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David Hsu

CEO & Co-Founder, Retool

Search every verified David Hsu interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. David Hsu, CEO and co-founder of Retool, appeared in a session on April 1, 2026, discussing the company's focus on enabling non-engineers to build internal applications and AI agents. He stated that Retool connects to data across various sources without storing it, a capability he said has attracted customers including the US Air Force, US Navy, US Army, and Coinbase. Hsu also described a strategic shift, saying the company is considering "a very high conviction bet to totally rearchitect our product" and move toward letting large language models generate code on the platform rather than using drag-and-drop frameworks. Hsu predicted that autonomous agents replacing human work is a "business economic inevitability" by 2028, citing pressure to optimize labor costs. He contrasted this with what he described as unsustainable growth in some AI companies, giving the example of a live coding firm with over $100 million in revenue but gross retention around 55%, suggesting such companies "will be gone in a few years without sustainable use cases." Hsu emphasized the importance of hands-on building, noting that he personally experiments with tools like Boltbox and that product leaders must iterate to avoid being reinvented by competitors.

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