9/22/2023: Airtable Laid Off Another 237 People
Last week, Airtable laid off another 27% of its workforce, after first laying off 20% at the end of the last year. According to Crunchbase, Airtable has raised $1.4B to date and was last valued at ~$11B at the end of 2021. In the announcement, CEO Howie Liu said:
I also hold myself responsible for Airtable’s long-term financial success for all of our stakeholders–customers, shareholders, and employees. As a cash flow positive business with a large capital reserve, we’ll now have the ability to invest and hire in new areas that we’re confident will drive continued enterprise growth.
If I understand this correctly, he was saying their model was not sustainable before the layoff so he has to make this tough decision. I applaud the CEO’s courage and I hope the affected employees can find new jobs quickly. But this is another example of a company raising too much money and then proceeding to over hire and over spend. If the company had stayed capital efficient, they could have avoided a lot of pain.
I have used Airtable’s product. It’s pretty nice but it’s basically a supercharged spreadsheet. Their new strategy is to focus on enterprise customers but I don’t think their product is necessarily a natural fit for enterprises. I believe they are doing this to achieve venture scale returns. If the company didn’t raise big venture money but instead grew more slowly and organically, it could have become a very profitable business and it could have eventually achieved what Basecamp or Craigslist has achieved. But with $1.4B of funding, they don’t have the option to focus on the small and medium sized customers any more. Airtable is a very nice product. I hope they succeed in the long run and keep the product delightful for small customers.