Stream: interviews

Topic: 650: Pivoting to Retool

Logbot (Jul 17 2025 at 22:07):

David Hsu from Retool joins Adam to discuss how he built Retool. From the pivot in YC, to building the mostly widely used internal tools platform, to now being the platform for AI agents in the enterprise—on this episode we cover David journey from YC to building agents for the enterprise. :link: https://changelog.fm/650

Andrew O'Brien (Jul 19 2025 at 15:13):

I said this back on Slack when the Retool ads dropped and I'll say it again: I think "CRUD without the crap" is a winner of a slogan for Retool and they can have that one for free.

Andrew O'Brien (Jul 23 2025 at 14:44):

The pitch of being able to build a Cursor style agent for any internal tool sounds like a compelling sell for optimizing a business. But I really have to worry about the blast radius with some of these apps, especially since they often include customer and employee data, control interactions with them, and are linked up with finance.

Given that story about replit deleting that guy’s production DB (which I mean… backups, bro) it would kind of give me pause to give an agent that kind of power.

Andrew O'Brien (Jul 23 2025 at 14:50):

Another thought: I bet y’all could come up with some internal apps. After all, you built your own podcast publication platform! And CDN! What’s something internal facing that isn’t as nice as you’d like right now?

Or, I seem to remember Adam mentioning that you have all of your raw audio archived on one of the storage episodes. Do you have a nice interface on top of that?

Suggesting those because the couple of times I’ve played around with Retool I’ve liked it enough to try to get it in the door (and was laid off right in the middle of the sales process :sweat_smile:— but that shouldn’t be a problem for you!).

Lars Ellingsen (Aug 31 2025 at 03:07):

I gotta be honest - getting feedback on my primary job from an LLM rather than my manager sounds pretty dystopian.

Like, I'm sure things are headed that way, but my goodness that will be miserable. Does it write your performance review too? Decide when to let people go or open new headcount?

Maybe I'm being overdramatic, but I imagine there will be some very interesting stories in the future. I'm not going to say "the next couple of years" because these changes are going to be ongoing for many years to come...

I also can't say I share David's optimism on increasing abundance being spread around to everyday people - but we've gotten into politics enough lately :sweat_smile:

Tim Uckun (Aug 31 2025 at 21:37):

I wonder if people will feel the AI will be less biased and less affected by office politics and therefore will prefer it.

Ron Waldon-Howe (Sep 01 2025 at 02:41):

The performance self evaluation system at work has a "proof read this with AI" button that is sometimes not hot garbage

Lars Ellingsen (Sep 01 2025 at 02:47):

Tim Uckun said:

I wonder if people will feel the AI will be less biased and less affected by office politics and therefore will prefer it.

Hmmm maybe, I prefer to actually know the office politics since that still affects me though. My experience so far with LLMs makes me think I'd hate this (I wouldn't mind feedback more generally, but not to replace my boss)

Daniel Buckmaster (Sep 01 2025 at 05:15):

less affected by office politics

Just wait til people realise who gets to write the prompts that are evaluating them.

Last updated: Oct 15 2025 at 11:36 UTC