![]() Kutcher decided to invest in Airtable on the spot. Kutcher was immediately impressed with Liu and Ofstad’s prototype, which Liu and Ofstad demonstrated in Kutcher’s trailer, telling the two founders that “I can really see this taking off, beyond Hollywood.” lot in Los Angeles while Kutcher was filming episodes of his sitcom, Two and a Half Men. Once they had an MVP, they needed funding––so they visited Ashton Kutcher on the Warner Bros. Liu and his co-founder Andrew Ofstad, a former Googler who had spearheaded the redesign of Google Maps, set about creating their first prototype. Liu realized that he could create an entirely new type of product that empowered users to create what were essentially simple applications and in a way that many users would find familiar and intuitive. While Liu saw a clear opportunity to redefine what spreadsheets could be, he didn’t want to just make a better spreadsheet. Most are used for organizing purposes.” - Howie Liu, founder, Airtable But almost 90% of spreadsheets don’t have formulas. “Spreadsheets are really optimized for numerical analysis and financial calculations. Despite spreadsheets’ natural applications in bookkeeping and other primarily numerical tasks, Liu discovered that most spreadsheets were cluttered, haphazard containers for various data. Liu’s time at Salesforce taught him many things, but arguably the most valuable insight Liu gained from his tenure at Salesforce was how many people were using spreadsheets as purely organizational tools. He left Salesforce after just one year––this time, to pursue an idea for another product. However, Liu’s time at Benioff’s company was short-lived. Liu spent a year as a Product Manager at Salesforce. Liu admired Benioff and the way he had worked his way through the ranks at Oracle and wanted to learn more from him. Although Etacts was short-lived, Liu was already trying to solve the problem of how people could derive more value from their data––a problem he would tackle even more aggressively with Airtable.Īlthough Liu later told Business Insider that he had personally made “in the low seven figures on day one at Salesforce,” Liu also said that one of the main reasons he sold his company to Salesforce was the CRM giant’s primary focus on the enterprise. Several other companies were courting Etacts with offers. Salesforce wasn’t alone in its interest in Liu’s contact manager product. The product showed promise but was shut down after less than one year in operation when Marc Benioff’s Salesforce acquired the fledgling startup for an undisclosed sum. Liu’s nascent company raised $700,000 from a range of angel investors, one of whom was the actor and tech investor Ashton Kutcher, who approached Liu after seeing a demo of the product at Y Combinator’s Demo Day in 2010.Įtacts didn’t last. Etacts was a CRM for email contact management. Liu’s first startup was Etacts, which he founded in 2010. Years before his second company (Airtable) reinvented the database, Howie Liu wanted to make email a more useful tool for salespeople. To understand Airtable, we need to understand the landscape of productivity software in 2012––and why such a gaping hole in that market created a unique opportunity for Liu and his team.
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