How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO)
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Why did Howie Liu decide to reorganize Airtable around AI?
If you were literally founding a new company from scratch with the same mission, how would you execute on that mission using a fully AI native approach? If you can't, then you should find a buyer and then if you really care about this mission, like go and start the next carnation of it.
Or people that work for you, how have you adjusted what you expect of them to help them be successful?
Cancel all your meetings for like a day or for an entire week and just go play around with every AI product that you think could be relevant to Airtable. Go do it.
Of the different functions on a product team, PM, engineering, design, who has had the most success being more productive with these tools? It really does become more.
about individual attitude, there's a strong advantage to any of those three roles who can kind of cross over into the other two. As a PM, you need to start looking more like a hybrid PM prototyper who has some good design sensibilities. Do
you see one of these roles being more in trouble than others? Today, my guest is Howie Liu. Howie is the co-founder and CEO of Airtable. I'm having a bunch of conversations on this podcast with founders who are reinventing their decade plus old business in this AI era to help you navigate this existential transition that every company and product is going through right now. Howie and Airtable's journey is an incredible example of this, and there's so much to learn from what Howie shares in this conversation. We talk about a very interesting trend that I've noticed that Howie is very much an example of CEOs almost becoming individual contributors again, getting into the code, building things, leading initiatives themselves, the something that we call the IC CEO.
We also talk about the very specific skills that he believes product managers and product leaders, also engineers and designers, need to build to do well in this new world that we're in. Also, how he restructures His company into two groups, a fast thinking group and a slow thinking group, which allowed their AI investments to significantly accelerate. If you're struggling to figure out how to be successful in this new AI era, this episode is for you. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. Also, if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of 15 incredible products, including Lovable, Replit, Bolt, N8N, Linear, Superhuman, D Script, Whisperflow, Gamma, Perplexity, Warp, Granola, Magic Patterns, Raycast, Chappie RD, and Mobbet.
Check it out at lenny's newsletter.com and click Product Pass. With that, I bring you Howie Loo. This episode is brought to you by Lucid Link, the storage collaboration platform. You've built a great product, but how you show it through video, design, and storytelling is what brings it to life. If your team works with large media files, videos, design assets, layered project files, you know how painful it can be to stay organized across locations. Files live in different places, you're constantly asking, is this the latest version? Creative Work slows down while people wait for files to Transfer. Lucid Link fixes this. It gives your team a shared space in the cloud that works like a local drive. Files are instantly accessible for anywhere.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Why did Howie Liu decide to reorganize Airtable around AI?
0:00–10:48
2
What was the impact of the viral “Airtable is dead” tweet and how did the company respond?
10:48–23:41
3
How does the “IC CEO” model change a founder’s daily work?
23:41–34:52
4
What are the fast‑thinking and slow‑thinking team structures and why are they important?
34:52–48:14
5
Why does Howie use AI hourly and become Airtable’s top inference‑cost user?
48:14–1:01:05
6
What new skills do product managers, engineers, and designers need to thrive in the AI era?
1:01:05–1:12:15
7
How can evals kill innovation and when should teams rely on “vibes” instead?
1:12:15–1:25:14
8
What practical advice does Howie give to CEOs and teams for succeeding with AI?
1:25:14–1:40:37
Speakers
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