David Hsu: preference

Transcript context

…Highlight 2020, but it looks like, you know, you made the right call there anyway. Maybe we should also, for people who are not clued into Retool, do a quick, like, what is Retool? You know, I see you as the kings or the inventors of the low-code internal tooling category. Would you agree with that statement? You know, how do you usually explain Retool? I generally say it's like Legos for code. We actually hate the low-code moniker. In fact, we have docs saying we will never use it internally, or even to customers. And the reason for that is, I think, low-code sounds very not developer-y. And developers, they hear the phrase low-code, they're like, oh, that's not for me. I love writing code. Like, why would I ever want to write less code? And so, for us, Retool is actually built for developers, like, 95% of our customers actually are developers, actually. And so, that is a little bit surprising to people. I'll generally explain it as, and this is kind of a funny joke too, I think part of the reason why Retool has been successful is that developers hate building internal tools. And you can probably see why. I mean, if you're a developer, you've probably built internal tools yourself, like, it's not a super exciting thing to do, you know, it's like piecing together a CRUD UI, you've probably, you know, pieced together many CRUD UIs in your life before, and there's a lot of grunt work involved. You know, it's like, hey, state management, it's like, you know, data validation, it's like displaying error messages, it's like the bouncing buttons, like, all these things are not really exciting. But you have to do it, because it's so important for your business to have high quality internal software. And so what Retool does is basically allows you to sort of, really fast, whether it's a front end, whether it's a back end or whatever else. So yeah, that's what Retool is. Yeah, actually, if you started hiring, and so I do a lot of developer relations and community building work, and you hired Krithika, who is now, who's also an AI, to start out your sort of DevRel function. And I was like, what is Retool doing courting developers? And then she told me about this, you know, developer traction. And I think that is the first thing that people should know is, which is that the burden and the weight of internal tooling often falls to developers, or it's an Excel sheet somewhere or whatever. But yeah, you guys have basically created this market, you know, in my mind, I don't know if there was someone clearly before you in this, but you know, you've clearly taken over and dominated. Every month, there's a new YC startup launching with that it's like, you know, we're the open source Retool, we're like the lower code Retool, whatever. And it's pretty, I guess it's endearing, you know, we'll talk about Airplane later on. But yeah, I think I've actually used Retool, you know, in my previous startups for this exact purpose. Like, we needed a UI for AWS RDS that they can, you know, like the rest of our non less technical people, like our sales operations, people could could interact with and yeah, Retool is perfect for that.…

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