Emmett Nicholas
Unicorn founderCo-Founder and senior engineering leader at Airtable
Greater Seattle Area
FoundedAirtable$11.7B
Find your path to Emmett
182 people in our graph share verified history with Emmett — schools, employers, funds. One of them is your warm intro.
About
Emmett Nicholas is a co-founder of Airtable, the no-code platform valued at $11.7 billion at its 2021 peak and sold to Bending Spoons for about $2.25 billion in equity value in 2026. A Duke computer science graduate, he wrote software at Microsoft and was a founding-era engineer at Stack Overflow before joining Howie Liu and Andrew Ofstad full-time in 2013; he served as Airtable's CTO until handing the role to OpenAI's David Azose in October 2025.
Deal analysis
- Airtable × Bending Spoons: who got the money home
An estimated liquidation waterfall: the late-stage pref stack took $1.29bn at ~1x, founders took ~$190m, and seed money made ~42x.
Read the analysis →
Beyond investing
- Education
- Studied computer science and electrical engineering at Duke University, class of 2008.
Mentioned above: the Duke University mafia →
From Emmett's own website — common ground for a warm intro.
Co-Founder and senior engineering leader at Airtable
Intro paths
In turn, Emmett can intro founders to Airtable's investors below.
Airtable's investors · 32
Co-founders at Airtable


Experience
Frequently asked questions
- Who is Emmett Nicholas?
- Emmett Nicholas is a co-founder of Airtable, the no-code platform valued at $11.7 billion at its 2021 peak and sold to Bending Spoons for about $2.25 billion in equity value in 2026. A Duke computer science graduate, he wrote software at Microsoft and was a founding-era engineer at Stack Overflow before joining Howie Liu and Andrew Ofstad full-time in 2013; he served as Airtable's CTO until handing the role to OpenAI's David Azose in October 2025.
- Where does Emmett Nicholas work?
- Emmett Nicholas is Co-Founder and senior engineering leader of Airtable.
- What companies did Emmett Nicholas found?
- Emmett Nicholas founded Airtable.
- Where did Emmett Nicholas go to school?
- Emmett Nicholas studied at Duke University (CS & ECE).
Founder mafias
Duke University mafia288
Also came through, then founded or led a company.
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Same school
Also attended Duke University954
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Shared employers
Also worked at Airtable37
+ 31 more
Also worked at Stack Overflow10
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Also worked at Microsoft2,000
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