The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Retool Founder, David Hsu on Why YC Is Helpful Pre Product-Market Fit but Not Post and Why VCs Are Not Helpful Pre-Product Market-Fit but are Post, Why it is Difficult to Become Unprofitable if You Set Yourself Up For Profitability Early & Why VC Th
17 Dec 2020
David Hsu is the Founder & CEO @ Retool, the company that allows you to build internal tools, remarkably fast. David has raised over $69M with Retool from the very best in startups including Sequoia, YC, Patrick and John @ Stripe, Henrique & Pedro @ Brex, Paul Graham, Nat @ Github, Peter @ Segment, Tomer @ Gusto and Elad Gil to name a few incredible names. Today Retool works with some of the biggest companies in the world from Amazon to Volvo to Mercedes Benz. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How David made his way from studying philosophy at Oxford to creating one of the valley's hottest companies in the form of Retool? 2.) How does David analyse pivots today? How does one balance between vision and persistence vs realism and knowing when is the right time to pivot? How did a conversation with John Collison change the course of Retool? What advice does David have for founders on pivoting? 3.) Why does David believe that YC is useful pre-product-market fit but useless post-product-market fit? What elements are so helpful vs not about YC? Why did David raise his Series A as a split between Sequoia and prominent angels? Why was that transformational for the company? 4.) Why was David sceptical of VCs for a long time? Why does David believe VCs are useless pre-product-market fit and useful post-product-market fit? What have been David's biggest takeaways from working with Bryan Schrier @ Sequoia? 5.) Why does David believe that once you are profitable and growing it is actually quite hard to become unprofitable? How does David advise founders considering raising VC vs bootstrapping? How does David know when to allocate resources more aggressively to a segment? What are the signs? Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode David’s Favourite Book: Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
No persons identified in this episode.
This episode hasn't been transcribed yet
Help us prioritize this episode for transcription by upvoting it.
Popular episodes get transcribed faster
Other episodes from The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
Transcribed and ready to explore now
20VC: The Startup Adding $1M ARR Every Week | Competing Against OpenAI's Codex and Claude Code: Who Wins | Why Gemini is Failing and GPT-5 Is Winning | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | The Ugly Truth About AI Coding with Zach Lloyd, Warp
17 Oct 2025
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital
04 Apr 2025
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
28 Feb 2025
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: The Insane Story of Glovo: Selling 30% of the Company for €100K | The McDonalds Deal That Saved Them | Running out of Money Three Times | Burning $1M Per Day | Being Acquired for $2.2BN with Oscar Pierre, Founder @ Glovo
26 Feb 2025
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Why Google Will Win the AI Arms Race & OpenAI Will Not | NVIDIA vs AMD: Who Wins and Why | The Future of Inference vs Training | The Economics of Compute & Why To Win You Must Have Product, Data & Compute with Steeve Morin @ ZML
24 Feb 2025
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC Exclusive: Mercor Raises $100M at a $2BN Valuation: Scaling to $70M in ARR in 24 Months | 9-9-6: 9AM-9PM - 6 Days Per Week: The Most Intense Culture in Silicon Valley | The Future of Programming, Models and Data with Adarsh Hiremath
20 Feb 2025
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch