Howie Liu's profile on Product Hunt | Product Hunt

Howie Liu

Cofounder, CEO @ Airtable

#45036@howietlairtable.com

Activity 12 Made 9 Hunted 603 Following 1,802 Followers

Upvotes (30)

Joined on August 18th, 2014

944 points

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@lumilevskyi CEO of Airtable here. I see you've used an Airtable embed to host the investor list. Very cool! However, it looks like you've also either intentionally or accidentally put an overlay over the Airtable branding at the bottom of tthe embed. This is a requirement for usage of our embeds product (unless you're on a custom plan). Can you please fix? Thanks!

3yr ago

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Nice work Harj, Ammon and team!

4yr ago

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Cofounder and CEO of Airtable here. First off, thanks for the kind words and welcome to the productivity space! "A non-programmer is someone who is uncomfortable with precision and abstraction, which seems to cover most people. For the most part they can only tell a computer what to do by pushing buttons. Sometimes one button push does a lot, but if there’s not a button (perhaps with a few accompanying form elds) that does what they want, they are reduced to leading the computer by the hand with a sequence of manual button pushes. Except for spreadsheets, we have not been very successful in finding better ways for them to adapt the computer to their needs." -Butler Lampson, founding member of Xerox Parc The spreadsheet is one of the most prolific and enduring productivity tools of all time—not just for arbitrary reasons like the political history between MSFT’s Access and Excel teams, but also for its fundamental, first-principles advantages of information density, an intuitive layout, rapid *and* highly intuitive manipulation capabilities, etc. (See also: http://home.cc.gatech.edu/guzdial/uploads/130/Alan%20Kay%20-%20ComputerSoftware-SA.pdf https://medium.com/@aofstad/making-and-breaking-the-grid-ee0741f86dc#.3c964x5ei http://www.infoworld.com/article/2927917/database/the-next-generation-of-spreadsheets-will-be-a-database.html ) As such, we at Airtable spent an inordinate amount of time designing and implementing a first-class grid view that was as fast and easy to use as a spreadsheet, but also offered the rich structure of a relational database. This meant replicating interactions like the fill handle and batch copy/paste, doing typecasting so you can paste text into a link cell and make it autolink to the corresponding record, doing perf optimizations so it can handle 1000s of rows, and handling true, full realtime sync on a relational database model (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8374364 ). That being said, our broader vision is to do for software creation what the GUI operating system did for personal computing ( see http://bit.ly/2ggGKL2 ). That is, to provide a lego kit for end-users to themselves create the software workflows that elegantly meld to their own idiosyncratic needs. Salesforce—where I previously worked after they acquired my previous company—has been attacking this problem for heavyweight enterprise use cases with Force.com (which also happens to be their fastest-growing segment of revenue, doing $1B+/year). We’re building a massively accessible, consumerized way for anyone to create their own useful software workflows. New view types has always been part of that vision; our philosophy is to put a high level of design scrutiny and interaction polish on our new features before releasing them, which is why we’ve done so in a gradual, piecemeal way over the past couple years. In Airtable, one of the most useful things you can do with views is to create multiple views with different presentation formats (i.e. kanban board, calendar, grouped records, etc) and different filter/hidden columns/row and column ordering conditions, on top of the *same underlying table*. This has been especially invaluable to our high-end customers, who may have hundreds of users interacting with the same table. Some other things into which we’ve invested much of our time over the past couple years are (after all, we have a furiously-working team of 20 with backgrounds from Google, Dropbox, Facebook, etc): -First-class native app experiences for Android and iOS (more on that here: http://bit.ly/2gmMAMb ) -A fully-featured API (and IFTTT/Zapier connectors) -And more major developments that I can’t quite share yet, but I promise will be useful to all Airtable users and enable even more possibilities with our platform. -Scaling up our system to provide durable realtime functionality to over 30,000 companies with over 3 million bases in Airtable (you can read about some of them here: https://airtable.news/ ) Hope that sheds some light on Airtable’s efforts to date, and where we’re going in the future!

4yr ago

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