire item of clothing to like, we got to like factory produce this thing, right? And what that means in an 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.”
2025-08-31 · Lenny's Podcast · How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I heard. Your interview with Brandesium, and later he talked about founder mode and that kind of YST retreat. And the points there really, really resonated with me, you know, and I feel like maybe less eloquently, I kind of like deduced some of the same principles just in my own experience, which is I think when you're scaling up, and this relates also to what we talked about before around 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? you know, all these decisions from a technical standpoint to design to even commercial and like what's the freemium model going to be like and like you know how are we going to market this product what does the website look like like they're all very intertwined right you can't like compartmentalize and then like you know almost like”
2025-08-31 · Lenny's Podcast · How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, in order to do that, you used to have dependencies on having assets created by marketing and SE 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? And I just think that's a new way, like it's a new operating mentality overall for every AI native company or company that I wants to compete in this new arena.”
2025-08-31 · Lenny's Podcast · How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like engineering, but they're well rounded enough to kind of be dangerous on the other two. I think that's kind of true in almost every other function, right? Sales as well. I think you should, you know, start to be able to play more of an SE role. Like traditionally salespeople 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 eye product now without actually being fluent in the product and be able to demo the product, right? So like, you know, AEs need to be like SE fluent as well. So I just think that that concept of like collapsing roles, 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 show customers, you know, convince customers of the value of your product and close deals, right? Okay.”
2025-08-31 · Lenny's Podcast · How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you can just do all of the thing yourself, like traditionally, how a marketing team might operate is like, okay, you have one person who's kind of responsible for executing the performance marketing kind of part of a campaign, right? Like they literally go into the Google AdWords interface and they're like tweaking the parameters of targeting and budget and like, you know, kind of conversion, tracking, et cetera. And then somebody else is actually responsible for coming up with the specific ad copy, right? And somebody else yet was responsible for coming up with the seed content or positioning guide, like written by a PMM that feeds into the ad creative and so on and so forth, right? Like maybe they're promoting some new demo asset, right? That somebody else created. And I just think that like, you know, in the same way that you can collapse the roles in EPD and like the ideal person, maybe they're very specialized and deep in one dimension.”
2025-08-31 · Lenny's Podcast · How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think just to really, really try to break down role silos. And I think that's true certainly for EPND in the typical EPD triangle. But I also think it's probably true even for non-product roles, right? I think it's true in marketing. I'm seeing something I'm really pushing for in marketing. I think our marketing team is like really leaning into actually is like.”
2025-08-31 · Lenny's Podcast · How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Changes that you're making to improve the output for that, right? But by that point, you've probably already scoped the product and maybe the way we would merchandise it in Airtable is not a completely open-ended capability, but like, hey, like here is a specific capability that can research one of these X number of entity types, including people in companies. And here's even like the filter conditions or criteria that are more explicit that you can define to give it the prompting to search for that thing, right? But I kind of think it's more useful as a way to iterate your way to improvement. And you can start really testing stuff like empirically, right? You can A-B test, especially if you have the scale of a really large product like Anthropoc or OpenAI. You can just test everything. And see, like, oh, this model actually performs better than this one. This product performs better than this one. But I think early on, like, you don't have that luxury and you're in a much more open-ended discovery process.”
2025-08-31 · Lenny's Podcast · How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of a report, it's actually going and compiling a list of things. The things could be companies or people or anything else. Find me every Marvel movie, right? Ever made. Find me every kind of DC comics like spinoff, right? Like series, right? Literally anything. And you have to go in and first just try out a bunch of random user-owned 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 on companies with this kind of parameter. And I think to me like evals are useful once you have like a sense of like what is that cluster of useful use cases, you can start then more like programmatically like measuring the”
2025-08-31 · Lenny's Podcast · How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basic scaffold of the form factor, and you kind of know what the use cases you want it to work well for and what you want to test against it. Whereas in the early days, especially if your product market fit finding either for an entirely new company or for like a new, a pretty dramatically new or bold new capability that doesn't really have like, it's not an incremental improvement of something that exists in our table today. I think you have to just be a little bit more creative initially and like throwing stuff at it, seeing what works to understand, okay, like let's use an example. You know, we're implementing this new capability that can use basically a long-running AI crawler agent that goes and researches the web for a specific type of object or entity, right? 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”
2025-08-31 · Lenny's Podcast · How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A completely novel product experience or form factor, you should actually not start with evals and you should start with vibes, right? Meaning like you need to go and just kind of test in a much more open-ended way. Like, does this even work? In kind of like a broad sense. So as an example, for our custom 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 agentic workflow used to generate these outputs, and you have to define like, you know, what does good look like, right? By definition for the eval. Like I would first start with a much more open-ended and like ad hoc style of like just throw stuff against the wall, like try different props and see how well it does. And to me, evals are more useful. A, once you've converged on the kind of”
2025-08-31 · Lenny's Podcast · How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, and I listened to your episodes with Mike who talk about this. I think it's like Interesting that, like, you know, like both heads of open AI and anthropic have converged on this point. I mean, look, I think I would add like a slightly different or additive take though, which is, I think.”
2025-08-31 · Lenny's Podcast · How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, again, exactly. I mean, some people would say, oh my God, that's so expensive, and you rack up 50 of those, you've cost $50 a month. I think it's like, well, it just saved you like hours of research by a human.”
2025-08-31 · Lenny's Podcast · How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is no. There is no ends up being, uh, and I think they only reasonably exposed it. It ends up being like something on the order of like a dollar plus per research call, which.”
2025-08-31 · Lenny's Podcast · How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Infinite number of things you could, like superpowers, you can give these field agents. I'm not going to tell you which specifically to do. Now, you can ask me to weigh in for sure, but like you should go and just experiment and prototype a few different versions of a few different directions we could go. Like what if you prototyped what it would look like to have a deep research implementation in field agents so that 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 chat GPT's own deep research on each of the speakers and have them all laid out side by side in this table right like go primoty that and see how like you know see how it feels and looks like and so i think some of the stuff can also be like in your daytime job especially if that daytime job is literally to go and build ai functionality”
2025-08-31 · Lenny's Podcast · How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. And look, I think that can be like night and weekend projects. It can also be like the daytime job projects, right? I mean, like, I am basically telling our teams on the AI platform group, especially like, look, in that low-hanging fruit metaphor, it's like, I'm not being prescriptive with you on like which watermelons you should pick. But you should go and we do have different pods within that group. But one of them, for instance, is what we call the field agents team. And they are responsible for the agents that work within your app. So this is not the agent that builds your app, but these agents that run on a customer's behalf to do like web research on your customers or they can, you know, go and analyze a document. And in the future, maybe do things like actually generate prototype of a feature from a PRD or from like a feature idea. I'm telling them, like, look, there's a almost.”
2025-08-31 · Lenny's Podcast · How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 test my”
2025-08-31 · Lenny's Podcast · How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Go and look at other people's shares. Like, eventually, you have to go and actually try building your own and then try building another one and another one and another one. And so I think that's where like, you know, when I think about how I honed my own product UX sensibilities, like I never, like, I mean, you know, and at that time that I was in school and kind of learning about this stuff, like there wasn't really any good curriculum for UX, right? It's not like there were like great college classes to learn product UX. I mean, even CS was like very academic in nature at that time. It wasn't applied. Software engineering like build an app or whatever. Maybe now at like some of the schools like Stanford, MIT, they have like actually UXE type courses, but it's still a rarity for most people to have access to that. And so the way I learned 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 want to build like a Yelp style app.”
2025-08-31 · Lenny's Podcast · How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think well, use the tools gives you exposure to what's possible, right? It's kind of like if you want it to be a great industrial designer and let's say like, I mean, the chair is kind of the ultimate hello world of like industrial design, right? It's like the like canonical design object. You wouldn't just sit there in a vacuum and with no familiarity with like the materials that you can use plywood, steel, whatever, or like existing form factors of church trying to invent the world's best church in a vacuum, right? Like you should go and first do a study of like all of the best churs out there today. Like go look at an Eames chair, sit in it, like try to examine it to kind of reverse engineer how it was made, right? And like, you know, and 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 actually going and designing or implementing or executing is the best practice. So like you can't just only”
2025-08-31 · Lenny's Podcast · How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I would actually go further and say, I think you need to get decently good at all three. Like, there's just a minimum baseline of like, if 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 designer who's really good at thinking about UX and interaction design and then just 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”
2025-08-31 · Lenny's Podcast · How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. And if you're an engineer, like, I think some of the best engineers and maybe Stripe always had a very good engineering culture of engineers who could think about the product and business requirements. In fact, like, you know, on any given product group at Schripe, my understanding is that like, you know, the DRI isn't always the PM, right? Like as is traditionally the case in kind of that triangle. It's like, you know, sometimes it's actually the engineer who's taking the product lead and saying like, this is what we need to build.”
2025-08-31 · Lenny's Podcast · How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You need to start looking more like a hybrid PM prototyper who has some good design sensibilities. And by the way, I think some of the best Engm and design cultures respectively over the past even few decades have always been multidisciplinary in nature, right? Like the original PM spec at Google required the PMs to actually be somewhat technical so they could understand that engineering kind of limitations of like the product designs they wanted to make. And they had to be kind of designy, right? Like I remember my co-founder Andrew when he was in the APM program was like always reading books about like design like even down to like visual design and color theory and that kind of thing, right? And so I think it's just a reminder that designers as well, like some of the best designers, if you're a designer in Apple, including hardware designer, like you have to understand some of the technical capabilities of how this stuff works.”
2025-08-31 · Lenny's Podcast · How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source