What has been the impact of Airtable's shift towards enterprise on its market position and user base?

When I started at the company, we hadn't even decided to be B2B. The founders were  really convinced that they were going to see viral end user consumer adoption in the same way that Dropbox or Evernote had. That was sort of the thesis and that they would eventually move into business, but they would start with consumers.

Just being frank with you, we absolutely did not see that. What we did see was that when businesses were signing up, then we would see viral adoption within the businesses. So we ended up sort of shifting to focus primarily on businesses, not explicitly enterprise, but lots and lots and lots of small businesses. That’s still really a foundation of the business.

But that shift towards more enterprise happened earlier than you might even have anticipated, and part of the reason was because we started getting Fortune 500s reaching out, being like, "We will pay you now."

And one of the reasons we knew sort of we were moving in the direction of product market fit was that people were going and hunting down ways to try and pay us because they wanted it to continue to exist.

That was a pretty big wake-up call for us that maybe we were really onto something. We should be focusing on those use cases and in those larger companies where maybe we were actually more valuable than we had anticipated being.

So that's when we brought in customer success, when we started having those conversations, and we honestly got away with serving huge enterprises without having real sales for far longer than any company has any right to, because the product was so incredibly popular within those companies. 

You would see a company go from a single team of 40 people to dozens of teams and more than 1,000 users in less than a year. Some of those were paid.

Some of them would be free, but it's a very, very different conversation with IT when you're going in being like, "Hey, so there's 1,000 people who are going to be super angry if you don't figure this out. Sorry." 

That was our bottom- up strategy: build a huge user base, and over-invest from a customer success perspective. We had really deep relationships with those people.

We were going in and doing trainings. We'd build custom content for them. We were onsite. I was in New York fucking all the time, working directly with those customers, as were people like Shani, really to get those incredibly deep relationships and insights. 

Then sales at that point was more of a "Make sure IT signs off on this" kind of a thing. It was very push them through a process, make sure that we fill out the security questionnaires, all that stuff. It wasn't really persuasive per se. It was much more like they're trying to give us the money, figure out how much it should be, and get rid of any roadblocks and focus a lot on capitalizing on that growth.

When that change finally happened, much later—because we were able to ride that for quite some time—we had so few people internally that we were always super oversubscribed if you were trying to get an enterprise deal from Airtable.

That changed not so much because we needed to go further up market— we were already working with huge enterprises and had been for years— but because the thesis of the company became that we could do that all faster by layering on a tops down sales motion and selling directly without necessarily always having a base of users in place.