Airtable
Founders
Howie Liu, Andrew Ofstad, Emmett Nicholas · Founded 2012 · HQ today: San Francisco, California, United States
Airtable was founded by Howie Liu, Andrew Ofstad, Emmett Nicholas in 2012. It is now led by Howie Liu.
Howie Liu, Andrew Ofstad, and Emmett Nicholas met at Duke University and later started Airtable in 2012. Liu told the BBC that early investors had difficulty understanding the idea of making database capabilities accessible through a spreadsheet-like interface. Airtable launched its product publicly in 2015.
Liu studied at Duke University, founded customer relationship management startup Etacts, and worked at Salesforce after Salesforce acquired Etacts.
Howie Liu co-founded Airtable in 2012 and served as CEO through its sale to Bending Spoons in 2026. The September 2026 closing announcement described him as an Airtable co-founder, not as its continuing CEO. (Exact birth year remains publicly undisclosed).
Product manager at Google who worked on the redesign of Google Maps.
Andrew Ofstad co-founded Airtable in 2012. Recognizing that traditional spreadsheets were completely inadequate for managing complex relational data, he helped design Airtable's highly visual, user-friendly interface. As a product visionary, he ensured the platform remained simple enough for non-technical users while possessing the backend power of a true relational database. (Exact birth year remains publicly undisclosed).
Software engineer at Google and Stack Overflow.
Emmett Nicholas co-founded Airtable alongside Howie Liu and Andrew Ofstad. He built the foundational architecture of the platform's real-time collaboration engine, allowing massive teams to simultaneously edit complex databases without data corruption or latency, a critical feature that allowed Airtable to replace legacy enterprise software. (Exact birth year remains publicly undisclosed).
Howie Liu
Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer
As the founding CEO, he led the company's strategic pivot from a consumer productivity app into a massive B2B platform used by Fortune 500 companies to build custom software without coding.
Howie Liu, Andrew Ofstad, and Emmett Nicholas founded Airtable in 2012.
No. Howie Liu served as CEO before the 2026 acquisition. Andrew Ofstad and Emmett Nicholas are co-founders but are not identified as current CEOs.
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