Why StackOverflow usage is down 50% — with David Hsu of Retool

**Alessio** (0:06)
Hey, everyone, welcome to the Latent Space Podcast. This is Alessio, Partner, and CTO in Residence at Decibel Partners, and I'm joined by my co-host, Swix, founder of Small AI.

**Swyx** (0:16)
And today we are with David Hsu from Retool, welcome.

**David Hsu** (0:19)
Thanks, excited to be here.

**Swyx** (0:21)
We like to give a little bit of intro from what little we can get about you and then have you talk about something personal.
You got your degree in philosophy and CS from Oxford. I wasn't aware that you did double degrees. Is that what you got?

**David Hsu** (0:34)
It's actually a single degree, which is really cool. So basically, you study philosophy and you study philosophy and you study the intersection. The intersection is basically AI, actually, it's sort of a computer stink. Our computers be smart. What does it mean for a computer to be smart? As well as logic. It's also another intersection, which is really fun too.

**Swyx** (0:50)
Five years ago, you launched Retool. You were in YC winter 17 and it's just been a straight line up from there, right?

**David Hsu** (0:57)
I wish.

**Swyx** (0:59)
What's something in all your LinkedIn that people should know about you, very passionate about?

**David Hsu** (1:02)
Yeah, sure. I read quite a bit. I probably read like two books a week or out of that. So it's a lot of fun. I love biking.
It's also quite a bit of fun. So, yeah.

**Swyx** (1:10)
Do you use Retool to read? Like what the hell?

**David Hsu** (1:11)
Until I'm not even retooled to read. Until that'd be funny.

**Swyx** (1:15)
What do you read? How do you choose what you read? Any recommendations?

**David Hsu** (1:18)
I'm mostly reading fiction nowadays. So fiction's a lot of fun. I think it helps me be more empathetic, if you will. I think it's a lot of fun. I actually just want to see what it's, you know, like to be in someone else's shoes. So that's a lot of fun. I just thought I'd read a good amount of philosophy as well. I find philosophy just so interesting, especially logic. We can talk more about that for probably hours if you want.

**Swyx** (1:34)
So yeah, I have a casual interest in epistemology. And I think that anytime you try to think about machine learning on a philosophical angle, you have to start wrestling with these like very fundamental questions about how do you know what you know?

**David Hsu** (1:49)
What does it mean to know?

**Alessio** (1:51)
That's its own pockets. We should do a special edition about it, but that's fun. Let's just maybe jump through a couple of things on Retool that I found out while researching your background.
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 founders on jumping back from that? I've seen a lot of people 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, deciding when to give up on it?

**David Hsu** (2:30)
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. 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 want to sort of under promise and over deliver, if you will.
And in Demo Day, I mean, maybe you two have seen a lot of the videos, like it's a lot of honestly over promising and also delivering because every startup, you know, says, oh, you know, I'm going to be the next Google or something. And then you're like, well, nothing's going on here. And so I really didn't want that. And so we chose actually not to present the Demo Day mostly because we felt like we didn't have anything substantial underneath. Although I see a few other founders in our batch probably would have chosen to present in this situation. But we were just kind of embarrassed about it. And so we basically took six months to just say, OK, well, how do we get customers? And we're not presenting it until we have a product that we're proud of and customers that we're proud of. And fortunately, it worked out. You know, since it was 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 almost like you go to college and all your friends are graduating when you failed or something. You failed your final. You have to redo it here. And 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 and we could have presented if we really wanted to. But, you know, 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, you know, raise some money and then shut the company down in two years.