How we restructured Airtable's entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO)
Airtable CEO Howie Liu explains how he restructured the company around AI, became the top inference-cost user globally, and why every software CEO must become an IC again.
- Airtable hit over $100M in free cash flow; the viral ‘Airtable is dead’ tweet used incorrect revenue data from a CB Insights analyst.
- Liu personally generates more AI inference cost than any Airtable customer globally, running LLM map-reduce jobs worth hundreds of dollars at a time.
- Airtable reorged EPD into two tracks: a fast-thinking team (ships AI features weekly) and a slow-thinking team (multi-month infra bets like HyperDB, supporting 100M+ row datasets).
- Liu cut his standing 1-on-1 roster and replaced most recurring meetings with timely, insight-driven sessions to free up IC time.
- He tells employees they can cancel all meetings for a full week just to experiment with AI products — mandatory play, not optional.
- PMs must become hybrid PM-prototypers with design sensibility; AEs must become SE-fluent enough to demo without a sales engineer.
- Liu’s advice to his decade-ago self: never step away from the product details you love, even as the company scales — delegation to execs erodes the integrative thinking that creates non-incremental outcomes.
- On evals: vibes-based open-ended testing catches things rigid eval suites miss; over-indexing on evals can kill innovation speed.
2025-08-31 · Watch on YouTube
