Passion-Driven Entrepreneurs Build Better Products

Howie Liu believes in leading from the details, not from a distance. As Airtable's CEO, he's embraced a return to being an individual contributor—what he calls the "IC CEO"—especially in the AI era where product innovation requires deep, hands-on engagement.

The traditional scaling playbook suggests CEOs should step away from details, industrialize processes, and delegate to specialized departments. Liu discovered this approach undermines what made the company successful in the first place. When you create separate fiefdoms with loose coupling between groups, you lose the "magical integrative value of holistic thinking" needed for breakthrough innovation.

Instead, Liu advocates for a barbell approach: maintain deep involvement in product details while still building the organizational capabilities to scale. This means cutting standing one-on-ones in favor of timely, insight-driven meetings, and reorganizing teams to enable both fast and slow thinking. His "fast thinking" team ships new AI capabilities weekly, while the "slow thinking" team handles more deliberate, infrastructure-heavy work.

For product teams navigating AI, Liu encourages cross-functional versatility. The most successful people in the AI era are those who can work across traditional boundaries—PMs who can prototype, engineers with product sensibilities, designers who understand technical constraints. He tells his team: "If you want to cancel all your meetings for a day or even a week and just play with AI products that could be relevant to Airtable, go do it."

This philosophy extends to how Liu spends his own time. He's proudly Airtable's heaviest AI user, sometimes spending hundreds of dollars on inference costs for a single experiment. He creates weekend projects to force himself to use new AI tools, believing that experiential learning is essential for understanding what's possible.

For leaders, this means reconnecting with what you love about building. As Liu reflects: "Don't step away from the details that you love... don't lose the essence of the thing that made this product happen." The most successful founders aren't just exploiting business opportunities—they genuinely love building products and solving problems.

For ICs, this means embracing versatility and continuous learning. Liu believes anyone can develop proficiency in adjacent disciplines: "Everyone can learn how to be a versatile unicorn product-engineer-designer hybrid in the AI-native era. The only thing stopping you is just going out and doing it."

Rethinking Company Structure for AI

Liu reorganized Airtable into two distinct groups with different operating modes:

• Fast Thinking Group: Ships new AI capabilities weekly, focusing on experimentation and rapid iteration
• Slow Thinking Group: Handles complex infrastructure and deliberate bets requiring more premeditation

This structure allows the company to both innovate quickly and build durable foundations. The fast group creates excitement and new use cases, while the slow group ensures those initial adoption seeds grow into larger deployments.

The AI-Native Mindset

Liu approaches AI transformation with a fundamental question: "If you were literally founding a new company from scratch with the same mission, how would you execute using a fully AI-native approach?"

For Airtable, this meant reimagining their entire product experience around AI, making their conversational agent Omni the default way of doing everything. Rather than just adding AI features, they took a clean-slate approach while leveraging their existing no-code components as building blocks.

This perspective requires leaders to honestly assess whether their existing assets help or hinder their mission in the AI era. As Liu puts it: "If you can't really introspect and say you're better off doing this with the pieces you have, then you should find a buyer and go start the next incarnation of it."