Airtable Layoffs Hit More than 250 Employees, Company to Operate More Cautiously

Airtable, an enterprise software company, this week announced layoffs impacting 20% of its workforce or 254 employees.

Airtable’s Howie Liu

In a blog, Howie Liu, Airtable’s co-founder and CEO, detailed the layoffs as part of a “major” evolution for Airtable.

In May, Zoom vet Laura Padilla joined Airtable as vice president of partners. Airtable hired her to formalize its channel strategy and partner program. Airtable isn’t saying whether she’s among those impacted by the layoffs.

Airtable’s chief revenue officer, Seth Shaw, chief people officer, Johanna Jackman. and chief product officer, Peter Deng, have departed the company.

Airtable Among Numerous Channel Businesses Announcing Layoffs

Airtable joins numerous other companies doing business in the channel that have or are laying off workers. Others include Aqua Security, Nextiva, HP, Asana, Oracle, Salesforce, RingCentral, SADA and more.

“Today we’re announcing a major evolution for Airtable: taking us from our roots as a primarily bottoms-up adopted product serving teams at organizations of many sizes, to a company that is focused on bringing connected apps to large enterprises,” Liu said. “With this new focus, we’ve made the difficult choice to reduce our team by 254 people and evolve our organizational structure. These steps are not a reflection of this team’s important work in building Airtable to date, but about what our organization needs going forward.”

Airtable’s early success was driven by “bottoms-up” adoption across organizations of all shapes and sizes, and it benefited from an “extraordinary” amount of organic growth, he said.

“We discovered enterprises increasingly adopted Airtable for critical workflows built around high-value datasets, often stretching across entire departments rather than at a team level,” Liu said. “This part of our business has become increasingly exciting and differentiated, not only in terms of our growth metrics, but also in the way enterprise customers are realizing organization-wide value from connected apps.”

Focusing on Large Enterprise Companies

Enterprise makes up the majority of Airtable’s revenue, growing more than 100% year-over-year, Liu said.

Airtable will devote the majority of its resources toward landing and expanding large enterprise companies with at least 1,000 full-time workers, where its connected apps vision will deliver the most differentiated value, he said.

Airtable also identified areas where it could narrow its focus and operate in a more lean fashion, Liu said.

In addition, it is cutting spending in areas like marketing media, real estate, business technology and infrastructure.

“In trying to do too many things at once, we have grown our organization at a breakneck pace over the past few years,” Liu said. “We will continue to emphasize growth, but do so by investing heavily in the levers that yield the highest growth relative to their cost.”

These updates will allow Airtable to operate more cautiously in this economic environment, Liu said.