David Hsu (@dvdhsu) / X

David Hsu

49 posts

David Hsu

@dvdhsu

founder, @retool

Joined June 2011

David Hsu
@dvdhsu
May 28, 2025
We’re excited to introduce Retool Agents, your first fully autonomous AI team. Already, our customers have automated 50k jobs and saved $6B in manual work. This is in every department, including product, finance, operations, support, etc. The secret? Your existing hyperspecific
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David Hsu
@dvdhsu
May 28, 2025
Replying to @dvdhsu
Building agents taught us something unsettling: LLMs + the right tools = AGI. Imagine your boss asks you, “Increase Oscar’s agent usage limit,” but your database has 12 different customers named Oscar. You’re blocked, and reply: “Which Oscar?”. Maybe you’d grab a coffee while
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David Hsu
@dvdhsu
May 28, 2025
Replying to @dvdhsu
Agents don’t just think — they do. They make decisions, execute workflows, and use your data to handle complex tasks that previously required humans. For example, here’s an agent that connects to your Google Calendar, Salesforce, and browses the web. Whenever a sales meeting is
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David Hsu
@dvdhsu
May 28, 2025
Replying to @dvdhsu
How are Retool Agents priced? Starts at $3 / hour. We charge you only for computer runtime. As you saw in the first video, agents are 50x faster than humans. $3 of agent labor is equivalent to $3,000 of human labor (50 * $60 / hour for a human). Now that’s ROI!
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David Hsu
@dvdhsu
May 28, 2025
Replying to @dvdhsu
Over the past 18 months, customers have already automated 100M hours of knowledge work in Retool. That’s the equivalent of 50k full-time knowledge worker jobs. Wow. And this is just the beginning — our goal is to automate the equivalent of 10% of U.S. labor by 2030. Based on our
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David Hsu
@dvdhsu
Mar 17, 2023
Visual Basic (and HyperCard) are why we started @retool. @ryanlucas wrote a homage to it (after numerous chats with @MrAlanCooper and @geary). We're really proud of how it turned out.
Ryan Lucas
@ryanlucas
Mar 16, 2023
I've wanted to write a rich history of Microsoft's Visual Basic for a long time. VB pioneered visual programming and had 3.5M developers(!) at its peak, but was lost to the sands of time. A short 18 months and 5,000 words later, it's finally finished👉 retool.com/visual-basic/
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David Hsu
@dvdhsu
May 28, 2025
Replying to @dvdhsu
We can’t wait to see what you build. Reply with a ⚒️ by end of day and we’ll give you 40 free hours of agent runtime on our fastest model. (A whole workweek!) Read more here:
Retool | Retool Agents: 100 million hours automated and counting
From retool.com
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David Hsu
@dvdhsu
Jan 5, 2023
Replying to @TrevMcKendrick
Engineers should have high standards for tooling! Most of our users are engineers (I am, too). It's hard to build something *all* engs love (e.g. Rails, emacs vs vim). But if most devs aren't happy we're not doing our job. (DM me w/ specific feedback!) Lots in the works here…
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David Hsu
@dvdhsu
May 18, 2021
Replying to @rsg
Hi, ceo @retool here. Please do connect; david AT great. Thank you!
David Hsu
@dvdhsu
Feb 15, 2024
Replying to @swainjo and @retool
Hi @johnswanlive — apologies — our team will be in touch today with a refund. (Not sure why we haven't responded to your support ticket — I will look into it.)
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David Hsu
@dvdhsu
Dec 22, 2021
Replying to @anshublog @alexrkonrad and 6 others
Higher valuations benefit companies because the company gets more money per share they sell. But if the company doesn't need capital, why not prioritize employees and give them more upside? (Yes, VCs get a slightly cheaper price, but we're only selling 1% this round.)
David Hsu
@dvdhsu
May 28, 2025
Replying to @AnthonyWForca
Good point. We’ll write a blog post about it. The main differences are a) these are non deterministic react-style agents (not workflows), and b) at scale, agent management is quite important. (If you have 1000 agents running, you’ll want them piping data in Datadog, which nobody
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David Hsu
@dvdhsu
Jan 5, 2023
Replying to @dvdhsu and @TrevMcKendrick
Our competitor is React and it’ll be hard to convince devs that a new programming paradigm is better. (But if you nail it, it can be a huge unlock—working with the Win32 API was awful before Visual Basic came along.) If you have ideas on where we should be heading, please DM!
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David Hsu
@dvdhsu
Jan 5, 2023
Replying to @dvdhsu and @TrevMcKendrick
Next few months, we’re launching better permissioning, supporting most git commands via source control, and revamping our code writing UX. We added debug tools, testing, and multiple environments in 2022. Extensibility and developer ergonomics are our top priority in 2023
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