> We had the capital and said, ‘let's hyper-scale; let's recruit as many smart people as we can and just throw them into the business and see what they can do,’
> Liu, 35, says that Airtable, a Forbes Cloud 100 honoree, had been swept up in the hiring frenzy that spread across the tech world following the easy-money days that followed the COVID lockdowns of 2021.
> “I let myself get caught in the hyper-competitive environment at that time. We had the capital and said, ‘let's hyper-scale; let's recruit as many smart people as we can and just throw them into the business and see what they can do,’” says Liu, adding that Airtable will be cash flow positive after this round of layoffs
Yes, totally, Joe Biden should disregard the careful work of thousands of economists and other professionals, and instead focus on a layoff of 237 people he heard about.
Good tool that fills the huge gap left when Microsoft Access failed to make the jump to the online world. Kudos to everyone who grabbed a slice of that free money pie, but it was never realistic that every app would have hundreds of millions of users.
Thats kind of a crazy valuation to employee count ratio. 237 = 27% of company means they have ~850 or so employees for a company with an 11.7b evaluation. Seems off.
I can’t speak for AirTable but in general you need to look at the cap table. A complex cap table and a likely down round could make it virtually impossible to negotiate another round. By series F there’s an awful lot of fingers in the pie.
No one I know now uses Access, even those who used it previously. That being said, give the average office worker Excel and if they know their way around the software, they will find ways to do extremely cool things with it. I've seen a bunch of cool shit built on excel, including a full blown POS system.
I feel similarly. It’s a cool tech but priced so it can’t take off.
They should focus on reducing resource need so they can cut price.
By focusing on big enterprises it starts a spiral because those companies can afford airtable, but they can also afford data engineering teams that don’t need airtable.
Imagine if google docs was $3000/user or something.
Interesting. Seems like the enterprise is the opposite direction of what AirTable needs to go in. Good bye Air Table.
I tried to build some apps based on AirTable and found it lacking. Zero idea what use the enterprise is going to find for this. Microsoft has that cornered with Power Platform. Despite it being a rickity piece of shit it smokes AirTable.
Baserow is cool. We evaluated it within our company a few months ago and eventually settled for Nocodb (https://nocodb.com/) - easy to run, more mature.
I had a bad experience with Airtable because I couldn't purchase the subscription. It turned out Airtable doesn't support cards issued in India. It's surprising that they neglected the whole country.
I'm sure there are other things it does, but pragmatically every time I've seen Airtable used in business it's used in a way which a simple excel spreadsheet shared on one drive, Dropbox, box, etc. Would do.
Honest question, what does it do that excel does not?
Forms, email automation or page designer are just some example.
My wife works for a niche RE agency and she created a whole CRM from scratch with Airtable. This was impossible with Excel.
You have the wrong paradigm. Airtable doesn’t improve on excel - it makes databases accessible to non-technical people. It’s the new MS Access: simple GUI for doing Joins, lookups, foreign keys without knowing that’s what you’re doing.
This is true, in theory. However when we attempted to deploy it this way in our org, the average non-technical user was simply unable to grok the concepts of relational databases and we ended up with a complete mess that needed to be manually groomed on a regular basis.
This resonates. Still, even simple Excel spreadsheets shared on OneDrive often end up a mess and need grooming by someone with some common sense.
I'm guessing I'm not the only one who's seen the folder with:
- Master Job List v1.xlsx
- Master Job List v1 (1).xlsx
- Master Job List v2-new.xlsx
- Master Job List v2-new updated.xlsx
- Master Job List v2-new 2023.xlsx
And then you open it up and there are 7 different fonts, sizes, duplicate sheets with conflicting information, circular refrerences, macros that won't load, some VBScript from 2004 that no longer runs... and this is the document that the COO uses daily to run the entire company.
I built a CMS backed by it to build sites that are mostly data, but have a few text blocks and images, so since all the data entry was in Airtable anyway, moving the rest of the content there made sense and now lots of small dev tasks can be done with zero dev time (change gets made in Airtable, product manager triggers the CI build, CI build pulls everything from Airtable)
We've been using Leaptable.us (https://leaptable.us/) which is much more simple (it's in beta) however's execution engine is open-source and it's support for AI Agents is the very promising.
We've found it hard to Justify Airtable within our organization. Practically 90% of it's functionality overlaps with Notion databases which users already have and is ingrained within our org deeply.
I think this is what happens to most companies, and what I also noticed with my projects too. The "big clients" usually make up for most of the revenue, while they require the least support and have the fewest complaints. The most vocal customers are the "cheaper" ones. It also makes marketing easier (spending $500 to get one customer paying $1000/month instead of 1000 customers paying $1/month).
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 81.9 ms ] threadInner workings of the mysterious "leadership"!
It would be fascinating to hear more about what this plan looked like internally.
> “I let myself get caught in the hyper-competitive environment at that time. We had the capital and said, ‘let's hyper-scale; let's recruit as many smart people as we can and just throw them into the business and see what they can do,’” says Liu, adding that Airtable will be cash flow positive after this round of layoffs
Learn to read
Asana founded in 2008 that went public in recent years is only worth $4B in market cap with over half a billion in sale.
Is this just the CEO signalling that he wants his exit?
- Retool with Databases
- Tooljet with Databses
- Budibase
- Baserow
- Grist (getgrist.com)
- Bubble
- The various Google Sheets Builders
- Probably 20+ other apps
On top of that: It's open source/supports self hosting Supports JS Design/interfaces are much more flexible
They should focus on reducing resource need so they can cut price.
By focusing on big enterprises it starts a spiral because those companies can afford airtable, but they can also afford data engineering teams that don’t need airtable.
Imagine if google docs was $3000/user or something.
I tried to build some apps based on AirTable and found it lacking. Zero idea what use the enterprise is going to find for this. Microsoft has that cornered with Power Platform. Despite it being a rickity piece of shit it smokes AirTable.
Leaptable is another Open Source framework like Airtable I saw recently with support for AI Agents. https://github.com/peterwnjenga/leaptable
It's not. The number of Indian customers willing to pay for Airtable would be tiny.
Honest question, what does it do that excel does not?
I'm guessing I'm not the only one who's seen the folder with:
- Master Job List v1.xlsx
- Master Job List v1 (1).xlsx
- Master Job List v2-new.xlsx
- Master Job List v2-new updated.xlsx
- Master Job List v2-new 2023.xlsx
And then you open it up and there are 7 different fonts, sizes, duplicate sheets with conflicting information, circular refrerences, macros that won't load, some VBScript from 2004 that no longer runs... and this is the document that the COO uses daily to run the entire company.
- Master Job List v1
- Master Job List v1 final
- Master Job List v1 final final
- Master Job List v2 final
- Master Job List v2 final, short
- Master Job List v1 absolute final
The v2 ones are forward looking, the 3rd one down is the one the COO uses to run the company, and the last one is the one they use to do the taxes
We've found it hard to Justify Airtable within our organization. Practically 90% of it's functionality overlaps with Notion databases which users already have and is ingrained within our org deeply.
- focus on small teams and individuals
- open source (with community contributing!)
- can be run self-managed
- portable data (lossless export in SQLite format)
- full of great features (granular access rules, formulas with python, conditional formatting, webhooks, etc etc)
If it's little-known, it's because we spend too much time building, not enough time selling.