The BBC's weekly The Boss series profiles different business leaders from around the world. This week we speak to Howie Liu, the founder and chief executive of the fast-growing spreadsheet start-up AirTable.
Silicon Valley boss Howard Liu is sitting, he believes, on an idea that could earn tens of billions of dollars. And with any luck, he tells the BBC, his company AirTable will be the one to execute it.
"It's a profoundly large opportunity, not unlike the scale of Amazon, or Facebook, or Google," he says without irony.
"I just think there's this sea change that's going to happen in terms of how people can interact with software."
The big idea? Spreadsheets, but better. Spreadsheets, but richer.
Spreadsheets are commonly used by professionals such as accountants to sort data, produce charts and do sums. But most of us find them too technical to use in anything but a basic way.
AirTable changes that, says Mr Liu, making it so easy that people who typically don't have coding skills - like cattle farmers - can set up complex cloud systems for what they do, such as keeping track of cows and equipment.
'Eyes glazed over'
The app has become a runaway success, attracting high profile customers such as entertainment company Netflix, electric carmaker Tesla and the magazine and website Time.
The company is also worth $1.1bn (£850m), based on its latest funding round, despite having only having a product on the market for four years.
Explaining the concept to investors was difficult in the company's early days, admits Mr Liu, who co-founded the business in 2012 and is also AirTable's chief executive. It didn't exactly sound like an entirely new idea.
"The concept of a spreadsheet predates even computing. Spreadsheets were the first killer app."
And so, when he and his partners went into investor meetings armed with their "pitch deck", they offered very little of what investors typically expected to hear.
"You see all these pitch decks out there that show a chart of growth, and market size, and all that kind of stuff. Ours looked nothing like that."
Instead they made a philosophical case for AirTable and how it could transform the world of work.
"Honestly, I think a lot of eyes just glazed over. I distinctly remember a few cases, even with the investors that said yes, where they said 'we don't really get what you're talking about'."
Ultimately, what got those investors on board was confidence in the AirTable team itself, which Mr Liu says was perhaps of more importance at such an early stage.
"There are many ways for a great idea with a bad team to fail, whereas even an unknown idea with a great team can succeed."