dalton

Hi there - this is not a pro-rata investment, we are investing this 375K right away

I realize that this is likely to be less illuminating than you would hope, but the Retool founders were relentlessly focused on getting their first users, building quickly, and getting to profitability as if their lives depended on it. Witnessing them go from 0-10K MRR was to witness someone walking through walls.

To give a perspective on how much of an outlier this team is, my recollection is they got to ~1M ARR very quickly and with just the 2 cofounders and one employee. That is rare.

Congrats to Retool!

I worked with Retool when they were in the YC W17 batch. They were previously working on a p2p finance app for the UK, and I remember sitting in the conference room when they told me they were pivoting to Retool.

The Retool idea made immediate sense to me because at my prior startup we used django-admin to crank out internal pages and it was amazing. So it seemed clear to me that having something along those lines that was available in every programming environment would be useful, but it was harder for me to wrap my head around competing with free. This sort of reminds me of Algolia competing with Apache Solr - as it turns out can be a great business if you build a great product and really understand your customers. Also I did not appreciate the power of having a drag-and-drop interface, all of the integrations etc.

David and the whole Retool team have done a truly brilliant job executing since then, excellent work.

I don't have much to add to all of the other YC-related information out there - I think having a cofounder is generally a good thing, but not every company we fund does.

I haven't heard that term before - but excellent advice!

That's a fair point, and there are a number of situation dependent factors. I wrote this letter to myself because I know what I would do differently 12 years ago and I have the benefit of hindsight now. Obviously the crisis is different today, we didn't have a pandemic in 2008, there is definitely no one-size-fits-all advice, and every company needs to be figuring out the right thing to do right now. But keep in mind what ended up happening 12 years ago is that everyone lost their jobs. The letter is my thoughts about what could have prevented that outcome back then, at least partly.

For large dollar value contracts you usually have an account rep/point of contact you can get on the phone.

You can explain to your rep what you are dealing with, what your budget is, and make a concrete ask. I get the sense that the larger of a customer you are for someone, the more willing they are to work with you.

Hi, I am the author of this post. As I said at the top my intent was not initially to publish it widely, but here we are. If anyone has questions about what I wrote I'm happy to answer them here.

Hello HN, I am the author of this - it's part of a series of short posts about startups I that worked directly with at YC. This is the first one I have posted one to HN.

Let me know if you have any questions. Also I would love to hear if you are working on something ambitious like the Culture Biosciences founders are!

Hi, I am the partner at YC who funded PostHog, though originally for a different idea.

I think this can be a great business, we have funded startups following similar models like Gitlab, Mattermost, etc. Excited to keep funding more :)