How we restructured Airtable's entire org for AI

I actually cut my one-on-one roster by default, and the idea is not that I don't want to spend time one-on-one with people, but rather that I found that the... Just having more standing one-on-ones actually precludes me from engaging in more timely topics.

"Alpha" here refers to valuable insights or proprietary information that can provide a competitive advantage, borrowed from finance terminology.

I want to make most meetings very timely and very informed by real alpha. There's got to be some kind of value and insight to seed that with.

For me, hundreds of dollars spent on this exercise is trivial compared to the potential strategic value of having better insights. It's as if a really, really smart chief of staff has gone through and read every single sales call transcript that we've had in the past year.

Cursor and Windsurf are AI-powered code editors built from the ground up with AI integration, representing "AI native" companies.

How would an AI native company, like a cursor or windsurf, et cetera, how would they execute? And are we executing as fast as them and taking advantage of all the new stuff as well as them?

If you want to cancel all your meetings for like a day or for an entire week and just go play around with every AI product you think could be relevant to Airtable, go do it.

We now have what I call the fast thinking group, which officially is called AI platform, but it really means we want to just ship a bunch of new capabilities on a near weekly basis.

The three roles refer to product managers, engineers, and designers on product teams.

There's a strong advantage to any of those three roles who can kind of cross over into the other two. It really does become more about individual attitude.

If you were literally founding a new company from scratch with the same mission, how would you execute on that mission using a fully AI native approach? If you can't, then you should find a buyer and then if you really care about this mission, go and start the next carnation of it.

You can't just look at screenshots or a pre-recorded video of a new product feature. AI is something you have to play with, and ideally you're playing with both the packaged up app or solution that you've built with it, but you're also playing around directly with the underlying primitives.

Everyone can learn how to be a versatile kind of unicorn product engineer/designer hybrid in the AI-native era. The only thing stopping you is just going out and doing it.

I take pride in being the number one most expensive in inference cost user of Airtable AI, not just within our own company, but I think for a long time I was globally across all our customers.

Don't step away from the details that both you love. If your passion is building product and product design, even if it feels like at times the company needs to do all this other stuff like scale up, go to market, and operations... Don't lose the essence of the thing that you love doing.