July 17, 2025

Pivoting to Retool (Interview)

1 hour 21 minutes

David Hsu from Retool joins Adam to discuss how he built Retool. From the pivot in YC, to building the most 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.

Join the discussion

Changelog++ members save 5 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!

Sponsors:

Auth0 – The identity infrastructure for the age of AI. Built by developers, for developers—Auth0 helps you secure users, agents, and third-party access across modern AI workflows. Token vaulting, fine-grained authorization, and standards-based auth, all in one platform.

Start building at Auth0.com/ai

CodeRabbit – AI-native code reviews, built for the modern dev stack. — CodeRabbit is your always-on code reviewer—flagging hallucinations, surfacing smells, and enforcing standards, all without leaving your IDE or GitHub PRs. Trusted by top teams to ship better code, faster.

Start free at CodeRabbit.ai

Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps close to your users — global Anycast load-balancing, zero-configuration private networking, hardware isolation, and instant WireGuard VPN connections. Push-button deployments that scale to thousands of instances. Check out the speedrun to get started in minutes.

Featuring:

David Hsu – Website, LinkedIn
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

Retool on Y Combinator – YC-backed company building internal tools fast

Retool Agents – Use AI Agents to automate workflows with natural language and data access

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

...more

View all episodes

By Changelog Media

4.7

285285 ratings