Autonomous Software and The Holy Grail of SaaS
Understanding Airtable’s Market Opportunity (Part 3, the last part)
Disclosure: I am an Airtable shareholder and former employee. These thoughts are 99% human and 1% machine. Read Part 1 Unlocking Practical Data or Part 2 The Age of Vertical SaaS.
The Holy Grail of SaaS
Imagine you could conjure the perfect work app your team needed that fit every business requirement you had. Imagine if this app was designed specifically for your vertical, accounted for compliance and regulatory needs, and worked seamlessly with all your tribal departmental processes built up over decades of operations. Finally, imagine this app was as easy to adopt as consumer-grade off-the-shelf software.
You’d call this unicorn software. The only way to procure software like this today is by funding a product development team or hiring expensive certified consultants to configure big-category SaaS platforms (e.g., CRM, ERP, HRIS, SCM, PLM) and waiting 9–12 months. You’d be taking on a ton of risk, and neither of these routes would lead to delightful UX for end users.
Of course, you’d want this software to be custom without sacrificing composability and the flexibility to make changes. Not every team requires flexibility, but the teams driving internal transformation need it desperately (e.g., groups in Geoffrey Moore’s Transformation Zone).
I call this magical software The Holy Grail of SaaS because it’s what every innovative operations leader wishes they had across every industry vertical. Today we’re all forced to make a tradeoff where we must choose two of three qualities:
Big-category SaaS companies see this tradeoff as an opportunity to launch a platform license and build an ecosystem of certified professionals to create new revenue streams and increase vendor lock-in. We’ve all come to accept that this is just how business software works.
Dreaming is Expensive
Salesforce platform revenue will likely cross $6B sometime this year. When I led the development team at Salesforce responsible for building visionary Dreamforce keynote demos, my goal was to constantly push the boundaries of what was possible. In 2009, an innovative demo was a custom Apex controller and Visualforce page showing a mashup between sales and service data. By 2015, we were launching Coca-Cola drones that could deliver personalized soda via mobile app — all powered by the platform.
Dreamforce keynotes are designed to blow your mind away. Nobody tells you that what you see on stage results from a massive investment in developer and admin time. All of this is to say my time at Salesforce left me wondering if it was possible to achieve powerful customization without the cost. And that leads us to Airtable.
Airtable and Autonomous Software
I joined Airtable in early 2020 because I was inspired by Howie, Andrew, and Emmett’s vision for business software. When Howie was at Salesforce, he saw the power and value of a declarative app-building platform (Force.com). Was it possible to democratize this power beyond certified administrators? In the past eight years, I think Airtable has more than proven that there’s massive value in lowering the bar for app creation. But how much further can we go?
Ali Ghodsi, CEO of Databricks, is pushing all his customers to think about how Data + AI can create a durable AI moat because he believes AI will eat all software. The companies with the most data to train their proprietary models will have a massive advantage over newcomers.
So let’s backtrack for a moment.
First, Airtable is helping teams unlock practical data. The company is learning how non-technical line-of-business practitioners think about data and how to create complex relationships (foreign key constraints) between data sets. Database schema design is no easy feat, and users often have to evolve and adapt a schema over time to account for new workflows and use cases. Although the humble spreadsheet is probably the most commonly used rudimentary database, it’s still a spreadsheet. Very few folks know how to manage multiple complex VLOOKUPs over tens of thousands of records. Google and Microsoft only have this data through AppSheet and Access, which are great tools but differ from Airtable from a usability and adoption perspective.
Second, Airtable enables teams to build and scale vertical software in mission-critical business areas. Customers across various industries train the platform on specific processes, regulatory requirements, compliance requirements, and more. Many of these aspects of vertical operations never get codified into software because it is too complicated or expensive. As we all know, the IT team is strapped for resources and can’t possibly build every app a group needs.
Third, Airtable has a unique view into how users build apps and where they struggle or succeed. Airtable knows which workflows suffice for a while but need to change when cross-functional collaborators join the mix. Airtable knows how teams share apps and how they grow to connect various data sets. In essence, Airtable has the potential to become an autonomous software platform. A software platform that builds software based on who you are and a simple set of requirements. More importantly, Airtable is highly flexible, so you can adapt your software when a process changes.
“I am a quality engineer at a rocket company, and I need an app to manage the verification and quality inspections of every part that goes into our rocket engines. The app must integrate with Oracle and notify manufacturers when a defect is discovered.”
“I am an assistant producer at a movie studio, and I need an app to manage the production process of a film shooting in four countries: The United States, Germany, China, and Chile. I must manage all the contracts across these geographies and track equipment film crews use.”
Conclusion
As an entrepreneur, this is the opportunity that excites me most about the future of software. Whether Airtable builds this future or not, it’s where we’re headed and represents a $100B opportunity for whoever gets there first and does it well.
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