Week 1157 -- Leaving Retool
I put in my 2 week notice this week.
As for what’s next, I’m going to be exploring startup ideas with my friend Justin Quan. We’ll mostly be focused on the AI space but we’ll be very open to everything and just follow where our curiosity takes us.
As for why I decided to leave:
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I want to work with Justin. He’s a rockstar at everything related to GTM and distribution, which is a perfect combination for my skill set of being technical and product focused. We met playing poker while at UC Berkeley and both decided to graduate early to join Retool. We both lived in Berkeley for our “senior” year and commuted together to SF while jamming on startup ideas. We’ve worked together on projects before, from tinkering on nights and weekends to winning Retool’s internal hackathon. I’ve always learned a lot from him in those experiences so I knew I wanted to work together full-time at some point.
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Learning rate. There is so much to learn by trying to do our own thing. Not only will we be able to immerse ourselves in new technology and new markets, but we’ll also learn a lot about our own psychology. How do we deal with uncertainty and a lack of structure? How do we resolve disagreements? Will we be able to keep each other disciplined and accountable? I’m confident we will do fine but we won’t truly know until we experience it.
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Financial considerations. I don’t care too much about optimizing for finances at this point in my life. I have no dependencies and I’m fine with living frugally if needed. I want to do things that will be long term impactful on my financial status and rolling the dice on starting a company is my preferred way of doing that. If it’s successful, then we’ve made enough money to not worry about it and hopefully found happiness in our day to day lives. If it fails, then we’ve hopefully learned some lessons that will make our next dice roll more likely to hit.
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I was super nervous before the conversation with my manager because I wasn’t sure how to bring it up. I’ve never quit a job before. She seemed surprised at first but was super supportive of my decision. She asked me the standard questions about why and what could’ve changed my mind but we soon started discussing her own startup experience and life advice. I felt a lot better after she shared her own experience of quitting her first job and her reminder for me to just do what’s best for myself.
I was a bit depressed for the next few days because I honestly had a great time at Retool and I was quite sad for my time here to end. I’ve felt well supported by my manager. I’ve met and become close friends with a ton of great people. I’ve gotten to work on cool projects like debug tools, runtime performance, and multiplayer. I had a ton of fun and unique experiences such as shaving my head, eating at French Laundry, playing poker in Vegas, and so much more. I’ll probably write down a timeline of events so I don’t forget all the memories.
One framework I’ve used to think about large decisions is whether I’d be willing to do something for free. I was combing through my old journal entries and found that one of my reasons for joining Retool was because I would’ve chosen to work here even if I wasn’t getting paid. And now, I will literally not be taking a salary in order to explore ideas with Justin so I’m very excited for this next chapter.
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Content:
- Bridgewater culture of “radical transparency”
- I found this to be an interesting example of a work culture that was intentionally crafted to cater for a specific company’s goals
- Retool CEO David Hsu on the best time to start a company
- “Best time to start a company, if you can, is when you’re young”
- Founders need to “be open minded, be low ego, be open to learning … but you also have to have conviction in your beliefs”
- My takeaway is to be okay with holding conflicting ideas in my mind. I’ll bias towards being open to learning/feedback given that I’m still very inexperienced, but if I do develop strong conviction on something then I’ll be firm about it.