Jason Henry
Airtable's cofounders (L-R): Emmett Nicholas, Howie Liu, Andrew Ofstad.
- Airtable is looking towards its next phase of growth and is opening up new offices in Silicon Valley and Texas, where it plans to grow its engineering and sales and marketing teams.
- CEO Howie Liu says the expansion is needed given how fast Airtable is growing - he says that since Airtable raised its Series C round of $100 million in 2018, the company's revenues have quadrupled, though he didn't share specifics.
- Liu says the expansion will help the company invest in developing the product and engaging with customers.
- It fits into Airtable's overall goal to make its product into more of a platform. That means letting people connect to other applications through Airtable, and likewise allowing developers to build new tools on top of it.
- Liu says that Airtable has always tried to build a sustainable business: While it's not profitable today, he says, it could be within a few quarters if it so chose. Right now, however, it's focused on growth.
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When Howie Liu started Airtable over seven years ago, he says he had one goal: make software more accessible to more people. He wanted to create a tool that would let anyone, even people who don't know how to code, create software and applications that could help them work better and more efficiently.
Billed as a hybrid between a traditional Microsoft Excel-style spreadsheet and a proper database, Airtable - now valued at over $1 billion - has found a base of fans who use it for everything from project management, to productivity, to spreadsheets.
Now the buzzy enterprise software company is valued at over $1 billion and is a tool that can do everything from project management to productivity to spreadsheets. Next up, Liu is looking to prepare for the company's next stage.
Although he declined to give specific numbers, Liu said that the company's revenues have quadrupled in the two years or so since Airtable raised its Series C round of $100 million in 2018. To keep pace with that rapid rate of growth, San Francisco-based Airtable is opening up two new offices and hiring about 140 employees in the next 18 months across the new locations.
"A lot of the headcount growth was just keeping up with the natural pull of the business and we're fortunate enough to have this bottom-up growth engine that allows us to scale our customer base fairly efficiently," Liu told Business Insider. "It was continuing to grow the team in a kind of similar trajectory, or at a similar pace, to the natural pace of the business."
The new offices will be located in Mountain View, CA - not far from Google's headquarters - and Austin, TX, and the company has already hired new executives to help build out each location. The office in Mountain View will be focused on growing the engineering and product teams, and the office in Austin will be focused on customer engagement.
Liu said the company had grown to size where it needed to look beyond the talent pool in San Francisco. Each office serves a tactical purpose, he suggests: By opening an engineering hub in Mountain View, south of San Francisco, it will be able to hire more engineers to develop the new core product.
Austin, meanwhile, came as a recommendation from Zoom CEO Eric Yuan - Liu says that Yuan recommended that Airtable open an office outside of the San Francisco Bay Area for marketing and sales staff, as soon as possible.
Airtable has raised $170 million in funding to date, and its most recent Series C round of $100 million in 2018 was led by Thrive Capital, Benchmark, and Coatue Management, according to Pitchbook. Investors in previous rounds include Caffeinated Capital and CRV
Controlled growth
Liu says that the timing of this expansion is very intentional. He says that the company has tried to be thoughtful about its growth, and hasn't wanted to hire beyond its means. He says that while the company isn't profitable today, that's a conscious choice, and never wants to expand beyond its ability to quickly achieve profitability.
"Our operating principle is that we should always have the ability, either by slowing down the aggressive expenditures that we're making and letting revenue growth coast us to profitability or having enough cash to where we can do so before we run out of money," Liu said.
Indeed Liu said, the company has been cash flow positive at certain points in its short history - but that the present moment calls for growth. However, he says, the company could achieve it again without having to raise more funding, should it need to.
Sustainability is Liu's top goal, and he said that the company aims to "be always at a state of intentional, controlled burn." Previously in 2019, he told Business Insider that while Airtable's financials are strong enough to go public, it isn't looking to do that at the moment.
Making Airtable into a 'platform'
The overall goal of this expansion fits into Airtable's plan to make its product into more of a platform. That means letting users connect other applications to Airtable, and likewise allowing developers to build new tools on top of it.
It's a process the company started back in 2018, when it launched Blocks, a "no-code" tool that lets users build more custom applications on top of Airtable. Blocks are essentially templates for commonly used applications in the workplace, that nontechnical users can drop in and start using and customizing.
Now with the expansion, Airtable is looking to build this strategy out even more. Kah Seng Tay, just hired as the general manager of the new Mountain View office, will also serve as Airtable's head of platform - and hire for the office accordingly.
"While we've been incredibly inspired by the number of powerful workflows that enterprise organizations have unlocked with our product today, we see an even greater opportunity ahead in further empowering those companies to create truly bespoke software solutions by increasing the surface area we can cover with our platform," Tay told Business Insider.
The other piece of that is building a more robust sales and marketing team, which is what Airtable plans to do in its new Austin office. Liu said the growth up until now has been organic: The base product is available for free, but requires a paid subscription to use certain advanced features and support larger teams. As users get hooked on Airtable, they come back to the company and grow their accounts.
The next step is to be more proactive, he said. "We want to find ways to come more proactively engaged with our customers in a way that adds value," Liu said.
Brian Hagen, the new general manager of the Austin office, said that given how many customers Airtable now has - over half of the Fortune 1000, he said - its important to invest in employees who can properly assist those customers.
"When you have that many customers and you're growing at the rate that we are, it's important to make sure that we invest appropriately involving our customer base and team," Hagen told Business Insider, adding that one team Airtable will be hiring for is customer support and success.
Ultimately, it's about making sure Airtable can reach as many people as possible, and make it easier for them to make and use software in their jobs, Liu said.
"We started out...with a clear intent not to build a project management tool or productivity tool, or even a spreadsheet or Microsoft Office replacement...we wanted to build a platform that would enable nontechnical users to create useful applications," Liu said. "Over the past eight years, a lot of what we've done is just kind of progressively built up more of the product to actually support that vision."
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