Retool

“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 …”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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?”

“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.”

“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…”

“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…”

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

“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 …”

“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.”

“Retool started as Venmo for the UK.”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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 …”