In the frenetic world of tech, where the ruling ethos is to move fast and break things, Howie Liu moves at a glacial pace. With Andrew Ofstad and Emmett Nicholas, he launched Airtable in 2013. They wanted to create a spreadsheet with the power of a database. Then they spent three years building a prototype. 

The trio pored over academic papers on collaborative software theory, agonized about the Node.js architecture and obsessed over the speed at which windows popped open. After reading Kenya Hara’s design book White, Liu spent months focusing on the interplay of color and empty space.

Now Airtable is coming to a boil. Liu’s cloud-based software has taken hold in 80,000 organizations, from Netflix to small nonprofits. Revenue is on track to jump 400% to $20 million in 2018, mostly on word of mouth.

Airtable has attached an approachable drag-and-drop experience to a powerful database, much as Windows replaced tedious text-based commands with a graphic interface or AOL offered a welcoming portal to the Web. “It’s an intuitive and fun way to build on data in a way you can’t with clunky products like Microsoft Access and Excel,” says Ray Tonsing of Caffeinated Capital. “It’s a joyful product to use.”

Liu is convinced Airtable can win by being software’s version of Lego, providing blocks to let any business build do-it-yourself custom software cheaply and quickly. “America’s most valuable data is still stored in people’s heads and on Excel sheets,” says Sam Lessin of Slow Ventures, which joined in Airtable’s fundraising in March. “If you can become the place where all the data that operates most business goes, the opportunity to build an ecosystem and be the next great platform becomes obvious.”

Airtable has illustrious acolytes. Netflix uses it as a tool in its postproduction pipeline. Atlantic Records built an Airtable program to manage communication between producers, songwriters and performers. WeWork, an early adopter, has thousands of employees on the software to manage and plan construction projects.

For Calvin Klein, an Airtable database ironed out its fabric-sourcing operation-once a complex juggle of thousands of emails and offline spreadsheets between designers, projects managers and overseas textile mills. Now there’s a central application that manages calendars, images, production costs, manufacturing lead time and shipping schedules. PVH, the parent company of Calvin Klein, has since deployed Airtable to its other brands.

During Hurricane Harvey, the nonprofit Austin Pets Alive created an Airtable app to track missing animals. Cattle farmers in Idaho use it to chart the health history and vaccination records of cows.

At 13 Liu taught himself to code C++ after finding an unread training book in his dad’s office. At 16 he went to Duke and in 2009 got a degree in mechanical engineering and public policy.

Liu landed a software development job in San Jose at Accenture. The salary was higher than his parent’s combined income. But the night before his start date, he got cold feet and never showed. “It was a tough decision. I didn’t have any financial resources to fall back on,” Liu says. “But ultimately I choose to try to do a startup.”

He launched a four-person company called Etacts that aggregated messages from email, Facebook and Twitter. In 2010 Liu got a spot in Y Combinator, the Mountain View, California, nursery for new ventures. Later that year he sold Etacts to Salesforce, netting a million-dollar payday and a gig building a chat product.

At Salesforce, Liu liked the people and the salary but again felt the pull to start something new. He left in 2012, traveled to Japan and Uganda and read books on philosophy and design theory. At that point Andrew Ofsad, a classmate from Duke, was on sabbatical from his sabbatical from his project manager job at Google. Soon the two were lugging oversize computer monitors to each other’s apartments to toy with programs. They wrote one for organizing photos and built a word processor for creative writing.

From Forbes