CMO Airtable, Archana Agrawal: Success Is Not a Formula

Archana Agrawal started her job as CMO of Airtable on March 18, 2020 — the same week that the US began to “shelter in place” as cases of the novel coronavirus rapidly rose. With kids who would be staying home from school and Airtable’s San Francisco office closed, everything was changing at once, so she switched into what she calls “problem-solving mode.” And, crucially, she discovered how to use family time to de-stress.

In this episode, Archana and Joubin discuss how she made her way from Africa to Asia to America; operating without a full night’s sleep; why her former coworkers made a game of trying to stump her; the secret power under the hood of Airtable; starting her current job right as “shelter in place” kicked in; whether she would stay at Airtable if the founder was no longer CEO; and how she views her responsibility on the boards of MongoDB and Zendesk.

In this episode, we cover:

• Staying in place & doubling down vs. moving on to bigger things (03:03)
• Moving from Liberia to India to escape civil war (07:13)
• Archana’s unusual grad school roommate: Her father (11:33)
• The value of breadth over depth, and following your passions (17:35)
• Cold-emailing her way into a job at Atlassian and the ridiculous job title Archana almost received (21:38)
• Understanding a team’s strengths and weaknesses — and her own (27:05)
• Her lowest point at Atlassian, the sale of HipChat and exit from the messaging business (34:33)
• Why it matters that Airtable looks like a spreadsheet, but is powered by a relational database (37:52)
• Going into “problem-solving mode,” and the most important outlet for escaping from stress (42:42)
• Working for founder-led companies (49:53)
• Being heard as a quiet person on advisory boards full of louder people (55:27)

Links:

• Connect with Archana
  • LinkedIn
  • Email: archana@airtable.com
• Connect with Joubin
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Email: grit@kleinerperkins.com
• Learn more about Kleiner Perkins
• This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm