

They launched in 2015 and later raised a subsequent round of Series A financing.
AIRTABLE TEMPLATES VENTURE SOFTWARE
He also wanted to stick to the world of software platforms, and spreadsheets seemed a natural place to start.Īfter raising $3 million from a consortium of financiers including Freestyle Capital, the Box Group, and actor Ashton Kutcher (who also invested in Etacts), Liu and his team spent most of 2012 conducting user research and working on a prototype of what would become Airtable. Liu says that while at Salesforce, where he worked for a year following the sale of his startup, he realized he was more interested in developing toolkits, as opposed to the tools themselves. Instead, he decided start Airtable, a collaboration platform that essentially modernizes one of the least sexy products around: spreadsheets. After selling his first startup, the CRM company Etacts, to Salesforce when he was 21, Liu could have focused his efforts on any number of subjects.

While entrepreneurs, financiers, and reporters tend to flock to “hot” sectors, like AI, autonomous driving, or cryptocurrency, the truth is, companies built around “boring” topics, like human resources or small business loans, are often the ones still standing in the long run.
