Inside Airtable’s AI Reinvention: How To Future-Proof Your Company In Rapidly Changing Times

We've raised 1.4 billion. We've kept a billion plus on the balance sheet. And we now generate over 100 million per year of free cash flow so we can self-fund effectively.

Okay. One is timing. I think there's moments right before or right during an inflection of a company that are optimal for raising. And basically you should only raise then and every other time is a horrible time to raise because if you're slogging it out and there's not a light at the end of the tunnel, you're not going to be able to convince investors to come in right then. So I think timing is everything. Like either at the very beginning, before you've kind of grounded out, or right when you're about to hit a corner or you're starting to see some inflection, timing is everything.

Well, we didn't always do this correctly, which is why a lot of this is great advice in hindsight. We raised our first round basically a year and a half into working on the product. We had self-funded. It was myself and my co-founder and we had a prototype we were going to launch imminently. And I think the inflection at that moment was just saying, look, we've built this product. It works. We have some very early alpha testers, no real traction, no real revenue. But we think that this is going to be big. And here's some of the early proof points. If you're investing now, it's kind of on the promise that it's going to work. And then we did another one right after we launched publicly when we actually started getting some early traction. Still not a runaway success, but it was still at a point where you could see the emerging trend. I think you want to do it before you've overplayed your hand.

So I think more importantly than not spending it is to just raise more than what you need. We spent money when we were an early company. We had a small team, we probably burned like a million plus per year, which is not nothing. But we made sure that we raised 3 million for our first round instead of we could have raised like 1 million or 1.5. And that would have meant we had 12 months to figure it out. So I think just always anticipating how much are you going to need to get to the next milestone with some extra safety cushion. I think too many companies go out, they raise like 6 to 12 months of runway. They burn it all very quickly. And then you're giving yourself very little room for error.

So when we started Airtable back over ten years ago, it was 2013. Really the vision was let's make app creation accessible to everyone. It's really powerful obviously to build apps, whether it's for your business, it could be a CRM app, it could be inventory management, but we wanted to make that really, really easy. And in 2013, that was a really powerful and kind of novel concept. App building software was kind of at its prime and yet it was very inaccessible. So we picked a really large market, went after it, spent two and a half years building the product before launching, very similar to Figma actually. And we basically started out with just a product that was great and end users adopting it on their own, pulling out credit cards. There was no sales team. It was a pure PLG, product-led growth company. So build a product, if people like it, they're going to come, they're going to share it. And it wasn't until maybe five years later that we started really seriously going into enterprise and saying, hey, we're going to not just let companies adopt us and pull us into larger companies, but we're going to go and more aggressively sell this product into larger companies. So Fortune 500, we're going to do these big multi-million dollar contracts, get entire pockets of the org on the product. That looks very different as a business. It requires a different type of team, leadership approach to building product and go to market. And we're now actually kind of in a little bit of a pendulum swinging back to our roots, which is, I think in the era of AI, the best products, in my opinion, in AI, whether it's ChatGPT or Claude or some of the newer products like Lovable, etc., they're all working because they're just great products and people love using them and they come in droves. It no longer takes many, many years to hit 100 million in revenue with the best AI products. If you can create a self-serve motion where people just experience the magic of your product immediately, you get really, really fast adoption. So we're also now kind of shifting back into this gear of how do we make just really great products powered by AI that are immediately valuable to people who come in and try it.

I think what's very, very unique about this moment is it's not just one disruption happening. People think of AI as like one thing, like the shift from desktop to mobile computing or maybe commerce to e-commerce, brick and mortar to e-commerce. But it's not like that. I think it's actually like 3 or 4 different disruptions, each equally big or larger than any of those other ones. The internet, computing, desktop to mobile, and they're all happening ten times faster and they're happening in a very stacked way. So to be very tangible, our core business is all about making app creation accessible. And the first version of that was very UI and user experience driven. We built a really intuitive product, maybe like Apple puts obsession into how you can use your computer or your iPhone. And we did that for app creation. But today, AI and agents clearly can build apps. And they can build them pretty well. And so the first layer of disruption for us is how do we take our core product and put AI into it so that anyone coming into Airtable doesn't just have to use the user interface, but you can talk to our AI omni and have it build an app for you. So there's both agents and the GUI way to build apps. That's the first level. But really, if you look at what's actually happening in the world, it's not just that existing things like software are going to be done more easily. It's that I think the way that customers interact with services and products is going to change dramatically. And instead of going to a website, instead of going to Nike.com, for instance, you're probably going to go and talk to agents to go and shop for you. And so the very nature of how companies operate is changing. The very nature of how work is done is changing. The very structure of companies is changing because of that. So Sam Altman has famously predicted there's going to be a $1 billion revenue business run by one person. I don't think that's just going to be one company. I think it's going to be the default that you're going to have very, very small teams, maybe 1 to 5, maybe ten people max, that build enormously leveraged companies that generate hundreds of millions, if not billions of revenue because they're able to be fully leveraged. And so there's so much disruption happening. What we need to do is not only change our current product and business to adapt, but also skate to where the puck is going. So we've launched this entirely new product called Hyper Agent, which complements Airtable, but is a completely separate new play. And it's basically a product for everyone to build their own Open Claw level agent and use it to run a company. Whether it's you individually going out and creating your own company, running with agents or existing companies going and deploying agents into their workforce.

So the short answer is you don't maintain business as usual. You know when apocalypse is coming. There's this SaaS apocalypse word that's been used. And I think it's not just accurate. It's actually underestimating the amount of disruption that's happening.