HomeKorean AmericanBreaking barriers: Howie Liu's Airtable valued at $2.5B

Breaking barriers: Howie Liu’s Airtable valued at $2.5B

While businesses across all industries are struggling to survive, Airtable, the no-code/low-code startup, co-founded by Howie Liu–a young tech entrepreneur who sold his first company to Salesforce at the ripe old age of twenty-one–has received another round of funding to the tune of $185 million, putting Liu’s latest venture at a $2.5 billion valuation.

Being a featured speaker at Disrupt2020, Liu, who was able to start Airtable with investment from Ashton Kutcher, said that while the company’s valuation has risen exponentially, he has no interest in leaving the company to cash out.

From Techcrunch:

“In spite of this great success, the upward trend of the business and the fat valuation, Liu was in no mood to talk about an IPO […] Nor did he express any interest in being acquired, and he says that his investors weren’t putting any pressure on him to exit.”

Liu, who grew up in College Station, Texas, found programming when he was thirteen years-old via an unread C++ training book belonging to his father who earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry while attending Texas A&M. His mother, while working minimum wage at McDonalds and finding work as a seamstress in the US, was an engineer in China.

In that way you could say that STEM was already in his blood. It makes you wonder if Liu’s drive also has anything to do with his mother not working as an engineer in the U.S. as well, for whatever the reasons.

But getting funding for a start-up can be tough. Making it successful and getting bought out, even tougher-much less getting bought out by Salesforce.

For all the success stories you hear about, they are few and far between in comparison to the overall percentages of startups that fail, or never even get to round one of funding.

In that sense, while the mantra for generations of Asian American parents is to get their children into careers like doctor, lawyer, or engineer (The Big Three), it also begs the question. If trying to start a company and getting funding is actually more akin to trying to be an actor, or making it as a singer.

At the same time, with barriers for Asian Americans in traditional companies preventing many from C-suite positions because of bias and sometimes outright racism, did Liu, who’s CEO of Airtable, break the “bamboo ceiling”, or did he simply make his own opportunities in spite of it?

And does this translate into similar positive imagery like in the arts? Does an Asian American entrepreneur like Liu serve as the same beacon of light for the young Asian American who reads through the business section before hopping on the bus to school? Is it the same as a young Asian American aspiring actor or thespian being inspired by seeing Constance Wu or John Cho in television and movies?

And do we as a community value one over the other?

No matter what the answer, it’s great we have individuals like Liu, to help us ponder these questions.

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