[Highlight] Airtable's Howie Liu on What Founders Get Wrong About Building Product

And I think what's been consistent, but not necessarily understood is that we've always wanted to be more of an app platform than a collaboration tool. So when we first launched, we have to had to obviously pick an MVP that was, you know, simple enough to build quickly. Although, quickly for us was, like, two and a half years, pretty much spent two and a half years before you shipped a product. Correct. Yeah. Actually, weirdly parallel timeline to some other great PLG companies like Figma and others, which we can come back to and, like, why I think that was a really interesting moment for creating this new grade of, like, desktop rich, you know, kind of, experiences that were web based collaborative, instantly shareable, and kind of disrupted, like, you know, certain work patterns. But we spent two and a half years building this product. And the reason for that was this was not meant to just be like a simple project management tool or even like a spreadsheet replacement, but really like an app platform that was way easier to use. Now the v one looked like a spreadsheet. That was partly on purpose because we wanted to make it really intuitive. You could just start using it, didn't have to learn a new UI, but then also partly because we didn't have the time to build out the interface layer or like additional views. You didn't have the time after two and a half years. I mean, hey. You know, we were working we were working, you know, Well, and and it makes sense. And and obviously, it worked out for you built this incredible Yeah. Tech infrastructure. But just on this meta point, if a founder because you do some angel investing. The founder came to you and said, how are you? Here's my pitch. And I'm gonna spend the first three years building it, and then I'll start shipping to the to the global world. Lead with that part. I mean, you know. Talk about, like, the big big, So what what has to be true? What kinds of products lend themselves to that type of formation versus the the lean startup iterative? Yeah. I think I mean, my belief now in hindsight, and I had a very short lived startup before Airtable, called eTax. Ended up getting acqui hired by Salesforce. So I only have a data point of of two, maybe like 1.2. But my belief is that either you have to have very strong conviction in the endgame and ideally even, like, the midgame of the company. Meaning, like, if you're building SpaceX, you have, like, enormous confidence that there's in like, massive market opportunity at at the end of the road. Right? If you can really make a cost effective, safe, like, scalable rocket, there is a market for rocket payloads that are cheap. Right? And and so you know there's a big payoff if you can do this. …