Lenny’s Podcast: Product | Career | Growth

Episode: How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO)
Date: August 31, 2025
Host: Lenny Rachitsky
Guest: Howie Liu (Co-founder & CEO, Airtable)

Episode Overview

In this episode, Howie Liu, co-founder and CEO of Airtable, shares his experience leading his company through a radical restructuring to become AI-native. Lenny and Howie discuss the existential transition facing all mature software companies due to AI, including changes in company structure, leadership approach, product management, and the skills needed going forward. The conversation offers concrete advice to founders and leaders aiming to adapt their organizations for the AI era—balancing speed, innovation, and durable growth.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Viral "Airtable is Dead" Tweet & Navigating Public Perception

[05:06 – 07:52]

• Howie addresses a viral tweet that erroneously declared Airtable was failing, explaining that the facts were wrong and lamenting how misinformation can spread quickly online.
• “The more surprising thing was just…this person has been tweeting a bunch of spicy takes that are not substantiated by real data…And yet this particular tweet went super viral.”—Howie Liu [05:19]
• Misaligned incentives on social media drive "sensational content," and corrections are rarely as viral as initial misinformation.

2. The Rise of the CEO-Individual Contributor ("ICCO")

[08:08 – 13:23]

• CEOs of AI-native companies must return to the roots of building—getting into the code, prototyping, and engaging deeply with the product.
• “As we started the company, I was very much in this mode…In that founding moment, the initial product market fit finding—especially for a product that is pure software—the tech was the product.”—Howie Liu [08:39]
• "With AI…it’s so rapidly evolving…you have to be in the details. There is no looking from the 10,000-foot view, throwing a bunch of people at this problem. It’s actually understanding the right product experience and the right business model…"—Howie Liu [11:29]
• Product leaders must become "chief tastemakers": they can’t just review, they must participate actively in creation and experimentation.

3. Use AI Personally—Frequently and Deeply

[13:23 – 16:09]

• Howie uses Airtable AI more intensively than anyone globally, seeing high AI inference costs as trivial compared to insights gained.
• "I take pride in being the number one most expensive inference cost user of Airtable AI—not just within our company, but I think globally."—Howie Liu [14:03]
• “The value versus the actual cost of AI, when applied greedily but smartly…it’s a crazy ratio and more people should be aggressively throwing compute cycles at these very high value problems.”—Howie Liu [15:21]

4. Restructuring Airtable for AI-Native Product Development

[19:01 – 23:32]

• Airtable moved from incrementally-focused, surface-area feature teams to functionally reorganizing into thematic business units.
• However, it still wasn’t fast enough—so they created two complementary execution groups:
  • Fast Thinking Team (AI Platform): "Ship a bunch of new capabilities on a near weekly basis…jaw-dropping value, excitement, and experimentation."
  • Slow Thinking Team: "Deliberate bets that require more premeditation," e.g., infrastructure changes or large-scale data systems.
• “Fast execution creates top-of-funnel excitement. Slow thinking allows those initial seeds of adoption to sprout and grow into larger deployments.”—Howie Liu [22:46]

5. Building the Fast Thinking Team: Archetypes & Hiring

[23:51 – 26:38]

• Successful members are entrepreneurial, autonomous, and able to think full-stack across technical and UX dimensions.
• Not just ex-founders; also includes those capable of independently assembling complex products, relishing ambiguity.
• Example: Prototyping complex new features like fully agentic app-building using conversational agents and code generation.

6. The Power of Product UX and Visual Metaphors in AI

[26:43 – 28:44]

• Howie’s passion is UX, especially bridging the gap between AI capabilities and user affordances.
• Critique: Many AI products lack sufficiently rich interfaces and metaphors. “The product UX part of me is just craving more visual metaphors or colors or some kind of…web interface richness to better represent or show all the different things you can do with the underlying model.” [27:37]
• Airtable leans into colors, interactivity, and visual states to improve “merchandising” of AI features.

7. The Need for Speed and Experimentation (“Maximally Accelerated”)

[28:44 – 30:49]

• Lenny references Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT), noting a recurring theme: “Is this maximally accelerated? How do we move faster?”
• Ship features, get them into users’ hands, and discover emergent use cases through real-world interaction.
• “You often don’t know what AI can do or what people want until it’s out. There’s a need to get it out quick—that’ll tell you what it should be.”—Lenny Rachitsky [29:16]

8. The PLG (Product-Led Growth) Model for AI Products

[30:49 – 32:58]

• The most successful AI products (e.g., ChatGPT) are frictionless and open for hands-on experimentation by users.
• Howie wants Airtable to continue PLG and builder-led adoption rather than becoming only sales-led for AI features.

9. Re-envisioning the Mission in an AI-Native World

[33:14 – 39:24]

• Companies must honestly ask: “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…go and start the next carnation of it.”—Howie Liu [39:04]
• For Airtable, the no-code primitives of their platform allow their agent to reliably and scalably build business apps in an agentic way, combining AI flexibility with product reliability.

10. Creating a Culture of "Play" and Experimentation

[47:02 – 47:41]

• Employees are encouraged and empowered to cancel meetings and spend days (or even weeks) simply playing with relevant AI products to develop intuition, skills, and ideas.
• “If you want to 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.”—Howie Liu [47:36]

11. From Document-Driven to Prototype-Driven Execution

[47:41 – 50:56]

• Move from planning-heavy processes (decks, PRDs, specs) to interactive, real prototypes: “The real proof is in the pudding…in a real prototype you can instantly try it out. It’s more like an experimentation playground now rather than deterministic resourcing and timelines.” [49:34]

12. Polymath Teams and Collapsing Traditional Roles

[51:07 – 58:28]

• “Any of [PM, Eng, Design], there’s a strong advantage to those who can cross over into the other two...If you’re a PM, you need to start looking more like a hybrid PM prototyper who has some good design sensibilities.”—Howie Liu [51:36, 53:16]
• Each function needs at least a minimal baseline of the others; ideally, all become strong full-stack “unicorns.” [57:42]
• This principle applies to the whole company—including marketing, sales, and beyond—not just product and engineering.

13. Advice for Leaders: Founder Mode and Hands-on Leadership

[73:02 – 79:32]

• Founders and leaders must embrace "founder mode"—remaining deeply involved, tying together details across domains to drive step-function improvements and rediscover product-market fit.
• “Don’t step away from the details that both you love…Always make sure that is still your number one, even if other stuff has to also add to your plate.”—Howie Liu [82:33]
• “Founder mode is not micromanagement, but caring deeply about details where cross-domain integration is the only way to get non-incremental outcomes.”—Howie Liu [79:32]

14. Skills for the Future: Play, Learn, Collapse Silos

[85:51 – 87:30]

• Every tech worker, especially in product orgs, must continually build skills outside their traditional discipline.
• “I really do believe that this is not a—you either have it or you don’t—in terms of the skill set needed to be relevant and AI native…Everyone can gain a good enough proficiency of software engineering if they really wanted to…Just go do it.”—Howie Liu [85:51]
• “It’s never been more exciting to be a builder. There are super intelligences that you can talk to…and tools that let you build quickly and learn by doing.”—Howie Liu [87:42]

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On leadership and taste:
  “It’s actually now also hard to taste the soup without participating in some part of creating the soup.”—Howie Liu [12:14]
• On learning quickly:
  “I find it to be really fun. There is a delight and entertainment value to just using AI, period…It always blows my mind just to think about, wow, five years ago we didn’t have any of this stuff.”—Howie Liu [43:28]
• On structure for a high-velocity AI org:
  “The AI platform (fast thinking team), we just want to ship major new stuff every week…you should drop your jaw at how awesome it is to use this new capability in Airtable.”—Howie Liu [21:34]
• On talent and upskilling:
  "If you want to 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."—Howie Liu [47:36]
• On practicing gratitude:
  "If you approach the world and the future with humility and gratitude…it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. You’re open-minded, you’re grateful, and then more opportunities actually come your way. Maybe it’s because of the energy you’re putting out into the world."—Howie Liu [97:01]

Standout Timestamps

• [05:06 – 07:52]: The "Airtable is Dead" tweet & navigating viral misinformation
• [08:08 – 13:23]: CEOs as individual contributors—why depth in product matters again
• [19:01 – 23:32]: How Airtable was reorganized into "fast thinking" and "slow thinking" teams
• [47:02 – 47:41]: Empowering teams to play and experiment deeply with AI tools
• [51:07 – 58:28]: The future is “polymath”—hybrid skills across PM, engineering, design
• [73:02 – 79:32]: Lessons from a decade of growth—why founder mode is indispensable

Key Takeaways & Action Items

• For leaders:
  Get back into the weeds. Experiment and use the tools yourself. Build “fast” and “slow” teams to balance shipping velocity and scalable infrastructure.
• For everyone:
  Collapse silos and grow your hybrid skill set—learn prototyping, engineering, design, product, and more.
  Take time to play and experiment with new products—especially AI—habitually.
• For organizations:
  Rethink your mission and product for an AI-native world—would you build the same thing the same way if you started from scratch?
• For product builders:
  Prototypes over decks. Ship, iterate, learn fast. The future belongs to hands-on, outcomes-focused, polymath teams.

Further Resources Mentioned

• Book: "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman
• Book series: "The Three-Body Problem" by Liu Cixin
• Podcast: Lenny’s episode with Brian Chesky (Airbnb founder)
• Brands/Products: Runway (AI video), studio D’Artisan, Self Edge, Whitesville (Japanese vintage clothing)

Closing Thought

“Everyone can learn how to be a versatile, unicorn, product-engineer-designer hybrid in the AI-native era. The only thing stopping you is just going out and doing it."
— Howie Liu [85:51]

Contact:

• Airtable: airtable.com
• Howie Liu: @howietl on Twitter / howie@airtable.com