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Retool raises $45M at a $3.2B valuation

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Re: Retool raises $45M at a $3.2B valuation

#91

Post by LionTamer »

bdcravens wrote: post #49
phphphphp wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a pragmatic software engineer: same. The code by default era can’t end soon enough, we shouldn’t be carrying the burden of our own inferior versions of things that already exist. A decade from now we will look back on the amount of code written now as a puzzling artifact of the past. Code when a ceiling has been reached with existing tools is the future — a ceiling which is getting higher and higher, thanks to Ret…

Indeed. I'd rather put my energy into solving unique business problems, rather than wiring up another standard table, form, or chart.

Why are the only options residing yourself to vendor lock-in or developing everything from scratch? There are plenty of open source tools, components, libraries, etc that can be used to speed up the pace of development without having a situation where you’re at the whim of your vendor because you’re unable to export your work into another form. I love the idea of creating tools that allow less technical people to build software or technical people to build software faster - but why can’t those tools be ones that allow you to export the final product into a universal format?

Re: Retool raises $45M at a $3.2B valuation

#92

Post by eeke »

jarek83 wrote: post #61
dvdhsu wrote: post #2

Hi all, founder @ Retool here. We've made a lot of progress over the past few years, but we first started on HN, and certainly wouldn't be here without all of you! For example, here's when we launched: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14515494 . Hilariously, we described Retool as "Excel with higher order primitives", and people understood it! (Only on HN!) After that, we spent around a year polishing the product…

I jumped on to see a demo and got stuck at the start where it wants me to add DB credentials. First thing is that I just wanted to fool around to see what I can do with it - it would be nice to have some playground DB for that instead of having to connect an existing set. Second thing - I'd be kind of hesitant giving access to my production DB to it this way. Do you consider adding some credentials store so I could f…

On your second question, there is a zero-trust way of using Retool via our self-hosted version, which installs in a few minutes via Docker (https://retool.com/self-hosted/). If you want, you can even fully airgap your Retool instance such that no data goes in or out. (In the future we are also thinking about how we can integrate with credentials stores!)

Re: Retool raises $45M at a $3.2B valuation

#93

Post by alistairw »

dvdhsu wrote: post #90
alistairw wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the exact same boat. Love retool and using it a lot for interfaces we want to whip up quickly, but the performance is terrible. We're just copping it at the moment since we don't have the time to invest in any other options!

Performance is our #2 priority for our engineering team this quarter. We have made some notable gains, but there is much more work to do. Thank you for the feedback and for sticking with us; we are hard at work on it, and expect to deliver more performance wins over the next few months. (If there are tips you want on improving app performance, feel free to reach out to me; we are happy to get an engineer from our sid…

Thanks for the reply! Sounds like your response to the parent — database connectors in other regions — will help resolve this. So we're happy to stick it out for now

Re: Retool raises $45M at a $3.2B valuation

#94

Post by LionTamer »

phphphphp wrote: post #30
monkeydust wrote: post #23

As someone on the product side I am getting more bullish each day on low-code tooling as it gets increasingly hard to source and retain engineering talent. Whist it might comes with downsides and limitations I think the positives in terms of time-to-market and cost outweigh these on balance for many types of needs (not all for sure). Congrats.

As a pragmatic software engineer: same. The code by default era can’t end soon enough, we shouldn’t be carrying the burden of our own inferior versions of things that already exist. A decade from now we will look back on the amount of code written now as a puzzling artifact of the past. Code when a ceiling has been reached with existing tools is the future — a ceiling which is getting higher and higher, thanks to Ret…

> we shouldn’t be carrying the burden of our own inferior versions of things that already exist

Why would people building software today need to do that? There are excellent, “batteries included” polished versions of plenty of the things we need to build software: package managers, developer tools, machine learning libraries with the latest algorithms, testing & CI/CD tooling, UI components, web servers, databases, etc. There’s even entire applications that are FOSS, if you want to build a new tool there’s nothing stopping you from adding whatever you want to a pre built FOSS application like LibreOffice, Calibre, etc.

Re: Retool raises $45M at a $3.2B valuation

#95

Post by jkradddic »

Dyac wrote: post #71
dvdhsu wrote: post #2

Hi all, founder @ Retool here. We've made a lot of progress over the past few years, but we first started on HN, and certainly wouldn't be here without all of you! For example, here's when we launched: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14515494 . Hilariously, we described Retool as "Excel with higher order primitives", and people understood it! (Only on HN!) After that, we spent around a year polishing the product…

Hi, congrats on the funding! I've been really interested in trying retool since my head of ops pointed me to it a few months back. I think it should meet my use-case but I'm not entirely sure. I run an experimentation program and I think retool might give me a way to build views on experiment performance for me and my stakeholders, but what I think it may be missing is some way of running statistics on the data, perh…

Retool PM here. This sounds like a good use case for Retool! (I built something similar to join performance data with metadata using Retool in my last role).

While we don't currently support using Python or R in apps, we do have something new shipping soon that'll make it easier to run heavier statistical lifting server side. If you're interested in a beta access, or even pairing on a build session, let me know at jane@retool.com.

Also, I think pre-calculating values and storing them in a database table is a smart idea if your velocity is increasing and you want folks to be able to access reports themselves. Your users will get a snappier app and you'll have a historical record of experiment results to reference.

Re: Retool raises $45M at a $3.2B valuation

#96

Post by snir »

dvdhsu wrote: post #83
doctor_eval wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Congrats. I think retool could be great, and I really wanted to use it for our internal tooling, but we operated in Australia and the lag was just nuts. Latency was over 1 second for a page view , compared to ~10ms for a locally hosted UI - it was unusable, and there didn’t seem to be any way to get a local server instance. Hopefully this is something money can fix :) the problem was the sum of UI latency to US(?) pl…

Yes, this is something our infra team is working on right now. As of today, somebody in Australia, with a database hosted in Australia, experiences two round-trips in order to get data (client => our backend => database => our backend => client). We are working on deploying our database connector in far more regions so this won't be a problem. I think ETA is ~next two months? Will check in with team now... An alterna…

Hi all, I'm Snir -- I lead engineering here at Retool.

I wanted to follow up on the above. Solving the round trip problem David mentioned above involves multi-region for our entire backend, inclusive of our DB. This is definitely a priority and something we plan on having by EoY.

Re: Retool raises $45M at a $3.2B valuation

#97

Post by doctor_eval »

snir wrote: post #96
dvdhsu wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this is something our infra team is working on right now. As of today, somebody in Australia, with a database hosted in Australia, experiences two round-trips in order to get data (client => our backend => database => our backend => client). We are working on deploying our database connector in far more regions so this won't be a problem. I think ETA is ~next two months? Will check in with team now... An alterna…

Hi all, I'm Snir -- I lead engineering here at Retool. I wanted to follow up on the above. Solving the round trip problem David mentioned above involves multi-region for our entire backend, inclusive of our DB. This is definitely a priority and something we plan on having by EoY.

Hi, thanks to both for your answers. I could see that it was a round trip problem, and it’s good to know you’re aware of it. Despite trying really hard, the latency made it unusable.

Also IIRC, there was way more than 2 round trips .. I think my UI made a few (GraphQL) API calls and they appeared to be serialised, so it really was in the order of 1-2 seconds for a page to load. This was 18 months ago so both my memory and your implementation might have changed since then.

In terms of using retool, unfortunately that particular ship has sailed for me, but I’ll be quite happy to reconsider it in any of my new projects once you have a solution that is a couple of hundred light-milliseconds closer :)

Re: Retool raises $45M at a $3.2B valuation

#98

Post by w-j-w »

MangoCoffee wrote: post #58
monkeydust wrote: post #23

As someone on the product side I am getting more bullish each day on low-code tooling as it gets increasingly hard to source and retain engineering talent. Whist it might comes with downsides and limitations I think the positives in terms of time-to-market and cost outweigh these on balance for many types of needs (not all for sure). Congrats.

>bullish each day on low-code tooling we use Microsoft PowerApps. i see it differently. if you build too much internal software/tools on PowerApps. your company is tied to Microsoft for a long term since there is no easy way to jump from PowerApps to another low code platform without redo.

So?

Vendor lock-in is just the price of using a vendor, and one which is often overwhelmingly worth paying. What you are saying is true, but it's not really enough of a detraction to justify building everything in-house.

Re: Retool raises $45M at a $3.2B valuation

#99

Post by drunkpotato »

dvdhsu wrote: post #2

Hi all, founder @ Retool here. We've made a lot of progress over the past few years, but we first started on HN, and certainly wouldn't be here without all of you! For example, here's when we launched: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14515494 . Hilariously, we described Retool as "Excel with higher order primitives", and people understood it! (Only on HN!) After that, we spent around a year polishing the product…

A combination of building back-end services and retool admin apps to interact with them has been super successful for us. Congrats on the great product!
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