Retool: Building Software with Software
By: Bryan Schreier on behalf of Sequoia
Atlassian, Stripe, GitHub — all are tremendous companies powered by the Rise of the Developer. Today, over 20 million software developers sit at the center of business creativity, and they build the products we touch every day. Software developers also enable most every other creator — from auto designers to filmmakers to authors — as these creators now leverage software tools to take their work to the next level. Every creator is evolving from the old way to the software-enabled way. Ironically, the one group left behind is the software developers themselves. In a classic display of “the cobbler’s children have no shoes,” developers haven’t focused on building software to help build software. Enter the low-code movement.
Not to be confused with no-code, which targets businesspeople, low-code empowers developers to leverage software to build software, saving them from reinventing the wheel and preserving valuable time for innovative creation. Today we’re delighted to announce our partnership with the leader in the low-code space — Retool.
Retool targets the largest category of software in its mission to enable developers — and that category is internal software. Today, at just about every company, both within and beyond tech, developers build and maintain internal software tools. Gartner estimates that up to half of all code is written for internal apps, and Forrester estimates that companies globally spend over $120B per year on custom-built software. And in our increasingly software-enabled world, this market is only getting bigger.
Why do companies spend so much? Internal apps have become the lifeblood of business operations. They help manage everything from documentation to CRM, analytics to employee onboarding. But among most software developers, “tools” remains a dirty word. The work is mission critical but lower-leverage, and weighs down development teams. And unsurprisingly, the resulting applications are often brittle and difficult to maintain.
I saw this firsthand in my time at Google. One of the teams I led was in charge of building internal tools — and most of my engineers were desperate to do just about anything else. While our colleagues relied daily on the systems we developed, actually building those systems simply wasn’t a good use of valuable engineering talent. Eventually, many of those developers went on to build ubiquitous products — including Gmail, Drive and Android — and the leader of that team moved on to build Qualtrics as a co-founder from its infancy to an $8B sale (and now IPO). These accomplishments were only possible after being “liberated,” as one of them described it, from working on internal tools.
Retool frees developers from the mundane, and empowers them to spend more time inventing, innovating, and improving products to maximize impact. When I first met Retool founder David Hsu last year, I was struck by the enormous potential of the idea. Here was a product that offered all the common building blocks of internal tools — such as tables, text inputs and forms — so engineers didn’t have to build them from scratch. But unlike other low-code solutions, Retool allows engineers to dive into code as-needed, enabling far more customization. Retool also provides authentication and on-premises deployment options to ensure engineers don’t have to choose between security and speed.
It was clear from the start that the founding team truly understood the problem — they’d experienced the same pain firsthand — and that they had developed a highly authentic solution. The benefits of leveraging Retool are many: engineers are delighted to spend more time on the highest impact work, business teams receive more robust tools faster, and everything sits on the same platform to decrease the maintenance burden. Retool wanted to give engineers Legos, not clay. And they were building a very powerful set of Legos.
Having just made their first hire at the time of our partnership in early 2019, Retool’s scrappy and talented team has since grown quickly. David and the team have proven to be adept at not only the product side, but the business side, as well. With such a deeply-rooted, personal understanding of the problem, they quickly achieved product-market fit, and today, Retool is on track to define the low-code category. The platform is used by a wide range of businesses, from small startups to Fortune 500s across industries, many of which have already built hundreds of internal tools leveraging Retool.
Thanks to low-code, and we think Retool in particular, the cobbler’s children can now have shoes. We see a future in which Retool becomes the de facto platform for building, hosting and managing apps, ultimately replacing a range of disparate tools and unnecessary low-level engineering. By moving engineers “up the stack,” the Retool team has already embodied one of the great opportunities of the low-code movement — and taken an important step toward rapid innovation. With Retool, millions of engineers can spend more of their time on the most fulfilling work, while their partner teams still get better tools, faster. It’s a win all around.
