Who are Airtable's decision-makers?

Howie Liu co-founded Airtable in 2012 after selling his prior CRM startup Etacts to Salesforce in 2010, where he spent a year as a product manager before departing. His background spans mechanical engineering and public policy (Duke University) — an unusual combination that shaped Airtable's dual focus on consumer-grade UX and enterprise-grade data architecture. Liu reorganized the entire org structure around AI-native product development in 2025, moving from functional silos toward product-aligned squads with embedded AI engineers, reflecting the founder-mode operating philosophy he described publicly in a June 2025 Lenny's Newsletter interview.

Andrew Ofstad (Co-Founder, CPO) previously led the redesign of Google Maps, bringing the product and UX sensibility that defined Airtable's early visual interface and continues to shape the Interface Designer and Omni app builder. Emmett Nicholas (Co-Founder) brings engineering depth from roles at Microsoft and Stack Overflow, overseeing core platform reliability. David Azose, hired as CTO in October 2025 from OpenAI where he led ChatGPT's business products engineering, was the first major external technical hire at co-founder seniority and represents Airtable's full commitment to the AI-native transformation — the DeepSky acquisition and Superagent product fall directly under his remit.

For software and infrastructure purchases, the buying committee typically spans the CTO (David Azose, who owns the technical stack and AI tooling budget), the CFO (Ambereen Toubassy, who controls procurement thresholds and vendor approval at deals above ~$50K), and the CRO (Brennan O'Donnell, who owns sales tools, CRM, and go-to-market technology). For marketing and brand technology, CMO Archana Agrawal is the functional decision-maker.

For AI-specific platforms and model providers, David Azose and Howie Liu are directly involved — the DeepSky acquisition was CEO-driven, and Liu has publicly discussed multi-model selection strategy (Airtable uses OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google models in Superagent). Enterprise software deals above $100K will typically require CFO and legal review alongside the functional buyer. The DeepSky founding team (Chris Chang, Mark Kim-Huang, and Forrest Moret) run Superagent product development semi-autonomously under Azose, creating a secondary technical buyer for AI-adjacent tooling.

Howie Liu reorganized Airtable's entire org structure in 2025 around AI-native product development, as detailed in his June 2025 interview with Lenny's Newsletter. The company moved from functional silos toward product-aligned squads with embedded AI engineers, a structure he explicitly described as 'founder mode' — CEO-involved, fast, and direct. The AI product organization (Superagent, Field Agents, Omni) operates semi-autonomously, with DeepSky's founding team running Superagent development under CTO David Azose.

Airtable employs approximately 900 people as of 2026, up from ~788 in 2024 after two rounds of layoffs (254 staff in December 2022, 237 in September 2023) that rightsized the organization following the 2021 hiring surge. With ~134 quota-carrying sales reps and revenue per employee of approximately $530K, the company is operating efficiently for a pre-IPO SaaS business. Engineering and product remain the largest functions, concentrated at the San Francisco HQ, with enterprise sales spread across Austin, New York, and London.