Brainstorming $10M AI Business Ideas w/ the Airtable Founder

Sam Parr

Alright, my friend. I recorded one of my favorite types of episodes. My friend **Howie** started a company called **Airtable**; they're worth around **$10 billion**, so he has seen it all. He knows what's going on in the world of **AI** and he has an amazing perspective. For this episode, I asked him a very simple question: **if he were 21 again today, or if he didn't have Airtable, what companies or business ideas would he want to work on?** He came up with **seven different ideas** that he would work on today. So if you are looking for a different business idea, or you're an **AI** nerd (which a lot of us are right now), you're going to love this episode. "Tell me about live shopping with AI avatars."

Howie Liu

I personally think this is a really interesting area. When you think about **live shopping**, which is a huge thing in **Asia**, there's probably tens of billions, if not **$100,000,000,000+** in GMV being transacted through live shopping. [GMV = gross merchandise value] This is basically where an influencer goes and *peddles* a product.

Sam Parr

"Is this on *Insta* [Instagram]? I mean, I pay attention a little bit to *Asia*, but is there a website I can go to to see this right now?"

Howie Liu

There's actually a big chunk of TMU that is powered by this—and definitely TikTok. TikTok has a huge number of these kinds of influencers who basically go and... there's actually a "Shop" tab that you can click on. You see these products, and it's a person basically describing the benefits of a product. Think about influencer marketing taken to the extreme: you just watch people peddling products, you click, and you buy. There's actually one company that's doing really well in the U.S. called Whatnot, and it actually—oh, yeah.

Sam Parr

I like whatnot.

Howie Liu

Yeah, exactly. And now what's cool about it is there's so much personality to the content. In a way, it's almost like watching **Twitch**. It's not just about the actual product; it's about seeing this person talk about the product. Maybe it's a really cool new shoe from **Nike** or a vintage shoe, and they're talking about their own experiences with it—childhood experiences with the **Jordan** brand or whatever. So it becomes a really interactive experience. My pitch for this idea is basically: obviously you can have really rich, engaging experiences in the very near future with **avatars**, right? I mean, if you go to heijen.com, it's a great avatar product—it's the easiest, fastest, self-serve avatar product out there.

Sam Parr

"Are you an investor in these guys?"

Howie Liu

I am an investor in **Heijen**, and I really like the team there. They just built the *best, easiest-to-use* avatar product — that was kind of their claim to fame. They have basically "premade avatars," which are effectively created from real human actors they've licensed. You can use one of their premade avatars, or you can create your own. I think of this as a really fundamental capability. Think about all the things you can do with avatars: sending a sales video where you're pitching each target customer in a personal way, or a CEO sending a thank-you video to every single attendee of our last event. In this case, I think applying the avatar concept to live shopping is powerful. You can have *one-on-one* interactions with — it could be a celebrity. Maybe you get real influencers to sign on. It's like a Kim Kardashian–type who's represented in avatar form, and each person shopping gets to have a one-on-one interaction with her about Skims and the Skims products they want to try out.

Sam Parr

Are you guys using any of this at Airtable? </FormattedResponse>

Howie Liu

We actually have an internal setup that's powered by *Airtable*. We use our own Airtable web agents to research different target customers. We've learned a lot about them, and we can generate customized email pitches for each one. Right now it's just email, but we're experimenting with video. We have an internal setup that can generate an avatar video, powered by *HeyGen*, automatically from content in a row in Airtable.

Sam Parr

It could.

Howie Liu

It could be a list of different event attendees for the use case I just described. I may actually use it for *thank-you notes* for different events that I host in the future. For example, if I host a dinner with some of our customers, I could automate creating a video that looks like it's me. I would probably be upfront about it and say, "Hey, here's an avatar version of Howie saying thank you for coming." The novelty of that would actually tickle people's fancy. So, the idea is to send a **personalized thank-you video** from me to every attendee at all of our events.

Sam Parr

Can you do that now? Like, if I—if I wanted to implement it... I mean, that sounds awesome. If I want to go and do that right now, how would I set that up?

Howie Liu

So you can do it today. It just requires a little bit of scripting in **Airtable**, and that scripting itself you can actually generate with **AI**. The idea is: you would create a list of different people you want to send the video to, or a list of topics you want to create videos for. We already have in **Airtable** a scripting layer where you can define any arbitrary code; it's hosted in our infrastructure. In this case, you would define the code to talk to the **HeyGen API**. A lot of these AI products have APIs, so you can create your own orchestration layer in **Airtable** to automatically, for each row, ask **HeyGen** to generate a video programmatically for you using this avatar. Then you get a link to a **HeyGen** video that you can directly send to a customer, or download it and attach it, etcetera.

Sam Parr

What's this **AI-personalized news** thing?

Howie Liu

When I think about my news-reading habits, I sometimes appreciate reading just the front page of The Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times. There's something valuable about that curated experience—everybody sees the same front page. Ironically, I actually get the print edition of newspapers because I like that physical and consistent experience. I know I'm seeing the exact same paper as millions of other people. For anything else—if I'm reading something online or I see a link—I usually copy and paste the content into *ChatGPT* or *Claude* and ask it to summarize. I might say, "Pull out the key information," etc. I even have some saved prompts to do this. What I really want is not to manually summarize each article. I want an *AI news aggregator* that automatically finds articles that are interesting to me. There are certain topics I care about, and I want an AI that knows what I care about. More importantly, it shouldn't just summarize the news and say, "Here are the summarized articles." It should become an interactive agent I can talk to—like a friend who's a super news expert and always reading everything. Our mutual friend Nick, for example, knows everything that's happening in the world: you spend thirty minutes with him and you learn about any topic you want. I want that—Nick in AI form—so I could just ask it, "Tell me more about this," and it can go and give me more info.

Sam Parr

Dude — my company... My company that used to own this podcast before we sold it was **The Hustle**. It was a daily newsletter. This was our pitch to our customers: we are your smart, no-bullshit friend who will tell you what you need to know every day. I had a team — it was crazy. We had a team of three people who would reach almost **3 million** people a day writing this newsletter. We actually were tinkering with this idea, and it was so manual. We were like, "What if a user tells us what they care about, and we write tons of different bits of news and plug it into someone's email based on their interests?" Then we'll even go...

Howie Liu

So, you can *mix and match*.

Sam Parr

Yeah. I was like, "We'll even go and get an expert, like *Howie*, to comment on some of the stuff, and we'll put some of the comments in the newsletter." And I was like, "Oh my god, this is so *manual*." What you're describing is—whenever I'm thinking about newsletters, I'm like, "This just *changes everything*." It totally... I actually think...

Howie Liu

But, you know... yeah.

Sam Parr

It could still be a great business, you. I would just use **AI** for all of it.

Howie Liu

Totally. And maybe you could take it to the next level, which is it actually becomes a platform—like **Substack**—where you allow creators to create their own branded newsletters and you push the distribution/promo of each one. Because you're powering this kind of white‑label, **AI‑powered** platform, they can very easily spin up their own custom newsletter. A different direction is that you create different **AI personalities**. I think a commonly underappreciated thing is that AI doesn't have to be robotic. It doesn't have to just be utilitarian—“summarize this article in a clean, AP‑style.” You could actually inject tons of personality and say, for example, “be like a **TMZ** gossip reporter who sensationalizes the crap out of this new celebrity gossip.” There are so many interesting ways to play around with that. News by nature is a very high‑engagement use case: it's something you read every day, maybe even every hour. So the opportunity to change how people interact with and find out about this stuff is huge. I think there’s going to be a very large business created there—**BuzzFeed**, **The Hustle**, etc., were high‑growth businesses in that era of news, and I think now there's going to be a different high‑growth era of AI news. Hey, I got a quick break because I want to tell you something cool.

Shaan Puri

So our sponsor for this episode is **HubSpot**. But instead of the ad telling you about HubSpot, they wanted to do something that's useful for you. They did some research and found that a bunch of people in our community have side hustles: they start a business on the side, get it going, and then it becomes their main hustle over time. So instead of just telling you about the features of HubSpot, they wanted to give you something that will be useful for your side hustle. They've put together a database of **AI prompts** — things that you could put into **ChatGPT** or your favorite AI tool that will help you with your side hustle. Check it out; it's going to save you a bunch of time. I think it's a prompt database you should be using to make your side hustle more successful. You can use this as your little personal cheat sheet — your toolset to be a better operator with your side hustle. You can either scan the **QR code** that's on the screen or get the link in the description to get the AI prompt database. Alright — back to the show.

Sam Parr

Are you a *personal finance* nerd? </FormattedResponse>

Howie Liu

I was a very early **Mint** user. I remember really wanting to have visibility over my different expenditures and to aggregate them. I will say the tedious act of planning and doing a lot of budgeting is *not my forte*. But I have a multifamily office tech setup now that helps with a lot of that stuff. </FormattedResponse>

Sam Parr

"You listed on here **real-time AI avatar products** for different vertical applications, like **personal finance advisors**. Tell me about that." </FormattedResponse>

Howie Liu

So the idea here actually is: if you're a very high-net-worth client, you can get a very strategic wealth adviser who literally sits down with you, looks at your balance sheet, reviews all your assets, talks about your goals, and actually comes up with a plan that's as good as a CFO's plan for a real corporation — but for you as an individual. It's the **business of you** as an individual, and you can plan it out. You can think about the cash-flow needs you have, what kind of assets you want to invest in for near-term versus long-term yield. The reality is most people don't get that level of attention and thoughtful design in a financial plan. Furthermore, most people don't even have access to a live financial adviser to just call up and talk to. There is something very comforting about literally talking to somebody. Maybe that's why a lot of banks still have retail locations — even though for most transactions you don't really need them, people want to go in and talk to a person. I think the idea here is using the really smart reasoning capabilities of the newest models. I don't think you could have done this "pre o three" [pre-O3 — referring to earlier models], where you could actually come up with a very thought-out personal financial plan, recommend how much you should invest into equities exposure, and recommend how much you should spend — but do it with an avatar on top so it's a very human-like experience. You get to talk to them and call them up anytime you're feeling stressed about your financial situation. Do you use any consumer-facing personal finance apps at all now? I don't, because I have this team that I can actually go and talk to. But to me, if everybody could have that experience...

Sam Parr

It's awesome. Everybody would be able to plan better. Have you seen—let me show you one. It's called **Kubera** (*kubera.com*). I have no association with these guys, but I've talked about them so much that I'm actually on their homepage because they, like, quote "Oh, cool"—they, like, quote... [trails off]

Howie Liu

That's awesome.

Sam Parr

They quoted me.

Howie Liu

Oh, yeah, there you are.

Sam Parr

And this doesn't matter if you're worth $50,000 or $100,000,000. A lot of people use software to **aggregate their net worth** because even if you only have $50, sometimes you'll own a couple of cars, maybe two bank accounts, maybe some amount of money in *Robinhood*, whatever. And then, if you're really wealthy, you have many, many dozens of accounts — some money with this person, some money with that person. You probably...

Howie Liu

Have some private investments.

Sam Parr

And this just does a really good job of aggregating it — *all of it* — which a lot of companies claim they do. The issue is...

Howie Liu

That Adapar *kinda* does that for the high end.

Sam Parr

Yeah, dude. I think *Addepar* seems awesome, but I think you have to have, like, at least $50,000,000 in liquid net worth with one of those banks — Morgan Stanley or J.P. Morgan — in order to get access to Addepar. That's insane. You have to be even more than an ultra-high-net-worth client. So Addepar is crazy, but I've never even seen it. With **Kubera** they do such a good job of aggregating everything because the connections don't break. Anyone who's ever used **Mint** or **Wealthfront** knows the connections to all of your accounts break all the time and you have to re-enter the password, log in... it's the biggest pain. These guys have done a good job with that. What they do is they have a version where you can export the information. Is it called— is it called **JSON**? </FormattedResponse>

Howie Liu

Yeah, **JSON**.

Sam Parr

So, you can export it in **JSON** format, which is what **ChatGPT** uses, or you could just connect your **Kubera** with your **ChatGPT**. Oh, very cool. It started as an export; now it automatically does it, and you can ask it questions. What I've done is use Kubera to upload all my accounts. When you do this, they don't actually have access to transact—obviously they can just view your accounts. Then I use ChatGPT to create a project that includes a **Warren Buffett** book, or sometimes a more aggressive financial advisor—like a book by someone who has written about financial advising—because you have different gurus sometimes, you know what I mean. I can use this to ask questions and have my own personal finance adviser. Do you know what I mean?

Howie Liu

Yeah, yeah. That's all — they're like, "Give me advice using the *fundamental investor theory*."

Sam Parr

Yeah. So you'll be like, "Look: my *net worth* is [blank] today. If I want to be at this mark in ten years, show me what I should do." Or, "If I want to buy a house in eight years, what would you suggest is a good budget to have based on what you know about me now?" You know what I'm saying?

Howie Liu

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm sure it *works great for that.*

Sam Parr

Dude, it's awesome. It's *so* awesome. Now, having a financial adviser is still great sometimes, because oftentimes the value is not in the advice they give—it's the fact that there's a human being you can trust. But anyway, this is how I've been using **AI**... yeah, yeah, with my mind.

Howie Liu

Well, I mean, imagine that—the experience you're getting—but now you also know about feeling like you can **trust a human** more. I mean, how much of that is based on the fact that it actually is a human versus how much of it is literally just the psychology of talking to a face?

Sam Parr

No. I think — I think you and I, because of our age, here's what I have to bet. *I'm making this up:* I bet that the 18‑year‑old today, in five years, is going to go to the doctor. When they go, they're going to tell their doctor, "This is the illness that I have, and I think it's this," because what you and I would have said five years ago—or your parents would have said five years ago—was, "WebMD says that it appears as though I have this illness." </FormattedResponse>

Howie Liu

Right, right.

Sam Parr

Yeah, so the young guys nowadays, they just say, "ChatGPT said this." The doctor is going to say, "Well, I agree with you, and according to my belief, ChatGPT says..." And **ChatGPT**, I think, is going to be the stamp of approval — or **AI**, like... yeah. I think they're going to trust AI more than a human being. Does that make sense?

Howie Liu

Oh, for sure. I mean, I think today it's already better. Everybody should be taking all of their personal health diagnostics — you get a blood test or whatever — and running that through a *ChatGPT-like* system. Upload it, ask it, "Here are my other symptoms; here's how I feel. Tell me what I might have or what could be wrong." I've seen so many stories from both personal friends and on Reddit, Twitter, etc., of people who caught diagnoses that their doctor just missed. Not necessarily because they're bad doctors — although a lot of doctors probably are bad doctors, right? Like, there's...

Sam Parr

A bit curt there, *dude*. They spent **ten minutes** with you. Like, what are they going to solve? </FormattedResponse>

Howie Liu

Exactly that.

Sam Parr

Yeah, exactly. I got an injury lifting weights about two months ago, and I used *ChatGPT* for PT [physical therapy]. It told me what to do, so I followed the routine for *three weeks*, and my back improved.

Howie Liu

Totally. I mean, it's literally trained on the best knowledge out there. You're getting the wisdom of Peter Attia, Huberman, and other health prognosticators to inform responses. ChatGPT is a response to you. I've become the **most extreme version of an optimist** for new, disruptive entrepreneurs and startups. What I mean is that the world moves through different phases. In a stable phase—when technology is relatively unchanged—things look a certain way. That was basically true of web and web tech from at least 2018 until generative AI hit. For a few years the technology was very stable and mature, and it became about leveraging existing distribution if you were an incumbent. It's really hard to compete against big players like Salesforce or Microsoft in that era. Now, a lot of those assumptions are off. Every company is kind of **up for grabs**. You can look even at non-tech companies: if you're a property-management firm, for example, half of your cost structure is automatable, if not more. In that world the margins on the business are so low. I actually talked to the founder of a company based in Germany that's doing exactly this. They're buying up different property-management firms and using their own AI tech to automate a large part of the job. They don't fire people; they keep everybody employed, but they take on more business as a result. They've quickly become one of the largest property-management companies in Germany, if not in Europe, by aggregating traditional businesses and creating AI leverage—taking what was probably a low-percent-margin business to a **tens-of-percent**-margin business. From a PE [private equity] standpoint, that leverage is huge. I think that's a playbook we're seeing a lot and are excited about, because every traditional business—especially those with a large portion of costs that could be automated—is up for grabs. Think about call centers, BPOs, but really any business with automatable cost structure.

Sam Parr

"What's a BPO?"

Howie Liu

**Labor-intensive business process outsourcing (BPO) companies.** There are a lot of offshore firms that have literally thousands of employees you can outsource very rote tasks to. Examples include analyst work—having people go comb through documents and look for factual information—or doing research for you. Support centers themselves are a form of **BPO**: large, client-agnostic call centers that can take on business from any client rather than serving a single company. For instance, you could say, "I want to spin up a call center for Airtable." Traditionally, that meant hiring a whole bunch of humans sitting in a room somewhere and hiring them on demand. Now, of course, a huge amount of that work can be automated.

Sam Parr

Dude, I get so many of those calls a day. A lot of times they say, "they are an **AI**." They're horrible... they still suck. Do you get a lot of those calls?

Howie Liu

"I... I do, although I mean..."

Sam Parr

I—I don't pick them up, dude. I pick them up. I always pick them up. I want to get to know these people. Sometimes I can tell where they are. Here's what I get all the time: I always get a text message that says, "This is Coinbase: someone in Serbia logged in to your account." I know it's a scam, but I call them and I'm like, "Oh my god, let's figure out how this scam works a little bit." I do it all the time, so I'll spend...

Howie Liu

I mean, first of all, you're totally **feeding the bear**. If you didn't give them a response, they'd know... you're a more likely target.

Sam Parr

Dude, I'm so into it. They're like, "What's your name?" I'm like, "Oh, it's Kevin Smith." And they're like, "Oh, I see your account right now." I'll be like, "You do what? Tell me about it. Tell me about it."

Howie Liu

How much do I have? Yeah, *this is awesome.*

Sam Parr

And so, they're like — they go through these whole scripts, and I'm like, *"This is... this is awesome that you found my account. That is really funny."* Do you... you? </FormattedResponse>

Howie Liu

You've got to figure out how to *scam the scammer*—by the end, you get them to give you their information.

Sam Parr

"Have you seen the YouTube channels that do that? They're so funny." "No, I haven't, dude. There's guys..."

Howie Liu

Oh — this is my weekend.

Sam Parr

There's guys on YouTube that have 10 million subscribers, and they're really elite, sharp guys. They will pretend they're old ladies — they use a voice changer — and get the scammer to install software so the scammer's webcam will come on and they can control it. It's... the greatest.

Howie Liu

"Oh no."

Sam Parr

This is the greatest jet.

Howie Liu

That is insane.

Sam Parr

"It's the *greatest*."

Howie Liu

"That's amazing."

Sam Parr

But these AI call companies — they're still horrible. Are you bullish on them?</FormattedResponse>

Howie Liu

Well, you know, I think the models have to get better at *real-time, synchronous interactions* — especially for **voice calls** — before AI can fully take them over. For chat, it's already better in many cases. When you're chatting with somebody, those chat experiences are often horrible with humans because the person is probably handling like twenty parallel chats; they don't really know or care about you, whereas an AI can be fully attentive. But I agree: voice is just not quite there yet. You've probably seen that *Sesame voice demo*, which is one of the better real-time voice interactions.

Sam Parr

"What's it?"

Howie Liu

**It's called "Interrupt" — Sesame.ai.** You can literally call it.</FormattedResponse>

Sam Parr

Oh yes, I did see this. I *absolutely*... you think this is a good product?

Howie Liu

I—it's a research team and this is a demo product, but I think it shows where the models are going. I think it could come from this team and this company, but **OpenAI**, **Eleven Labs**, etc. are all working on improving that *interactivity*. OpenAI revealed the last voice model release where you could actually interrupt the AI halfway through a conversation. That was kind of a big deal. It's still not there yet because it doesn't feel right—if you just talk to it, it doesn't feel like a human. But I think that will be a frontier we'll cross in the next year or two.

Sam Parr

"So, one of the last things you had on here was **AI productivity tools**. You said **Cursor** for email — what's that look like?"

Howie Liu

So I just generally think this form factor is not about using AI to completely replace the current workflow. The cool thing about **Cursor** is that it's not just a chat interface you use to generate code or to say "you don't need to code." It's actually an IDE — they forked **VS Code** [Visual Studio Code], a popular IDE, and added an *agentic* coding experience on top. As a developer, you can still be in the code. In fact, I think that's the value of Cursor. I think applying that paradigm to other productivity experiences makes sense — one obvious example is email. Usually, you open email, click on each message, read each one, etc. You can currently go to a separate product like Gemini, and **Claude** and OpenAI both have integrations into email where you can ask questions about your inbox. But I think the ideal experience is a blended one. In that blended experience, you can run agentic workflows and AI could automatically do some pre-reading of your emails, telling you what's important and what's not. It might even do research across your other content sources — look up information in your accounts and calendar, or do a web search — to help you decide things like, "Hey, I got this pitch from an entrepreneur who wants to be on my podcast — is it worth my time?" It could already have a recommendation for you. So, one of the places people spend a lot of time today is email (and, for developers, the IDE). That's where I would attack: start with where people are actually spending time, because, on first principles, a lot of that time could be automated or augmented with AI.

Sam Parr

So I'm going to ask you how you would build this. From my side, I had an email company, so I know a little bit about email, but I don't know the tech — I don't know the technical capabilities of everything. Email is hard to build on top of because **Gmail** owns everything. **Superhuman** did something interesting. For the listeners: Superhuman was a brand-new email client — you downloaded Superhuman and used that instead of Gmail. They recently sold last week for, I think, the rumor was about **$800 million** or so.

Howie Liu

Yeah, saw that.

Sam Parr

*To a great...*

Howie Liu

Yeah, to Grammarly.

Sam Parr

And it was a **very bold mission**. I think they fell short — if they sold, that's what I'm guessing, if I had to guess. But it was a pretty magnificent effort to get after it. My question to you is: if you were going to build something like this, you pretty much would have to **start from scratch**. I would think of a **new email client**, not a **Gmail** plugin.

Howie Liu

Yeah. So, interestingly, I also worked in email before Airtable. My startup before that was a Y Combinator (YC) company, eTax. It was actually — I think we were the first startup to build a Gmail plugin. It wasn't an official plugin at the time; there was no plugin framework. We literally figured out, on our own, how to hack what's called the DOM, which is basically Gmail's HTML representation of the email client. We literally injected a UI on top of that with a Chrome extension. So we kind of pioneered this idea of, "Oh wow, you could be an email." Then we added our own sidebar to every email to show information about who you're talking about.

Sam Parr

But could they have banned you?

Howie Liu

They could have certainly sent us a **cease and desist** and said, "What you're doing is against our **TOS** as a site." Then they could do some things to make it annoying for us. It's almost like they could just keep moving the target — they could change the layout of the page.

Sam Parr

They just make your life.</FormattedResponse>

Howie Liu

Without making it look different to the user in ways that would break our integration. And that did happen. I don't think it was intentional. I think they would just update the page, re-render it, and then it would change the layout. Then, for a day, our extension would be broken. We'd have to furiously try to code a fix. That was kind of the really, really early days. Ironically, Superhuman's founder, Rahul, had actually founded a company that kind of competed with them — Rapportive — around 2010. Rapportive would... yeah.

Sam Parr

Yeah, yeah. Oh my man — for anyone who's above, probably 33, who was involved in technology, **Reportiv** was a game-changing tool. It was so cool that they created that.

Howie Liu

Yeah, yeah. So, you know, email has been... I mean, it's interesting. From the time that [unclear: "reported and etax"] existed to now, email really hasn't changed very much at all. Like, you look at Gmail — it's kind of the same product. And, you know, the **status quo argument** is: "Well, it's good enough; don't fix it." But I think that, to me, *Superhuman* was an interesting innovation on email. They did build their own client. I don't actually think it's that hard. Certain things seem really hard in theory, but in practice they're not that hard. *Airtable* — obviously it's hard to build Airtable — but we ended up architecting our own proprietary database engine to power it instead of using something off the shelf like MySQL or Postgres to power the real-time collaboration parts of our table. It turned out that it was the right decision, and ultimately it turned out to be cleaner and better for us to go that route than to try to repurpose something off...

Sam Parr

The

Howie Liu

Shelf.

Sam Parr

But it's harder. You know, my quick thought: you have to raise—yeah, you have to raise **tens or hundreds**, or you did, and someone else would also have to raise a **fuckload** of money to do that. But also, getting revenue for that, I think, would be a slog. I don't— you guys did it fast, but **Superhuman** did not.

Howie Liu

Yeah, and I think Superhuman was an interesting product for a number of reasons. I mean, one: I think it was a really good product, but it was really hard to articulate what the killer feature or set of features was that made it 10x better than email—or normal email. It was faster, and it had some nice features like email tracking, etc., but it was hard to say, “This is clearly a different paradigm; this is 10x better.” I think that with AI you could now build a product that actually is *radically different, radically better*. In fact, a former Airtable employee of mine, JB, is now working on a company that's doing exactly this. I did a little funding round into it—chief.so. Oh—is it loading for you? Okay, there.

Sam Parr

"We go. You have to give them — you have to write a *bigger check*, though, so they can get a *.ai*."

Howie Liu

Exactly. Yeah, I think it's a really interesting space. I actually think that you can build this product without a massive team and a massive funding round. Maybe part of that is because, you know, in a very meta way, you're very **AI‑leveraged** in how you build products. You can get so much more done as an AI‑leveraged team than you could have in the past — *Cursor* itself.

Sam Parr

It's just hard to build a business when you charge **$20 a month**.

Howie Liu

Meaning, it's like—it's *not enough*, or it precludes too many people.

Sam Parr

The first one.

Howie Liu

Yeah. So, actually, one of the premises here is that there is a **top 1% audience** — not necessarily meaning the richest 1%, but a **1% power-user audience of email** for whom email is like their life. Right? Probably for you; definitely for me; every VC; maybe even realtors, lawyers, etc. Email is everything to them. And if you can make them 10% more efficient at email, they'll pay — not $20 but $200 a month. Maybe even $2,000 a month. If you gave me an awesome email product that even saved me, call it, **5 hours a week** in time and, not only that, allowed me to not miss key opportunities... Sometimes I get literally hundreds of real emails every day that **Gmail** considers important. Frankly, with that many coming in, I miss some, and sometimes they're really important.

Sam Parr

Like, I have a full-time assistant, and it feels like a *large chunk* of her job is just categorizing my emails.

Howie Liu

Yeah, for sure. Some people have a full-time **EA** who literally doesn't just categorize the emails but goes through them, does research on each one, and tells you, "Hey, I did some research — this is how you should respond." I think it's a huge, huge space. One of my lessons learned from Cursor, actually... and I remember...

Sam Parr

Did you invest in them?

Howie Liu

Now, first, looking at the cursor.

Sam Parr

What's that? You invested in Cursor?

Howie Liu

I did. Actually, I was introduced to them by Peter Fenton from Benchmark, who's our investor at Airtable. He's one of the most phenomenal pickers of talent and opportunity spaces that I've ever met—brilliant in every way as an investor. I remember having this discussion with him about, "What is the **TAM** for something like **Cursor**?" You have to factor in that, of course, Microsoft exists. They actually literally own VS Code—even though it's open source and you could fork it. They already have GitHub and this massive developer audience. How big can an upstart get? This was when Cursor was probably in the low millions in revenue. My argument was that the developer audience for **AI-augmented coding** is so large. Today you might have, call it, 30 million developers—that's the number Stripe always quotes. Maybe that will expand to 50 to 100 million developers.

Sam Parr

Yeah, no-brainer.

Howie Liu

It's easier to develop. On top of that, it would be perfectly rational for every single one of those people to pay at least **$1,000 a year** for an AI—like a coding agent—that makes them way more productive. Not just 10% more productive, but **2x**. Maybe it's even rational for them to pay **$10,000**. Okay. Now you're talking about a **$30 to $300 billion TAM**. Carving off even a small, few-percent niche of that—especially when coding itself is so fragmented (different types of coding, different languages, front-end, back-end, etc.)—means all you have to do is win a sizable **5%** niche and you've built a multibillion-dollar revenue business.

Sam Parr

Is that the framework for how you think of what's interesting for starting companies?

Howie Liu

I think so. I mean, I think there's two paths you can take. One is to go really **broad**, like in this Cursor example or "Cursor for X." Pick a market that's just so big — tens of millions of potential target users — and for whom the value is significant enough that they will pay for it. It's not freemium or purely a free, ad-driven product experience; it's not a consumer product. Pick something that's broad enough and deep enough where there's a very large pie to capture value from. Then, even if you end up only capturing a niche of that pie, you still have a really large business on your hands. The alternate path is to go really **deep and narrow**. This is more like the property-management example, where you're probably never going to have 100 million users who need property management software, but if you go into that vertical and you attack it.

Sam Parr

You might have 5,000, yeah.

Howie Liu

Yeah. If you go in and attack it very deeply, for each one you can extract even more revenue out of them. In this—I mean, the *most leveraged* way you can extract revenue out of that space is not just to sell white‑label software and charge a property management firm X dollars per month. You actually take the entire cake by buying them out outright, running the PE playbook, and getting leverage on their... [transcription cuts off]

Sam Parr

"And what's **Airtable**, the first one?"

Howie Liu

**Airtable** is definitely the first one. We're in a space where, especially now that we've relaunched the product as basically an *agentic-first* product, you can literally come in and talk to our agent, **Omni**, to ask it to build any app. It's very much akin to the vibe of coding products out there, but the difference is that ours is backed by the reliable **no-code** components we've spent the past ten years building—making them scalable, real-time collaborative, etc. So if you want to build any business app—say, for your business you want a **CRM**, or a way to track people who are coming on your show, or a content pipeline—any of those things, we want to be the best way to spin up a reliable business app for internal operations. We're not trying to be an external, consumer-facing prototype tool. If you want that, go to, like, the Replits and the V Zeros, etc., to spin up a consumer-facing hobby app. But for business apps, the need is definitely at least tens of millions of people out there who want to build apps for their own business. Every single business should be creating apps this way and will probably be replacing old legacy software with this over the next few years. What's—last question: what's this all you wrote in?

Sam Parr

The sheet you just wrote—*exotics*?

Howie Liu

Exotic ideas for AI — more off-the-beaten-path stuff. I think there are some really interesting new niches that will be created. An example would be: what's the next consumer social app that's **AI-native**? I don't think that just means it looks like Instagram or TikTok and has some AI features to help you write posts. I think it might mean something different. There are a few startups trying this where you actually have social networks or chat groups where half the participants are actually **AI avatars**. What does that look like? What's interesting about this space is that, unlike the **pre-AI** approach — where you take a known problem and do something very solvable, like automate support costs or automate property management costs with AI — you can very clearly visualize what that looks like. What I find really interesting is that we don't know what consumer behaviors are going to look like in an **AI-native** era. We saw the transition from linear TV to internet to mobile, etcetera, and at each... [sentence trails off]

Howie Liu

I think there were some surprises about the way content and engagement patterns have actually changed. It's not like we just took people watching *linear TV*. </FormattedResponse>

Sam Parr

Right.

Howie Liu

And then gave them *YouTube*. It's like, we...

Sam Parr

Somehow, I went from watching **TV** to watching *video games* on my phone.

Howie Liu

Is exactly, yeah.

Sam Parr

*I mean, like...*

Howie Liu

Nobody would have guessed Twitch, right? How's that the big thing? I just think that when you have people who are not just technologists—like the first wave of post-ChatGPT inhibition was very much driven by technologists who were very close to the models and the model research and understood what the models were capable of—you start to see a shift. I think we're going to see more and more people who are actually more *artists* than technologists. Think about the artistry of: what does consumer psychology and behavior look like when you have this new "paintbrush," which is AI-powered experiences? In some cases, I think you can create hyper-engaging consumer experiences that could be even more addictive than social media is today. Imagine people having the "perfect girlfriend or boyfriend avatar." People are already kind of doing this with even ChatGPT or Grok, etc. Grok [xAI, Elon Musk's product] has an "unhinged" mode—if you played with that, it's pretty interesting. They also have a "sexy mode," which, as you can guess, is basically where they've removed all of the PG and safety features that ChatGPT and Claude have. So you could have a very explicit conversation with this AI and it will happily engage. That just kind of shows you that most of the AI experiences we're getting, especially from the big model companies, have been very cleaned up...

Sam Parr

**My attention:** petite, controversial questions all the time, like...

Howie Liu

Yeah, like it... and it's like it refuses.

Sam Parr

"It refuses."

Howie Liu

"I can't answer that."

Sam Parr

And sometimes I ask it things where I'm asking, like... For example, *I love history*. If I'm reading about **World War Two**, I'll ask it about very sensitive topics and say, "Explain this topic to me." But anyway, it won't even touch some of these things.

Howie Liu

Yeah, exactly. You know, that's the whole debate — it's a little bit like *free speech censorship* but applied to AI, right? It's about how much you can actually censor AI for safety and for moral clauses. How much of that is even globally applicable versus what's moral for one culture but maybe immoral for another, etcetera? I think it's interesting to see Grok be... [trails off]

Sam Parr

That's crazy.

Howie Liu

Not completely *unfiltered*, but it is a lot more... pushing the boundaries, right? </FormattedResponse>

Sam Parr

So, I had *never* heard of this. I don't...

Howie Liu

I think there's... yeah, yeah, yeah. No—I mean, you should try it today. Try the *"unhinged"* button.

Sam Parr

Like, I was trying to learn about the Israel–Palestine conflict. I'm just trying to understand the background, and Chatuchipati won't even touch some of the topics. I'm like, "Oh — *I'm just trying to learn.*"

Howie Liu

Controversial—exactly. Yeah. And so, I think that's going to be really interesting when you start to see people really push the boundaries. I mean, you know, they say a lot of great tech is always pioneered for the salacious, the black market—*Silk Road*-type stuff, right? And so, what does that look like in the **AI era**?

Sam Parr

Well, **you're the man**. I appreciate your insight. I like...

Howie Liu

No, I enjoyed this. This was awesome.

Sam Parr

It's fun because you have a really interesting perspective. You're a young guy, but you've been in the game for so long, and you have such breadth because of the size of your company. So it's really cool to see your thinking—how you are gonna, like, somewhat predict the future and all that stuff. But, dude, **you're badass.** I appreciate you doing this.

Howie Liu

Oh, thank you. Well, I *really enjoyed the combo*, and I'm happy to chat anytime.

Sam Parr

Alright, that's it. That's the pod.