Alessio Fanelli: observation

Transcript context

…Yeah, totally. What does it mean to know? That's its own podcast. We should do a special edition about it. That's fun. Let's maybe jump through a couple of things on Retool that I found out while researching your background. So you did YC, but you didn't present a demo day initially because you were too embarrassed of what you had built. Can you maybe give any learnings to like founders or people who are built? I've seen a lot of people kind of give up early on because they were like, oh, this isn't really what I thought it was going to be to be a founder. They told me I would go to YC and then present and then raise a bunch of money and then everything was going to be easy. So how did that influence also how you build Retool today in terms of picking ideas and deciding when to give up on it? Yeah. Let's see. So this is around about 2017 or so. So we were supposed to present at the March demo day, but then we basically felt like we had nothing really going on. We had no traction, we had no customers. And so we're like, okay, well, why don't we take six months to go find all that before presenting? Part of that, to be honest, was I think there's a lot of noise around demo day, around startups in general, especially because there's so many startups nowadays. And I guess for me, I'd always wanted to sort of under-promise and over-deliver, if you will. And then demo day, I mean, maybe you two have seen a lot of videos. It's a lot of, honestly, over-promising and under-delivering because every startup says, oh, I'm going to be the next Google or something. And then you peer under it and you're like, wow, nothing's going on here, basically. So I really didn't want that. And so we chose actually not to present on demo day, mostly because we felt like we didn't have anything substantial underneath. Although actually a few other founders in our batch probably would have chosen to present in that situation, but we were just kind of embarrassed about it. And so we basically took six months to just say, okay, well, how do we get customers? And we're not presenting until we have a product that we're proud of and customers that we're proud of. And fortunately, it worked out. Six months later, we did have that. So I don't know if there's much to learn from the situation besides I think social validation was something that I personally had never really been that interested in. And so it was definitely hard because it's hard to sort of, it's almost like you go to college and all your friends are graduating, but you failed or something, you failed the final and you have to like redo it here. It's like, well, it kind of sucks that all your friends are up there and on the podium presenting and they are raising a ton of money and you're kind of being left behind. But in our case, we felt like it was a choice. We could have presented if we really wanted to, but we would not have been proud of the outcome or proud of what we were presenting. And for us, it was more important to be true to ourselves, if you will, and show something that we're actually proud of rather than just raise some money and then shut the company down in two years.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.