Logbot (Jul 17 2025 at 22:07): 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
| Ch | Start | Title | Runs |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | 00:00 | This week on The Changelog | 01:07 |
| 02 | 01:07 | Sponsor: Auth0 | 01:29 |
| 03 | 02:40 | Start the show! | 06:16 |
| 04 | 08:56 | Y Combinator experience | 03:00 |
| 05 | 11:56 | What is an internal tool | 02:11 |
| 06 | 14:06 | Pivoting to Retool | 03:42 |
| 07 | 17:48 | Ah ha! moment | 06:30 |
| 08 | 24:18 | Has the mission changed at all? | 11:29 |
| 09 | 35:47 | Sponsor: CodeRabbit | 02:43 |
| 10 | 38:31 | Agents in the Enterprise | 06:22 |
| 11 | 44:52 | What agents are being built? | 09:01 |
| 12 | 53:53 | Agent framework | 03:33 |
| 13 | 57:27 | Internal tools templates | 05:12 |
| 14 | 1:02:39 | Internal tools at Retool | 03:33 |
| 15 | 1:06:12 | Can AI build my Retool tools? | 03:00 |
| 16 | 1:09:12 | App from DB? | 09:09 |
| 17 | 1:18:21 | Wrapping up | 01:35 |
| 18 | 1:19:55 | Closing thoughts and stuff | 02:01 |
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!).
Last updated: Aug 18 2025 at 01:38 UTC