The Ledger
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Hsu: Higher valuation for the same quality company is always worse
“Higher valuation, given the same company quality, is always worse.”
Most early-stage startups die from losing motivation, not running out of money
“I think that's actually true in most startups. Actually, it's like most startups die in the early stages, not because you run out of money, but really because you run out of motivation.”
Hsu: AI coding assistants only speed up development by 10% to 20%
“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…”
Hsu: AI chat only boosts productivity 10-20% and won't replace employees
“The chat, again, will help you, like, 10 or 20%, but it's unlikely that you're going to replace an employee with chat. Like, you know, you're not going to be like, oh, I have a relationship manager at JPMorgan Chase, and I've replaced him with an, you know, AI…”
Hsu: AI workflows, not chat or agents, are the next value driver
“So we think sort of the AI workflow space is a really exciting space, and I think that is the next step in sort of delivering a lot of business value by AI. I personally don't think it's, you know, via chat or, you know, via agents quite yet, so.”
Enterprise AI skepticism will surge without clear returns within a year
“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.”
Hsu: Most global software engineers write internal-facing code
“Most of the software engineers in the world and most of the code-written in the world actually goes towards these internal facing applications.”
OpenAI would decisively defeat any AI startup competitors
“I think if I was competing in startups, OpenAI would win for sure. Like, at this point, OpenAI is so far ahead from both a model and a pricing perspective that, like, there is no reason for it to go really, I think, in my opinion, at least, a startup model.”
Future Llama models will match frontier GPT models if progress slows
“As AI progress slows down, so if we get like Llama-IV, Llama-V for example, maybe it's a comparable at that point, like GPT-V or GPT-VI, like, It made it to the point where it was like, look, I just want to use Lama. Like, it's, you know, safe for me to, you k…”
Retool survey found GPT-4V NPS was around 14 vs 45 for GPT-4
“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”
Hsu: YC Demo Day is driven by startups over-promising and under-delivering
“And in demo day, I mean, maybe you two have seen a lot of videos, like it's a lot of, Honestly over-promising and usher delivery, because every startup, you know, says, oh yeah, you know, I'm going to be the next Google or something, and then you appear under …”
Hsu: 95% of Retool customers are developers
“Like, 95% of our customers actually are developers, actually.”
Every internal enterprise app will be AI-infused within three years
“Practically every app, every internal app especially, is going to be AI infused over the next, like, three years.”
Hsu: Open-source AI infrastructure and tooling is going to win
“We think the open source movement in AI, especially when it comes to all the supporting infrastructure, is going to win.”
Silicon Valley is still largely searching for real AI use cases
“Especially in Silicon Valley, where a lot of the innovation is happening, I think there's actually not that many AI use cases, to be honest, and, ah, AI, to me, even as of what, like January, 19, yeah, 19 to 24, still feels like, ah, in search of truly good us…”
Hsu: 60% to 70% of AI business utility comes from ChatGPT
“I think a lot of the utility in AI today like, I would probably argue 60, 70% of the utility, like, you know, businesses I found in AI is mostly via ChatGPT and across the world, too.”
Hsu: Best AI adoption is engineering-driven, not operations-driven
“I think the companies that adopt AI the best, it is going to be engineering driven, I think, rather than, like, operations driven or anything else.”
Retool changed its north star metric from revenue to active developers
“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.”
Hsu: AGI should be judged by functional output, not human-like cognition
“The trick is, if the output is the same as a human, then I'm happy, basically. I don't really care about what's going on inside. And so it feels like caring about the inside is like a pretty high bar. Like, why do you care? It's kind of like the plane thing, l…”
Hsu: Roughly half of Retool's early 20-40 employees were former founders
“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…”
Many 2013–2017 startup founders held only single-digit equity by IPO
“If you look at actually a lot of founders in sort of, you know, the operations, statistics space, or, you know, those that fundraise, like, you know, 2013, 20 17, a lot of the founders by IPO only have a few percentage points, actually, for company.”
Retool has internal docs barring employees from using the term 'low code'
“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.”
Hsu: The best AI use cases exist in non-tech legacy enterprises
“If you go outside of Silicon Valley, there are actually a lot of use cases for AI, but, ah, a lot of this is not obvious. Like, you have to get into the businesses themselves”
Hsu: Developers prefer modular building blocks over finished end solutions
“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.”
Hsu: Retool has 11 separate business units using its platform at Amazon
“Today at Amazon, actually, we have, I think, 11 separate business units that use Retool at this point”
Retool skipped its initial YC Demo Day due to having zero traction
“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…”
Hsu: Retool had 5-6 years of runway paying founders $30k-$40k
“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…”