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SPEAKER_02: Hey everybody. Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of this week in startups. I'm super excited. We are rounding the corner here in our rising stars of SAS. What is SAS? Software as a service. Charging people instead of for a box of 10 floppy disks in the eighties or two CD-ROMs in the nineties

SPEAKER_05: or some giant download of Adobe's creative suite for $1,200. Nope, no more. You pay as you go, you pay per month and you pay a small amount of money. What does this do? Well, it gives those companies a bit of a sharper edge. Now, what is that sharper edge that you get when you charge a subscription? You are only as good as your last month. If Netflix as a consumer subscription doesn't release any new content for two, three, four months, or if they were charging too much for their software, they find out about it. They have that feedback loop, which is magical. And that's what has revolutionized the software industry. You used to pay for Microsoft Office, $400 a year, you get the box, then they would come out with the next one and they would send more boxes. It's a pain in the neck. Then Microsoft just charges whatever it is, 20, 30 bucks a month for the office suite. And everybody finds it easy breezy, but it adds up because if you have a five-year lifespan, that is five times 12 is 60, 60 times 20, $1,200. It turns out they're kind of drip, drip, drip, bleeding you for a bigger dollar number. That's why Adobe's stock price has gone bonkers. They thought Adobe would crash because of SaaS pricing. It soared, as did Slack, which was bought last week for $27 billion. And we thought we would just dive into it. I'm really excited today to have David Hsu from Retool on the podcast. David has been building retool.com

SPEAKER_03: for a couple of years now. I think 2017 is when he started. And he has the greatest investors in the

SPEAKER_06: history of Silicon Valley on his team. Sequoia. Sequoia Capital. The people who funded Google, YouTube, Apple, Cisco, the list goes on and on. WhatsApp. I am lucky, as you know, to have been the first Sequoia Scout and the most successful of all time. So it's nice to see my squad over at Sequoia win big. And of course, I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, you also were a Y Combinator company, correct? We were. Winter 17. Yeah. So welcome to the program. Congrats on almost $70

SPEAKER_03: million in funding for going through Y Combinator, the best accelerator in the history of Silicon Valley. I guess we're close second along with Techstars to them and the great venture capital from Sequoia, of course. And welcome to the program. You heard my little intro there.

SPEAKER_08: about the power of SaaS pricing. When did you first become aware of this sort of revolution in software generally? And then how did it inform the creation of Retool?

SPEAKER_14: Yeah. So SaaS, we probably first, I probably first became aware of as a sort of, you know, I'm, let's say, a cheapskate and I prefer to pay one time for software. You know, I don't want to sort of pay every month or something. And gradually, I think this must have been maybe 2014, 2015,

SPEAKER_15: 2016, something like that. All the software sort of going subscription, you know, like you said, sort of office one subscription, a few others one subscription. And I was like, okay, you know, guess I'm paying monthly now. But I think there are some pros for both. I think a lot of pros

SPEAKER_16: actually for consumers, especially, but actually some pros for the companies. Like you said, Adobe stock price is soaring. But those are kind of the obvious ones. I mean, for the consumers, you can try before you buy because a month is not that expensive compared to, let's say, paying $300 for office in 2017 or whatever it is. So there's a few advantages there. But on the

SPEAKER_18: enterprise side or on the sort of business side, I think there are a lot of advantages because

SPEAKER_16: exactly to your point, now you have to fight for every customer. You know, sure, you can sign maybe like a prepaid annual subscription. But, you know, when they sign the prepaid annual for 2016, who knows what they'll pay you again in 2017. And so it really keeps companies, I think, on their toes

SPEAKER_14: to keep on innovating. And for us in the early days, it allowed us actually to find product

SPEAKER_15: market fit very quickly, because every one of the early days paid monthly. And so we had to be sort of very on our toes, making sure they are happy customers, because they weren't happy customers, they weren't going to stay customers very long. And so that was actually quite helpful for us,

SPEAKER_20: actually, when we got started.

SPEAKER_02: So explain to people what retool.com is, and who were those first couple of customers that you listened to, and you obsessed over, in order to get product market fit, because I think that is

SPEAKER_22: something you have very strong feelings on, and that you've learned a lot on through mistakes and big victories.

SPEAKER_25: Yeah, so retool is a new way of building software. The idea is

SPEAKER_16: today, most software today, you know, you build it by writing code in front of a computer. And highly specialized people, engineers, write this code, and it's kind of hard to understand, actually. And even for engineers, you know, engineers oftentimes don't enjoy writing this kind of stuff. It's especially for today, we're starting off building,

SPEAKER_14: retool starts off letting you build internal applications very quickly. And no software engineer really is that excited about building internal tools. I'm sure you've worked with many software

SPEAKER_18: engineers, I've worked with many, I am a software engineer. No engineer gets excited about the prospect of having to build, you know, 30, 40, 50, 100 tools. And so anyhow, retool is a much higher

SPEAKER_16: level way of building software. So instead of actually writing code, we actually give you all

SPEAKER_18: the building blocks. So it's actually like Legos, basically, and we give you the Legos, and you

SPEAKER_16: piece them together into whatever you want. And you customize the last 20, 30, 40% with code, instead of having to write the whole thing with code from scratch. And so it's just a much faster way

SPEAKER_11: of building software, basically. And was your market developers, or entrepreneurs and founders

SPEAKER_08: who don't know how to code didn't have the money to hire developers because the no code movement, which you timed perfectly, and we've had bubble and countless other folks on the podcast making no code solutions. And there seems to be, we had web flow on we had apps without code, we've we really have driven deep into this. But there seems to be that developers are anti no code. And I don't know

SPEAKER_05: exactly why. I get the sense that it might be they might be a little threatened, maybe their jobs are going to go away, or they fear the limitations that they're going to build on it and then never be able

SPEAKER_02: to change it. So who is the customer for it? And then if the customer is developers, what concerns do they have? Or do they have a bias against no code?

SPEAKER_32: Yeah, yeah, this is really interesting. So maybe a two part answer for you. When we started

SPEAKER_18: Retool, there was no such thing as a low or no code space. When we started it, we were just engineers and we were like, we're tired of building internal applications. Maybe we could try, you know, a fast way of

SPEAKER_16: building this stuff. It's been really interesting sort of seeing the no code landscape develop in the past, I think really year, maybe year and a half or something. And we've ridden the wave, which has

SPEAKER_33: been very helpful for us. But when we started, there certainly was no wave to ride.

SPEAKER_34: Helpful how? When you have a wave like this that you came before, and then all of a sudden the waves

SPEAKER_36: get really big on the beach. And you're like, whoa, this beach has got a great surf break. How does it make your job easier?

SPEAKER_38: Yeah, so I think from a marketing perspective, or from a customer interest perspective, there is a

SPEAKER_18: lot of customer interest now, especially from larger companies. And so if you take a look at our website and look at our logos, we have some very large customers ranging from NBC to Warner Bros, to Jaguar Land Rover, to Mercedes Benz, to the US Army, you know, a lot of very large companies.

SPEAKER_14: Some of them, I think maybe 10, 20, 30 percent of them came in because they were excited by, hey, you know, is there a faster way of building software? Is there a new way of building software

SPEAKER_18: that we don't know much about yet? And so on the low and no code thing, or on the no code thing you asked about, I think what's interesting is we sell almost exclusively to developers. And I would say

SPEAKER_16: retools more, I would say, low code than it is no code. And I actually have a few strong opinions here, which is I think no code is highly unlikely that you can sort of build anything really meaningful

SPEAKER_18: in no code. And the reason is coding is actually pretty hard. You know, if you're trying to build a, you know, application that's, you know, used by a lot of people, it's actually pretty complex, and there's a lot of complexity in it. And, you know, as it turns out, coding is a pretty good way of getting a computer to do something. If you sort of want to fully get rid of the code and have sort of a drag and drop GUI to do it, you know, it's difficult, if not impossible. And so what you

SPEAKER_14: see is you see all these sort of no code solutions that can get you to something like 40 percent or 50 percent very quickly. But the last 50 percent, when you want to do it, you actually just can't do it. You hit a brick wall, basically, you know. A good example here is, let's say you're using Airtable,

SPEAKER_16: for example, right? Airtable is really great if you just want a spreadsheet, you know, on steroids. But as soon as, let's say, you actually want to write data back to a database,

SPEAKER_18: or data becomes, let's say, too big for Airtable to store it somewhere else, Airtable stops working. You've got to start entirely from scratch. If, let's say, you have a data type that Airtable doesn't support, you know, you're hosed. That's nothing you can do. You've got to move off Airtable, right? You're in trouble. And so that's why I think sort of for serious business applications,

SPEAKER_14: no-code is quite hard to actually make work. Okay. When we get back from this quick break,

SPEAKER_03: I want to know when does that transition occur from when you're using a what-you-can-see-is-what-you-get with ZWIG type interface, you're building this internal app. When do you see that actual roadblock happen and then people have to go under the hood and look at the actual code and then maybe bring in a developer or start actually writing code as opposed to the visual drag and drop kind of interface that most people associate with no code when we get back on this week at startups.

SPEAKER_43: SaaS companies, software as a service are amazing to invest in. Why are they amazing to invest in? Because they have some level of predictability. The team at pipe.com came up with a great idea. What if we came up with a marketplace where investors on one side could look at private companies, startups, essentially, they could look at their subscription revenue and say, I'll buy a year's worth of your subscriptions for your monthly subscriptions. Now think about that. Somebody is paying $10 a month for a product. They pay $120 a year. Somebody might want to buy that at a little bit of a discount. So they make a little bit of money. And then that gives the startup the money to deploy to get more customers. That's known as the flywheel, you know, Jim Collins style. There's no debt. It's not a loan. It's not money from venture capitalists. So it's not taking equity from you and diluting previous shareholders. One of my portfolio companies, STEEZY, you probably know them, S-T-E-E-Z-Y. Ev, the founder, called me and Evan said, hey, listen, we are doing this thing with pipe.com. I said, I know those guys. They're on my podcast. He said, really? I said, yeah. He goes, that's where I heard of them. I said, oh, okay. Anyway, STEEZY is a subscription dance app. They were able to get all of this money in advance. They're monthly subscribers. They were able to sell to investors on the marketplace. And now they can deploy that money. They're so confident that you'll love trading your SaaS subscription. This is for you, the founders, that if you sign up for pipe.com slash twist, they'll eliminate all your trading fees for one full year. My God, I hope STEEZY did that.

SPEAKER_05: Pipe.com slash twist, and they will eliminate all your trading fees for one full year. Let's get back to this amazing episode. All right, David Hsu is with us. He is the founder, co-founder, I'm sorry, to his other founders and CEO of retool.com. They are a no-code platform for developers who are building typically internal apps, at least according to the website. You'll correct me if I'm wrong if people are using this for front-end, public-facing apps as well. There's this question and this opinion that is pervasive in the no-code space, which is developers saying, you're going to wind up coding anyway. Why waste your time with these tools when you're going to have to get under

SPEAKER_36: the hood and write code anyway? How do you answer that?

SPEAKER_14: I think that's true, which is that if you look at, let's say, no-code, it's just very hard to build

SPEAKER_18: very custom applications with no-code, actually. Literally no-code whatsoever. And so I think what's special about retool, and to my understanding, or the only player in the space that does this, with retool, what you do is you use a drag and drop interface to get to something like, you know, 50% of what you want, maybe 60% of what you want. But the last 30 or 40%, we actually want you to write code because we think that code is actually a very good way of getting computers to do something. We don't want to invent our own language and have you sort of use a drag and drop interface for it. We want you to just go write JavaScript, go write SQL if you want. And so what's interesting about retool is that

SPEAKER_16: you can get to, let's say, 56% quickly, but then customize the last 30 or 40%, however you want, with code. And so that I think is pretty different from if you look at sort of most of the no-code

SPEAKER_50: players, let's say like an air table, like a bubble or anything like that. That's what's

SPEAKER_08: special about retool. When you started looking at this opportunity, there were a group of people who

SPEAKER_03: were not developers who were using, I remember back in the day, things like Microsoft's Access, right? And then there was FileMaker. And I used to be part of this. I used to make little database systems for medical offices when I was 15 years old using, I think, Access. And there were some other database programs that let you build like little, you know, basically what Google does with forms or air table does with forms. And then maybe some conditions here or there, if this, this, then that's little Booleans that I guess Booleans would be the way to say it of, you know, choices that you have to make. And, you know, if a person is getting approval for something, do this and send it to that person. So you, when you were starting doing your product market research

SPEAKER_05: for this, were able to find some of those people. Talk about that product discovery step that a lot of

SPEAKER_56: people skip. And when, what did you learn by infiltrating like the Microsoft Access file?

SPEAKER_59: Is it FileMaker, the other one that was its contemporary? FileMaker. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_14: Yeah. So, um, we had a hack, which was that we're, we're all engineers. And so it was, we built for ourselves. And so that I think was quite helpful, but that didn't make any money, right? Because we can't sell to ourselves and count that as revenue. And so we had to go find people who would

SPEAKER_16: actually, you know, actually try and use a retool. Um, and during this process, uh, we initially started, cause we went through the accelerator Y Combinator. We initially started by selling to other batch mates and that was pretty effective. Um, and so if you're thinking about doing the

SPEAKER_14: accelerator, I think if you're a SaaS company, this is one huge advantage is that, uh, you get sort of this, uh, uh, ready and sort of willing, uh, audience of other startups, uh, that think alike, uh, and are ready to purchase software because they don't want to be spending time building internal tools either. Right. Um, so that helped us a lot in the early days, maybe your first,

SPEAKER_16: you know, two, three, four customers came from that. Um, we learned quite a bit, uh, you know, a lot of hypotheses were proven correct. Some were proven incorrect. Um, so that was a lot of fun in the early days, but then eventually you have to start selling to people you don't know, right?

SPEAKER_65: Uh, we're selling, selling to friends, family, you know, all I go so far. And that's when-

SPEAKER_56: It's also a negative signal, right? I mean, I've, I've talked to venture capitalists who

SPEAKER_03: discovered this sort of Y Combinator playbook. And I think tech stars was doing it as well, which is you get on book face, which is like Facebook's, I'm sorry, which is Y Combinator's internal social network. It's kind of your internal Slack, I guess.

SPEAKER_08: And this became a playbook, which was, Hey, get the thousands of other folks. Hopefully you get three or four to use your product. Then when you present to investors, you have three or four customers, but they might've been, you know, get doing you a favor by using it and who knows if they stick with the product. So

SPEAKER_71: investors specifically started saying, Hey, where did you acquire these first five to 10

SPEAKER_15: and invest the customer? Yeah. You made it from the joke, which is, you know, you can sell someone something to sell you something. They both have revenue, but in reality, no one's actually making any money. Right. Right. Yes.

SPEAKER_75: And there's certainly a lot of that. I think a little round tripping as we call it in the industry.

SPEAKER_14: I'll pay you 10 bucks and pay me 10 bucks, something like that. So, yeah, so, um, I agree. Uh, and, uh, I think the benefit is that you get early users, but you shouldn't view that. You should, you should

SPEAKER_16: view that as, you know, there's some signal there for sure, but, but it's not substantial. Right. Um, to really know whether you have product market fit, you have to sell to people you don't know at all. They hopefully buy a product. And so for us, that's when we learned a lot about, you know,

SPEAKER_18: discovery sales, product market fit, all that fun stuff, because, um, one pretty interesting, uh,

SPEAKER_16: like you said, you know, retool is conceptually similar to file maker or access and stuff.

SPEAKER_14: And so one day, uh, we were thinking, you know, how do we sell retool? How do we find people that would use retool? And I remember I just went on LinkedIn, uh, I searched up some file maker user

SPEAKER_16: group. I found it, uh, I requested to join, you know, two days later I was approved and I infiltrated the file maker user group. And then I took a look to see who was there. And there's, you know, a few hundred members and, uh, just take a look at the names, took a look at the companies, script some emails, um, and then started sending cold out to these people.

SPEAKER_06: So you're basically find people who are using the competitor or the legacy product.

SPEAKER_08: Yeah. You go to their LinkedIn group, you infiltrate it, you look at their profiles and you find

SPEAKER_11: the hundred of them, 200 of them, and you email them. And then some number respond, what percentage would respond out of a hundred or 10?

SPEAKER_82: Uh, and what would they tell you? And then how do you parse that feedback?

SPEAKER_16: Very little, uh, over very, very few respondents out of 300 or so, maybe three, maybe six, something like that responded.

SPEAKER_14: One to 2% response rate. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and, uh, the really disappointing thing that was not the response rate,

SPEAKER_15: it was the responses. Um, I think we got some really negative responses. I think, you know, out of six responses, probably five out of six told us, uh, this is a terrible idea. We shouldn't go do anything. And then one guy was like, this is a bad idea,

SPEAKER_86: but I'll have the phone with you to tell you why it's a bad idea. Uh, okay. That's slightly better. I don't want to date you. I think that you're not the proper

SPEAKER_56: mate for me, but I'd love to get on the phone with you and tell you exactly how bad

SPEAKER_90: of a mate I think you would be. It's basically what they're telling you.

SPEAKER_91: So what did they tell you when you got on the phone with them? Um, so what we discovered is I think FileMaker is quite legacy. I think FileMaker first came out

SPEAKER_16: maybe something like 20 years ago, right? And so the people using FileMaker were sort of pretty ossified in their ways and they were using FileMaker 20 years later. Even FileMaker, I don't think it's well supported today, right? I don't know. It's kind of like a shell of a company that got bought by Apple actually, maybe 10, 15 years ago. And there's really no innovation there.

SPEAKER_15: So the fact that they're using FileMaker should tell you something, which is they don't care about, you know, being on the bleeding edge or trying new things. Um, and that's something we didn't realize, but anyways, uh, what they told us basically was FileMaker serves my needs very well. Um, here are maybe three very specific FileMaker things that, uh, you know, that kind of annoyable FileMaker, but they were not generalizable. You know, it was like, uh, this FileMaker button, instead of being here, uh, should be over here. And what are we going to do with that feedback? You know, it's not like we're cloning FileMaker, right? Um, and so that was

SPEAKER_14: interesting because it was a total failure, basically sort of trying to, uh, uh, get into this FileMaker user group trying to email them. It was a total failure. No customers ever came out of that. In fact, we actually got more, we got less motivated, uh, because of, uh, first of all, the lack of replies, but also the, uh, the, uh, negative replies too. And so, um, but what's interesting

SPEAKER_18: though, is if you sort of look at the product today, our product today is actually not very different from the product emailed. I mean, of course it's more advanced. There's so many ways that we have so many more features that we have so many product lines now, but the fundamental product is actually pretty similar to what we had before. And I think this for us was a very interesting learning about product market fit, which is that when it comes to product market fit,

SPEAKER_16: there's both the product, but there's also the market. Um, and, uh, most people just think, you know, Hey, I emailed some people. It didn't work. Let me go pick up my product. Let me email

SPEAKER_18: them again or something. Um, as it turns out, you can also adjust the market. And so for us, we were like, okay, that formula we think didn't really work. Um, why don't we try finding more

SPEAKER_100: people who are similar to us engineers, developers who are building startups or working at big companies?

SPEAKER_16: At the beginning, it was startups, uh, because they were more likely to reply. Um, got it. But, uh, I think this is a, uh, aside, but a very interesting point about developers, um,

SPEAKER_14: is that developers are remarkably similar, uh, at a big company and a midsize company as well. So, you know, we have developers, we have customers now, let's say at NBC,

SPEAKER_16: it's actually pretty similar to a developer at, let's say, you know, a Allbirds, another customer is pretty similar actually to a developer at Brex, let's say, uh, to, you know, a developer at a small 2% YC company. Um, and if you think about, you know, sort of frameworks that developers use, like

SPEAKER_14: React, for example, React is used to buy large companies, small companies, you know, everything in the middle. Uh, and so that I think is one big advantage of creating a developer-first product is that if you, you know, let's say sell to salespeople or sell to operations people or support people or, you know, it's so different, you know, NBC is so different from Brex, right? Whereas developers, you know, a developer that gets a job at Brex could probably get a job at NBC, could probably get a job at Bank of America. Uh, and so that, uh, helped us a lot in the early days. So anyways, we pivoted, uh, uh, our market a little bit and said, hey, you know,

SPEAKER_15: file market developers probably is not the market. Let's actually go switch to just developers. Um,

SPEAKER_36: and that- Now what about this point around developers being anti-no-code? Is,

SPEAKER_05: speak to that because there's obviously some group of them who are embracing this. So what did the, what does that group understand about no-code or WYSIWYG tools or whatever it is versus the developers who have a bias or they're anti-retool or just anti-no-code in general?

SPEAKER_18: I think the key is actually low-code rather than no-code because, um, when we sell to, uh, developers, developers actually are generally pretty excited about retool. And the reason, so, so I think you had

SPEAKER_16: two hypotheses before about why developers don't like no-code. Um, one, maybe they feel a bit

SPEAKER_14: threatened. Two is, uh, maybe it's not flexible enough. In our experience, it's really the latter. Um, to be fair, maybe they haven't confessed the former to us, but I think it's mostly the latter, which is that, um, actually this is true for me too. You know, I'm an engineer and I hate using something like a, let's say like a Weebly or a Webflow or, you know, any sort of WYSIWYG tool, because I just feel like, you know, I can't express what I want to express, you know, I can't write code, I can't customize it. And I'm just highly skeptical as an engineer that I could

SPEAKER_18: possibly use a WYSIWYG tool and really customize things. Um, so I think it's really mostly that.

SPEAKER_16: And for us, uh, we don't have that problem because we say, hey, you know, the first 30, 40, 50% of, you know, sort of the laying out the application, which is not the stuff you want to be doing anyways, you can use a drag and drop tool for that. But the remaining stuff, you know, you're probably going to have to write code to customize it. You know, a good example is, um, let's say you're trying to, uh, write a switch statement in JavaScript. So switch statement basically says, hey, you know, if the number is one, do this. If it's two, do this. If it's three,

SPEAKER_14: do this. If it's four, do this. If it's five or more, do this, let's say, right. Um, trying to do that in a WYSIWYG editor is really painful. And you can imagine why you basically have to draw a bunch of, you know, bubbles. You have to draw a bunch of arrows who say, hey, you know, uh, this variable is the bubble and the arrow, I'm going to draw one for one, draw another one for two, draw another three, and then you got to execute, you know, this other bubble. It gets really complicated, right. Whereas in code, it's really simple. You say, you know, switch, you know, X, let's say, switching on, you say case one, case two, case three, case four, it's just much more

SPEAKER_16: concise. Um, and so that I think is a good example where you lose a lot of flexibility, uh, when you try to re-implement coding in a non-textual format. Um, and so, uh, I think developers are

SPEAKER_14: skeptical of no code. And I think rightfully so, uh, because, uh, trying to use a WYSIWYG editor is just so much less powerful. And in most business applications that we've seen, power is critical. If you're building, let's say, you know, a simple app for, let's say, uh, you to track, you know, uh, play time with your daughter, for example, you know, you probably don't need anything that complex, right? If it doesn't fit your spec exactly, that's fine. You know, if you don't have the exact data type, you'll, you'll make do. But if you're a large company like MPC, let's just try to predict, uh, uh, or try to price, you know, ads for the Olympics next year, you know, that

SPEAKER_108: is, you're talking about hundreds of millions, billions of dollars in revenue, billions of

SPEAKER_56: dollars in expense. If the boss, uh, whatever she wants, she's going to get it. And, uh, yeah.

SPEAKER_05: Are you drinking apple juice or a little bit of McAllen 18? Answer that question when we get back. I also want to know what your thoughts on now, you just raised, I think at a $925 million. So you're just before becoming a unicorn, essentially probably a unicorn, your thoughts on the employees.

SPEAKER_03: I know you have some strong feelings on this employees who are drawn to this sort of, you know, unicorn hunting and trying to get on that unicorn squad versus, uh, the right employees. When we get back on this week in startups,

SPEAKER_111: as someone who's invested in over 200 amazing startups and advise countless others,

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SPEAKER_03: All right, let's get back to this amazing episode. All right, David Hsu is here. He is DVD HSU on the Twitter if you want to follow him. And he is the CEO of retool.com backed by Y Combinator and Sequoia. What a great group of backers. And actually a shout out to Indie Hackers. He was on Cortland's podcast as well. And Cortland was on our podcast episode 1143. And you got Patrick from Stripe also

SPEAKER_08: as an investor. That's fantastic. Yeah, me too.

SPEAKER_06: So, I saw you just refilled that lowball looks like a scotch glass, but you're drinking that pretty

SPEAKER_08: fast and you're seeming pretty coherent. That's apple juice or is that scotch?

SPEAKER_32: I do have a high tolerance, but I'm actually drinking tea right now.

SPEAKER_120: So, okay, it's tea. All right, good. I was looking at that. I was like, four o'clock taping during a pandemic, month 10 of the pandemic. Everybody's at home. No

SPEAKER_02: judgments. If you need a Macallan 18 to get through the pod, I understand.

SPEAKER_08: So, some thoughts on going from a bootstrap company who, let's face it, you're pretty conservative in terms of raising money in the beginning and hiring. You took your time

SPEAKER_03: to get product market fit, but hey, here we are four or five years later. I mean,

SPEAKER_05: less than five years later, four years later, now you got a billion dollar market cap. One, how did that happen? I mean, what was the uptick in this product in terms of revenue in order to get to that valuation? Because that would imply to me at least 25 million in

SPEAKER_03: revenue or something in that range, if it was 50 times revenue, which would be an incredible valuation, by the way. And what are your thoughts on building a team when you start getting to this

SPEAKER_18: unicorn level? Yeah. So, we were actually always pretty quiet about Retool. It turns

SPEAKER_16: away I actually raised a Series A something like 18, 19 months ago, something a year and a half ago, we actually raised a $25 million Series A as well. That's a big, it's more like a B,

SPEAKER_03: let's be honest. Yeah. Because they're probably buying 15% of the company at that point. So, it's probably $150 million valuation, something in that range. Something like that.

SPEAKER_131: Yeah. And so, what's interesting is on the sort of bootstrapping side of things,

SPEAKER_16: I think for SaaS companies today, starting a SaaS company is so cheap, especially if you're a technical founder. You really just don't need that much money to keep going. And so, for us, when we went through YC, YC gave us 120K, whatever it was. After that, we raised a small seed around, maybe around a million dollars entirely from angels. And once we did that, I think we burned maybe

SPEAKER_124: 100K of it, maybe 200K of it. And we, I think we're already in the maybe, just hit a million in revenue or something. We raised a Series A. Wow.

SPEAKER_56: So, you're basically dilute 7% with the accelerator deal, 6% or 7% common. And then you, if you raised a million out of 10 million or something like that, you dilute 10%. So, you still, you and your co-founders and team own 83% of the company at that point. And then you really shouldn't even use the money for a couple of years. So, that's in a way frustrating, but it's a nice insurance

SPEAKER_36: policy to have all that cash in the bank. But then you went big two years later, three years later.

SPEAKER_118: How do you make that decision to go big? Yeah. So, I think we really made the decision actually in the Series A, because I don't think we would have raised a Series A if we just wanted

SPEAKER_15: to stay sort of small, because look, at that point, our life was pretty good, right? I mean,

SPEAKER_14: at that point, the team was maybe three people, maybe four people, something like that. Two hundred and a couple million in revenue. Exactly. How much? Right. And so, if we wanted to... What were you making at that point? I think just above one, maybe one point, one point, two million dollars in revenue,

SPEAKER_18: something like that, right? And so, if we wanted to, we could have very easily moved to Hawaii and just, you know, lived a pretty happy life. And it wasn't stagnating, right? It could have grown a bit more and, you know, we could easily make 500K a year, maybe a million dollars a year per person, we'd be pretty happy. But ultimately, our goal is not to just make a million dollars a year.

SPEAKER_16: Our goal is to change how software is built. And I think there's a real opportunity for us to do that today. I mean, if you sort of look at how software is built today, it's actually kind of ridiculous how, if you look, you know, 10, 20, 30 years ago, the way we built software actually has not

SPEAKER_14: fundamentally changed at all. It really is, you know, you sit around a computer, you write code, it's pretty esoteric-looking code, if you're not an engineer, that is, and you get computers that do things for you. And it's very low level. You know, you're saying, hey, if this, then that, you know, if this, then that, you know, it's very low level. And so for us, when we first started out,

SPEAKER_16: you know, to be clear, that was not our vision. Our vision was not to sort of change how programming was done. Our vision was to, hey, you know, I think there could be a faster way of building all these internal applications. But as we got deeper and deeper in and got more and more customers, we realized that the kind of stuff that people are building on Retool ranges so much. It's, you know, like previously mentioned, sort of a tool for, let's say, NBC to go manage

SPEAKER_18: pricing for ads for the Olympics, all the way to, you know, how Brex does like KYC and onboards

SPEAKER_14: customers, for example, all the way to, there's another startup that was actually in our batch, it was, you know, kind of like Uber for kids, where, you know, you as a parent can sort of send your kid on Uber ride, basically. And they would manage somebody you could trust and make sure you

SPEAKER_145: had security and safety and all, they knew how to deal with the kid. And they would manage all the

SPEAKER_18: rides via Retool. And, you know, that is how they looked up where the car was, where your kid was, right? And so all this stuff is being built on Retool. We're like, wow, that's so, you know, so different, right? You know, Olympic ad forecasting tool is so different from tracking your kid, right? And that's when we realized that, hey, you know, there is a potential here to really not just

SPEAKER_14: change how NBC does, you know, forecasting, but really change how software itself is built. And once we realized that, I think it was clear to us that, you know, if there's an opportunity,

SPEAKER_16: you know, if there's such a big opportunity, we got to take it. And so that's how we ended up raising the Series A. And so we raised it, you know, it was what, just above a million revenue, something like four people, I believe. And even then, you know, we went pretty big, we raised $25 million for the Series A. And for a while, we weren't sure that we should do it. It was with Sequoia as well. We weren't really sure because, I mean, we just had to use the money from the seat. And so actually, in retrospect, when we raised the B, we had actually used maybe a few hundred K, maybe, you know, five, I think less than a million dollars from the Series A as well.

SPEAKER_03: So it was completely opportunistic. You didn't need to do it. You do these opportunistic raise. Now you put yourself in the driver's seat, you got a bunch of cash. What is the plan to deploy that cash? I understand why VCs want to put the money in. They think you're going to win. They think they're going to get a return on investment. But because you're so capital efficient, because you're so frugal, because you're a developer led CEO team, and you have product market fit, obviously. So we know their goal. But then what do you decide to do with the money? You have to think, hey, we want to change the world. Is it localizing it to

SPEAKER_56: other languages? Is it just hiring developer evangelists? Is it marketing? Is it, you know, building new product lines? How do you think about deploying that amount of capital in a company that's already profitable? Yeah, great question. So on our side today, I think there's a lot of

SPEAKER_18: building to be done. I mean, today, to give you a sense, Retool is a 50-person company. It's not very big. Wow. But I mean, you did, that's a big change from a three-person company.

David Friedberg: You did that in two years? You went from three to 50 in two years or so? Yeah, let's do the math. Yes, we did. So yeah, two years ago.

SPEAKER_155: That's four people. Actually, it might have been two people,

SPEAKER_118: actually. I think we were two people two Novembers ago, or December. But two Decembers

SPEAKER_159: ago. So you're adding a person every other week. It's pretty intense.

SPEAKER_18: Yeah, yeah. So on our side now, I mean, Retool is still a pretty small company. Like, a lot of things are not built up. I think our sales team, when we raised the B, I want to say, was three people. It was small. Marketing team was two, three people in the Series

SPEAKER_15: B. Support team was one person. Success team was two people. So you got to add a zero to each of those. Exactly. Given that we have product market fit and we have a lot of customers that are really demanding better support. They're, you know, where people, leads coming in every day who are

SPEAKER_16: demanding talking to salespeople or demanding the help that a salesperson can provide.

SPEAKER_131: And so we really just need to grow the team, really. Yeah.

SPEAKER_16: That said, I think a interesting divide amongst sort of Silicon Valley companies is whether to be, let's say, more sales driven or more, let's say, engineering or product driven. Right. And you see a lot of companies who, you know, raise a large round is go hire a lot of salespeople, and really try to blow up, let's say, marketing, try outbound, really hit the gas at the sales side. I think sales is incredibly important to a SaaS company. It is critical to have a high performing and eventually large sales team. That said, I don't think, you know, for our goal of becoming the way developers build internal software and eventually the way, you know,

SPEAKER_18: people just build software in general, you don't get there via sales. There's too many developers.

SPEAKER_161: No, you got to get the developers to buy in, right? If they don't buy in, it's over. But if you do get

SPEAKER_03: a hundred of them who've bought in at a big company like Peloton or NBC, well, then somebody's got to go and sell in a $10 million a year. So I guess when we get back from this quick break, I want to know, how do you do this bottom up sales where people are paying 50 bucks a month, $600 a year for a developer to use the platform to, what's the biggest customer you have in terms of seats? If you can say it, and if not, you can make a composite here. When we get back from the break, I want to understand how you make that shift, like Slack struggled to do is the one thing that Stewart said maybe, and I think Saks and Chamath on the All In podcast, who were involved with the company said, you know, was the one maybe leak in their game, the one thing they could have done better self admittedly across the team in an amazing outcome. But they did say Slack was late to getting the million dollar plus clients. I'm wondering if you've thought about that. And how do you think about hitting those seven figure, eight figure clients when we get back

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SPEAKER_05: this week in startups. Okay, let's get back to the show. Welcome back to this week in startups.

SPEAKER_56: Our guest today is David Hsu, son of parents who immigrated to America, correct?

SPEAKER_166: Yes. We talked before. And in this day and age, your parents probably would not have been allowed

SPEAKER_14: into the country. You ever think about that? I do. Yeah. It's crazy how much Silicon Valley is built by immigrants. If you look at the companies started by immigrants and their children, it's,

SPEAKER_11: yeah, ridiculous. It's unbelievable. And to just think your parents would not have been allowed in if we continue this insane immigration policy. We need as many high-performing immigrants in this country as possible. And we, it's a free resource and we're giving it away to other people, other

SPEAKER_03: countries, right? What it's, it's just amazing to think it's, and it's so often the sons of the immigrants or the daughters of the immigrant parents who then go out and have the outlier success, right? It's because somebody struggled to get here. And then those kids,

SPEAKER_08: I mean, you, you, you share a burden or do you, did you feel a burden coming up that you needed to

SPEAKER_11: perform in a way to live up to the risk your parents took and the suffering they must have had

SPEAKER_78: in coming here from China? Yeah. I think to some extent, uh, because like you said, it's a, it's not an easy journey to move to another country where you don't know anyone at the age of,

SPEAKER_16: you know, 20 or 23 or 25 or whatever. So brave. So I'm incredibly grateful to the fact that they moved here because if, if they hadn't, you know, retail, first of all, definitely wouldn't be a thing, but I would be totally different. I'd probably be doing something entirely different in China. Um, so I'm closely grateful for that.

SPEAKER_03: It's just something, uh, I think everybody who listens to this podcast and we think about what we want from our representatives and from this country in the next decade, we really do need to really think about this incredible diamonds. We're basically being offered diamonds and platinum and rare earth minerals in the form of brains and raw talent. And we are stopping them at the border for some insane reason. Uh, when we went to break, we talked about Slack.

SPEAKER_08: They have 87 customers, I think, who spend over a million dollars a year, but for a company that's, you know, doing a billion dollars a year, it's an incredibly low

SPEAKER_03: number of people. They added sales on the back end. Slack is run by a product design, you know, guru and, uh, Stewart and, you know, it's truly talented, but he said himself, Hey, we need to get more people in the sales team. So how do you think about that? Who's your big,

SPEAKER_56: uh, who's your big, um, who's your biggest customer and what does that footprint look like? And how do you think about those seven, eight figure deals? Yeah. So we started doing sales

SPEAKER_14: very early, uh, very, very early. Uh, and I think sales oftentimes gets a bad rap, but, uh,

SPEAKER_18: sales is actually the way you learn about your customers and how you actually find product market fit because most SaaS companies don't start off with product market fit. You got to iterate a little bit, you got to tweak this, got to tweak that. And the only way you figure out what to tweak is by talking to customers. Uh, and, uh, the, uh, those concrete way that, you know, a customer actually likes their product is if they pay you money for it and keep on paying money for it.

SPEAKER_39: Yeah. Uh, and they don't charge. Generally customers don't give you their credit card if they don't want the product.

SPEAKER_14: Yeah. Yeah. Uh, and so, uh, for us, sales is always incredibly important. Um, it's something we invested very early in. For me, I think,

SPEAKER_16: I think probably something like 60, 70% of my time in the early days was spent on sales. I mean, once we had any product,

SPEAKER_34: Really? You did it yourself. So you were doing the development of the product,

SPEAKER_11: hiring people to work at the company and doing the sales that must lead to a straight line to a deeper understanding because you were fearless in doing sales, which most developers,

SPEAKER_03: I think if you ask most developers to go on a sales call, they, that would be their worst nightmare. And if you ask most sales executives to go write some code, that would also be their worst nightmare.

SPEAKER_172: These two circles overlapping for you is probably a big reason of why you have such tight product market fit. Correct.

SPEAKER_16: I think so. Um, and it's, I think there is, uh, this image of sales that it's, you know, you go to like a steak dinner and kind of, you know, shove product, uh, down someone else's throat that they don't actually want. That could not be further from the truth, at least, you know,

SPEAKER_05: for us today. Yeah. That was like the old Oracle days, like in the nineties.

SPEAKER_18: Yeah. Yeah. Um, the best, you know, for us today, sales really is about delivering value to the customer. Um, and if you figure out how to deliver value to the customer, the money will come, uh, you know, we're not worried about that. It really is. How do we solve the customer's problem? And the only way to, for us to solve the customer's problem is by really writing code and working together very closely with them to understand sort of, okay, you're trying to build, let's say, the, uh, uh, Olympic ad prediction tool. What does that require from us? You know,

SPEAKER_14: do you need to connect to this thing? Oh, we don't support that yet. Okay. Let's come back tomorrow and we'll have support, we'll have support for it by then. Um, and so really sales and the early thing is really just working very closely to making sure we deliver value to customers. Um, and because

SPEAKER_18: of that, now we actually have quite a few fairly large deployments of retail. And so if you look at

SPEAKER_14: the website itself, uh, you'll see, we have sort of wide variety of, uh, larger companies using retail, ranging from let's say media, uh, Warner Bros, NBC, Peloton, arguably, um, all the way to, uh, a lot of banks using retail. What would be the biggest footprint in terms of, you know, just

SPEAKER_82: how many figures of sales yearly and how many developers on the platform? Yeah. Where are you at?

SPEAKER_14: So today our largest deployments have maybe around tens of thousands of people using, uh,

SPEAKER_196: retool, uh, in an organization, in an organization. And so if you do the math, they probably figure out what that revenue actually looks like.

SPEAKER_197: Yeah. Very few people with that many people. Yeah. Yeah. The, um,

SPEAKER_14: crazy thing is, I think we didn't realize this, uh, and I think it's hard to grasp your head around, uh, in the early days of a company. I mean, to us, even, you know, today selling, let's say that, you know, like getting any company to pay us, let's say millions, if not tens of millions of dollars

SPEAKER_18: for software, it seems almost ridiculous. But then you think about the value that you are delivering and the value that software delivers, uh, today, uh, to companies is remarkable. If you look at a company like Coca-Cola, for example, the cost of making Coca-Cola is actually not getting any cheaper. You know, they can release new product lines, right? But like the cost of manufacturing actually does not go down that much. Instead, what Coca-Cola nowadays is innovating on is software. Uh, every business today is a software company and you're able to drive tremendous efficiency gains. You're able to drive tremendously more revenue by having exactly the right software. Uh, and so for us, uh, that is why, uh, that has the value we deliver. Um, how do you, uh, how do you run

SPEAKER_08: an organization that is servicing, you know, people walking up and buying, you know, the,

SPEAKER_03: or using the free version, buying single seat versions for startups? And then you also have an organization where you have these whales that are going to spend seven or eight figures with you

SPEAKER_08: a year. And how do you convince people that the smaller up and coming accounts are even worth

SPEAKER_05: giving attention to because you, you have a limited amount of people. And if there are people who want to put a thousand or 10,000 people into the product, like how do they even waste their time? I'm using air quotes here, but how would you,

SPEAKER_125: how do you get them to not look at the five person company as wasting their time on just a management

SPEAKER_18: basis? Because so from our, our goal is to not just make a lot of money. Our goal is to actually, uh, change the way developers build software. And to do that, it's not just,

SPEAKER_14: you know, investing very heavily in one or two, or even three or five companies, you know, or investing in, let's say a fortune 10 or fortune five. That's not the goal. I mean, we'll do that too, obviously, because they will pay, uh, a lot of money in order for us to further

SPEAKER_18: develop product for the, build the company. But given that our goal really is to change how people build software, we have to be, uh, uh, sort of very responsive, uh, to everyone who want to use

SPEAKER_14: ritual, whether that is a small two person company, a midsize, you know, 10,000 person company, or the giant, you know, 500,000 person company. Um, because oftentimes many of the best ideas actually

SPEAKER_18: come from the smallest companies. Uh, and so a lot of our product roadmap actually comes from the smaller companies because they are the ones who are really on the forefront. Yeah. They're risk taking at the tip of the spear. Yeah. If we're just building for, you know, the fortune five or fortune 10 or something,

SPEAKER_16: you know, we would probably make very different product decisions and it would probably be much shittier product to be honest. Yeah. We'd probably index less on usability, index more power. Yeah.

SPEAKER_08: Do you also do the hosting? So in a way, is this a front end and developer tool with a belt in AWS

SPEAKER_05: cloud competitor on the back? Is that part of this? Or do people build with your tool, put it on-prem or put it into the Amazon or, you know, Azure cloud?

SPEAKER_16: So we do both. So you can either host your tool on-prem inside, let's say AWS or whatever, it's Docker in it. So it's very easy, or you can use a cloud version

SPEAKER_18: where we'll do all the hosting for you. And so all you do is you build your app and you send someone the URL and you're done. Um, and so we do both.

SPEAKER_207: What do most people choose to do? I'm curious. Most people choose the cloud, uh, by number 100%. Your cloud or other people's cloud, you mean?

SPEAKER_208: Uh, sorry, our cloud.

SPEAKER_08: Yeah. Cause why would you go unbundle and break it apart and then put in some somewhere else? So in that case, you are in a stealth way, uh, competitor to Amazon Web Services and Amazon Web Services dipping their toe into no code. Correct. They have some sort of offering now. Yeah. What's their offering and is it even considered competitive to yours? And how do you think about AWS as this giant competitor?

SPEAKER_14: Yeah. They're, they're, uh, offering is actually Honeycode is what it's called. Um, and funnily enough, uh, we're actually, Amazon's actually a customer of ours actually. Um, and we were talking to, uh, or maybe a deconstructor of yours. Deconstructor and rebuilding it. Well, so we're actually, um, uh, now selling to another Amazon business unit. I think it's actually AWS actually. And they are actually also, uh, using reach one, we asked them sort of,

SPEAKER_16: why don't you use Honeycode? And they're like, well, you know, it's, it's not a developer first product. You know, everything I want to build, I can't build it as a Honeycode actually. That makes sense. And so it's a slightly different product. And so I think what Honeycode is

SPEAKER_14: particularly good at is if you are building an application and don't really have sort of, you're not a software developer, you don't really understand, you know, how to write code or you don't write code, um, Honeycode is quite good for that, but it does also mean the apps you build are very, uh, difficult to customize. They're, you know, conceptually much simpler, I would say. And, uh, you can imagine, you know, if AWS sort of builds applications, they're actually pretty complex applications, right? And in order to build such complex applications, it's not enough just to have a no code tool. You actually have to write code. And so I think that's why Retool is actually fairly differentiated from something like a Honeycode. I would view Honeycode as let's say competitive with like a bubble or let's say a, uh, air table, something like that. So what do you think of this

SPEAKER_03: movement of serverless computing where, you know, people fire up these little Kubernetes, I guess? And, you know, you don't need to have this massive server infrastructure. What do you think of the serverless movement? Do you think about it a lot? Do you think it's the future? Like a lot of people

SPEAKER_131: are saying? Yeah, I think this is quite interesting because, um, on the movement side, uh, I thought a bit

SPEAKER_177: about the serverless was quite big, actually. Uh, I think maybe two, three years ago, maybe last year or two, um, but it really seems to have died down. And it's, uh, interesting to think about why that

SPEAKER_16: is. And I think it's actually service is a very good example. I think of a trend that got hyped up, but never actually really went anywhere. And I think the reason is because it didn't actually deliver value to customers. Um, in the sense that serverless that actually turns out was actually

SPEAKER_14: harder to manage, uh, than just managing your own cloud servers, uh, or using other different cloud

SPEAKER_56: services. But a massive cost savings, right? If you get a lot of traffic, it could be a massive cost

SPEAKER_15: savings. To, to some extent. Yeah. I think if you look at the math, it's like, it's kind of tricky. It's like in some cases cost savings, but they've used a lot. It's actually not cost savings. It's tricky. Got it. Interesting. But so I think the problem with serverless is that it never really

SPEAKER_16: delivered sort of, uh, value to customers. And that's what I think a lot about now because, uh, you know, today we are riding this wave called low or no code. And, uh, it's interesting to think about, you know, is this just a trend? Is it a fad? Is it going to go in, you know, a year or two? If so, why? So why not? If not, why not? Um, and for us, I think there's a difference, but, uh, you know, we will see how it plays out. I think low code really actually delivers substantial value to customers because now engineers are actually able to do things just substantially faster than before. Whereas serverless, it kind of is repackaging it a little bit. It doesn't actually, uh, save you that much

SPEAKER_14: time. It doesn't actually, uh, sort of, uh, result in more revenue or drive cost savings. And so

SPEAKER_56: it's just to compare these sort of two movements. What about this concept that people have had,

SPEAKER_03: uh, and started talking about where you're going to be able to just talk to an AI agent and it will build whatever you want. So you and I could sit here and say,

SPEAKER_56: let's make a, an Uber Lyft competitor that's for, uh, parents and we wanted to have, you know, Apple and Google login and Facebook login, and we wanted to have a checkout service and we wanted to support Stripe and it just builds it for us as we're talking. Is that going to happen? And if so,

SPEAKER_18: when it will take a while, but actually we want to get there eventually. Um, I think the, uh, the thing is today, the building blocks are so primitive. If you look at code today,

SPEAKER_14: right, the building blocks are, you know, uh, very basic things. You know, if you look at a line of code, for example, it's, you know, it's, it's very low level. Um, and there's no way to say, I want to add a Google login, you know, on my app. And there's no way you can do that in five minutes.

SPEAKER_18: You know, you've got to write a lot of code and do that. And a large part of why Retool is more

SPEAKER_16: efficient for developers is because it's much higher level. And so, you know, we handle a lot of the stuff that you don't want to worry about. Let's say like, you know, login, authentication, authorization, audit logs, that kind of stuff. Um, but then you can customize it also, if you want and sort of get very deep in, if you want it. So eventually we actually want to do that

SPEAKER_14: such that you can just say, Hey, you know, like you said, you know, I want, let's say a map right here. And maybe before you go to the map, you've got a login via Google, you got a login by Apple, whatever it may be. So you drag, let's say a login component over here. And then it eventually goes here, but that's still very far away because, um, and even if we were to do that, I think the customization is still key because what you just described, you know, could actually be one of, you know, there could be a million apps that fit your description. You know, there's sort of so many nuances that you have to sort of really, uh, if you really want to tune the sort of last, you know, 20, 30%, that's actually where most of the work is. So we'll always support writing code,

SPEAKER_16: but I, this is our vision is to eventually be. Wow. Are you working on that? Are you

SPEAKER_82: working on like a, uh, Siri type interface where I could talk to it and have it do stuff just as

SPEAKER_236: there's no talking yet, but there's dragging and dropping. So yeah. So, I mean, it's a,

SPEAKER_08: that sounds like two developers, uh, doing talking could build that two developers working on the, the audio, uh, intelligence, uh, would be pretty easy to do. Uh, as we wrap up here, long-term with the company, we're seeing companies with, you know, let's call it a $50 million footprint of revenue get pulled into spectacular specs and getting pulled into the

SPEAKER_03: private market. I'm sure you've got people knocking on the door saying, Hey, you're ready to spec. You want to go public. How do you think about this new world? Uh, because you have been innovating in, uh, the early stages of how to fund the company. And now there's this new innovation that's been reborn that Chamath is, uh, kind of spearheaded here of, Hey, you know, maybe go, uh, public quicker based on the promise of, uh, and the early performance. Number one, are you,

SPEAKER_11: are people knocking on the door? And then number two, how do you think about it? Cause it does seem

SPEAKER_16: tempting. Yeah, we get a lot of interest. I typically ignore the emails as archive them. Um, the, I think there are a lot of pros and cons to, uh, just going public in general,

SPEAKER_14: you know, special back or not. Um, and, uh, for us, I think, you know, one pro, for example, certainly is liquidity for everyone. Um, because, uh, we, you want to reward early employees who've been here for a long time. And, you know, I think that is, uh, something that is really a big pro of eventually getting liquidity for everyone. That's it. There are a lot of cons in the sense that

SPEAKER_16: I think, you know, if you were, if we were to go public, we would sort of be living, you know, quarter to quarter, month to month, it'd be sort of much more short term. Whereas for us,

SPEAKER_18: if you look at Retool today, we are still so, so, so early. Um, if you look at, you know,

SPEAKER_14: the amount of software being built in Retool today, you know, if you look at software generally as a

SPEAKER_118: whole, even if you constrain it to just internal applications, probably something like 0.00001%

SPEAKER_18: of all internal apps today are being built at Retool. So we could grow something like 10,000, a hundred thousand times and still only be 1% of all software being built. And so for us, there's just so much opportunity ahead of us, and so much growth left in the company, that I don't think it makes sense now. That said, I do think that, you know,

SPEAKER_177: there are many pros to doing it, specifically liquidity, which I really think a lot about.

SPEAKER_125: Yeah, the ability to acquire other companies and just this unique moment in time. And it's going to be fantastic for the industry if certain people do choose to provide, you know,

SPEAKER_03: an opportunity that would only be available to private market investors, to the public. But, you know, it's, we have to convince CEOs that it is actually worth it. And I think very reasonably, you're like, yeah, too soon for us. And then there's a bunch of people who

SPEAKER_161: are at 200 million, 300 million in revenue. And they're like, it's too soon for us. And I'm like, are you sure it's too soon? Because two or 300 sounds like a good number to go publicly.

SPEAKER_16: It depends a bit on the market size, I think. Because if, for example, you're in a $500 million market, you've captured most of it, there's not much growth left. And, you know, at that point, I think you might look for liquidity to everyone. In our case,

SPEAKER_14: the market size is just so, so large, and we're so far away from there today, that there's so much growth left in the company. And so, it's really early days for us.

SPEAKER_253: Is this your first company? It is, yeah.

SPEAKER_56: First company, you made it to unicorn status, essentially. Congratulations on that.

SPEAKER_03: Are you having a hard time staying focused? I mean, these are big numbers. You own the majority of the company. This is a big number to think about your net worth. And then also come to work every day, son of immigrant parents. It's a little heavy, right? How do you stay personally focused when you've got this big net worth number out here that is completely illiquid? Since you're such an honest guy.

SPEAKER_259: Well, it's never been the motivation, right? Because, honestly, between the Series A and the Series B,

SPEAKER_16: like, sure, your net worth goes up very much, but it doesn't matter whether you're worth, let's say, $20 million or $250 million. It doesn't really make that big of a difference.

SPEAKER_224: That's interesting. Most people don't realize that.

SPEAKER_56: Yeah. They don't realize that there's an upper bound to how much you can spend on a hamburger

SPEAKER_05: or a vacation. And spending $50,000 going on vacation or $5,000 going on vacation is pretty much the same experience. And $15 on a great hamburger and, you know, $50 hamburgers with a little foie gras on it, very little difference.

SPEAKER_16: Yeah. So for me, that's never been the motivation. And I think for the team here, it's also not, I mean, of course it's sort of nice cherry on top, you know, but that's not the primary motivation. The primary motivation has always been there is this opportunity for us to change how software is built and how cool is that, right? That is, yeah. If let's say in 10 to 20 years, if all software has been built in Retool, we were the first 50, 100, 500 people at this company, that is going to be so cool.

SPEAKER_82: Awesome. All right. With that, I will let you get back to the grind, finish off that scotch. I don't believe you that it's tea. I think that looks a lot like Macallan 18 to me, but that was a long pour. So you held it together, David. If you're looking to work at Retool, they're hiring, looking for developers, I'm sure,

SPEAKER_245: salespeople, I'm sure.

SPEAKER_118: We're specifically looking for a very interesting profile. We're looking for

SPEAKER_18: former founders who like sales and who are somewhat technical. Wow. Because as you can imagine for us,

SPEAKER_14: sales is kind of tricky because we're selling to a developer, right? So you've got to be pretty

SPEAKER_245: technical on that evangelist technical sales process. Exactly. So if somebody's down for that, it's well-paying. It's nice. Please email me. Yeah, David at Retool.

SPEAKER_03: Please email david at retool.com. Continued success, David. Thank you for taking the time. Thank you to our partners for the rising stars of SaaS series. This is our 10th episode of 10 episodes. We had so many great people.

SPEAKER_56: Christian came on to talk about pitch.com, which was just tearing it up and a great product. Jason Lemkin, the investor behind Saster. Maritas came on to talk about income sharing agreements. Linda came on to talk about dishcraft, robotics. Just so many. Chris from Chow Now comes to mind. What a great series we've had, thanks to the team, Nick and Matt, Maureen and everybody for putting together a great first rising stars of SaaS. We did for 2020, and we'll do it again in 2021. I think it's been a great, awesome series. David continued success, and we'll see you all next time on This Week in Startups.