a startup? What are the critical skills/experience/mindset that a product manager needs to develop if he/she wants to transition from corporates to startups? How different is it working as a product manager in an established vs.
Whereas vertical products can take a much more straightforward/linear approach to all of the above (at the cost of being reductionist, the vertical approach is to listen to customers, build the features they ask for, rinse and repeat), we have to always solve “meta” problems and try to think about what lego pieces we can build to solve not only one customer’s problem but all other variants of that problem as well.įrom a marketing standpoint, this means we also need to do a good job of speaking to the high-level value of Airtable, while also touching on the specifics of illustrative use cases to make those value propositions more tangible. Such a great question! It’s a challenge that percolates through to every role we have: from marketing to engineering to design to customer-facing. What are the challenges you deal with in building out a horizontal product with unknown/varied use cases, and how does your team overcome those challenges? Honestly, the things I most wish I had known couldn’t have been learned until after we launched and started getting an influx of real adoption across different industries. We did tons of research on the space, talked to folks who had founded related companies in the past, did user studies/prototypes, etc. “You can’t spreadsheet your way into a calculation that shows you this is going to be it.We actually spent a few years working on Airtable before we launched publicly. “You have to have some creative leap of imagination that no focus group, no deterministic process will show you,” he said. While Liu values the power of prototyping and testing, he ultimately believes you have to take a risk in entrepreneurial endeavors.
#Howie airtable linkedin how to
He emphasized the importance of hiring early and finding co-founders “who are willing to stretch their imagination” and “stretch their disbelief that against all odds, this thing is going to work.” He added that the right co-founders can also offer emotional support and push your ideas to be better.Īccording to Liu, investors and co-founders are not just there to execute on what you already know how to do - they also “help you figure out what you need to do in the first place,” he said. Liu said he also had investors and co-founders who were supportive of the longer pre-launch period. He added that it’s important to “show rather than tell” that the idea will work. Liu recommended that entrepreneurs build prototypes and get as much early customer feedback as possible during the early stages of a company to iterate accordingly. Because Airtable had to gain the trust of their clients and keep their valuable information safe, Liu said the stakes were higher.
#Howie airtable linkedin software
This time was especially important because of Airtable’s function - they were, as Balani said, building software that builds software. Liu described a “level of complacency and serenity” during these early stages because of the founders’ excitement about the end product - they were prepared to be patient, he said. “The features we have since added were all part of the original vision we had set out to execute against.”Īirtable was built over three years, which Balani contrasted to the “conventional wisdom these days” of launching startups very quickly. “In 2012 we made an internal vision deck that had a rough business plan and basically described our five-plus year roadmap,” he said. He founded Airtable one year later in early 2013. He then began working at Salesforce, where he said he learned things critical to the founding of Airtable. Still, his entrepreneurial endeavors started early with his first venture in 2010, a next-generation customer relationship management system called Etacts. He added that he was “somewhat disappointed” that he graduated in 2009 without finding one. Airtable now has over $600 million in funding, according to event moderator Ravi Balani, and a mission to “democratize software creation by enabling anyone to build the tools that meet their needs,” according to the company website.ĭuring the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar sponsored by the Stanford Technology Venture Program and BASES, Liu said that he went into undergrad at Duke University searching for a drop-out worthy idea. Liu and his co-founders, Andrew Ofstad and Emmett Nicholas, spent three years building Airtable, a cloud collaboration platform that combines spreadsheets and databases, before its launch in 2015.
Airtable co-founder and CEO Howie Liu said that establishing a clear vision during a company’s early stages and being patient are vital to a new business’s success at a Wednesday event.
0 kommentar(er)
