Airtable

Shaan canceled the dinner that would have gotten him into Airtable early

Shaan recounts DMing Airtable's Howie Liu years ago when the company was valued under ~$100M, inviting him to a mastermind dinner. Sam and another guest canceled, so Shaan canceled the dinner and never met Howie — a missed shot at an early friendship and investment.

“And I was like, Howie, yo, love Airtable, think it's fucking great. I think it's gonna be big. You know, you're a fellow Duke guy. That's awesome. Hey, I host these mastermind dinners, you should come to one. And he's like, oh, I'd love to. And we scheduled it. And you were scheduled to go to it. And then I think you and one other person canceled and you were like, oh, I can't come. And so I canceled the dinner. And so I never met him. And like, you know, fuck, who knows what could have been. We could have been homies by now. We could have been invested a long time ago, you know, under $100 million.”

Every SaaS company really competes with Excel

Shaan's lens for evaluating SaaS: people use Excel for everything, so any software tool's real competition is Excel, not other SaaS apps. It's why he's bullish on Airtable as the best threat to Excel.

“Because Excel is like the— there's this great quote, which is like, every SaaS company, you actually compete with Excel. You don't compete with other SaaS companies, you compete with Excel, because people just use Excel for everything.”

Hire someone to actually reply to your DMs and turbocharge your network

Shaan describes giving his right-hand man full access to his DMs after repeatedly discovering he'd messaged founders early (e.g. Airtable) then never followed up. Replying consistently turns early 'this is dope' notes into deals and investments years later.

“And it's basically 9 times out of 10, it's me saying, hey, this thing's dope. And they're like, wow, thanks, I didn't know, nobody knows about this yet. And I'm like, yeah, we'd love to talk, you know, we'd love to invest in talk to you about it. And they're like, cool, here's my email, let's find a time. And then I don't follow up, and then I never reply. And then like it's 4 years later and I'm like, hey, congrats on that, you know, $100 million round you just raised.”

Steal thisGive an assistant access to your inbox to reply to and follow up with every interesting founder you spot early.

Semil Shah's breakout-company-of-the-year track record

Investor Semil Shah picks one breakout company each year. His list: Stripe (2012), Snapchat (2013), Slack (2014), Coinbase (2017), Airtable (2018), Superhuman (2019), and Hopin (2020) — a near-perfect hit rate of generational companies.

“So 2012, he picked Stripe. 2013, he picked Snapchat. 2014, he picked Slack. Um, didn't do 2015, didn't do 2016. 2017, he did Coinbase. Um, 2018, Airtable. 2019 was Superhuman. And for 2020, he picked Hoppin.”

Steal thisTrack who the best investors publicly call as breakout each year, and study what those companies have in common.

Steal great copy's cadence: feed GPT-3 a famous ad, swap the product

Sam's favorite OpenAI use: paste a famous ad (e.g. the classic Volkswagen ad), then prompt 'now here's a great ad about Airtable' and the model writes a new ad that borrows the original's structure and cadence — without even being told what Airtable is.

“I did this thing where I found famous advertisements and I told— I wrote into OpenAI, this is a famous advertisement about Volkswagen. And I have— and then I copy and pasted and then I go, now this is a famous advertisement about Airtable and it, and it wrote an ad about Airtable that was very similar to that famous Volkswagen ad.”

Steal thisPrime an AI with a proven piece of copy, then ask it to write the same thing for your product so it inherits the winning cadence.

Run growth-hacker experiments on your parenting

Werdelin applies experiment-logging to family time: bored building the same blocks with his son and reaching for his phone, he logged 'play experiments' in Airtable, bought a tabletop ping-pong table, and replaced the bad interaction with one they both loved.

“And so something as simple as, oh, you know, when I was about 5, I thought to play ping pong. So I bought a ping pong table, right? Like a little thing that you put on top of your dining table. And so next weekend, I then, again, because I'm slightly crazy, I put in my little Airtable of my experiments. And then I went down to try that and he loved it.”

Steal thisTreat personal life like a growth funnel — log small experiments (even for parenting) and keep the ones that produce a better outcome.

Single-player to multiplayer: the collaboration wedge

Shaan's idea-generation framework: take any work tool that's still solo and make it collaborative, the way Google Docs did to Word, Airtable to Excel, and Figma to Photoshop. Find what's still single-player and make it multiplayer.

“So the question is what's left? What is something that today we all still do solo, you know, single player and we should be doing it multiplayer. And so I don't know what's left, like design has been done, docs has been done, Excel has been done, but there might be something still in the sort of workflow or workspace. And maybe it's by vertical, maybe like consulting companies use this one thing a lot or defense contractors use this one thing, but like everything that's a solo player thing will be multiplayer.”

Steal thisFind a work tool that's still single-player and build the collaborative, browser-based multiplayer version.