David Hsu on Product failure
From Enabling Non-Engineers to Build AI Agents & Apps | Retool CEO · · Product School
“And so we launched that product in August of last year where we actually now allow an LLM to go use our product. And so the LLM, if you ask to build an app, it doesn't actually write React code. It actually uses tools inside of our application to go build the application for you. Almost as if it were a human building the application, you know, if you will. And to be honest, uh, that's a mistake. That was a mistake. And uh, today we're actually thinking about, we're considering, and I believe we're going to go down this path. It's a very high conviction bet for us, which is, let's actually go totally rearchitect our product actually and throw away a lot of the work that we've worked on for the past five, six years, and actually go all in on, why don't we just get LLM to actually go generate code that runs on top platform instead of LLMs trying to use the frameworks that we've put together and spend the last five, six figures on.”
On , David Hsu, CEO & Co-Founder at Retool, spoke about Product failure during Enabling Non-Engineers to Build AI Agents & Apps | Retool CEO on Product School.
About David Hsu
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.