Alex Wiltschko

But interestingly, we had written this fake business plan.

It was basically a vision deck more than an actual business plan.

But we had said, conjectured, we're going to have to go after a long tail of the prosumer, SMB audience, basically like Dropbox.

And I think what was really surprising is it turned out to be a little bit more like Slack, where we got the most virality within larger companies.

So there'd be a big media company or even a scaled startup, like a WeWork or something, that would run all of their operations very quickly early on, on Airtable, and then just grow with the company.

I mean, WeWork was one of our early customers, had probably 10,000 people when they were at their peak.

It basically was used by almost every employee there.

And a lot of their operations, building operations, et cetera, were just built on Airtable by default.

And I kind of learned the value of having this data gravity.

Once you get enough data into a product like Airtable, it just kind of retains really well within the company and gains more and more usage.

Until the company.

I mean, one of the maybe benefits of like not being an overnight success, because we took like two and a half years to build the product.

Sure.

Even like from 2015 to 2017, 18, I would say like we were getting like a steady compounding of growth, but it wasn't like Slack or like Dropbox where it just overnight became super easy, right?

Like it felt like we had to really grind.

We had to think about like,

How do we need to improve the product and increase the shareability and the scalability of it?

So it's kind of a grind for at least the first five years.

And 2018, when we got our first unicorn round, is kind of the first year where it felt like it was starting to get easy, right?

So 2018 to 2021, very fun, easy years, but also money just was being printed in the world, unlimited money.