20VC: Airtable's Howie Liu on Potential Consolidation In The Collaboration Tools Market, The Transition From Peacetime To Wartime CEO & How To Make The Move To Remote Work Successful; The Process Beyond The Tools
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC
4.4 • 637 Ratings
🗓️ 27 April 2020
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Howie Liu is the Founder & CEO @ Airtable, the all in one collaboration platform that has taken so much of our ecosystem by storm. To date, Howie has raised over $170M from some of the best in the business including Benchmark, Thrive, Coatue, Caffeinated Capital, Founder Collective, CRV and Freestyle to name a few. Prior to founding Airtable, Howie was the Co-Founder @ Etacts, an automated intelligent CRM that was acquired by Salesforce just 9 months after creation. Howie then led the social CRM product at Salesforce. Fun fact, Howie started his career as an intern at Freestyle Ventures.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Howie made his way from founding Etacts to changing the way we think about databases and spreadsheets today with Airtable? How did Salesforce acquiring Etacts impact Howie's operating mentality with Airtable?
2.) With the rise of remote work, what have been Howie's core observations from the last month of the world going WFH? What does it take to succeed? What mistakes have Airtable made in their process of work from home? Why did it not work? What lessons did Howie take from that?
3.) How does Howie think about Airtable's transition from an application to a platform? What does he perceive as the core challenges in making the transition? What lessons has he learned from studying others who have done it? Why did Howie choose Peter Fenton @ Benchmark to work with?
4.) How has Howie seen himself evolve and scale as a leader over the last few years? What have been the most challenging elements? How does Howie think about which individuals he would like as mentors? How does he determine which advice to ingest vs to reject?
5.) How does Howie analyse the remote work/collaboration tools environment today? Does Howie believe we will enter a period of consolidation with the proliferation of new tools created? Does Howie believe we will see an unbundling in collaboration tools?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Howie’s Fave Book: Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire, Spying on Whales
As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the 20 minute VC with me, Harry Stebbings. |
| 0:02.5 | And if you'd like to suggest questions or guests for future episodes, you can do on Instagram at H. |
| 0:07.1 | Stebbings, 1996 with 2Bs. |
| 0:09.2 | I always love to see you there. |
| 0:10.6 | However, to our episode today, and over the last few years, this company has really changed so much of how we work. |
| 0:16.1 | And I've wanted to do this episode for a long time, and so I'm very excited to welcome Howie Liu, founder and CEO at Airtable, the all-in-one collaboration platform that's taken this ecosystem by storm. |
| 0:25.7 | To date, Howie's raised over $170 million from some of the best in the business, including |
| 0:30.2 | check this out, benchmark, Thrive, Co2, caffeinated, founder collective, CRV, and freestyle, |
| 0:36.4 | to name a few. And prior to founding Airtable, Howie was the co-founder at E-Tax, an automated intelligence |
| 0:41.8 | CRM that was acquired by Salesforce just nine months after creation. |
| 0:45.6 | Howie then led the social CRM product at Salesforce. |
| 0:48.2 | And I'd also need to say huge thank you to a raft of incredible people who helped me |
| 0:51.8 | put the scheduled together today. So Dave at Freestyle, |
| 0:54.5 | Dan and Karen at Co2, Max at CRV, Josh at Thrive, Ray at caffeinated, and Villi at 2 Sigma. |
| 1:00.0 | Thank you so much for some awesome question suggestions today. I really do appreciate that. |
| 1:04.6 | But before we move into the show today, I want to take a moment to mention HelloSign, |
| 1:08.3 | a great example of a company that found success in building |
| 1:11.2 | a product focused on user experience. HelloSign is an effortless e-signature solution used by |
| 1:16.5 | millions to securely send and request legally valid digital signatures and agreements. They raised |
| 1:21.9 | a total of $16 million in funding and recently got acquired by Dropbox for an impressive $230 million. Check out |
| 1:28.5 | hello sign.com forward slash 20 VC to join the thousands of companies and founders who value fast, |
| 1:34.8 | secure and simple e-signatures. And speaking of signatures and getting deals done there, you really |
... |
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