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 23 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
Hsu claims 95% of Y Combinator advice is in Paul Graham essays
“Almost everything YC tells you is available online. If you just go read every PG essay, you know, you could probably become a YC partner, basically, if you read every essay, and just maybe that's being a little bit uncharitable, but, you know, I think you coul…”
Hsu argues Y Combinator adds no value after product-market fit
“Once you have product pocket fit, you don't really need to be talking to anybody who's just kind of heads down, just executing, just writing code, talking to customers, you know, for as many hours a day as you can, really. And so once that does happen, You kno…”
Hsu argues VC help for struggling startups rarely yields real results
“I think, you know, it is true that when companies are not doing well, they'll sort of ask for more help, ask for more advice or whatever else. But I think in the end, it doesn't actually make that much of a difference. You may sort of spend more time with the …”
Hsu claims venture capital advice is unhelpful prior to product-market fit
“I think pre-proto market fit, I would hope you know your market better than your VC does. If you don't, you probably have some problems. It's got other issues. And so in that case, I really don't think the advice that a VC offers you is going to be that helpfu…”
Hsu argues burnout is driven by lack of results, not hard work
“I think if you try to really increase the clock speed and sort of cadence at which you move, but there are no results, I think that leads to burnout very quickly. At least for me, and potentially for you as well, and for many people I've talked to, working har…”
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 claims DoorDash is the only major startup built from landing-page testing
“The only case where I know this might potentially have worked was I think it was paloaltodelivery.com or something, which then became DoorDash. I think it's the only sort of recorded case of this ever actually working, but if you look at all the other sort of …”
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.”
Hsu argues executing sales properly may be harder than engineering
“If anything, it may be harder than engineering to really do sales properly.”
Hsu argues SaaS companies are inherently stable and rarely face acute crises
“I think part of it also is a SaaS company is just fairly stable in the sense that nothing really goes that wrong, really, for us.”
Hsu finds Silicon Valley insular compared to the UK tech scene
“Silicon Valley texting is quite insular. It's funny you ask this, because to some extent, I suppose the texting in the UK is definitely smaller, but it's actually, I think, much more positive and uplifting to some extent. I think, you know, the rest of British…”
Hsu's pre-Retool payments startup lost money on every transaction
“But then it turns out it's actually a terrible business in the sense that every time someone sends money, we were losing money. And so the faster we grew, the more money we actually lost”
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 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 early profitability makes fundraising easy and businesses resilient
“If you can get to profitability very early and you can keep your growth rate up, you're just in such a great position. Your business is just so healthy. It says that, you know, it's very hard to ever become unprofitable, and raising money becomes so easy if yo…”
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…”
Hsu pivoted to Retool with $150K bankroll and 70 days of runway
“We had to raise what the one 20 K from YC. And then we had some money from previous tech internships or something that was like maybe 30 K or something. And so we have one 50 K in total. And I think we're burning something like one or two K a day, which meant …”
Hsu spent 70% of early engineering time building internal tools
“Probably 60 to 70% of our time, actually, was spent developing internal tools for regulatory purposes, for fraud purposes, and stuff like that.”