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Airtable Lays Off 27% of Firm, Shifts Focus to Big Clients
- XCSme 3y agoI think this is what happens to most companies, and what I also noticed with my projects too. The "big clients" usually make up for most of the revenue, while they require the least support and have the fewest complaints. The most vocal customers are the "cheaper" ones. It also makes marketing easier (spending $500 to get one customer paying $1000/month instead of 1000 customers paying $1/month).
- dsagal 3y agoFounder of Grist here (https://www.getgrist.com/ https://www.getgrist.com/): - focus on small teams and individuals - open source (with community contributing!) - can be run self-managed - portable data (lossless export in SQLite format) - full of great features (granular access rules, formulas with python, conditional formatting, webhooks, etc etc) If it's little-known, it's because we spend too much time building, not enough time selling.
- foxbee 3y agoFor an open source alternative try something like Budibase or Baserow.
- nine_zeros 3y ago> We had the capital and said, ‘let's hyper-scale; let's recruit as many smart people as we can and just throw them into the business and see what they can do,’ Inner workings of the mysterious "leadership"!
- ssharp 3y agoWhat did they ship from this? Interfaces? Is that it? It would be fascinating to hear more about what this plan looked like internally.
- Michelangelo11 3y agoPractically definitional ZIRP.
- ssss11 3y agoWow. So visionary.
- 71a54xd 3y ago[flagged]
- schleck8 3y ago> Liu, 35, says that Airtable, a Forbes Cloud 100 honoree, had been swept up in the hiring frenzy that spread across the tech world following the easy-money days that followed the COVID lockdowns of 2021. > “I let myself get caught in the hyper-competitive environment at that time. We had the capital and said, ‘let's hyper-scale; let's recruit as many smart people as we can and just throw them into the business and see what they can do,’” says Liu, adding that Airtable will be cash flow positive after this round of layoffs Learn to read
- ryanwaggoner 3y agoYes, totally, Joe Biden should disregard the careful work of thousands of economists and other professionals, and instead focus on a layoff of 237 people he heard about.
- dragonwriter 3y agoIt is, and a startup reconfiguring as it pivots its focus is something that happens irrespective of overall unemployment levels.
- pedalpete 3y agoI'm curious why AirTable needs to shed people in order to focus on becoming a pubic company, but Stripe can continue to grow and remain private. Is this just the CEO signalling that he wants his exit?
- thiscatis 3y agoI think you missed some layoffs news about Stripe.
- jahewson 3y agoI can’t speak for AirTable but in general you need to look at the cap table. A complex cap table and a likely down round could make it virtually impossible to negotiate another round. By series F there’s an awful lot of fingers in the pie.
- xnx 3y agoGood tool that fills the huge gap left when Microsoft Access failed to make the jump to the online world. Kudos to everyone who grabbed a slice of that free money pie, but it was never realistic that every app would have hundreds of millions of users.
- ericmcer 3y agoThats kind of a crazy valuation to employee count ratio. 237 = 27% of company means they have ~850 or so employees for a company with an 11.7b evaluation. Seems off.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- deodar 3y agoDumb question - are you saying the employee count sounds too low given the valuation or too high?
- acchow 3y agoThat's their Dec 2021 valuation right? That was a valuation bubble. See the 30-80% fall of most companies since then.
- pcurve 3y agoAgreed. Airtable is only projected to have $150M in sale in 2023. Even $1B is probably optimistic at this point. Asana founded in 2008 that went public in recent years is only worth $4B in market cap with over half a billion in sale.
- datavirtue 3y agoThey are trying to battle Microsofts Power Platform...and getting trounced.
- truetraveller 3y agoThere's just way too much competition for Airtable: - Retool with Databases - Tooljet with Databses - Budibase - Baserow - Grist (getgrist.com) - Bubble - The various Google Sheets Builders - Probably 20+ other apps
- Axsuul 3y agoDoes anyone have a great self hosted competitor to Airtable with a comparative mobile app?
- PhilipDaineko 3y ago[dead]
- dsagal 3y agoGrist doesn't have a mobile app, but has pretty decent UI on mobile browsers.
- user_named 3y agoBaserow
- aurareturn 3y agoDon’t forget plain old Excel, which every office worker knows how to use.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- beckingz 3y agoNot to mention the original microsoft access database.
- fakedang 3y agoNo one I know now uses Access, even those who used it previously. That being said, give the average office worker Excel and if they know their way around the software, they will find ways to do extremely cool things with it. I've seen a bunch of cool shit built on excel, including a full blown POS system.
- beckingz 3y agoI was wondering when this was going to happen. Airtable is a cool technology, but seemingly overhyped at their price point.
- prepend 3y agoI feel similarly. It’s a cool tech but priced so it can’t take off. They should focus on reducing resource need so they can cut price. By focusing on big enterprises it starts a spiral because those companies can afford airtable, but they can also afford data engineering teams that don’t need airtable. Imagine if google docs was $3000/user or something.
- datavirtue 3y agoInteresting. Seems like the enterprise is the opposite direction of what AirTable needs to go in. Good bye Air Table. I tried to build some apps based on AirTable and found it lacking. Zero idea what use the enterprise is going to find for this. Microsoft has that cornered with Power Platform. Despite it being a rickity piece of shit it smokes AirTable.
- Brajeshwar 3y agoAlmost Airtable-ish Open Source and more economical alternative - https://baserow.io https://baserow.io (no affiliation).
- Dinnerbone 3y agoBaserow is cool. We evaluated it within our company a few months ago and eventually settled for Nocodb (https://nocodb.com/ https://nocodb.com/) - easy to run, more mature. Leaptable is another Open Source framework like Airtable I saw recently with support for AI Agents. https://github.com/peterwnjenga/leaptable https://github.com/peterwnjenga/leaptable
- jerrygoyal 3y agoI had a bad experience with Airtable because I couldn't purchase the subscription. It turned out Airtable doesn't support cards issued in India. It's surprising that they neglected the whole country.
- iancmceachern 3y agoI'm sure there are other things it does, but pragmatically every time I've seen Airtable used in business it's used in a way which a simple excel spreadsheet shared on one drive, Dropbox, box, etc. Would do. Honest question, what does it do that excel does not?
- wryanzimmerman 3y agoI built a CMS backed by it to build sites that are mostly data, but have a few text blocks and images, so since all the data entry was in Airtable anyway, moving the rest of the content there made sense and now lots of small dev tasks can be done with zero dev time (change gets made in Airtable, product manager triggers the CI build, CI build pulls everything from Airtable)
- otachack 3y agoI guess an advantage is that it's a competitor to a single Microsoft vertical? So is Notion though and a few others. Competition is healthy.
- lormayna 3y agoForms, email automation or page designer are just some example. My wife works for a niche RE agency and she created a whole CRM from scratch with Airtable. This was impossible with Excel.
- iancmceachern 3y agoThis is a great example! Thank you!!
- lordofmoria 3y agoYou have the wrong paradigm. Airtable doesn’t improve on excel - it makes databases accessible to non-technical people. It’s the new MS Access: simple GUI for doing Joins, lookups, foreign keys without knowing that’s what you’re doing.
- knubie 3y ago
- techtonicshift 3y agoWe've been using Leaptable.us (https://leaptable.us/ https://leaptable.us/) which is much more simple (it's in beta) however's execution engine is open-source and it's support for AI Agents is the very promising. We've found it hard to Justify Airtable within our organization. Practically 90% of it's functionality overlaps with Notion databases which users already have and is ingrained within our org deeply.
- QuantumGood 3y agoLeaptable GitHub sign in fails. User verification fails after email login. Unable to use; seems more Alpha than Beta.
- gorenb 3y agoYour post has the largest item ID. You are amazing.
- dustingetz 3y ago$150M and slowing growth isn’t even a unicorn. 1.4B raised, founded in 2013