Howie Liu

Howie Liu graduated from Duke University with a degree in mechanical engineering and public policy. While still in college, he worked on complex computational airflow design projects utilizing neural nets and served as an early analyst at Freestyle Capital. His subsequent experience leading the social CRM product at Salesforce gave him deep, firsthand insight into the rigid limitations of legacy enterprise software, inspiring his mission to build a flexible, user-centric alternative.

Howie Liu is the co-founder and CEO of Airtable, a multibillion-dollar cloud collaboration platform that democratized software creation through its powerful low-code database architecture. Liu founded his first startup, Etacts, at age 20, which was acquired by Salesforce in 2010. Inspired by his experiences in enterprise software, Liu partnered with Andrew Ofstad and Emmett Nicholas to launch Airtable in 2013. His vision was to create a tool that combined the simplicity of a spreadsheet with the power of a relational database, allowing non-technical users to build their own business applications. Under his leadership, Airtable has grown into a cornerstone of modern enterprise operations, achieving widespread adoption across Fortune 500 companies and expanding aggressively into AI-driven workflows.