Howie Liu built Airtable into one of the most powerful no-code platforms in the world—used by over 450,000 companies and backed by everyone from Benchmark to Thrive to YC. In this episode of HD in HD, I was joined by the founder and CEO of Airtable as he reelected on the unexpected turns that shaped his entrepreneurial path—from cold-pitching algo trading models at a college career fair, to building software that powers teams at scale. In our conversation, we get into: why Airtable took 2.5 years to launch—and why it was worth it how a CRM for his personal contacts became his first YC-backed startup what Salesforce taught him about B2B scale (and what it didn’t) how he talked his way into a quant internship that disappeared overnight the $0-to-financial freedom moment that let him finally think big We only scratched the surface on the Airtable chapter, so don’t be surprised if there’s a part two. ABOUT US: We’re proudly sponsored by Brex —a brand I co-founded, now supporting over 30,000 businesses like Anthropic, DoorDash, and Scale AI, helping them make every dollar count. Connect with us: 1. Howie Liu– https://x.com/howietl 2. Henrique Dubugras– https://x.com/hdubugras This episode was produced and distributed by our friends at Atomik Growth: https://atomikgrowth.com 00:00 Intro 01:20 Introducing Howie and Airtable 02:10 Early life and family 07:33 Early tech 14:13 Building Websites 32:18 Dreaming big 34:07 Middle-Class Entrepreneur Theory 35:55 High school 44:57 College applications 56:40 Duke University 1:05:10 High-paying jobs 1:07:10 Internships and early career 1:09:23 Neural networks and quant trading 1:16:10 New internship 1:22:02 First startup and lessons learned 1:34:22 The birth of Airtable 1:38:27 Outro