The 10% Bet That Built a $12B Company | Howie Liu (Airtable)

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