Howie Liu is the co-founder and CEO of Airtable, a cloud collaboration service, spreadsheet-database hybrid, with the features of a database but applied to a spreadsheet.
Early life and education
Howie Liu was born in 1989, to Korean parents, who were raised in China. Liu grew up in College Station, Texas, where his father earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry at Texas A&M. Liu’s mother, an engineer in China, worked at McDonald’s in minimum-wage jobs and as a seamstress. Liu taught himself to code C++ at the age of 13, after finding an unread training book in his dad’s office. At 16, Liu went to Duke University, and in 2009, earned a degree in mechanical engineering and public policy.
Early career
While in college, Liu helped with the formation of early-stage venture fund Freestyle Capital at Duke University in January 2008. In 2009, at the age of 20, Liu with Evan Beard co-founded Etacts, a CRM tool enabling users to stay in touch with people in their address book, to disrupt the CRM industry with a product for individuals and SMBs to effortlessly manage their relationships across email, phone calls, and social media.
Etacts’ investors include Y Combinator, founders of Youtube, Powerset, Delicious, Ron Conway, Ashton Kutcher, and Eric Hahn. In December 2010, CRM and SaaS market leader Salesforce acquired Etacts for an undisclosed amount. After the acquisition, Liu led the social CRM product at Salesforce.
As a product manager, Liu was able to witness firsthand how things were managed at an enterprise company, communicating with clients in various industries, and participating in meetings with Fortune 500 CIOs. Working with Salesforce’s President of Products Alex Dayon, on an everyday basis, also developed many little details of the business Liu didn’t know then; but Liu only stayed at Salesforce for about a year.
Airtable
In September 2012, Howie Liu co-founded and became the Chief Executive Officer of Airtable, a cloud-based software company that blends a traditional spreadsheet with a database, along with former Google Maps manager Andrew Ofstad as Chief Product Officer and Stack Overflow developer Emmett Nicholas as Chief Technology Officer, in San Francisco, California.
Airtable is a combination of spreadsheet-database, with the features of a database but utilized to a spreadsheet. The fields in an Airtable table are comparable to cells in a spreadsheet, but have varieties such as phone number, checkbox, and drop-down list, and can reference file attachments like images. Users can create a database, add records, set up column types, link tables to one another, sort records, collaborate, and publish views to external websites.
In April 2015, Airtable launched its API and embedded databases, which set the groundwork for its blocks development framework. In July 2015, Airtable launched Airtable Forms to collect and organize data. In August 2015, Airtable made Add to Slack option available to integrate Airtable with Slack. In December 2015, Airtable redesigned its iOS application and introduced barcode as a new field type.
Airtable’s various clients of over 80,000 organizations include Netflix, Insomniac Events, Penguin Random House, Outdoor Voices, Calvin Klein, Airbnb, Condé Nast Entertainment, The City of Los Angeles, Carnival Cruise Line, half of the Fortune 1,000, and WeWork. Revenue is on track to surge 400% to $20 million in 2018, mostly on word of mouth.
In 2008, Airtable received an honorable mention in Fast Company’s Innovation By Design Awards.
Funding rounds
In March 2013, Airtable raised an undisclosed amount in a seed round from investors Caffeinated Capital and Founder Collective. In February 2015, Airtable raised $3 million in another seed round from Data Collective DCVC, Freestyle Capital, CrunchFund, Hammerstone, Caffeinated Capital, Bebo founder Michael Birch, Box Group, Ben Ling, Ashton Kutcher, David Beyer, Snapup founder Shan Mehta, Farmville creator Amitt Mahajan, Box executive Villi Iltchev, OpenDoor founder Eric Wu, Color Genomics co-founder Othman Laraki, and YC partner Aaron Harris. The investment round used to pursue that aspiration and get its application more widely disseminated.
In June 2015, Airtable raised $7.6 million in a Series A round, led by CRV with the participation from VP Sales & Customer Success at SurveyMonkey Brennan O’Donnell, Founder of Parse and Director of Product Management at Facebook Ilya Sukhar, CEO and Co-Founder at ZenPayroll Joshua Reeves, Co-Founder and CTO at Lookout Kevin Mahaffey, Co-founder of Color Genomics Othman Laraki, and Raymond Tonsing. Funding also came from existing seed investors Freestyle Capital, Caffeinated Capital, DCVC, CrunchFund, and Founder Collective.
In March 2018, Airtable raised $52 million in a Series B round, led by Caffeinated Capital and CRV, with the participation from existing investor Freestyle Capital and new investor Slow Ventures, which makes the company values at $62.6 million. In November 2018, Airtable raised $100 million in a Series C round, led by CRV, Thrive Capital, Coatue Management, and Benchmark, with the participation from strategic angels Delphine Arnault, Emily Weiss, Alexa von Tobel, Sarah Smith, Dan Rose, and existing investor Caffeinated Capital.
Airtable has raised a total of $170.6 million in its five rounds of funding and is funded by 32 investors. Airtable has $5 million in estimated revenue annually. Airtable competes with CrossCap, Basecamp, and hopTo.