David Hsu: preference

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…I think I would just kind of zoom out a little bit to just a general founder questions. You have a lot of fans in the founder community. I think you're just generally well-known as a very straightforward, painstaking person about just business. Something that is the perception from Joseph is that you have been notably sales-led in the past. That's his perception. I actually never got that, but I'm not that close to your sales portion. And it's interesting to understand your market, the internal tooling market versus all the competition that's out there. There's a bunch of open source retools and there's a bunch of... I don't know how you categorize the various things out there, but effectively what he's seeing and what he's asking is, how do you manage between enterprise versus ubiquity? Or in other words, enterprise versus bottom-up, right? I was actually surprised when he told me to ask that question, because I had always assumed that you were a self-serve, sign-up, bottom-up led. But it seems like you have a counter consensus view on that. Yeah. So actually when Retwelf first started, we started mostly by doing sales, actually. And the reason we started by doing sales was mostly because we weren't sure whether we had product-market fit and sales seemed to be the best way of proving whether we had product-market fit out. Because I think this is true of a lot of AI projects. You can launch a project and people might use it a bit and people might stop using it and you're like, well, I don't know. Is that product-market fit? Is that not? It's hard to say, actually. However, if you work very closely with the customer in a sales-led way, it's easier to understand their requests, understand their needs, and stuff like that, and actually go build a product that actually serves them really well. And so basically, we viewed sales as like working with customers, basically, which is like, I think actually quite a, I think it's a better way to describe it, what sales is of an early-stage company. And so we did a lot of that, certainly, when we got started. I think we, over the last maybe five years, maybe like three years ago, four years ago, something like that, I think we have invested more on the self-serve ubiquity side. And the reason for that is when we started Retwelf, we always wanted, actually, some percent of software to get built inside of Retwelf, whether AI software or origin software or broadly UIs and whatnot, but like software, basically. And for us, we're like, we think that maybe one day, 10% of all the code in the world could be written inside of Retwelf, actually, or 10% of the software could be running on Retwelf, which would be really, really cool. And for us to achieve that vision, it really does require a broad-based option of the platform. It can't just be like, oh, only like 1,000 customers, but the largest 1,000 companies in the world use it. It has to be like all the developers in the world use it. And for us, there's like, well, I think 25, 30 million developers in the world. That's of course, how do you get to all the developers? And the only way to get to those developers is not by sales. You can't have a salesperson talk to 30 million people. It has to be basically in this sort of moms-up, product-led, Ubiquity kind of way, basically. And so for us, we actually changed our focus to be Ubiquity, actually, last year. So our gold star metric used to always be sort of revenue-generated or revenue-generated. We actually changed it to be number of developers building on the platform, actually, last year. And that, I think, was actually a really clarifying change because obviously, revenue was important. It funds a lot of our product and funds the business. But we're going to fail if we aren't able to get to something like 10, 20, 30 million developers one day. We can't convince all developers that Retool's a better way to build a sort of class of software, let's say, internal applications for today. And so I think that has been a pretty good outcome. e day. We can't convince all developers that Retool's a better way to build a sort of class of software, let's say, internal applications for today. And so I think that has been a pretty good outcome. I think about the last five years of Retool. I think the starting off with sales, so you can build revenue, and then you can actually build traction, and you can hire more slowly. I think it was really good. I do think the focus towards bottoms-up Ubiquity also was really important because it helps us get to our long-term outcome. What's interesting, I think, is that long-term Ubiquity actually is harder for us to achieve outside of Silicon Valley. To your point, I think at Silicon Valley, Retool is reasonable Ubiquitous. I think if you're starting a startup today and you're looking to build an internal UI, you're probably going to consider Retool, at least. Maybe you don't choose it because you're like, I'm not ready for it yet or something. But you're going to consider it, at least. And when you want to build it, I think it's actually a high probability you will actually end up choosing it. It's awesome. But it's that if you think about a random developer working at, let's say, like an Amazon, for example. Today at Amazon, actually, we have, I think, 11 separate business units that use Retool at this point, which is really awesome. So Amazon is actually a big Retool customer. But the average here at Amazon probably has never heard of Retool, actually. And so that is where the challenge really is. How do we get, like, I don't know, let's say 10,000 developers at Amazon building via Retool? And that, again, I think is still a bottom-up ubiquity thing. I don't think that's like a, I don't think we're going to like, you know, go to Amazon and knock on every developer's door or send out an email to every developer and be like, go use Retool. They're going to ignore us, actually. I think it has to be, use the product, and you love it, you tell your co-worker about it. And so for us, a big bottom-up ubiquity, but marrying that with enterprise or the community business has been something that's really near and dear to our hearts.…

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