The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 19 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Harries: Retool is 'dead at the wheel' amid AI transition
“And I think Retool is kind of dead at the wheel at the moment. I don't hear the recent things they've been launching, and so I could imagine Loveball going in that direction.”
Harries: Retool Is Dead at the Wheel Compared to AI App Builders
“And I think Retool is kind of dead at the wheel at the moment. I don't hear the recent things they've been launching, and so I could imagine Loveball going in that direction.”
Early-stage startups should hire adaptable 'street fighters' over incumbent sales reps
“So I think in the beginning, you have no idea what you're doing. You have some ideas, you know, what hypotheses you're testing, but you don't have sales enablement. You don't really have the playbook for the deals yet. Do you have your ICP? Do you know if your…”
Sales leaders should design compensation plans where 80% of reps hit quota
“And how can you take that and map it into a comp plan where, you know, hopefully I think the logic I've always used is that you should design a comp structure where at least 80% of your reps are hitting.”
Hsu argues founder conviction beats testing landing pages for startup ideas
“Yeah, so I think conviction is very important, and so I think when choosing ideas, I think conviction probably is sort of highest order you have to care about, basically, is do you actually get convicted about the idea? I have a bunch of friends now, and I'm s…”
Hsu believed Retool lacked product-market fit until reaching $3M-$4M ARR
“I think up until maybe three... Three, maybe four million dollars in ARR. I don't think even up to three or four million dollars in ARR, I was fairly convinced we did not have product market fit.”
Dorfman: Startups should not reinvent software pricing models
“They, you know, there are no models going out and creating a new pricing model is why, like, do not reinvent the wheel when it comes to pricing.”
Dorfman: Retool hired sales enablement too late, creating process debt
“I think that one of my biggest lessons was you hire for sales enablement too late and I think we hired too late. I think we have a lot of Process debt as a result.”
Dorfman: Selling new software categories requires driving behavior change
“Selling into a new category is really challenging. It's a different type of challenge retools, a new category segment was a new category. You're not just selling a point solution. You're not just selling a product. You have to create budgets. You have to creat…”
Retool's value proposition shifted from speed to efficiency during the market downturn
“What's been interesting actually about the market shift over the last Few months, it feels like years is, is the value property tool has shifted a little bit. It was acceleration. It was time to value. It was enabling people to grow really quickly and move at …”
Hsu plans for Retool to eventually power all general software development
“Yeah, well, we're still very, very, very, very far away from our goal. Our goal is to be the way software is built. And today, point, you know, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, one bits of software is built in Retool today. So, you know, we're starting with…”
Retool reached a $1B valuation in 3.5 years with three employees
“I think if you look at Retool, you know, I think the company is, what, three and a half years old, so, you know, by all sort of means, it doesn't look like it was that slow, you know, reached a billion after an evaluation, at least, at three and a half. And ye…”
Hsu says Retool would have died without John Collison's YC feedback
“Without him, we might still be working on it. So, well, we'd probably be out of business at this point, but we probably would have worked on it for another year or two.”
Sequoia acquired a 15% to 17% stake in Retool's Series A
“In our case, I think Sequoia probably owns, I think it's either 15 or 17%, something like that, or in the Series A, at least, they own something like that.”
Retool burned only $100K of its $1.4M seed before raising Series A
“At that point, we were four people. I think we would raise maybe 1.4, something like that in the seed. And so I think when we were raising our A, I think we'd burn maybe a hundred K of the 1.4, something like that.”
Retool spent only $1M of its Series A before raising Series B
“When we raised the Series B, I think we've spent a million dollars in the Series A, so, so, you know, I guess we haven't really deployed the capital very much.”
Retool AEs host customer hackathons and dinners to close deals
“We've got two folks down at a customer onsite right now, running a hackathon with the team. They're retool sponsoring a hackathon and they're building applications together. And so they're meeting all these new teams. They're embedding themselves in the busine…”