David Hsu on Data privacy
From Enabling Non-Engineers to Build AI Agents & Apps | Retool CEO · · Product School
“Specifically in your question, uh, one thing that's really unique about Retool is that we don't really store any data. You know, we store user accounts obviously, but we don't store your operational data. So how Retool works is you could use Retool to build applications. Retool allows you to go build applications very quickly with AI. We allow you to generate applications, whether front end applications, backend applications, automations, whatever you want to generate, all those apps on top of your data in your cloud. And one of the uh, core uh, uh, pieces of advice we got for starting out is, oh, well, you know, uh, you should go be this sort of full stack application generation thing, where you store all the data, you store everything, and that's going to make it really easy to get started with, and that's true. It actually does make it really easy to get started with when you don't have to connect to anything. But what we believed is that when you look at applications being built, how many applications being built in the enterprise, how many internal tools being built rely on external data? We think 90, 95% of internal tools rely on external data. Whether it's data you have in Data Bricks, in a Postgres database, in Salesforce, in Data Bricks, in a spreadsheet, even wherever the data is, it's going to be somewhere else. It's very rare actually that people are building internal tools with sort of new data entirely from scratch.”
On , David Hsu, CEO & Co-Founder at Retool, spoke about Data privacy 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.