, Airtable’s founder and CEO, says the cuts are part of a plan to focus the company on winning large enterprise clients and get spending under control. The cuts follow a December 2022 layoff that shed 254 people.
“The market has tipped towards favoring efficient growth over growth at all costs,” Liu tells Forbes. “We must operate the business in a more mature way that puts us on a path to become a public company and to have durability and efficiency in how we grow.”... [+] television interview in San Francisco, California, U.S., on Thursday, March 15, 2018. Liu talked about the gap his company fills in Silicon Valley. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberghonoree, had been swept up in the hiring frenzy that spread across the tech world following the easy-money days that followed the COVID lockdowns of 2021.
“I let myself get caught in the hyper-competitive environment at that time. We had the capital and said, ‘let's hyper-scale; let's recruit as many smart people as we can and just throw them into the business and see what they can do,’” says Liu, adding that Airtable will be cash flow positive after this round of layoffs. “It’s a sickening feeling.
Liu says the cuts will be company-wide, with the largest layoffs hitting product and sales teams that were focused on selling and servicing smaller clients. “We are realigning to go after bigger use cases, and therefore bigger deals. We want to consistently get customers with million-dollar-plus spend rates, versus supporting lots of little ten-thousand-dollar customers from a sales touch standpoint.