The 10% Bet That Built a $12B Company | Howie Liu (Airtable)
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Show Notes
Howie Liu built Airtable into one of the most powerful no-code platforms in the world—used by over 450,000 companies and backed by everyone from Benchmark to Thrive to YC.
In this episode of HD in HD, I was joined by the founder and CEO of Airtable as he reelected on the unexpected turns that shaped his entrepreneurial path—from cold-pitching algo trading models at a college career fair, to building software that powers teams at scale.
In our conversation, we get into:
- why Airtable took 2.5 years to launch—and why it was worth it
- how a CRM for his personal contacts became his first YC-backed startup
- what Salesforce taught him about B2B scale (and what it didn’t)
- how he talked his way into a quant internship that disappeared overnight
- the $0-to-financial freedom moment that let him finally think big
We only scratched the surface on the Airtable chapter, so don’t be surprised if there’s a part two.
ABOUT US:
We’re proudly sponsored by Brex —a brand I co-founded, now supporting over 30,000 businesses like Anthropic, DoorDash, and Scale AI, helping them make every dollar count.
Connect with us:
1. Howie Liu– https://x.com/howietl
2. Henrique Dubugras– https://x.com/hdubugras
This episode was produced and distributed by our friends at Atomik Growth: https://atomikgrowth.com
00:00 Intro
01:20 Introducing Howie and Airtable
02:10 Early life and family
07:33 Early tech
14:13 Building Websites
32:18 Dreaming big
34:07 Middle-Class Entrepreneur Theory
35:55 High school
44:57 College applications
56:40 Duke University
1:05:10 High-paying jobs
1:07:10 Internships and early career
1:09:23 Neural networks and quant trading
1:16:10 New internship
1:22:02 First startup and lessons learned
1:34:22 The birth of Airtable
1:38:27 Outro