Alex Wiltschko

Howie Liu, co-founder and CEO of Airtable, now also maker of HyperAgent, part of Airtable.

I've been doing this for 12, 13 years now.

Yeah, yeah.

So in high school, I kind of got into programming.

My dad had this C++ book, left it in the corner of the house one summer, and I was super bored.

C++ is a rough place.

I mean, this was like 2003.

So pre-Python, for the most part.

I mean, Python was around, but people didn't really use it.

Definitely early days for even web apps.

Rails didn't exist, all that stuff.

So learned C++.

Thought it was kind of cool.

And then started thinking about, how do I turn this into a real career?

Because it was a lot more fun than classes.

And I went to Duke, took some mechanical engineering classes.

on the side basically learned how to do web app programming like first with PHP then like rails and stuff and I stumbled on Y Combinator actually like pretty early on it was like maybe oh six Like literally the first class like I guess so far because I remember um, like I saw a looped First company and I was doing research like I wanted to do a similar type of company or product and I was like Nope, you know, I was a nobody in college and know anything and through that like found out about Luke.

I was like

damn it, somebody's already got this idea, and then learned about YC and Sequoia.

And so that kind of became my first inroad into just learning about that whole world of startups and tech.