![]() ![]() But we knew the collaboration aspect was important, and wanted it to be fully real-time.Īfter six months or so of just a purely front-end prototype, we started building out the server side. There wasn’t backend persistence, but it still allowed you to simulate the collaborative aspects of it. Pretty early on we built out a simple collaborative layer it still did something hacky, it shared data through local storage. We definitely were building the prototype with collaboration in mind. Did you worry that it was too focused on the single-player, single-session use case? Or you thought that if you could nail that, that was extensible to the whole problem? What’s the design to make that accessible to an end-user? Building out this spreadsheet interface, and this very simple table metaphor that people could easily interact with and understand, was the first thing we needed to de-risk. The main problem was simplifying this very complex thing in the database. We tried to prove out the interaction paradigms and the design. And we didn’t actually build the backend, so it would work really well and persist to local storage in the browser. We built the whole thing in our own Javacript framework on the web, in the browser. It was basically a complete, front-end only product. Subscribe Were you prototyping one feature at a time and testing it, or were you prototyping the whole thing? We pretty much took that approach in the early days of Airtable: create a lot of prototypes, create a very early demo, try it, show it to people, get feedback, and iterate quickly. The next day, rinse and repeating, making a bunch of changes, and testing that with users. The way they invented the initial GUI operating system, and the early days of Mac, was a lot of prototyping, coming up with metaphors, and testing them out with users. It showed us this was possible and kept us going. Moving from a command-line interface to something much more accessible to a broader audience. We saw these old products like HyperCard, old database products that were end-user focused, the creation of the original GUI operating system. Or the execution hasn’t quite been right. A lot of the best ideas have been around for a while, and the time hasn’t been right. In some ways it validated what we were working on. When you say you did research on early tech pioneers, I’ve talked to lots of entrepreneurs and haven’t heard that before. We actually knew each other in college and used to work on hack projects together and talk about tech a lot. ![]() We were inspired by the problem of taking this thing that we do as programmers, which is create useful software, and enabling anybody to do that. At Salesforce he saw that a lot of useful business software is more or less just a database with some CRUD actions and views and workflow on top of it. I was at Google, Howie had started a YC company, Etacts, that was bought by Salesforce. ![]() We both left our respective companies about the same time. I did a lot of reading from a lot of early computing pioneers, like Alan Kay, Doug Engelbart. ![]() Early days were just trying to set a solid foundation we took our time learning about the space. Our third co-founder, Emmett, joined shortly after. You started in 2012, give us a quick timeline of what it took to get Airtable live.Īndrew Ofstad: I started in 2012 with my co-founder Howie, our CEO. Immad Akhund: I want to dive into the journey of getting the product to market initially. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Highlights from Series Tea with Andrew Ofstad Working with Alex Dayon, Salesforce’s President of Products, on a daily basis also taught many little details of the business he didn’t know then.How Airtable thought about pricing their Pro account As a product manager at Salesforce, Liu was able to see firsthand how things were run at an enterprise company, joining meetings with Fortune 500 CIOs and talking with clients in different industries. But Marc Benioff spent a lot of time at Oracle, learning from the inside."Īnd his choice turned out to be the right one. "You look at the big consumer companies out there, Jerry Yang didn’t learn from consumer companies, and Mark Zuckerberg just went straight out of college. "I thought it would be the best learning experience," Liu told us. Ultimately, it came down to Liu’s desire to get his feet wet in a large enterprise company. In fact, he says, a number of different companies, including a big consumer brand, showed interest in Etacts. "I personally made in the low 7 figures on day one at Salesforce," Liu told Business Insider.īut it wasn’t just the financial part of the deal that made Liu want to take Salesforce’s offer. ![]()
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