Retool (YC W17) is hiring hackers to combine visual programming with AI
Hi HN,

We’re Retool (https://retool.com), a visual programming environment for building internal tools. Here’s a 3 minute demo video: https://d3399nw8s4ngfo.cloudfront.net/videos/intro-to-retool....

You can think of Retool as something like Visual Basic, but in the cloud. The idea is that there are lots of internal applications that businesses need, and today, build from scratch (probably via React). But while React is great for many things (our landing page is built in React, our product is built in React, etc.), it’s possible that it might be overkill for building a simple form that POSTs data back to your API. (Who _wants_ to worry about debouncing the submit button, handling errors from the backend, and authenticating and authorizing the users?)

We launched on HN around five years ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17725966). Since then, we’ve launched three new products – a native mobile product (https://retool.com/products/mobile), an automation product for developers (https://retool.com/products/workflows/), and a database product (https://retool.com/products/database/). We’ve hired and grown the team to over 350, and are proud to have businesses like Doordash, NBC Universal, Mercedes Benz, and the NFL using Retool.

The network at Retool is also fairly strong — our lead investors in the Series B were Sequoia, along with Elad Gil, Nat Friedman, as well as John and Patrick Collison. Other investors include the founders of Github, Gusto, Segment, PagerDuty, Plaid, etc.

This year, while other companies are downsizing, we’re doubling down. (Literally.) We’re attempting to double our engineering, product, and design orgs this year. We think the opportunity to invent the future of programming is enormous, and we’re looking for more hackers to join our team.

We think that AI is going to change the way people build software. We think that there is tremendous potential in building interfaces that help humans and AI collaborate together to build software. We want to build a world where humans can quickly assemble full applications by just providing high level directions to AI.

We believe we’re set up especially well to do just that – we have all the building blocks for creating software (frontends, backend compute, data storage) as well as a live interactive builder environment. Why entangle yourself with messy things like Webpack, Docker, and Kubernetes when you can directly manipulate a live app, running right in front of you?

We also think that the world, as a whole, is under-utilizing AI. Businesses are broadly interested in generative AI and LLMs, but don’t know how yet to leverage and use them. It should be simple for businesses to quickly set up flows to have AI automatically triage bug reports, summarize customer feedback, and enrich datasets.

We’ve shared a sneak peak of what we think some of this could look like (https://retool.com/blog/gpt4-in-retool/), and there’s a bunch more coming up that we’re really excited to talk about soon.

If you’re interested in working with AIs and LLMs to change the way companies build software, we’d love to hear from you. We've made multiple hires from HN in the past, so we’re posting here. But if you know any friends who are interested, feel free to tell them to reach out as well.

Please email me at david AT retool with “HN” in the subject line.

Thanks!