AI is a Tool for Fashion Recommendations among Influencers

Airtable: The No-Code App Platform that Lets You Build Apps with Shared Data

Airtable, the San Francisco-based app platform, is the go-to tool for anyone who wants to build and customize apps using shared data. It’s a no-code platform that allows companies to create flexible checklists, organize collections or ideas, and manage customers or contacts.

The brain behind Airtable is Howie Liu, who was known for building apps even in college, including a “maps apartment listing mashup”. He explains, “I scraped Craigslist for listings and then put them on a map which Craigslist itself didn’t even do at the time. It has a Yelp style search and filter interface, which in hindsight, doesn’t sound that covered, but at the time there wasn’t a great deal of documentation around how to build that sort of a rich, single page app experience. So I was also learning how to reverse engineer these interfaces and build them myself from scratch.”

While Liu understands that his initial business idea wasn’t viable because he didn’t own the data and didn’t have a relationship with the realtors who listed the content, his experience and knowledge in app building inspired him to start Airtable.

After graduating from Duke University in 2009, Liu landed an internship at CrowdFlower, a tech company, where he learned the ropes of the Silicon Valley startup system. He teamed up with a friend from college to build Etact, a customer relationship management software platform. Liu’s participation in Y Combinator’s 2010 winter cohort helped him launch his first startup. Soon after the program, Salesforce acquired Etact.

Liu worked for Salesforce and was inspired by their focus on building a really flexible platform. This inspired him to start Airtable, a much more disruptive platform for building an app that doesn’t require an admin, a lot of time and money, or a ton of resources. Today, Airtable has over a thousand employees and has raised nearly 1.4 billion in funding.

As AI makes a huge splash in the last few years, Liu and his team are always looking for ways to innovate their products. “I’m generally not the type of person who jumps on bandwagon or hype trends,” Liu said. “With AI, you can actually just see for yourself. Today, its capabilities are these large language models…So I think this is going to be this massive sweeping force that is going to create winners and losers in software.”

According to Liu, plenty of innovation is occurring within other companies attempting to incorporate AI, but he wants Airtable to approach it differently. The team at Airtable wants to weave AI into their go-to-market plan, to engage with customers and frame the value of their product because they can deliver a lot of value through AI on their platform. “Rather than us just trying to add another tackle on AI, we’re trying to be very clear and opinionated about our approach to AI,” says Liu.

In conclusion, Airtable is the perfect platform for anyone in an organization that wants to build and customize apps with shared data. You don’t need a ton of resources to build an app and, with AI becoming more prevalent, Airtable’s team is continuously looking for ways to innovate their platform. Liu’s experience in app building and AI has paved the way for Airtable’s success.

Editor Notes:

It’s fascinating to see how Howie Liu’s experience led him to build Airtable, a platform that has revolutionized app building. With AI becoming more prevalent, Airtable’s future looks brighter than ever. For more tech news, visit GPT News Room.

Source link