Airtable is being acquired by Bending Spoons for 1.285B. A few thoughts from seeing how ~100k teams use Airtable alongside our products: At roughly 2.7x its $480M in ARR, Airtable is either very expensive or an absolute steal. It’s expensive if Airtable fails to adapt. AI-generated software will erode horizontal SaaS, per-seat pricing will keep weakening, and customers will gradually replace it with software built specifically for them. Bending Spoons is betting that Airtable’s revenue will remain durable through that transition. But with the right execution, I think there is a 10x upside case. Teams use Airtable to run important operational processes where data, permissions, integrations, security, and reliability matter. That gives it a deeply embedded position inside hundreds of thousands of organizations. Bending Spoons now has two very different paths to choose from. The first is the PE playbook: reduce product development, increase prices, and improve margins. Airtable is sticky enough that this could work for a few years. But it would be bad for customers and a huge waste of the opportunity. The second is the ambitious path: evolve Airtable from a tool where teams organize work into a platform that can help perform it. If Airtable can add an intelligence layer that understands how organizations operate and safely executes work, it could accelerate both its growth and the value it provides customers. Airtable tried moving in this direction with Hyperagent, but it felt too little, too late, and disconnected from the core product. My guess is that building this into a product as mature as Airtable is simply hard. Its custom database and interface builder were created for a different era of software, before isolated databases became easy to provision and LLMs could generate custom interfaces and workflows. If Bending Spoons takes the ambitious path, it has a significant technical challenge ahead. I hope it does, and makes Airtable much better for its customers. Or maybe they’ll see @zite coming and decide to throw in the towel 😉

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