[00:00:01]
Danny Fellars: Alright.
[00:00:02]
Danny Fellars: Welcome in to the Built On Air podcast.
[00:00:05]
Danny Fellars: This is a big one.
[00:00:07]
Danny Fellars: So today is 08/04/2026, and myself, Ali, and Kamille are here to talk about, some breaking news this morning.
[00:00:19]
Danny Fellars: I am grateful that they announced this on a Tuesday morning and not a Wednesday morning so we could talk about it today.
[00:00:26]
Danny Fellars: It’s funny.
[00:00:27]
Danny Fellars: I was telling Ali and Kamille last night I went to bed kinda worried about, like, today’s episode of, like, if we’ll have enough content to talk about, and, Airtable came through this morning.
[00:00:37]
Danny Fellars: So if you have not heard, Airtable is being acquired by a company I had never heard of before this morning.
[00:00:46]
Danny Fellars: So Bending Spoons is the company, and, we’re gonna talk a lot about it, today.
[00:00:52]
Danny Fellars: So initial reaction when you heard that this morning.
[00:00:58]
Kamille Parks: Shock.
[00:01:00]
Kamille Parks: I think I was one of the many people who thought Airtable was positioning themselves to go public, which this is the opposite of that.
[00:01:10]
Alli Alosa: Yeah.
[00:01:11]
Alli Alosa: Yep.
[00:01:11]
Alli Alosa: Definitely shocked.
[00:01:13]
Alli Alosa: Yeah.
[00:01:13]
Alli Alosa: Shocked and a little bit, like, what’s gonna happen next.
[00:01:19]
Alli Alosa: So it’ll be interesting to see.
[00:01:21]
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
[00:01:22]
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
[00:01:23]
Danny Fellars: That was my like, holy cow.
[00:01:24]
Danny Fellars: Like, what does that mean for everything?
[00:01:27]
Danny Fellars: You know?
[00:01:28]
Danny Fellars: I’m sure everybody part of me is like, man, I I can’t imagine what employees are thinking.
[00:01:36]
Danny Fellars: Like, I’ve had I was discussing with Airtable employees yesterday.
[00:01:40]
Danny Fellars: I’m guessing they had no idea, you know, the the regular employee.
[00:01:46]
Danny Fellars: And so I’m sure today, the offices are abuzz and the internal chats are abuzz at Airtable discussing this.
[00:01:55]
Danny Fellars: So let’s talk through the terms first.
[00:01:58]
Danny Fellars: So let me see if, let me first let’s go over here and go here.
[00:02:07]
Danny Fellars: Okay.
[00:02:08]
Danny Fellars: So let’s k.
[00:02:11]
Danny Fellars: So we’ll go here.
[00:02:12]
Danny Fellars: So here’s the announcement.
[00:02:14]
Danny Fellars: So the announcement came from Bedding Spoons.
[00:02:16]
Danny Fellars: I actually went to if you go to Airtable newsroom, I was like, oh, what did Airtable say about it?
[00:02:26]
Danny Fellars: Nothing.
[00:02:27]
Danny Fellars: It is not in their newsroom yet.
[00:02:30]
Alli Alosa: Oh, right.
[00:02:32]
Danny Fellars: So this came from Bedding Spoons.
[00:02:36]
Danny Fellars: Official announcement that they’re announcing it, and they do announce terms.
[00:02:41]
Danny Fellars: So 1,285,000,000 together.
[00:02:46]
Danny Fellars: So that’s the value of the company, and Airtable was profitable and already had a lot of cash, on the books.
[00:02:54]
Danny Fellars: And so with their cash, they’re valuing it at 2,250,000,000.
[00:02:59]
Danny Fellars: Now that’s interesting because, it it it was publicly reported.
[00:03:04]
Danny Fellars: The last fundraise they did, I believe, was worth 10,000,000,000.
[00:03:09]
Danny Fellars: 11.
[00:03:10]
Danny Fellars: Point, it was worth 11,800,000,000.
[00:03:14]
Danny Fellars: Right before that.
[00:03:15]
Danny Fellars: Yep.
[00:03:16]
Danny Fellars: Before that.
[00:03:16]
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
[00:03:17]
Danny Fellars: So but this was back in ‘22 maybe.
[00:03:21]
Alli Alosa: Oh.
[00:03:21]
Danny Fellars: But, yeah, I don’t think they’ve raised since then.
[00:03:28]
Danny Fellars: So huge, huge, carved down from from, you know, almost $12,000,000,000 down to down to 2,000,000,000.
[00:03:36]
Kamille Parks: That’s kinda in line with some other companies, though, that saw boom from, like, the COVID era where everyone needed to pivot to doing more things digitally.
[00:03:48]
Kamille Parks: And, you know, Airtable is pretty good at letting you do some stuff digitally.
[00:03:53]
Kamille Parks: So I think some of that might be why, not necessarily all related to people’s faith in Airtable, but, yeah, it is a stark difference.
[00:04:05]
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
[00:04:06]
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
[00:04:07]
Danny Fellars: So and they even give numbers.
[00:04:08]
Danny Fellars: So 20% year over year growth, 480,000,000 as of last June.
[00:04:16]
Danny Fellars: So, you know, 480,000,000.
[00:04:18]
Danny Fellars: So that’s what little two two and a half around there if you get to the 1.2, valuation.
[00:04:28]
Danny Fellars: So that’s pretty low for a SaaS company.
[00:04:30]
Danny Fellars: There’s a industry wide, you know, crunch of SaaS companies with with AI.
[00:04:40]
Danny Fellars: And so we’re seeing a heavy reduction in multiples.
[00:04:44]
Danny Fellars: SaaS always used to get the highest multiple possible on exits, and that is that story is changing.
[00:04:53]
Danny Fellars: And this is definitely a a data point in that story changing.
[00:05:00]
Danny Fellars: So pretty crazy.
[00:05:01]
Danny Fellars: So Bedding Spoon, who are they?
[00:05:02]
Danny Fellars: So they are, an Italian company.
[00:05:06]
Danny Fellars: They just went public, about a month ago, and so this is their first acquisition after being a publicly traded company.
[00:05:15]
Danny Fellars: Some of their biggest ones, they own AOL.
[00:05:18]
Danny Fellars: So they basically acquire, software entities, and then they bring them in house.
[00:05:24]
Danny Fellars: And we’ll be talking about, you know, what their model looks like here in a second.
[00:05:28]
Danny Fellars: But, so anyways, they they have a portfolio of companies that, we’ll go through and and kinda look at what there is.
[00:05:37]
Danny Fellars: So if you’re wondering what’s gonna happen to Airtable, stick around.
[00:05:41]
Danny Fellars: We’ll we’ll go through their their track record of how they have operated in the past.
[00:05:48]
Danny Fellars: But first, let’s look at a couple other initial reactions on Twitter.
[00:05:56]
Danny Fellars: I’ve I’ve seen mix, so I’ve kinda been going through the Twitterverse and and what people are saying.
[00:06:02]
Danny Fellars: Some people are basically saying, you know, this bending spoon has a reputation of just gutting companies and just completely decimating them and and then also jacking up prices.
[00:06:15]
Danny Fellars: We’ll get into specifics, but that’s one view.
[00:06:18]
Danny Fellars: Other views are they actually help companies, and, and and they actually, you know, invest in them when companies previously hadn’t been investing in the product.
[00:06:30]
Danny Fellars: And so so you’ll you’ll get a mixed reaction.
[00:06:33]
Danny Fellars: So, take everything with a grain of salt.
[00:06:38]
Danny Fellars: So this is basically saying, you know, if you if you were an equity holder in Airtable, it’s not looking good for you at the valuation that they got, you know, for employees, because they had raised they had raised over they’d raised more money than the 1.125 they they sold the value of the company for.
[00:07:03]
Danny Fellars: So they’re basically paying back the the money.
[00:07:06]
Danny Fellars: Although the the cash also helps with that as well.
[00:07:09]
Danny Fellars: So there is some money to to go to early employees, but, probably not a ton for employees that weren’t there from the beginning.
[00:07:24]
Danny Fellars: I don’t know what this one means.
[00:07:27]
Danny Fellars: Me either.
[00:07:29]
Danny Fellars: Anyways, I think that’s just AI generate.
[00:07:35]
Danny Fellars: K.
[00:07:35]
Danny Fellars: So let’s go through.
[00:07:36]
Danny Fellars: So what I did was, I asked HyperAgent, and we’ll talk about HyperAgent, what that means.
[00:07:42]
Danny Fellars: I asked HyperAgent to do a deep dive on what this acquisition means and and, you know, and and the track record for bending spoons and get some insights.
[00:07:54]
Danny Fellars: So I’m gonna share the report that that HyperAgent, created.
[00:07:58]
Danny Fellars: I’ll share this link with people so you can review this.
[00:08:03]
Danny Fellars: And the big thing that it highlights is and it’s interesting, and this report calls it out.
[00:08:10]
Danny Fellars: Nobody nobody nobody is reporting on the fact that as part of the filing that they did with the, the six k, the government, tax filing with the SEC, they intentionally carve out HyperAgent.
[00:08:28]
Danny Fellars: And so HyperAgent got moved into a separate company called HyperAgent Inc.
[00:08:35]
Danny Fellars: And so HyperAgent is not part of this acquisition.
[00:08:38]
Danny Fellars: So HyperAgent is going to be a standalone product.
[00:08:42]
Danny Fellars: My guess is that’s where Howie, the CEO of of Airtable is gonna move.
[00:08:48]
Danny Fellars: He is the original developer of of HyperAgent.
[00:08:52]
Danny Fellars: And so my guess is that’s he he’s gonna continue with that and likely won’t, be part of, you know, Airtable going forward after the acquisition rolls out.
[00:09:04]
Danny Fellars: So that’s a it’s an interesting carve out.
[00:09:09]
Danny Fellars: You know, it’s interesting.
[00:09:10]
Danny Fellars: Superagent so you have HyperAgent and Superagent.
[00:09:15]
Danny Fellars: Superagent, I think, is part of this.
[00:09:17]
Danny Fellars: They never officially closed it, although that was the word it was closing.
[00:09:20]
Danny Fellars: So maybe bending spoons will do something with hype with Superagent, hyper agent.
[00:09:30]
Danny Fellars: So it highlights that.
[00:09:35]
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
[00:09:35]
Danny Fellars: Okay.
[00:09:36]
Danny Fellars: So who is who is bending spoon?
[00:09:39]
Danny Fellars: I’m gonna move this over here so I can see you guys.
[00:09:46]
Danny Fellars: So Milan based so in Italy, so they’re valued at 18,000,000,000.
[00:09:52]
Danny Fellars: Okay.
[00:09:52]
Danny Fellars: So they’re listed on the Nasdaq, so they’re US listed even though it’s a European company.
[00:09:59]
Danny Fellars: And, there’s some revenue numbers on them.
[00:10:04]
Danny Fellars: And so yeah.
[00:10:06]
Danny Fellars: So, basically, here’s their list of companies that that they’ve, acquired.
[00:10:12]
Danny Fellars: So Evernote was their was that their first one or is AOL?
[00:10:17]
Danny Fellars: Okay.
[00:10:17]
Danny Fellars: AOL was just this year.
[00:10:18]
Danny Fellars: I didn’t realize that.
[00:10:19]
Danny Fellars: Okay.
[00:10:19]
Danny Fellars: So they started with Evernote in 2023.
[00:10:23]
Danny Fellars: If you remember Evernote, it there there’s actually some overlap between Evernote and, Airtable.
[00:10:29]
Danny Fellars: Kamille was saying she was a heavy Evernote user back in the day.
[00:10:34]
Kamille Parks: When I was a youth.
[00:10:36]
Danny Fellars: Yep.
[00:10:38]
Danny Fellars: But, yeah, it talks about, you know, what they did.
[00:10:41]
Danny Fellars: So they basically, they reduced the free tier.
[00:10:47]
Danny Fellars: Although they kept a free tier, but they drastically reduced how much you could do, and then they raised prices.
[00:10:56]
Danny Fellars: And Evernote was kind of a dying company.
[00:11:00]
Danny Fellars: I think I’ve been to their offices in the Bay Area many years ago.
[00:11:04]
Danny Fellars: And at one point, they were kind of the darling of of, Silicon Valley, but then they kinda died down.
[00:11:14]
Danny Fellars: And, so yeah.
[00:11:15]
Danny Fellars: So they got acquired.
[00:11:19]
Danny Fellars: And but, anyways, they they they’re still around.
[00:11:22]
Danny Fellars: So Evernote is still a product, that’s there.
[00:11:25]
Danny Fellars: K.
[00:11:25]
Danny Fellars: Here’s one that hits close to home, StreamYard.
[00:11:29]
Danny Fellars: I didn’t realize that that this company had acquired StreamYard.
[00:11:33]
Danny Fellars: We were running our our, podcast this podcast on StreamYard for many years.
[00:11:40]
Danny Fellars: And then just this year, a couple months ago, I started getting emails from them saying that, that they were raising the prices on us and, significantly.
[00:11:54]
Danny Fellars: And I didn’t realize that it was this, spoon company, doing it.
[00:12:01]
Danny Fellars: So, anyways, we moved.
[00:12:02]
Danny Fellars: I it was enough of a price increase that I moved for an alternative, so we’re now on a alternative platform.
[00:12:10]
Danny Fellars: And so that was what was behind StreamYard.
[00:12:14]
Danny Fellars: They were adding features to it.
[00:12:16]
Danny Fellars: So from that perspective, I saw it moving in a good direction, but, but it looks like they were getting pretty hit on reviews, billing trust damage.
[00:12:32]
Danny Fellars: Yep.
[00:12:32]
Danny Fellars: That’s what I saw.
[00:12:36]
Danny Fellars: Cofounders left within a month of the deal.
[00:12:38]
Danny Fellars: So that’s one.
[00:12:40]
Danny Fellars: Meetup is one you probably recognize.
[00:12:43]
Danny Fellars: So that was an early early, early Internet entity.
[00:12:51]
Danny Fellars: So 2024, they got acquired, and it looks like they invested in the product and and are adding to it.
[00:13:02]
Danny Fellars: So all of these, you might recognize.
[00:13:05]
Danny Fellars: WeTransfer, I never really used it, but was aware of it.
[00:13:09]
Danny Fellars: This is one they say they’ve they’ve shipped a 100 plus improvements to it since acquiring it.
[00:13:16]
Danny Fellars: And so there’s one.
[00:13:17]
Danny Fellars: They did jack up the prices as well.
[00:13:21]
Danny Fellars: Isu, I remember that.
[00:13:24]
Danny Fellars: Kind of a small one.
[00:13:25]
Danny Fellars: Brightcove, it’s more like an infrastructure play, for video.
[00:13:35]
Danny Fellars: Never heard of Komoot.
[00:13:38]
Danny Fellars: Harvest, this is one, I’ve used Harvest before.
[00:13:41]
Danny Fellars: I didn’t realize that that one got acquired as well.
[00:13:46]
Danny Fellars: Vimeo, you probably heard of Vimeo, video hosting.
[00:13:53]
Danny Fellars: So no confirmed changes.
[00:13:56]
Danny Fellars: So that’s interesting.
[00:13:57]
Danny Fellars: So they haven’t announced any significant changes.
[00:14:02]
Danny Fellars: So they didn’t actually merge it.
[00:14:04]
Danny Fellars: So operating separately, that’s interesting.
[00:14:09]
Danny Fellars: So I wonder if that one was more profitable.
[00:14:14]
Danny Fellars: AOL.
[00:14:15]
Danny Fellars: Can’t believe AOL still exists.
[00:14:20]
Danny Fellars: Eventbrite, there’s another one you’ve likely heard of.
[00:14:24]
Kamille Parks: Yeah.
[00:14:26]
Kamille Parks: I I think I’ve heard about about half of these and some so you know?
[00:14:36]
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
[00:14:37]
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
[00:14:37]
Danny Fellars: Attractive.
[00:14:38]
Danny Fellars: I was I’m not familiar with that.
[00:14:40]
Danny Fellars: It’s a hardware deal.
[00:14:44]
Danny Fellars: So, yeah, interesting.
[00:14:47]
Danny Fellars: But yeah.
[00:14:48]
Danny Fellars: So there definitely is, like, a track record of of going in and gutting.
[00:14:52]
Danny Fellars: But the big difference is the ones that they did that with, I think, were not profitable dying companies that they’ve gone in and had the gut.
[00:15:02]
Danny Fellars: So it will be interesting their response to Airtable that is profitable, is growing, has, you know, cash on the books to to leverage.
[00:15:15]
Danny Fellars: And, so they may take a different approach.
[00:15:21]
Danny Fellars: That is good to see that at least some companies, they haven’t done any changes.
[00:15:26]
Danny Fellars: So Vimeo was, you know, not that long ago, plus months.
[00:15:34]
Danny Fellars: So maybe it’s about to be announced.
[00:15:38]
Danny Fellars: So yeah.
[00:15:38]
Danny Fellars: So I think so here here we go.
[00:15:40]
Danny Fellars: So here’s kind of the the thing that’s interesting.
[00:15:44]
Danny Fellars: So April of next year is when it will officially close.
[00:15:50]
Danny Fellars: Right?
[00:15:51]
Danny Fellars: So the so the announcement today does not mean that it’s officially closed.
[00:15:56]
Danny Fellars: It takes time to do all the the paperwork and everything.
[00:16:00]
Danny Fellars: So there’s still, you know, six months before this is a done deal, which means the next six months, nothing is gonna drastically change.
[00:16:10]
Danny Fellars: Now what might change is the current, you know, Airtable strategy.
[00:16:16]
Danny Fellars: They might freeze development, features, things like that.
[00:16:20]
Danny Fellars: You know?
[00:16:23]
Danny Fellars: We might see some of that.
[00:16:24]
Danny Fellars: And then, you know, what to expect after that transition and first cuts.
[00:16:29]
Danny Fellars: It’s very likely that, leadership you know, there there’s gonna be a lot of overlap, between Bending Spoons and Airtable at the top level of of leadership, and and so you’ll likely see, some cuts there.
[00:16:47]
Danny Fellars: You know, this is predicting support and degradation of of customer support, which will not be good because I think a lot of people were already complaining about a lack of customer support.
[00:17:02]
Danny Fellars: And then and then comes the pricing, interior restructuring, and then reinvestment becomes visible.
[00:17:09]
Danny Fellars: So so I think there’s some good and some good and some bad to to take away from this.
[00:17:16]
Danny Fellars: I’m kinda taking, an equal, stable approach of, like, optimistic that maybe in the long run, there will be some improvements.
[00:17:27]
Danny Fellars: But definitely in the short run, this is a shock to the entire ecosystem of what it means.
[00:17:35]
Danny Fellars: The big thing for me of is, like, the strategy that that Bending Spoons is gonna take with Airtable.
[00:17:41]
Danny Fellars: I think Airtable, we all saw we’ve been around the evolution of it being, like, self serve, not quite not not an enterprise tool, but then they started to get traction in the enterprise, and then they decided to kind of not go all in.
[00:17:57]
Danny Fellars: They always had their non enterprise offerings, but really focus their strategy and attention on enterprise.
[00:18:04]
Danny Fellars: Now with Bedding Spoons, they do not, from my perspective, have an enterprise software offering currently, which means they do not have that expertise in house to to be a true, you know, enterprise sales, SaaS, solution.
[00:18:21]
Danny Fellars: So they might look at this and say, what if we take Airtable back to its roots and, like, go down market and be more mid market where, you know, Vimeo, Harvest, StreamYard, Evernote.
[00:18:37]
Danny Fellars: You know, I’d say Vimeo, I’m sure, has a an enterprise offering, you know, Eventbrite, but I I would still put these in kind of the the mid market space.
[00:18:49]
Danny Fellars: So that to me is decision of where they take it.
[00:18:54]
Kamille Parks: The, one of these if you just scroll up a little bit, Dan, I’ve I’ve forgotten the name because it’s not a a platform I used.
[00:19:00]
Kamille Parks: Actually, my bad.
[00:19:01]
Kamille Parks: Scroll down.
[00:19:03]
Kamille Parks: Is it Komoot?
[00:19:07]
Kamille Parks: I looked that one up, and it’s like, find the best trails and adventure paths near you.
[00:19:14]
Kamille Parks: That’s not gonna be an enterprise platform.
[00:19:16]
Kamille Parks: So, I mean, you could repurpose some of the internal technology and stuff.
[00:19:20]
Kamille Parks: You could always do that.
[00:19:22]
Kamille Parks: That’s sometimes why acquisitions happen, not for the company itself, but, like, if you take this idea and repurpose it elsewhere kinda deal.
[00:19:33]
Kamille Parks: I think Airtable has done that with some of its acquisitions.
[00:19:38]
Kamille Parks: But, yeah, I kinda agree that none of these really read enterprise app building, improve your workflow kinda deal, maybe Evernote.
[00:19:51]
Kamille Parks: But the other ones are they don’t seem to have a one thing holding them all together as, like, a theme, at least to me.
[00:20:03]
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
[00:20:04]
Danny Fellars: I mean, Eventbrite is nowhere in that space.
[00:20:12]
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
[00:20:12]
Danny Fellars: And, you know, so here, they it’s interesting because this one, they maybe went upmarket.
[00:20:18]
Danny Fellars: They eliminated their free tier.
[00:20:24]
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
[00:20:26]
Danny Fellars: So in StreamYard, from my experience, they’re moving more up tier as well, but not enterprise.
[00:20:34]
Danny Fellars: I mean, StreamYard is not an enterprise product by any means.
[00:20:40]
Danny Fellars: So I think that’s the big question for me is where do they take it?
[00:20:48]
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
[00:20:49]
Danny Fellars: And then here’s an analysis of, you know, highest risk is free plan, lower tier, lower risk at enterprise and business, the increased prices.
[00:21:03]
Danny Fellars: K.
[00:21:03]
Danny Fellars: So I had to do an analysis.
[00:21:05]
Danny Fellars: What what’s the negative outlook and what’s the the positive outlook?
[00:21:11]
Danny Fellars: So pattern is nine for nine on cost extraction.
[00:21:16]
Danny Fellars: Institutional knowledge is the thing that actually gets destroyed.
[00:21:20]
Danny Fellars: That that’s what’s interesting is, like, I look at Airtable and these other products.
[00:21:25]
Danny Fellars: Like, Airtable, the complexity of the product is so high.
[00:21:30]
Danny Fellars: All, you know, all that knowledge, like, those the engineers that have been with Airtable from the beginning are likely not gonna be around.
[00:21:40]
Danny Fellars: And so,
[00:21:43]
Kamille Parks: Yeah.
[00:21:44]
Kamille Parks: Because any qualified engineer is gonna be able to jump in and read the code of Airtable and get what it does, but what you’re losing is why did we build it this way?
[00:21:57]
Kamille Parks: Mhmm.
[00:21:57]
Kamille Parks: Because when you when you come into something fresh, into something that already exists, a lot of times, I tend to be like, we’re gonna, it’s gonna be efficient.
[00:22:08]
Kamille Parks: We’re gonna follow best practices.
[00:22:10]
Kamille Parks: We’re gonna we’re gonna go nuts.
[00:22:12]
Kamille Parks: And then you kinda read the current state of things, and you’re like, well, if I change this, I’m gonna have to overhaul this over here, and then that might affect our business users.
[00:22:23]
Kamille Parks: So we can’t just do that without, you know, launch comms and all these things, and so it kinda snowballs.
[00:22:29]
Kamille Parks: And so institutional knowledge is really important for, you know, an app of this size because I’m sure there’s quite a bit of that within Airtable.
[00:22:39]
Kamille Parks: Like, I recently complained to Airtable about, here’s all of these weird inconsistencies in the product of this is a feature, but not here, but it is here.
[00:22:50]
Kamille Parks: Mhmm.
[00:22:50]
Kamille Parks: And I’m thinking of a lot of things like that.
[00:22:53]
Kamille Parks: There there might be a very good reason why the feature isn’t where I expect it to be, but somebody’s gotta know that before they, you know, accidentally make some adjustments that have some downstream impacts.
[00:23:07]
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
[00:23:08]
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
[00:23:09]
Danny Fellars: The part that scares me is that transition.
[00:23:12]
Danny Fellars: If you have, you know, an enterprise account rep, you know, getting getting that that knowledge transferred to a new team, there’s gonna be some major, speed bumps.
[00:23:29]
Danny Fellars: Stability of the platform really concerns me during this transition because I truly believe that behind the scenes at Airtable, there’s there’s a few people, like, putting duct tape in places to keep it afloat on a daily basis.
[00:23:45]
Danny Fellars: You know?
[00:23:46]
Danny Fellars: And, those people putting duct tape, if they leave, there’s gonna be some outages and and, slow response rates that that concerns me.
[00:24:01]
Danny Fellars: So that that’s where my big fear is for the immediate transition period.
[00:24:05]
Kamille Parks: Even the little stuff.
[00:24:06]
Kamille Parks: I’ve I’ve talked to some Airtable employees that didn’t know what the universe was.
[00:24:11]
Kamille Parks: Mhmm.
[00:24:12]
Kamille Parks: So it’s like, that is it’s on the website.
[00:24:16]
Kamille Parks: It’s not, you know I didn’t make it up.
[00:24:18]
Kamille Parks: It is a feature of Airtable, but it’s so low key.
[00:24:21]
Kamille Parks: It’s not really advertised anymore.
[00:24:23]
Kamille Parks: It used to be advertised all the time in the early days, but not so much anymore.
[00:24:28]
Kamille Parks: And, like, when you’re onboarded, as a new Airtable employee, they’re probably focusing on the big stuff nowadays.
[00:24:36]
Kamille Parks: Here’s what an automation is.
[00:24:38]
Kamille Parks: Here’s interfaces.
[00:24:39]
Kamille Parks: Here’s Omni.
[00:24:40]
Kamille Parks: I was talking about the universe.
[00:24:42]
Kamille Parks: So how many of these little pieces of Airtable are gonna become even more stale than they might already be?
[00:24:51]
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
[00:24:52]
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
[00:24:53]
Danny Fellars: So, yeah, the road map.
[00:24:56]
Danny Fellars: This one doesn’t concern me as much.
[00:24:58]
Danny Fellars: I actually almost view this as a possible as a positive that HyperAgent is not part of this deal because I think a lot of people were looking at HyperAgent as like, hey.
[00:25:10]
Danny Fellars: Focus on the core product.
[00:25:12]
Danny Fellars: You know?
[00:25:12]
Danny Fellars: Like, we’re get get get that improved first.
[00:25:16]
Danny Fellars: And we we all saw, you know, the the focus moving to hyper agent, and and I think a lot of people that prefer you know, use the core Airtable didn’t like that.
[00:25:29]
Danny Fellars: So this might be a positive that somebody comes in and says, we’re just gonna focus on this core platform and make it better at what it does.
[00:25:38]
Danny Fellars: That that actually could be a positive in my book.
[00:25:43]
Danny Fellars: This is this is another one.
[00:25:45]
Danny Fellars: You know, this is this is interesting where it’s like Airtable had almost a billion dollars of cash on the books that it could use to reinvest into the product.
[00:25:54]
Danny Fellars: Now Bending Spoon gets access to that billion dollars.
[00:25:58]
Danny Fellars: They’ve got 5,000,000,000 in debt that they’ve got a service.
[00:26:02]
Danny Fellars: Now that billion dollars of cash can get used elsewhere, and not back into Airtable.
[00:26:09]
Danny Fellars: So that’s that’s definitely a negative.
[00:26:12]
Danny Fellars: And just the overall attention that Airtable is gonna get of you know, now it’s one of 10 portfolio companies, and they’re not gonna stop after Airtable.
[00:26:23]
Danny Fellars: They could be announcing acquisitions, you know, every month.
[00:26:27]
Danny Fellars: And, just I can’t imagine how hard it would be to to digest all these companies and get them stable after a transition like this.
[00:26:43]
Kamille Parks: Yeah.
[00:26:44]
Kamille Parks: When was the most recent acquisition?
[00:26:48]
Danny Fellars: May of this year, Tractive, I think.
[00:26:52]
Kamille Parks: Okay.
[00:26:52]
Kamille Parks: I have no idea how long it takes to do any of this transition work, but I assume you would want to focus on one transition at a time.
[00:27:05]
Kamille Parks: And if this deal wouldn’t go through until, I think you said, April of next year?
[00:27:09]
Danny Fellars: February.
[00:27:10]
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
[00:27:11]
Kamille Parks: That’s, like, that should be some good buffer between May of this year and February of next year to sort of okay.
[00:27:20]
Kamille Parks: Well, now we’re focusing on onboarding Airtable as part of our suite of products.
[00:27:25]
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
[00:27:27]
Danny Fellars: So that’s the negative.
[00:27:29]
Danny Fellars: Obviously, we’ve kinda highlighted those.
[00:27:32]
Danny Fellars: Those are the the obvious ones that come to mind.
[00:27:36]
Danny Fellars: Let’s maybe take a a positive spin.
[00:27:38]
Danny Fellars: What what what could be the positive case for this?
[00:27:40]
Danny Fellars: So nothing has been shut down since the company started.
[00:27:45]
Danny Fellars: You know, the company has only been around for four ish years, but they do invest in in the companies that they’ve acquired.
[00:27:56]
Danny Fellars: This is kind of interesting.
[00:27:57]
Danny Fellars: You know, Airtable was in a difficult position.
[00:28:00]
Danny Fellars: I think they recognize you know, I think all of us thought that an IPO was in the works.
[00:28:05]
Danny Fellars: That’s where, you know, two years ago, they were they were getting ready the IPO.
[00:28:12]
Danny Fellars: And then, you know, the market shifted.
[00:28:19]
Danny Fellars: So what I thought was interesting is, you know, I I had the thought this morning of, like, okay.
[00:28:24]
Danny Fellars: I’d never heard of this bending spoon before.
[00:28:27]
Danny Fellars: Now I do know a little bit about them.
[00:28:30]
Danny Fellars: Is this better than had Salesforce acquired Airtable?
[00:28:35]
Danny Fellars: Because that you know, a lot of people work with it in Salesforce was an investor in Airtable, so they already had an inside seat.
[00:28:44]
Danny Fellars: What would that have looked like versus the spending spoon?
[00:28:50]
Kamille Parks: Salesforce, I think I think that would have been interesting because Salesforce has a very formal, like, developer pathway.
[00:29:04]
Kamille Parks: There’s, like, licenses that you can get for, like, I have a certified Salesforce, consultant or developer or whatever you wanna call it.
[00:29:12]
Kamille Parks: They’re massive.
[00:29:14]
Kamille Parks: They’re a global company with a lot of different use cases that they have.
[00:29:18]
Kamille Parks: And so Airtable being absorbed by them, I think, would probably look different, but I also don’t know I have no idea where that would have led, but I think it is, like, an interesting comparison that someone much more knowledgeable than I can articulate why something like this, acquisition, which seems to be a portfolio of more consumer facing, applications versus Salesforce, which is explicitly enterprise.
[00:29:52]
Kamille Parks: If I’m not mistaken, I feel like you’re a small company.
[00:29:55]
Kamille Parks: You have no need for Salesforce at all.
[00:29:58]
Kamille Parks: I could be wrong, but I feel like they’re much more enterprise than, what it looks like Bending Spoons is about.
[00:30:06]
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
[00:30:06]
Danny Fellars: Yep.
[00:30:07]
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
[00:30:07]
Danny Fellars: For sure, you would have known the strategy with Salesforce.
[00:30:10]
Danny Fellars: It would definitely be going upstream even more so.
[00:30:14]
Danny Fellars: Or, you know, do they kill it off completely?
[00:30:18]
Danny Fellars: Because that’s
[00:30:19]
Alli Alosa: the
[00:30:19]
Danny Fellars: thing is, like, there’s companies that would have acquired Airtable and completely killed it, you know, within two years of mishandling it.
[00:30:30]
Danny Fellars: So so there is hope that this may have extended the life of Airtable.
[00:30:36]
Danny Fellars: So that’s that’s the pro case for it.
[00:30:40]
Danny Fellars: You know?
[00:30:40]
Danny Fellars: And so they do have a record of of reinvestment, into the product, and, you know, some products have maintained high customer review rating.
[00:30:55]
Danny Fellars: You know, if you’re an enterprise customer, you’re likely okay for the time being.
[00:31:03]
Danny Fellars: It does show flexibility.
[00:31:05]
Danny Fellars: So so, you know, they don’t they may not use the same playbook with every acquisition.
[00:31:14]
Danny Fellars: And now Airtable essentially is part of a part of a publicly traded company.
[00:31:19]
Danny Fellars: So they are now publicly traded, which means, you know, they they have an obligation to their their public investors.
[00:31:30]
Danny Fellars: You know, I’ll have to look at the stock price and see if it’s something that I personally would would invest in.
[00:31:36]
Danny Fellars: I don’t know.
[00:31:37]
Danny Fellars: I’ll have to look at it.
[00:31:39]
Alli Alosa: I’m gonna look it up right now.
[00:31:41]
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
[00:31:42]
Danny Fellars: I think I saw I saw a tweet that, like, insider there is a huge jump last week, on the on this on the stock, and they’re like, okay.
[00:31:55]
Danny Fellars: Insiders got wind of this happening a week ago.
[00:32:00]
Danny Fellars: So alright.
[00:32:03]
Kamille Parks: They become public, just not in the way that I was expecting.
[00:32:09]
Kamille Parks: So I remember our our sandwich bet days, and I wonder who would get the sandwich in this in this example.
[00:32:18]
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
[00:32:19]
Danny Fellars: Very true.
[00:32:21]
Danny Fellars: Okay.
[00:32:21]
Danny Fellars: Real quick on on Reddit, it was posted as as always, most people so here’s the real question that if you’re if you’re a heavy Airtable user and this news concerns you, where do you go?
[00:32:34]
Danny Fellars: Like, that’s always been the question that we’ve had is, like, I don’t believe there are, like, direct competitors to, like, easily move off.
[00:32:44]
Danny Fellars: There’s a couple mentioned in this thread, Fibrory, which I actually looked.
[00:32:49]
Danny Fellars: They they’ve evolved.
[00:32:53]
Danny Fellars: I I remember looking at them years ago and then had kinda forgot about them, but Mhmm.
[00:32:58]
Danny Fellars: They’re still around.
[00:33:01]
Danny Fellars: Or maybe Oh.
[00:33:01]
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
[00:33:02]
Danny Fellars: I think there was I think I saw them.
[00:33:04]
Kamille Parks: I did, like I spent a month, at this point, over a year ago, trying to, like, line up what are the alternatives to Airtable.
[00:33:14]
Kamille Parks: And what I’ve generally come to the conclusion of is Airtable has done a good job of spreading itself so that it’s a database.
[00:33:24]
Kamille Parks: It has an automation layer.
[00:33:26]
Kamille Parks: It’s the user interface as well.
[00:33:29]
Kamille Parks: And a lot of the alternatives are very good at one or maybe two of those things, but not so good at all three.
[00:33:37]
Kamille Parks: Mhmm.
[00:33:38]
Kamille Parks: And depending on what you’re after, you might not need all three, but you probably want all three because you’re used to all three.
[00:33:46]
Kamille Parks: Yeah.
[00:33:47]
Kamille Parks: And when I was evaluating, you know, I have a business, and I was like, what do I run my business on?
[00:33:55]
Kamille Parks: And I started to lean more towards the open source alternatives, which made it so based on the ones that I was looking at, I would have to do, okay, automations I’m outsourcing.
[00:34:08]
Kamille Parks: Instead of using the inbuilt automation layer, I would use a separate dedicated automation tool, and then have the open source alternative be my, back of the house database, which is fine for a lot of people, but you lose kind of it’s a blessing and a curse because the curse of SaaS in general is that you don’t own your business logic, and it’s really hard to extract.
[00:34:35]
Kamille Parks: Now as of a week and a half ago, now you can extract what your automations do relatively easily, but before then, for years, God help you, if you needed to explain to an external developer, I have this I have 10 automations that are daisy chained together.
[00:34:53]
Kamille Parks: You know, you you get that with SaaS.
[00:34:55]
Kamille Parks: And so having a dedicated thing, a tool for that, that could be better overall depending on what your use case is.
[00:35:03]
Kamille Parks: But, yeah, I think what a lot of people are probably getting at when they are talking about the alternative SKIA is that I can’t just give you one tool to replace what you’re using.
[00:35:14]
Kamille Parks: I need to know what you’re using it for.
[00:35:16]
Kamille Parks: I saw someone, suggest ClickUp, which is more for, like, task management, project management.
[00:35:22]
Kamille Parks: I’ve used ClickUp.
[00:35:23]
Kamille Parks: I kinda liked ClickUp.
[00:35:24]
Kamille Parks: I think it was I was early in the game with their user interface.
[00:35:27]
Kamille Parks: It was a little it it could use some polish, but this was two years ago.
[00:35:31]
Kamille Parks: I’m sure it’s perfectly fine now.
[00:35:33]
Kamille Parks: But you’re not gonna use ClickUp, I don’t think, to run, like, a store, for example, inventory.
[00:35:40]
Alli Alosa: You’re gonna
[00:35:41]
Kamille Parks: use it for project management.
[00:35:42]
Kamille Parks: So when you’re asking, either in this thread or any other thread, I need an alternative.
[00:35:49]
Kamille Parks: Lead with what you’re doing.
[00:35:50]
Kamille Parks: That’ll help people be like, oh, I’ve used such and such for that, and it was great.
[00:35:56]
Kamille Parks: You know?
[00:35:58]
Danny Fellars: Absolutely.
[00:35:58]
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
[00:35:58]
Danny Fellars: We’re yeah.
[00:35:59]
Danny Fellars: I agree.
[00:36:00]
Danny Fellars: Like, I I mean, I actually still use ClickUp in some use cases.
[00:36:05]
Danny Fellars: Our agency runs on ClickUp for our task management, but we still leverage Airtable on top of it.
[00:36:13]
Danny Fellars: They’re very different use cases.
[00:36:18]
Danny Fellars: Where I where I don’t see a direct alternative is, like, your operational backbone system of a multi department environment.
[00:36:29]
Danny Fellars: You know?
[00:36:31]
Danny Fellars: Like, I you you could you could piecemeal it with different things, but, Airtable’s power was, like, tailoring a solution to how you wanted your operations to run and getting multiple departments, to have their own environment that could then, you know, sync data where relevant.
[00:36:55]
Kamille Parks: Yep.
[00:36:56]
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
[00:36:56]
Danny Fellars: I think the alternative and and this is where I personally am going, although I don’t know that others are, is, like, I’m now building my own software, you know, with Vibe Coding and AI.
[00:37:07]
Danny Fellars: It’s so much easier to to build your own stuff and host it yourself.
[00:37:12]
Danny Fellars: But I’m also, you know, more developer.
[00:37:14]
Danny Fellars: I don’t know that most companies will move that direction, but I think, you know, these these lovable and bolts, if if if maybe it’s like a site where, you know, you’re building your your entire workflow, VibeCoded, on a platform like that.
[00:37:34]
Danny Fellars: Maybe that’s the real alternative.
[00:37:36]
Alli Alosa: I was gonna say Softr Yeah.
[00:37:38]
Kamille Parks: But I
[00:37:38]
Alli Alosa: would promise to try try their database out.
[00:37:41]
Alli Alosa: I’ve heard really good things, and they’re I think if they haven’t already increased their record limit, they’re about to be increasing it to, like, a million records or something like that.
[00:37:51]
Alli Alosa: I can’t I’m not fully up to date on their current limits.
[00:37:55]
Kamille Parks: But Yep.
[00:37:57]
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
[00:37:57]
Alli Alosa: Right.
[00:37:57]
Kamille Parks: And impressive.
[00:37:59]
Kamille Parks: If we’re worried about potential price increases for Airtable and to be clear, none of the press releases have said that that is an intention, and that they, of course, wouldn’t say that until the deal actually goes through anyway.
[00:38:13]
Kamille Parks: But if price goes up as it did with Evernote, another one of those acquisitions, you also kinda consider when you’re looking at alternatives, if you’re splitting what one app did for you into several different apps, well, then look at the price of all of those apps together.
[00:38:29]
Kamille Parks: And if you’re developing it yourself, remember that you cost money.
[00:38:33]
Kamille Parks: So how much of your time is being spent building those tools?
[00:38:38]
Kamille Parks: And depending on what your skill set is and the tools that you have available to you, you might be able to build something better than what Airtable would let you do because Airtable has some rigid restrictions sometimes.
[00:38:48]
Kamille Parks: So I’m talking in circles of, like, there is no one answer for everybody.
[00:38:53]
Kamille Parks: Some people are gonna be better off with Lovable or Zite or one of those.
[00:38:57]
Kamille Parks: Some people are gonna be better off using something like ClickUp, and some people are gonna be better off using just, like, a just a basket of sass and, the things you have to consider for yourself.
[00:39:09]
Kamille Parks: What am I using it for?
[00:39:12]
Kamille Parks: How mad at me is my team gonna be if we have to transition?
[00:39:16]
Kamille Parks: Sometimes you gotta play that game.
[00:39:18]
Kamille Parks: And, you know, what’s my budget?
[00:39:20]
Kamille Parks: Those are the three questions I think everyone should kinda ask themselves closer to February.
[00:39:26]
Kamille Parks: You know, think about it now, but, definitely have a good thought about it before February.
[00:39:34]
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
[00:39:34]
Danny Fellars: For sure.
[00:39:35]
Danny Fellars: So so we have a couple of comments from from people watching.
[00:39:42]
Danny Fellars: So built for a table.
[00:39:44]
Danny Fellars: So there is some hope.
[00:39:45]
Danny Fellars: That’s good to hear.
[00:39:47]
Danny Fellars: K.
[00:39:47]
Danny Fellars: So Lorraine, uses Brightcove, and they’ve seen their quality get better since it’s got acquired, including their customer service.
[00:39:56]
Danny Fellars: So she’s hopeful.
[00:39:57]
Kamille Parks: So that’s the one.
[00:39:59]
Kamille Parks: I complain about irritable all the time here.
[00:40:02]
Kamille Parks: And one of the things that I don’t complain about as much publicly, but it’s it’s the customer service.
[00:40:09]
Kamille Parks: Because sometimes I feel like I’m an expert.
[00:40:13]
Kamille Parks: I get it.
[00:40:13]
Kamille Parks: My questions are always gonna be harder than someone who’s just new to the platform.
[00:40:17]
Kamille Parks: But sometimes I feel like they don’t know what I’m talking about.
[00:40:21]
Kamille Parks: And I’m like, it’s your platform.
[00:40:23]
Kamille Parks: You should know more than I do, and yet I don’t get that vibe a lot of the time.
[00:40:28]
Kamille Parks: So if, if if what this person is saying carries over to Airtable that they reinvest in really the customer experience, including customer support, that’ll be a net positive.
[00:40:43]
Danny Fellars: Yep.
[00:40:44]
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
[00:40:45]
Danny Fellars: For sure.
[00:40:46]
Danny Fellars: So true.
[00:40:49]
Danny Fellars: Alright.
[00:40:49]
Danny Fellars: Well, let’s, we spent forty minutes on this acquisition.
[00:40:53]
Danny Fellars: I didn’t think we’d spend that long, but this obviously impacts everyone.
[00:40:59]
Danny Fellars: And, yep.
[00:41:01]
Danny Fellars: And Lorraine says customer service disappeared from Airtable.
[00:41:05]
Danny Fellars: Why we use consultants.
[00:41:06]
Danny Fellars: Very true.
[00:41:07]
Danny Fellars: That’s why as a consultant, it’s it’s been a good win for for those on that side as well.
[00:41:14]
Danny Fellars: So, anyways, so let’s move on.
[00:41:18]
Danny Fellars: But we’d love to hear your feedback.
[00:41:20]
Danny Fellars: Let us know here in the comments.
[00:41:22]
Danny Fellars: Let us know what’s your what’s your initial take.
[00:41:24]
Danny Fellars: Are you pro You on the pro side or or the con side of of the outlook for this?
[00:41:30]
Danny Fellars: If you are looking elsewhere, let us know where you’re looking and, what your thoughts are.
[00:41:36]
Danny Fellars: We’d love to hear, and we’ll definitely be monitoring this over the coming months, and see see what happens.
[00:41:45]
Danny Fellars: But, yeah, in the meantime, there have been some some new, feature updates.
[00:41:53]
Danny Fellars: So we’ll kinda go through some of these real quickly.
[00:41:57]
Danny Fellars: So we highlighted this before.
[00:41:59]
Danny Fellars: Ask Airtable questions directly from Slack.
[00:42:02]
Danny Fellars: So this was a big upgrade to their Slack.
[00:42:05]
Danny Fellars: So they’ve had a Slack, integration for
[00:42:09]
Alli Alosa: years Mhmm.
[00:42:10]
Danny Fellars: But they’ve now AI enabled their Slack integration.
[00:42:14]
Danny Fellars: So it’s
[00:42:15]
Kamille Parks: come in three phases.
[00:42:16]
Kamille Parks: I think it started with just get notifications about Airtable into Slack, a typical Slack bot.
[00:42:23]
Kamille Parks: And then a couple years ago, it was you could get actionable buttons straight from an Airtable automation, so you could update records from Slack into Airtable directly, and then this, which is a step beyond that even more.
[00:42:40]
Kamille Parks: And they refer to it specifically as Omni.
[00:42:43]
Kamille Parks: So some of the language, I think, is a little confusing about what this feature is, but they they say Omni in, if you read the support doc that comes with this announcement.
[00:42:55]
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
[00:42:56]
Danny Fellars: I saw that.
[00:43:01]
Danny Fellars: But that is not the case.
[00:43:02]
Danny Fellars: So I tried to get this to work in my Slack.
[00:43:04]
Danny Fellars: I was able to get it it to integrate, but something was not configured.
[00:43:08]
Danny Fellars: I it might be because I had the old one before, and I tried deleting it and reinstalling.
[00:43:13]
Danny Fellars: I could not I could get it to install.
[00:43:16]
Danny Fellars: I could see the bot, but when I ask it when I tag it, I couldn’t get a response.
[00:43:22]
Danny Fellars: So I’m still trying to get this working in my environment.
[00:43:27]
Danny Fellars: But, yeah, I don’t I I’m almost positive that it’s not the same as Omni.
[00:43:32]
Danny Fellars: It’s using the MCP, so it only exposes what what the MCP client can expose.
[00:43:39]
Kamille Parks: Well, that’s confusing.
[00:43:40]
Kamille Parks: Yeah.
[00:43:41]
Kamille Parks: Because we talked about in the previous episode, Omni can do more than what the MCP can do.
[00:43:47]
Kamille Parks: So, mean, there’s only so much you could do from Slack anyway because of the nature of Slack, not really Airtable’s fault.
[00:43:53]
Kamille Parks: But yeah.
[00:43:55]
Kamille Parks: I can’t the the language is a little a little confusing.
[00:44:00]
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
[00:44:01]
Danny Fellars: So, yeah, I’m pretty sure based off of this, it’s just what MCP can do.
[00:44:08]
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
[00:44:08]
Danny Fellars: I think they use Omni to just represent anything AI related, but that’s confusing.
[00:44:17]
Danny Fellars: K.
[00:44:17]
Danny Fellars: So, yeah, what if if we can get this working, we’ll we’ll demo this in the future, but I don’t think it’s gonna be anything different.
[00:44:26]
Danny Fellars: Some concerns I had is, like, does this expose everything?
[00:44:32]
Danny Fellars: I think you actually lock it down to a single base is what I saw.
[00:44:37]
Danny Fellars: So you can only, connect a single base to to communicate with.
[00:44:44]
Kamille Parks: I think each chat can only think about one base at a time.
[00:44:48]
Kamille Parks: That’s how I read it.
[00:44:49]
Kamille Parks: Because you could give it a different base, and it’ll it said it would lose all chat context.
[00:44:56]
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
[00:44:58]
Alli Alosa: But I
[00:44:59]
Kamille Parks: could be wrong.
[00:44:59]
Kamille Parks: I have my own Slack instance as well, so I could try and, test this in my own time and see if I I could get it to work.
[00:45:07]
Danny Fellars: Maybe maybe this was my problem to see.
[00:45:12]
Kamille Parks: It it does have a, like, a paragraph in somewhere in this article that’s like, it will only think about one base at a time, and then you have to say, oh, I’m talking about a different base.
[00:45:24]
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
[00:45:24]
Kamille Parks: And then it, like Which it?
[00:45:26]
Kamille Parks: Yeah.
[00:45:26]
Kamille Parks: So that’s definitely in here.
[00:45:29]
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
[00:45:30]
Danny Fellars: The other concern I had was, okay, if I, like, install this on built on air Slack community, then now anybody can communicate with what I expose that to.
[00:45:41]
Danny Fellars: You gotta be careful who has access to it.
[00:45:46]
Kamille Parks: Yeah.
[00:45:46]
Kamille Parks: I I feel like it should do the thing that OAuth connections do and not letting you if you do it for our whole Slack instance, which has over a thousand members, not everyone has access to, like, the base that we use to run the podcast on.
[00:46:03]
Kamille Parks: So Mhmm.
[00:46:03]
Kamille Parks: It should be able to pull your email address and, like, know whether or not you have access to the base, but I don’t know that.
[00:46:10]
Kamille Parks: It
[00:46:11]
Danny Fellars: I don’t I don’t think it does because you have different emails for your Slack login versus your you know, unless you’re on SSO.
[00:46:19]
Danny Fellars: I I don’t think it does.
[00:46:20]
Kamille Parks: I find that disappointing.
[00:46:23]
Kamille Parks: Yeah.
[00:46:24]
Kamille Parks: Because that’s that could be very dangerous.
[00:46:26]
Danny Fellars: Or does anybody I guess anybody can read if you’re if you’re chatting with Airtable, but I wonder if you does each person have to authenticate to be able to chat with it, and then it knows your individual permissions?
[00:46:42]
Kamille Parks: I would like that.
[00:46:44]
Kamille Parks: That feels more secure to me and, not sure if that’s the case.
[00:46:48]
Kamille Parks: But
[00:46:49]
Danny Fellars: I I think it was.
[00:46:50]
Danny Fellars: I think I just configured it once as the admin.
[00:46:55]
Danny Fellars: It’s kinda scary.
[00:46:57]
Danny Fellars: But, anyway alright.
[00:47:00]
Danny Fellars: Let’s move on.
[00:47:01]
Danny Fellars: Couple other things.
[00:47:02]
Danny Fellars: So, this is something Russ, as always, I think, was the first to highlight this.
[00:47:08]
Danny Fellars: K.
[00:47:08]
Danny Fellars: So let’s see.
[00:47:09]
Danny Fellars: How long has formatting as a single select been around?
[00:47:14]
Danny Fellars: Maybe a year?
[00:47:15]
Alli Alosa: Two years?
[00:47:16]
Alli Alosa: Years, I think.
[00:47:17]
Alli Alosa: Yeah.
[00:47:18]
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
[00:47:18]
Danny Fellars: Couple years.
[00:47:20]
Danny Fellars: So this is with the formula field.
[00:47:23]
Danny Fellars: If you you could go into the formatting and you could, format it as a single select, and then you could you’d have to define each item.
[00:47:33]
Danny Fellars: Anyways, they’ve expanded that to where now you can format things as a URL or an email, so you could have different field.
[00:47:41]
Danny Fellars: It so that helps with how it displays, things and and especially, like, URLs that that’s helpful to be clickable and things like that.
[00:47:51]
Danny Fellars: And,
[00:47:52]
Kamille Parks: inter interfaces.
[00:47:54]
Kamille Parks: Most people use the Airtable user field or collaborative field or or whatever it’s called now.
[00:47:59]
Kamille Parks: I think it’s now called user.
[00:48:01]
Kamille Parks: But you could also use an email field to control visibility settings.
[00:48:05]
Kamille Parks: And if you had a a formula that, you know, if it’s marketing, it’s Jim’s email, and if it’s sales, it’s Jane’s email, that kind of thing, You couldn’t use that formula for that visibility setting.
[00:48:19]
Kamille Parks: So this adjustment, it’s one of those little things that, like, I just sort of consigned myself to deal with in Airtable.
[00:48:29]
Kamille Parks: Yeah.
[00:48:30]
Kamille Parks: Because it’s not that big of a problem in the grand scheme of building an application, but it resolves the need for some of these, like, hacky little workarounds if you wanted to use things like conditional visibility.
[00:48:45]
Danny Fellars: Right.
[00:48:45]
Danny Fellars: We’re already we’re already seeing the impact of the acquisition.
[00:48:49]
Danny Fellars: The Airtable has three the Airtable has three records.
[00:48:53]
Kamille Parks: Airtable’s been doing that for years, though.
[00:48:55]
Kamille Parks: Sometimes it is a crapshoot with Airtable performance.
[00:48:59]
Kamille Parks: I’ll load a base that has 499,000 records and a load like that.
[00:49:04]
Kamille Parks: And then sometimes I’ll load a base like this, and it’ll take Yeah.
[00:49:08]
Kamille Parks: Like, a full minute to load.
[00:49:10]
Kamille Parks: There’s no telling.
[00:49:11]
Kamille Parks: It’s a mystery.
[00:49:13]
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
[00:49:15]
Alli Alosa: Yeah.
[00:49:16]
Alli Alosa: I wonder also if that the URL formatting because I feel like if you didn’t switch it to URL, it would still highlight it would still function as a URL.
[00:49:27]
Alli Alosa: Right.
[00:49:27]
Alli Alosa: You could still click on it.
[00:49:29]
Alli Alosa: However, I think if you actually switch it to URL, I wonder if that gives you similar to if you had it displayed as an email and interfaces, you could then use it as, like, an image display, how you could use that the URL field to show an image in a gallery view now.
[00:49:52]
Alli Alosa: I don’t know if I Yeah.
[00:49:53]
Alli Alosa: Articulated that correctly.
[00:49:54]
Alli Alosa: But
[00:49:55]
Kamille Parks: No.
[00:49:55]
Kamille Parks: I mean, you’re right.
[00:49:56]
Kamille Parks: It it’s it’s another instance of interfaces let you use certain fields for certain things, but formulas were oftentimes ineligible because they didn’t output the expected type.
[00:50:08]
Kamille Parks: So this is also a reminder to myself and other developers.
[00:50:14]
Kamille Parks: Sometimes you have in your code only let only select this, variable if the output is of type x, y, and z.
[00:50:28]
Kamille Parks: And then there’s extra configuration that you have to do to say, well, I wanna accept single select fields, but also formulas formatted as a single select.
[00:50:41]
Kamille Parks: If you did the same thing with URL or email, you’re gonna have to update your code to account for this now being a thing.
[00:50:49]
Kamille Parks: I don’t think this is gonna have merely the developer impact as the single select, which is a great feature.
[00:50:55]
Kamille Parks: I’m not knocking that feature.
[00:50:56]
Kamille Parks: I love it.
[00:50:56]
Kamille Parks: I use it all the time.
[00:50:58]
Kamille Parks: But, man, did I have to go back and update a few things to be like, oh, well, I have to account for this new possibility.
[00:51:04]
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
[00:51:06]
Danny Fellars: Yep.
[00:51:06]
Danny Fellars: That is tricky.
[00:51:07]
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
[00:51:08]
Danny Fellars: The one that I always that, I mean, I I rely heavily on is is formatting as a checkbox.
[00:51:18]
Alli Alosa: Mhmm.
[00:51:18]
Alli Alosa: That
[00:51:18]
Kamille Parks: All the time.
[00:51:19]
Kamille Parks: That it made so many, like, utility fields so much more readable because I I opened a very old base, not recently, and it was a lot of ones and zeros.
[00:51:31]
Kamille Parks: And it was a lot of math of, like, if equals zero, and
[00:51:35]
Alli Alosa: I’m like, I
[00:51:37]
Kamille Parks: wanted a Boolean.
[00:51:38]
Kamille Parks: And, technically, yes, that’s a Boolean, but you know what I mean.
[00:51:42]
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
[00:51:42]
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
[00:51:43]
Alli Alosa: I have a really a a silly annoyance with the checkbox functionality here or, like, when you’re formatting the formula as a checkbox, something I’ve noticed and it probably won’t happen on this table because you only have three records.
[00:52:00]
Alli Alosa: Right click on the field and say filter by this field, fill yeah.
[00:52:04]
Alli Alosa: Filter by this field at the bottom there.
[00:52:07]
Alli Alosa: It usually, you know, have when you have enough records or, like, I don’t know what the cutoff is to show the apply button.
[00:52:13]
Danny Fellars: Uh-huh.
[00:52:14]
Danny Fellars: A thousand.
[00:52:15]
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
[00:52:15]
Kamille Parks: Well, if you have more than 5,000 records, and then it will show you the first thousand, a decision I find strange.
[00:52:22]
Kamille Parks: But go ahead, Ally.
[00:52:24]
Alli Alosa: Well, either if you have that apply button there I used to really dislike it, and now I rely on it heavily.
[00:52:32]
Alli Alosa: And if you typically, if you were to click on any other field that’s not a checkbox and say filter by this field, it would open this up with the filter ready for you to play with, and then you hit apply.
[00:52:44]
Alli Alosa: Then the changes take effect.
[00:52:47]
Alli Alosa: Mhmm.
[00:52:47]
Alli Alosa: That’s not the case with this checkbox field.
[00:52:49]
Alli Alosa: Just a word of warning.
[00:52:51]
Alli Alosa: It as soon as you right click, it will add to your filters and apply it at the same time.
[00:52:58]
Kamille Parks: Like
[00:52:58]
Alli Alosa: Oh.
[00:53:00]
Alli Alosa: It will and it’ll always say where it’s unchecked.
[00:53:02]
Alli Alosa: Like, it’ll always add it be being unchecked, and it will I
[00:53:10]
Kamille Parks: like the apply feature.
[00:53:13]
Kamille Parks: I think it’s I think it’s good practice, but, yeah, the the cutoff is opaque.
[00:53:19]
Kamille Parks: And I think what I just said probably isn’t even accurate.
[00:53:22]
Kamille Parks: It might be a Yeah.
[00:53:23]
Danny Fellars: For the first time it isn’t.
[00:53:25]
Kamille Parks: So it’s like I feel like if if it were across the board, I think I would be fine with it.
[00:53:33]
Kamille Parks: I would take some time to adjust.
[00:53:36]
Kamille Parks: Or if it were, like, made very clear when that functionality happens.
[00:53:41]
Kamille Parks: But I don’t know why it wouldn’t apply to a formula formatted as a checkbox.
[00:53:46]
Kamille Parks: That feels like a miss.
[00:53:49]
Alli Alosa: Right.
[00:53:50]
Alli Alosa: It’s really strange.
[00:53:51]
Alli Alosa: And it does.
[00:53:51]
Alli Alosa: If you’re, like if you open up the filter and add it manually, it it waits for you to hit apply.
[00:53:58]
Alli Alosa: But if you right click on the field and say filter by this field, it applies it immediately.
[00:54:04]
Alli Alosa: Yeah.
[00:54:05]
Danny Fellars: The button is there.
[00:54:06]
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
[00:54:07]
Kamille Parks: Yeah.
[00:54:08]
Kamille Parks: So we would need to demonstrate this on a much larger table.
[00:54:11]
Kamille Parks: Yeah.
[00:54:11]
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
[00:54:11]
Danny Fellars: Exactly.
[00:54:12]
Alli Alosa: It’s hard to say without actually being able to show it.
[00:54:14]
Alli Alosa: I was just trying to see if I had one at hand, but I don’t.
[00:54:19]
Alli Alosa: Other other So big annoyance while I’m on the thing is if you are in in that table and you click on the test output test, like one of those cells in the text field to the left, like, where it says Dane Fellwood.
[00:54:37]
Danny Fellars: Okay.
[00:54:38]
Alli Alosa: Yeah.
[00:54:38]
Alli Alosa: And then expand that, with the little arrows.
[00:54:42]
Alli Alosa: And now try an arrow down.
[00:54:46]
Alli Alosa: Nothing.
[00:54:47]
Kamille Parks: Yeah.
[00:54:48]
Kamille Parks: I think this used to work.
[00:54:49]
Alli Alosa: It did.
[00:54:50]
Kamille Parks: And now it did.
[00:54:51]
Kamille Parks: So
[00:54:53]
Danny Fellars: here it was.
[00:54:54]
Danny Fellars: But
[00:54:54]
Alli Alosa: All the time.
[00:54:56]
Alli Alosa: If you expand it, you can no longer arrow around, and you used to be able to.
[00:55:00]
Alli Alosa: And I, again, relied on that heavily, and now it’s gone.
[00:55:03]
Alli Alosa: And I’m, like, freaking out.
[00:55:05]
Kamille Parks: Yeah.
[00:55:05]
Kamille Parks: That is a, that’s an accessibility feature.
[00:55:08]
Kamille Parks: So, you know, a lot of my complaints are petty annoyances, but that’s, that’s not cool.
[00:55:15]
Kamille Parks: Some people, can only navigate basically using the keyboard and not so much the mouse.
[00:55:20]
Kamille Parks: So, yeah, I don’t know about that.
[00:55:26]
Danny Fellars: Interesting.
[00:55:30]
Alli Alosa: Driving me crazy.
[00:55:31]
Alli Alosa: Like, I used to, like if you have a for my my use case is typically if I have too long text fields, I’m trying to compare the values of them.
[00:55:38]
Alli Alosa: I’ll arrow between them because if it’s too big to see the whole thing, I can’t see it unless I expand it.
[00:55:44]
Alli Alosa: And so then I can, like, arrow back and forth.
[00:55:47]
Alli Alosa: But that’s
[00:55:51]
Danny Fellars: Alright.
[00:55:53]
Danny Fellars: Getting to the end here.
[00:55:55]
Danny Fellars: K.
[00:55:55]
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
[00:55:56]
Danny Fellars: So this one and Gary mentions that you can do it on the roll up as well, so that’s good.
[00:56:03]
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
[00:56:04]
Danny Fellars: I I would
[00:56:04]
Kamille Parks: agree on that.
[00:56:05]
Alli Alosa: That’s awesome.
[00:56:07]
Kamille Parks: Now when are we gonna get, roll ups equivalent of single select?
[00:56:10]
Kamille Parks: I assume it would become multi select, or single select because sometimes you could get a single text value.
[00:56:16]
Kamille Parks: So it it should allow you to do both.
[00:56:18]
Danny Fellars: But it’s true.
[00:56:19]
Danny Fellars: You can’t.
[00:56:20]
Alli Alosa: What I would really like is I mean, what could maybe solve for what I’m looking for there is just to be able to only include unique values in a lookup field.
[00:56:30]
Alli Alosa: Like Yeah.
[00:56:31]
Alli Alosa: Just a toggle.
[00:56:32]
Alli Alosa: Like, only show me the unique single select values.
[00:56:35]
Kamille Parks: Now someone might say, Ally, why don’t you just use a roll up?
[00:56:38]
Kamille Parks: And you would say
[00:56:39]
Alli Alosa: I want the colors, and I want the selection drop down from the filters.
[00:56:43]
Alli Alosa: I don’t wanna lose my look and feel of my single select.
[00:56:46]
Alli Alosa: So,
[00:56:48]
Kamille Parks: for me, the I I feel that way, but especially about lookups of linked record fields.
[00:56:54]
Kamille Parks: Because if you’re in an interface, you could turn that lookup of a linked record into a a visualization.
[00:57:00]
Kamille Parks: That’s great.
[00:57:00]
Kamille Parks: But if you don’t wanna do that, you see those duplicates.
[00:57:03]
Kamille Parks: And you know?
[00:57:06]
Danny Fellars: You can do the if if all of them are the same value, you can get the limit to just get the first one.
[00:57:14]
Danny Fellars: Mhmm.
[00:57:14]
Kamille Parks: Yes.
[00:57:15]
Kamille Parks: And I’ve used that, but sometimes it’s a mix, you know, and I wanna I just, I wanna consolidate.
[00:57:23]
Kamille Parks: So I don’t I don’t want them all repeating and roll ups figured it out.
[00:57:27]
Kamille Parks: So,
[00:57:28]
Alli Alosa: I need
[00:57:28]
Kamille Parks: to do a lookup.
[00:57:30]
Alli Alosa: That first and last option, something to note that’s important there that I figured out somewhat recently is if you don’t filter it to only show the values that are not empty
[00:57:44]
Kamille Parks: Mhmm.
[00:57:44]
Alli Alosa: It will give you if the first value is empty, it will just give you an empty value.
[00:57:50]
Alli Alosa: Yep.
[00:57:50]
Alli Alosa: Yep.
[00:57:50]
Alli Alosa: Yeah.
[00:57:50]
Alli Alosa: Yeah.
[00:57:50]
Alli Alosa: You need to filter.
[00:57:52]
Alli Alosa: Yep.
[00:57:52]
Kamille Parks: I almost exclusively use array compact and array unique, if I’m in a roll up, and then I will use slice.
[00:58:01]
Kamille Parks: But, yeah, that’s a good tip.
[00:58:03]
Danny Fellars: Mhmm.
[00:58:03]
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
[00:58:03]
Danny Fellars: I usually, yeah, do the filter and only return ones that have a value.
[00:58:08]
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
[00:58:09]
Alli Alosa: I’ve got a good hack also along the multi like, getting a unique value from the lookups of a single select.
[00:58:15]
Alli Alosa: If you sync it to a different table, that’ll give you just the unique values, a different base.
[00:58:24]
Danny Fellars: Alright.
[00:58:24]
Danny Fellars: We’re coming up on the and I do have a hard stop here.
[00:58:27]
Danny Fellars: So let’s we’ll highlight, a couple other.
[00:58:30]
Danny Fellars: So we talked about, previously the MCP additions for automations, and then Kamille calls out a couple, other ones that aren’t often mentioned, revert action and submit form.
[00:58:44]
Kamille Parks: Yeah.
[00:58:45]
Kamille Parks: Those are two that I wouldn’t even considered, being added either to the API or the MCP, but they are great additions.
[00:58:53]
Kamille Parks: So happy to see them.
[00:58:55]
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
[00:58:56]
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
[00:58:56]
Danny Fellars: Let’s maybe maybe next week’s episode, we could we could get to our MCP, and then I think that would be cool to to showcase these.
[00:59:04]
Danny Fellars: There’s one other one that maybe we’ll save for next week.
[00:59:06]
Danny Fellars: So maybe next week’s show will dive into some of these tidbits that that we’ve been talking about.
[00:59:11]
Danny Fellars: So, anyways, let us know your feedback on today’s big news, and, hopefully, the initial scare wears away.
[00:59:21]
Danny Fellars: I think in the end, everything will be okay, and we’ll be just fine figuring this out together.
[00:59:30]
Danny Fellars: Have a good week.
[00:59:31]
Danny Fellars: We’ll be back next week.
[00:59:33]
Alli Alosa: Thank you.