Retool

“The reality of Airtable and tools like it Is that AI has made it, you know, there's like other businesses that were really, really flying, like in the Airtable days, like Retool and these kind of lightweight UI layers that made it easier to interact with datab…”

“Retool is no longer very popular, but we were heavy users of it, like in 20, 20, 21.”

“Most of the UI UX for this platform is built in retool. And so like you can basically go into retool and there's like a prompt manager, a tool manager, an eval manager.”

“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.”

“Retool was very different from both my experiences at Stripe and at OpenAI, because both Stripe and OpenAI, for better or for worse, were inbound companies, right? There was so much latent demand that we were fighting off people breaking down the door, trying …”

“Something quite controversial, which is to take the thing that our sales team was gated on a self-hosted version of retool and made that available self-serve to anybody who wanted it. They didn't have to talk to a salesperson and that kind of blew up the funne…”

“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.”

“Retools leadership team was like a collection of very different personalities. It was a big team was like, you know, I think they had 10 people on sort of the overall operating leadership team. Stripes team was always tight knit, five people.”

“I invested in Notion, Airtable, and Retool within, I don't know, two years of each other, whatever the time frame was. But at the time, there was no low code, no code. Kind of thesis. It was just, these are really interesting founders working in interesting ar…”

“Their latest valuation is 3.7. They've raised one hundred fifty million dollars from Sequoia and a bunch of other great companies. Listen to this growth. First nine months, 500,000 dollars in revenue. In 2018, they hit two million in ARR. In 2024, they hit aro…”

“So at a valuation of 3.7 I think there's room to run. I think there's a five or 10 X potential here.”

“Valuation is high, so I think four or five X is tough from there, right? To become a fifteen billion dollar company is tough, but I think it's a good, really good company.”

“The very first trade show that we did was more than three X ROI payback on the investment that we put into the booth”

“So at Retool, it was almost like a heat map of role X vertical. And then you kind of wanted to see how green could you get in maybe 10 of those in a year. Like, I don't really think you could do much more than that.”

“I would say the pipeline coverage you need, we used to need about 1.5 X. Now it's closer to two, 2.5.”

“Actually, I think we're in a really interesting position because if you look at the website, you don't see AI anywhere. You have to dig deep into our docs to actually see where AI fits in.”

“The pipeline profit has been within 10% of accuracy. Every quarter.”

“I think the key when you're interviewing salespeople is when you ask a question, you have to go five layers deeper on the answer.”

“If you're working with zero to a hundred employees, the sales cycle looks pretty similar across the board. But if you're looking at say a strategic segment where you have a rep that only works with three or four customers and you have odd with a BDR, you have …”

“Vyond Change their idea and got really excited about it and renamed to Brex. And this was Brex, which is like a Decacorn. And Cashew changed their idea and renamed to something called Retool. And so out of my 35 companies, the ones that objectively seemed the …”

“If you just are following the same principles and have the same information flow into your brain, you're going to come up with the same ideas as everybody else. And so the prompt here is to try to go more off the beaten path, either from your personal experien…”

“I think five of the first 50 employees at ramp came from contrary, a lot of the people at retool, a lot of the people and roll.”

“So we were supposed to present at the March demo day, but then we basically felt like we had nothing really going on and no traction. We had no customers. And so we're like, okay, well, why don't we, you know, take six months to go find all that before present…”

“I think that at that point we had raised something like maybe a million dollars, maybe a million and a half coming out of YC. So, I mean, to us to people, you know, that was a huge amount of money. I was like, wow, like how are you ever gonna spend a million a…”

“One thing we did actually early on that I think has paid a lot of dividends, especially, you know, which was a lot larger now is we hired a lot of former founders. So I want to say like when we were, I don't know, 2030, 40 people, we were probably like half fo…”

“We actually hate the low code moniker. We actually never, in fact, we have docs saying we will never use it internally. Or even to customers.”

“Like, 95% of our customers actually are developers, actually.”

“If you talk to most engineers today, like, a lot of engineers do use Copilot but if you ask them, like, how much time does Copilot save you, it's not like coding is tenx faster than before. You know, coding is maybe, like, 10% faster, maybe 20% faster, or some…”

“Practically every app, every internal app especially, is going to be AI infused over the next, like, three years.”

“We think the open source movement in AI, especially when it comes to all the supporting infrastructure, is going to win.”

“I think one huge advantage of some of the developers is that they actually don't, like, developers don't want to be given an end solution. They want to be given the building blocks to themselves to build the end solution.”

“We have, I think, basically never built anything specific for one customer”

“I do think that based on what we are hearing from customers, if we're not seeing returns in like a year or something, there will be more skepticism. So I think there is like a it is time bound, if you will, so.”

“Most of the software engineers in the world and most of the code-written in the world actually goes towards these internal facing applications.”

“GPT-IV.V. MPS, I want to say it was, like, 14 or something, like, it was, like, not high, actually. But the GPT-IV MPS thing was, like, 45 or something like that”

“Our growth star metric used to always be, sort of revenue-generated, or in a new AR-generated. We actually changed it to be number of developers building on the platform, actually, last year.”

“Today at Amazon, actually, we have, I think, 11 separate business units that use Retool at this point”

“To what do you attribute your success and you can't say luck? Cause you know, I think humble people will always say luck in some way. And you know, I always kind of wanted to like, did you like, how self-aware are you basically? And I think, and how curious ar…”

“Retool started as Venmo for the UK.”

“Today some of the top growth companies, like, Block, Vercel, Ramp, Retool, Mercury, and Substack are building with Linear. We also additionally have lots of other companies, like thousands of other companies using, using Linear.”

“I think actually both in the Stripe case and the Retool case, the thing that both of these companies have in common is you're building for developers. The people who are building the product are the customers in a lot of ways. So like they get it, you know, th…”

“The moment at which it became clear, like we really do need PMs at Stripe. And I think we felt the same way at Retool is your customer base starts expanding. You start having different kinds of customers. You need to understand Sort of the whole market, all of…”

“At a retail, we have these team charters, and we do team planning, and at the bottom of every team charter, we have a section called Think Bigger with, you know, 20% more time. What would you do that isn't on this list already?”

“Another really neat tradition that we had at Stride, we have a retail now too, is this idea, this thing called crazy ideas. So at the beginning of every year, David will send out a blank Like a blank doc to the org, and it's titled Crazy Ideas, and the prompt …”

“Every, so every year that we send out the doc, we look at the past year, the doc from the past year and we're like, okay, like, What did we do anything on this list? And like consistently we do anywhere between like three to eight things on the list.”

“So that was actually one of the crazy ideas and that ended up becoming Retool Workflows, which, you know, we launched just last year in November.”

“We started really small with all of these initiatives. So, you know, I think I mentioned we really had one or two people working on, on each of these products for like the first six months. So it was like one engineer and one designer or one engineer and one P…”

“And we eventually decided that we were going to run it as a separate team because we wanted the team to be able to move really, really quickly. And we didn't want it to get bogged down in what are just the realities of running a product that has product market…”

“Like our PMs are really very technical. Like everyone has, you know, either a CS degree or has done some sort of engineering. In the past.”

“We use Retool to build Retool. So our product roadmap lives in a Retool app and the app that we use to, you know, to have feature flags for particular features is a Retool app. So PMs are just in the product all day long, every day. They're their own customers…”

“Teams that have one always want the other. Like whenever, whenever I talk to candidates, I feel like you can always tell what, you know, their company has because they'll be asking a lot of questions about the opposite. Like they're probably like growth compan…”

“This year we're actually trying something different. We are doing a science fair. Where each product team has a little booth and they get to sort of stand there and anyone who has questions about the product can come, you know, from the go to market side, can …”

“I do a little personal exercise for myself every six months where I, like, sit, like, sort of chart out the team that we have today and, like, write down all the strengths that we have, all of the weaknesses that we have as a team, and then I try to sort of hi…”

“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…”

“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 …”

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”