A message from our CEO | Airtable (2024)

Sep 15, 2023

2 MIN

Filed Under

Hi everyone,

Over the past few years, Airtable's transition into an enterprise-focused company has helped the world's leading organizations transform how they operate. To plan for the long-term and set ourselves on a durable growth path that best serves our customers, we’ve made the difficult decision to reduce the size of our team by 237 people. You’ll receive an email in the next few minutes to let you know whether your role has been impacted.

This decision is the result of the last year of work to better understand the needs of our enterprise customers and the opportunity ahead in this current financial climate. We’ve validated our enterprise focus and developed a clear understanding of what we need to deliver on Airtable’s growth potential. This has given me the clarity that our business demands a different mix of roles than we have today. Although this is the right decision for the business long-term, it doesn’t diminish the impact this has on an individual level. This was a difficult decision that I did not make lightly, and I take full responsibility.

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.

As I look to the future, I have full conviction about where Airtable is going and how we'll continue to succeed. Since our founding a decade ago, we have been focused on helping organizations build powerful, flexible apps that run their most important business processes – and today, half of the Fortune 500 are paid customers of Airtable. Enterprise customers in nearly every industry are powering mission-critical initiatives using our platform, with many spending millions per year. We also still benefit from an exciting amount of organic growth – our highly efficient self-serve business continues to grow, driven by inbound customer demand. We’ve made immense progress in establishing Airtable as a platform for critical workflows built around high-value datasets, and our focus going forward is to align our product and go-to-market efforts to further deliver on this enterprise opportunity.

To those departing, thank you for everything you’ve done for our customers and for the company. We want to support you through this transition, and will be offering the following benefits and resources:

• Severance pay and compensation: You’ll receive a minimum of 16 weeks of pay, with an additional week for every full year at Airtable, inclusive of any contractual and/or statutory pay.

• Accelerated equity vesting: You’ll receive 2 months 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.

• 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.

• Transition support: You can keep your Airtable-provided laptop and related equipment, and we’ll also provide career transition support.

• Airtablets based internationally: If you’re based outside the US, you’ll be receiving similar offerings with differences based on local laws and employment standards.

To those staying on, I acknowledge this difficult decision will take time to process, especially in light of all the change we've experienced this year. We'll host a short All Hands tomorrow to come together as a company and talk more about how we'll move forward at 9:30am PT – please check your calendar for details. In the meantime, leaders within your functions will be following up with more information relevant to your specific teams.

I want to sincerely thank everyone for your hard work, dedication, and commitment to continuing our focus to power the next generation of enterprise apps around the world. I’m grateful for the impact and valuable contributions you have made to shape Airtable into what it is today.

Howie