I missed this. Well. I don’t usually frequent PR pages of software tools I use since I don’t own any Airtable stock shares. But I am quite deeply entrenched in this product with a few applications and moving to anything would be painful and time-consuming process. So for anybody who is looking at Airtable or other potential solutions like SmartSuite or Coda, should be aware Airtable is going through some transition and the Airtable that comes out of it may be a very different one.
Here is the PR statement from the company from December 2022 and it gives some hints about what is going on there, it’s not just downsizing but a complete shakeup.
Read Howie Liu’s message to Airtable employees
Today we’re announcing a major evolution for Airtable: taking us from our roots as a primarily bottoms-up adopted product serving teams at organizations of many sizes, to a company that is focused on bringing connected apps to large enterprises. With this new focus, we’ve made the difficult choice to reduce our team by 254 people and evolve our organizational structure.
These steps are not a reflection of this team’s important work in building Airtable to date, but about what our organization needs going forward. As founders, Andrew and I are responsible for these decisions and the path that led us here. For those who are leaving, we deeply appreciate your contributions in getting Airtable to this stage. We are truly sorry to part ways.
You will receive an email within the next few minutes with details about your individual status. In the meantime, I wanted to share more detail on what’s happening and why.
Strengthening our focus on enterprise
Airtable’s early success was driven by bottoms-up adoption across organizations of all shapes and sizes, and we benefited from an extraordinary amount of organic growth. We discovered enterprises increasingly adopted Airtable for critical workflows built around high-value datasets, often stretching across entire departments rather than at a team level. This part of our business has become increasingly exciting and differentiated – not only in terms of our growth metrics but also in the way enterprise customers are realizing organization-wide value from connected apps. Enterprise, which makes up the majority of our revenue, is growing more than 100% YoY with best-in-class of NDR of 170%.
We’ve rapidly expanded and executed on multiple fronts. At the time, I believed we could successfully pursue all of them in parallel. However, in taking a hard look at our efforts in the current market environment, we’ve identified the teams best positioned to capture the opportunity in enterprise in order to bring complete focus, alignment, and accountability in our execution.
Specifically, this will require two shifts for our business.
First, we will devote the majority of our resources toward landing and expanding large enterprise companies with at least 1k FTEs – where our connected apps vision will deliver the most differentiated value. Builders will be able to create apps that are not only extremely intuitive and delightful for end users, but powerful in breaking down data silos across their organizations.
Second, we have looked at each team across the organization and identified areas where we could narrow our focus and operate in a more lean fashion. This follows a thorough review of non-people spending where we have already begun reducing our spending in areas like marketing media, real estate, business technology, and infrastructure. In trying to do too many things at once, we have grown our organization at a breakneck pace over the past few years. We will continue to emphasize growth, but do so by investing heavily in the levers that yield the highest growth relative to their cost.
Together, these updates will allow us to operate more cautiously in this economic environment. Although we are fortunate to be well-capitalized and have strong enterprise revenue growth with low churn and high rates of expansion, being a lean organization becomes doubly important in times of economic uncertainty.
Saying thank you and farewell to colleagues
None of this background makes up for the fact that layoffs are an incredibly painful experience for those who are impacted. I want everyone who is leaving to know that we are grateful for all of your contributions in building this company, and we will provide the following resources to support you during this transition. Those outside the US will receive similar offerings with differences based on local laws and employment standards.
- Severance pay and compensation: You’ll receive a minimum of 16 weeks of pay, with an additional 2 weeks for every full year of service.
- Accelerated equity vesting: You’ll receive 60 days of accelerated time-based vesting of Airtable RSUs, and if you’ve been here less than one year, we will remove the one-year vesting cliff.
- Continued benefits: You’ll receive the cash equivalent of 6 months of existing healthcare premium coverage, along with an additional cash payment to cover other Airtable-provided benefits for the next 60 days.
- Transition support: You can keep your Airtable-provided laptop and related equipment to help you find a future opportunity as quickly as possible. We will also provide career transition support and create an alumni directory for those who want to stay connected.
- Immigration support: If you have a visa, we’ll connect you with our immigration counsel to discuss your status and structure your severance offering to provide additional time for you to find your next opportunity.
Each departing employee will receive additional information via email, along with an invitation to a 1:1 to meet with a leader and get their questions answered.
Moving forward with a new organizational structure
For those who are staying on with Airtable, we will gather tomorrow at All Hands and in the next week to reset and move forward.
One immediate update we’ll discuss is a new organizational structure aligned to these evolutions in our business. Following many thoughtful conversations with each of our leaders about this more narrowly focused mode of execution, we’ve mutually decided with JJ, Peter, and Seth to part ways. After guiding our people, product, and CE functions through our most recent phase, they’ll be departing today and advising us during this transition. We’ll introduce Marta, Andrew, and Kevin as the new leaders of these functions at tomorrow’s All Hands.
I recognize this is a lot of change all at once and ask for your patience as we navigate these updates to our business. We will follow up in the coming days with more context on how we plan to execute on the opportunity ahead.
In the meantime, I’m encouraging everyone to take care of yourself, support your colleagues, and continue doing right by our customers who rely on Airtable every day.
