YouSaid · the spoken record
Howie Liu
- lines on the record
- 105
- first
- 2025-08-31
- most recent
- 2025-08-31
- sittings or episodes
- 1
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- 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
“Think like it's a learnable way of operating, I really like to believe in the growth potential of any human, right? And any individual, like, I think if you really have a growth mindset, and that's why one of our most important core values is 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 become more fluent 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 leveraged and fast way, right? So I like to think like, you know, people who are willing to jump on the train are just going to become more and more effective. And it's not like, oh, like as a PM, my role is becoming entirely irrelevant, right? Like, no, it means that as a PM.”
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
“Leverage all of these AI capabilities in this kind of 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 an almost infinite set of possible AI capabilities that we could execute on, right? And I'm always telling the team, like, look, the great news is we have, it's like we have all these fruit trees and 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 20 feet and pick it up instead of having to climb the really tall coconut tree to grab like a hard coconut from like 50 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, and what that means is that like if we can build this culture and I 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
“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 make the team smaller, but rather like the really cool thing for Austin, 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. 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 creative production workflow or kind of leveraging deep research or AI-based 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 effect.”
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 product functionality is in the interaction of it, right? Like, think about the design of ChatGPT. Again, it's like, you know, 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 queries, right? And what happens after you fire off a prompt, right? So I think I found that there are people within each of these functions. who are very good at thinking about product and experience and like you know it kind of can go and prototype out like the whole thing they're designers who can kind of do do 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 the pms as well i think like there are some pms who are like really”
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 found is that it really does become more about individual attitude and maybe some like polymathism. There's a strong advantage to any of those three roles who can kind of cross over into the other two, right? Like kind of the hybrid unicorn types, right? So if you're a designer who can be just technical enough to kind of be dangerous and understand a little bit of like how these models work and how does tool calling work and all of this stuff, like then you can actually design a concept or even prototype a concept, including in these prototyping tools, that's much more interesting and maybe realistic than if you're just stuck in kind of the flat, like, let me put something in a static design, right? Concept, right? Because I think designs have to be more interactive. Like the whole value of the product.”
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 execution, right? Like, we're going to put this many people on this problem, and this is an eight-week timeline to this milestone. And then we're going to ship in a quarter from now. And I think now the whole thing is just a lot more experimentation and iteration driven.”
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
“Few like realistic prompts that I can imagine. And in a demo at a real prototype, you can instantly try it out on unrealistic rather than golden pathy scenarios and see how it feels too. Does it feel too slow? Like, do we need to expose more of the reasoning or steps that are happening behind the scenes, create a progress bar or something like that? But it's really hard to get that feel of the product with anything but a functional prototype that really does in an open-ended way, you know, like use the AI to do whatever you put in. So I think it's more like a experimentation playground, it feels like, how we need to execute versus, I think in the past, it sometimes felt like a more deterministic resourcing and kind of timelines view.”
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
“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 have the ultimate excuse, like you can use, 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 Airtable, go do it like period. So I think that's the most important thing is like this play, this experimentation. I think there's also a lot of other kind of shifts in how we execute prototypes over decks. I want to see actual interactive demos because like, again, it's hard to, you know, in a deck or in a PRD, you could say like, okay, well, we're going to make Omni really good at handling this kind of app building. Okay, those are just words. The real proof is the putting of like, okay, let me try it out on a”
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 built a marketing landing page for this new 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 what typically we would have done in the past is like, okay, we're going to write a doc about it and then share the doc. I'm just going to show you like an actual landing page with like visuals and everything in there, right? Or like I'll share 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 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 you know but really trying to encourage everyone to like go and”
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
“One is really, really, really stressing this idea of go play with this stuff. And I mean, when I say play, I really mean play like in the psychological sense of like, you know, there's a difference when 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 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 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 screenshots of the things that I'm doing in these various products. So like, you know, as an example, like I will go into one of the prototyping tools and show like, hey, like, you know,”
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
“The point about the pace of the world moving so much faster in AI than any other landscape, it's like in SaaS, in the mature SaaS era, 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 every year and see what the major releases they're putting out are or ServiceNow or so on. This is the equivalent of that, but like there's major new releases and products and so on like every week, right? Not like every year. And so I just think you have to say abreast of all 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 the write up on TechCrunch or, you know, even a tweet about like a new capability. Like, you kind of have to try it to really get a”
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 be like, it always blows my mind just to think about, 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's some like basically very advanced, you know, kind of regressions that we could run with AI, but like it looked nothing like this, right? 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 come out. So I think that is a big part of it because.”
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, but like there's a difference between just understanding the model, but then also understanding the product form factors in which they can be placed, right? Meaning when you apply the model in a more structured way, right? You know, when you apply the model with different tool calling than maybe what ChachP has in its kind of like out of the box form, when you apply it with like, you know, kind of a more agentic workflow, again, that might be different from like what ChatGPT gives you out of the box. Like that's when you kind of learn, you really get to inspire yourself on like one of the product form factors that these new models can take. And plus, by the way, like I find it to be really fun. Like there is, to me, like a delight and entertainment value to just using AI period because like A, it's not like perfectly predictable. So I think the element of like you're not quite sure what you're going to get. It's like a box of chocolates.”
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 it's not just understanding the models, which is also very, very important, right? Like Juby 5 came out yesterday and like playing around with it a bunch just on like a variety of different like personal use cases”
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
“That's literally an example of something like just a fun weekend project. And to be honest, these things only take you like an hour, right? If you become kind of pre-proficient with using the products, like they're all so easy to use. You can literally do the deep research thing, you know, kick off query, make a coffee, come back in 20 minutes. Okay, like, let me prompt it to generate me some dialogue. It's a little bit like what notebook LM 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 Hajjan avatar and then download the video and like play it, right? Like, and just for fun, right? I'm not like trying to make that into an actual like, you know, kind of YouTube, like video business. But I think coming up with like these different fun weekend projects is a really useful construct to force myself to actually try these products in a more than just like a Twitch click way. And what it gives me is like, A.”
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
“Oh, cool. What if I? To take like a what if I were to like try to create a funny little 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 Cheet and pull together the results, have it composed like, you know, kind of a Did you actually do this?”
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
“One, I try to use as many different AI products, including not Airtable, right? Like as I can, and both literally for the novelty factor and just like, you know, some new cool demo comes out like runway release their immersive world kind of engine, right? And so I'm going to go try that out, right? Like when Sesame AI put out their like cool like kind of interactive voice voice chat demo, like I tried that out because like even though we don't have a direct and near term like you know kind of need for like really realistic and interruptible like kind of voice mode where it's not as core to our capabilities like I just want to understand 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 real kind of reason to use these products like you know”
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
“The code that it's written basically as the app gets more and more complex, right? And what 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 collaborative and really rich has”
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
“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 lawyer trying to build like a case management system, like that's what we've always been focused on. And I think in this AI native world, clearly you should be able to generate those apps agentally. And yet, if you have an agent that has to generate every single bit of that app from scratch, from code, it's going to be very unreliable. There's going to be bugs. There's going to be data and security issues. And then you're also going to have a context collapse as it just cannot manage all 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
“How would our mission best 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, and then by the way, like, do you have useful building blocks that you can leverage from your existing product and your existing business? Or are you literally worse off having this legacy asset versus starting something from scratch? 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 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 really thought about this and like really feel strongly that the building blocks that we have.”
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
“These days, yeah, exactly. And so, like, I think this is like it's a different means to the same end. And so it's almost like we have to lean into this because if we started Airtable today, like this is what we would be all in on. Now, I think that the advantage that we have, and like, I do think you have to be realistic to yourself, especially 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 going to throw in some AI stuff on the landing on the marketing site, you know, put in a couple AI features and call it a day. Like, I think you actually have to take a clean slate approach to saying 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
“From scratch, right? And I think that, like, as the models got better and better, you saw that the new form factors emerge. I think Cursor did a great job of being an early pioneer of this more agentic way of leveraging the models to do more complex things and generate more 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 3D shooter game from scratch and just watch it go and like create all the files and 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 if you think about the original vision of Airtable, it was always about democratizing self-creation. Like we just strongly believed that, you know, the number of people who use apps far outweighs the number of people who can actually like build their own or manipulate apps and 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
“There is clearly an incredible magic to vibe coding and app building with AI, right? And this is actually a prime illustration in my view of that concept we talked about a second ago, which is as capabilities of these underlying models evolve, the form factor in the product UX also needs to evolve with it, right? And so the earliest models, like the kind of original ChatGPT, like GPT 3.5 era models were not nearly as smart as the current models, right? And so you couldn't really ask it to one shot a more complicated chunk of code or certainly not like a full stack app and expected to work. And so the right form factor for leveraging those models in a software creation context was GitHub co-pilot, right? It's like autocomplete a few lines of code at a time, right? But you couldn't chat to it and tell it like build me this entire 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
“We now made our agent the default way of doing everything in our table. And like, you know, it's like now the Airtable app, as you know it, is almost like an artifact that's manipulated by, you know, and kind of like can be tool used by the agent.”
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
“Era Anyway, I kind of started moving up market and like doing more sales execution, although that was still always on top of like usually PLG within an enterprise. But we started doing more and more sales execution. We still have that. That's still really 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 builder-led adoption and like literally showing in the product experientially not telling in like a deck the value that you can get from AI and Airtable, right? Like I think that's so key and it's Nux, 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 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.”
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. And so, I mean, literally, that is just the most insane ramp curve. And I don't think they would have gotten there if you couldn't just come in and literally tried the product out. And, you know, kind of as a little bit of a rebuttal of the point I made earlier where I think ChatGPT doesn't do a ton right now and even earlier, like they did even less to 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 hard question really well. But like, clearly, the magical kind of nature of it still appealed to you enough. Everybody used it. And so I think, you know, 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 kind of PLG darlings of our.”
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 couldn't agree more with both of those, and particularly on the second point, I think it's interesting clearly there have been companies that have both been successful in PLG and more sales-led kind of distribution for AI products. The most notable ones I can think of are like Palantir with their AIP deployments. That's obviously very sales-led. You're not PLGing into a Palantir deployment. But even companies like Harvey and so on, they're doing very well and it's primarily from what I understand, like sales led, right? You're not self-serving into a Harvey instance at a law firm. And yet, like to me, the best way to get AI value out there is experientially, right? And so you can kind of get that in a sales motion. You can like, you know, show a demo. Maybe you can do a POC, but 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 can.”
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 the underlying model, right? And so that's something we've tried to do with Airtable is like show all of the different states and use colors even to play those up.”
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
“What's under executed today in the world of AI products is there's so many awesome capabilities of AI, and most of them are really undermerised and there's like very poor actually visual or otherwise metaphors or affordances given to users to help represent or understand like what those underlying capabilities are, right? Like, I mean, ChatGPT obviously like, you know, extremely successful product. So not knocking it at all, but like you come in and you just get this like completely blank chat box, right? By default, now they have suggestions underneath and so on. But like, you know, the product UX part of me is just like crazing more visual metaphors or colors or some kind of like use the canvas of a web interface and all the richness of interaction you create there to better represent or show all the different things that you can do with”
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 will say just as a note, I consider myself at my core, like a product UX person, right? That's my passion. And, you know, everything else I've had to learn to kind of run this company is almost like what was a necessary part of the journey. But like my real passion is thinking about product UX, right? And I think of UX in a deeper sense than just like the cosmetic design, like, you know, what you could put into a framer, you know, kind of prototype, like I think of it as literally, what should this product do and how should it represent that and behave for the user? That is the product, in my opinion, right? 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.”
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
“It with the existing airtable platform capabilities, but we're also giving it the ability to actually do CodeGen to extend those apps with really final mile, very bespoke functionality or visuals, right? So you could say like, hey, generate me a very, very specific type of map view with this kind of heat mapping and this kind of like icons. And when you click it, do this. That's a capability that there's so much ambiguity in some of the design decisions around it. Like, you know, 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 the right human workflow for approval and review and then repromptting and so on? So just so many different like design decisions. And you need somebody who can really think full stack about that kind of product and design and not overwhelmed by that, you know, kind of open evidence.”
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
“It really just requires a lot of 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 rippling, for instance, does a lot of actual acquisitions and gets actual founders into the company. We found that, you know, that's great. And we've done some of that as well. But also there are some really, really capable people who didn't literally have to 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 technical layers of the problem, but like also like what is the wow factor we're trying to create, right? So tangibly like, you know, we're doing this new thing that's about to ship where 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.”
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
“We have a mix. So we brought in, I mean, we're always hiring, right? Like there was never a point in the company's life where we stopped hiring. And that candidly, even when we had to do two riffs, right? That significantly kind of reduced our headcount, you know, we just like way too quickly grown and overscaled the business at a certain point. But even when we did our rifts, we were still actively recruiting and hiring in, I mean, every major department, but especially in EPD, because it's always been my belief that like you all, like it would be arrogant to say that we have all the people we ever need already in the rosters day, right? Like we're always going to need to find new fresh perspectives, new skill sets, et cetera. And so we've continued to hire. I think we've learned as we've gone along of like, you know, what is the ideal type of hire? And we've done some aqua hires and learned from that as well. But I think the fast thinking part.”
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 love that book. But slow thinking is 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 ship a new piece of infrastructure that has a lot of data complexity like our data store, HyperDB that now can handle like multi-hundred million record data sets. That's not something you ship in a week, right? In a hacky prototype. We now have these two separate parts of the company. And I actually think what's really cool is like they actually complement each other very well, right? Because the fast execution, the AI stuff, you know, that creates the top of funnel excitement, that also, you know, kind of inspires new use cases and new users to come into Airtable, including in large enterprise, right? Like, enterprises can use this.”
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
“Platform. But it really means we want to just ship a bunch of new capabilities on a near weekly basis. And each of them should be like truly awesome value, right? Like you should drop your jaw how awesome it is to use this new capability in Innertable. And then separately we have the slow thinking group. And that's not meant to be better or worse. It's literally like you need fast and slow thinking in the common sense to operate, right? Like as 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 was still, you know, there was more kind of holistic bets being made. So the teams pillar could think not just about one feature, but the overall onboarding experience where like really think about Nux in a way that touched multiple parts of the product. But it still felt like it wasn't, especially as we started to execute more on AI stuff, it wasn't allowing us to aggressively and quickly move as a AI native company would, right? Like, I mean, when you look at 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 kind of roadmap for enterprise. We have this roadmap for this group. And it just feels like one cohesive product that's shipping at a breakneck pace. So we did this recent reorg where now we have the what I call like the fast thinking group, which officially is called AI.”
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
“Surface areas instead of just like each one kind of incrementally improving. And so we reorged initially to basically different business units effectively, right? So I know Airbnb has done like kind of the functional to GM, 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 10,000 seats or 20,000 seats for product operations, right? So a lot of architecture, a lot of scale, that kind of work. We would have a what we call the teams pillar, which is more about self-serve, like kind of the product UX, like how easy it is to adopt the product, onboard, share, do all the kind of like basic functionality. And AI pillars, solutions pillar, and basically infra. And what we found, though, with that approach is that”
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, so I mean, we did do a reorg of the EPD org. So before we had, we've gone through a few different kind of reorgs over the past call it four years. The 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 so on and so forth, right? And that has its benefits like 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 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 coordinate dramatic changes across a wider set 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
“To always ask the question, how would an AI native company like a cursor or Windsurf, et cetera, like, how would they execute? And are we executing as fast as them and taking advantage of like all the new stuff as well as them? So bringing that level of intensity and urgency to how I spend my time within, that's been the mainest shift for me”
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
“To seed that with now, in addition to that, I'll supplement with like, you know, when I'm in person with someone like I want to carve out time for a proper catch up and less structured, 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 common, it's almost a barbell approach where it's like, you know, if you're going to spend time with somebody in a freeform way, like actually do it in a high quality, not forced weekly ritual way, like go for a longer lunch or coffee walk or whatever in person when you can. Maybe that's like a once every month or two kind of thing. And then like the in-betweens are either topical. So we do have standing meetings for, you know, like now we have a weekly basically sprint check-in on all of our AI execution stuff, which now is like half the company or half the EPD org is working on AI capabilities. We're trying to ship very quickly. Like, you know, I basically want.”
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, so I actually cut my one on one roster by default. And the idea is not that I don't want to spend time one-on-one with people, but rather that I found that the just like having more standing one-on-ones actually precludes me from engaging in more timely topics, right? Like I like to think of the best types of meetings as very urgency driven. And like, you know, there's some timely topic. You've discovered some insight. Maybe I talked to some new startup, right? And I learned something from their product or their approach. And I want to bring that into how we're thinking about a new feature at Airtable or even just like plant the seed with like, you know, some different EPD people within Airtable. Like I want to make most meetings very timely and very informed by real alpha, right? There's going to be some kind of value and insight.”
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 very astute product insights, marketing insights, positioning insights and segmentation insights, like that's invaluable, right? Like you could pay a consulting firm like literally millions of dollars to get that quality of work. So to me, I still think the value versus the actual cost of AI when applied greedily but smartly, like it's just, it's a crazy ratio. And like more people should be aggressively throwing compute cycles at these very high value problems.”
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
“Doing a lot of LLM calls against long transcripts of let's say sales calls to extract different types of insights like here's the product apps identify or here's summaries etc and we also have now a capability that's basically like an LLM map reduced so effectively even if you can't fit like you know the entire corpus of content into one LLM call because the context window limitations will map through like all of this content and break it up into chunks and then like perform an LLM colon 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”
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're describing exactly right hourly, literally hourly, like, or you know, you could even have a measure of inference, like cost, right? Like the equivalent underlying inference compute cycle, right? How many tokens they use? Yeah, I mean, I'm proud to say, I'm pretty sure I'm still the, I just checked this recently, but I take pride in being the number one most expensive in inference cost user of Airtable AI, not just within our own company, but I think for a long time I was globally across all our customers as well. I'm like, well, I mean, like, I'm extremely intentionally wasteful, wasteful in the sense of like, you know, I'll do something that costs like maybe hundreds of dollars of actual inference cost, right? Like, for instance,”
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, 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 kind of get comfortable with them to put them into a new dish.”
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
“That's right. I mean, I think that, and I would also say it's actually now also hard to taste the soup without participating in 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 feels right or not, or like it feels like we're being bold enough and we're properly productizing these new capabilities. But I think to really understand the solution space of what's possible, you kind of have to be in the details, right? I mean, literally like you can't just look at kind of screenshots or like a pre-recorded video of like a new product feature, like AI and stuff you have to play with. And ideally, you're playing with both the packaged up, you know, app or solution that you've 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. You're really pushing them to the boundaries.”
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 every new type of 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 to be continuously relevant and kind of refine product market fit in this era, I think you have to be in the details. Like there is no looking at it from 10,000 foot view and saying, oh, we're just going to 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 and the right everything else to support that engine to take advantage of the capabilities in our product domain.”
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
“But process and people and so on, you kind of get 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 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? And using what I would call like more blunt instruments 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 entering this moment where like every certainly every software product in my opinion has to be refounded because like AI is such a paradigm shift. It's not even like just like the shift from desktop to mobile or on-prem to cloud where that was more like a very one-time and somewhat predictable change in form factor. Like I think AI is so rapidly evolving that with every evolution, like every new model.”
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
“Search 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. It's those like little decisions 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 real-time data architecture, that made the product what it was, right? I think the same is true for Figma, which actually had a very parallel timeline to us. Like we both were founded around the same time, both spent two and a half years building the product like hands-on, you know, that early team before launching. 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 new kind of gen AI moment, like I think there was a maturing era of both SaaS overall and Airtable specifically where, you know, as you scale up and you kind of learn how to build teams and organizations and like you have to kind of like scale up stuff that's not actually those intimate details.”
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
“The underlying reason for this shift, at least for me, is that as we started the company, I was very much in this mode, right? Like I was literally writing code, both on the back end, thinking about the real-time data architecture of our platform, also the front end, the UX. And I would argue that in that founding moment the initial product market fit finding, and especially for a product that is pure software, right? Like we weren't building a operationally heavy business like a dog walking marketplace where the tech is only an afterthought, like the tech was the product, right? And in a very meta sense, like Airtable is the platform for other people to build their own apps, right? So like it's all about the tech, like the very intimate design decisions, again, both architecturally and on the front end and the product UX choices, like that is the product's value prop, right? Like you can't separate those two. You can't say like, okay, like I reset.”
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