Alessio Fanelli: belief

Transcript context

…Wow. No one's asked me that before. Let me think. Sam was, I think he was, I want to, I forgot, I think maybe president of YC in our batch. We actually weren't in his group actually at the very beginning. And then we got moved to a different group. I think Sam was clearly very ambitious when we first met him. I think he was very helpful and sort of wanted to help founders. But besides that, I mean, I think we were so overwhelmed by the fact that we had to go build a startup that we were not, you know, honestly paying too much attention to everyone else's partner taking notes on them. That makes sense. Well, and then just to wrap some of the Retool history nuggets, you raised a series A when you were at 1 million in revenue with only three or four people. How did you make that happen? Any learnings on keeping teams small? I think there's a lot of overhiring we've seen over the last few years. I think a lot of AI startups now are raising very large rounds and maybe don't know what to do with the capital. So this is kind of similar, actually, from sort of why we choose not to demo day. And the reason was, it feels like a lot of people are really playing startup. I think PG has an essay about this, which is like, you're almost like playing house or something like that. Like, it's like, Oh, well, I hear that in a startup, you're supposed to raise money and then hire people. And so therefore you go and do that. And you're supposed to, you know, do a lot of PR, because that's what, you know, startup founders do. And so you could do a lot of PR and stuff like that. And for us, we always thought that the point of starting a startup is basically you have to create value for customers. If you're not creating value for customers, like everything else is going to, nothing's going to work. Basically, you can't, you know, continuously raise money or hire people if you don't have customers. And so for us, we were always very focused on that. And so that's initially where we started. I think it's, again, maybe goes to like the sort of presenting something truthful about yourself or staying true to yourself is something to that effect, which is we didn't want to pretend like we had a thriving business. And so the only way to not pretend was actually to build a thriving business. And so we basically just, you know, put our heads down and, you know, grinded away for probably a year, year and a half or so, just writing code, talking to customers. And I think that at that point we had raised something like maybe a million dollars, maybe a million and a half, something 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 we ever going to spend a million and a half? The runway was like, you know, five, six years at that point, right? Because we're paying ourselves 30, 40K a year. And so then the question was not like, oh, we're going to run on the runways. The question was like, we better find traction because if we don't find traction, we're going to, you know, just give up psychologically. Because if you run an idea for four years and nothing happens, you're probably psychologically going to give up. And I think that's actually true in most startups, actually. It's like most startups die in the early stages, not because I run out of money, but really because you run out of motivation. And for us, had we hired people, I think it would have actually been harder for us because we want to run out of motivation faster. Because when you're pre-product market fit, actually, trying to lead the team of like, you know, 10 people, for example, to Marshall's product market fit, I think it's actually pretty hard. Like it's, you know, every day people are asking you, so why are we doing this? And you're like, I don't know, man, like, hey, trust this. That's actually a very tiring environment to be in.…

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