(gentle music) >> Good morning from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE live at AWS Reinvent 2022 with tons of thousands of people today. Really kicks off the event. Big keynote that I think is probably just wrapping up. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. Dave, this is going to be an action packed week on theCUBE no doubt. We talked with so many different companies. Every company's a software company these days but we're also seeing a lot of companies leaving software that can help them operate more efficiently in the background. >> Yeah, well some things haven't changed at Reinvent. A lot of people here, you know, back to 2019 highs and I think we exceeded those two hour keynotes. Peter DeSantis last night talking about new Graviton instances and then Adam Selipsky doing the typical two hour keynote. But what was different he was a lot more poetic than we used to hear from Andy Jassy, right? He was talking about the universe as an analogy for data. >> I loved that. >> Talked about ocean exploration as for the security piece and then exploring into the Antarctic for, you know, better chips, you know? So yeah, I think he did a good job there. I think a lot of people might not love it but I thought it was very well done. >> I thought so too. We're having kicking off a great day of live content for you all day today. We've got Eleanor Dorfman joining us, the sales leader at Retool. Eleanor, welcome to theCUBE. It's great to have you. >> Thank you so much for having me. >> So let's talk a little bit about Retool. I was looking on your LinkedIn page. I love the tagline, build custom internal tools best. >> Eleanor: Yep. >> Talk to us a little bit about the company you recently raised, series C two. Give us the backstory. >> Yeah, so the company was founded in 2017 by two co-founders who are best friends from college. They actually set out to build a FinTech company, a payments company. And as they were building that, they needed to build a ton of custom operations software that goes with that. If you're going to be managing people's money, you need to be able to do refunds. You need to be able to look up accounts, you need to be able to detect fraud, you need to do know your customer operations. And as they were building the sort of operations software that supports the business, they realized that there were patterns to all of it and that the same components were used at and again. And had the insight that that was actually probably a better direction to go in than recreating Venmo, which was I think the original idea. And that actually this is a problem every company has because every company needs operations engineering and operations software to run their business. And so they pivoted and started building Retool which is a platform for building custom operations software or internal tools. >> Dave: Good pivot. >> In hindsight, actually probably in the moment as well, was a good pivot. >> But you know, when you talk about some of those things, refunds, fraud, you know, KYC, you know, you think of operations software, you think of it as just internal, but all those things are customer facing. >> Eleanor: Yep. >> Right so, are we seeing as sort of this new era? Is that a trend that you guys, your founders saw that hey, these internal operations can be pointed at customers to support what, a better customer service, maybe even generate revenue, subscriptions? >> I think it's a direction we're actually heading now but we're just starting to scratch the surface of that. The focus for the last five years has very much been on this operations software and sort of changing the economics of developing it and making it easy and fast to productize workflows that were previously being done in spreadsheets or hacky workarounds and make it easier for companies to prioritize those so they can run their business more efficiently. >> And where are you having your customer conversations these days? Thinking of operations software in the background, but to Dave's point, it ends up being part of the customer experience. So where are you having your customer conversations, target audience, who's that persona? >> Mainly developers. So we're working almost exclusively with developer teams who have backlogs and backlogs of internal tools requests to build that sales teams are building manual forecasts. Support teams are in 19 different tools. Their supply chain teams are using seven different spreadsheets to do demand forecasting or freight forwarding or things like that. But they've never been able to be prioritized to the top of the list because customer facing software, revenue generating software, always takes prioritization. And in this economic environment, which is challenging for many companies right now, it's important to be able to do more with less and maximize the productivity especially of high value employees like engineers and developers. >> So what would you say the biggest business outcomes are? If the developer is really the focus, productivity is the- >> Productivity. It's for both, I would say. Developer productivity and being able to maximize your sort of R and D and maximize the productivity of your engineers and take away some of the very boring parts of the job. But, so I would say developer productivity, but then also the tools and the software that they're building are very powerful for end users. So I would say efficiency and productivity across your business. >> Across the business. >> I mean historically, you know, operations is where we focused IT and code. How much of the code out there is dedicated to sort of operations versus that customer facing? >> So I think it would actually be, it's kind of surprising. We have run a few surveys on this sort of, we call them the state of engineering time, and focusing on what developers are spending their time on. And a third of all code that is being written today is actually for this internal operations software. >> Interesting. And do you guys have news at the show? Are you announcing anything interesting or? >> Yeah, so our focus historically, you sort of gave away with one of your early questions, but our focus has always been on this operations, this building web applications on building UIs on top of databases and APIs and doing that incredibly fast and being able to do it all in one place and integrate with as any data source that you need. We abstract away access authentication deployment and you build applications for your internal teams. But recently, we've launched two new products. We're actually supporting more external use cases and more customer facing use cases as well as automating CRON jobs, ETL jobs alerting with the new retail workflows product. So we're expanding the scope of operations software from web applications to also internal operations like CRON jobs and ETL jobs. >> Explain that. Explain the scourge of CRON jobs to the audience. >> Yeah, so operations software businesses run on operations software. It's interesting, zooming out, it's actually something you said earlier as well. Every company has become a software company. So when you think about software, you tend to think about here. Very cool software that people are selling. And software that you use as a consumer. But Coca-Cola for example, has hundreds of software engineers that are building tools to make the business run for forecasting, for demand gen, for their warehouse distribution and monitoring inventory. And there's two types of that. There's the applications that they build and then the operations that have to run behind that. Maybe a workflow that is detecting how many bottles of Coca-Cola are in every warehouse and sending a notification to the right person when they're out or when they, a refill is very strong, but you know when you need a refill. So it does that, it takes those tasks, those jobs that run in the background and enables you to customize them and build them very rapidly in a code first way. >> So some of the notes that you guys provided say that there's over 500 million software apps that are going to be built in the next few years alone. That's tremendous. How much of that is operation software? >> I mean I think at least a third of that, if not more. To the point where every company is being forced to maximize their resources today and operational efficiency is the way to do that. And so it can become a competitive advantage when you can take the things that humans are doing in spreadsheets with 19 open tabs and automate that. That saves hours a day. That's a significant, significant driver of efficiency and productivity for a business >> It does, and there's direct correlation to the customer experience. The use experience. >> Almost certainly. When you think about building support tooling, I was web chat, chatting on the with Gogo wifi support on my flight over here and they asked for my order number and I sent it and they looked up my account and that's a custom piece of software they were using to look up the account, create a new account for me, and restore my second wifi purchase. And so when you think about it, you're actually, even just as a consumer, interacting with this custom software on the day time. And that's because that's what companies use to have a good customer experience and have an efficient business. >> And what's the relationship with AWS? You guys started, I think you said 2017, so you obviously started in the cloud, but I'm particularly interested in from a seller perspective, what that's like. Working with Amazon, how's that affected your business? >> Yeah, I mean so we're built on AWS, so we're customers and big fans. And obviously like from a selling perspective, we have a ton of integrations with AWS so we're able to integrate directly into all the different AWS products that people are using for databases, for data warehouses, for deployment configurations, for monitoring, for security, for observability, we can basically fit into your existing AWS stack in order to make it as seamless integration with your software so that building in Retool is just as seamless as building it on your own, just much, much faster. >> So in your world, I know you wanted to but, in your world is it more analytics? is it more transactional, sort of? Is it both? >> It's all of the above. And I think what's, over Thanksgiving, I was asked a lot to explain what Retool did with people who were like, we just got our first iPhone. And so I tried to explain with an example because I have yet to stumble on the perfect metaphor. But the example I typically use is DoorDash is a customer of ours. And for about three years, and three years ago, they had a problem. They had no way of turning off delivery in certain zip codes during storms. Which as someone who has had orders canceled during a storm, it's an incredibly frustrating experience. And the way it worked is that they had operation team members manually submitting requests to engineers to say there's a storm in this zip code and an engineer would run a manual task. This didn't scale with Doordash as they were opening in new countries all over the world that have very different weather patterns. And so they looked, they had one, they were sort of confronted with a choice. They could buy a piece of software out of the box. There is not a startup that does this yet. They could build it by hand, which would mean scoping the requirements designing a UI, building authentication, building access controls, putting it into a, putting it into a sprint, assigning an engineer. This would've taken months and months. And then it would take just as long to iterate on it or they could use Retool. So they used Retool, they built this app, it saved, I think they were saying up to two years of engineering time for this one application because of how quickly it was. And since then they've built, I think 50 or 60 more automating away other tasks like that that were one out of spreadsheets or in Jira or in Slack notifications or an email saying, "Hey, could you please do this thing? There's a storm." And so now they use us for dozens and dozens of operations like that. >> A lot of automation and of course a lot of customer delight on the other end of the spectrum as you were talking about. It is frustrating when you don't get that order but it's also the company needs to be able to have the the tools in place to automate to be able to react quickly. >> Eleanor: Exactly. >> Because the consumers are, as we know, quite demanding. I wanted to ask you, I mentioned the tagline in the beginning, build custom internal tools fast. You just gave us a great example of DoorDash. Huge business outcomes they're achieving but how fast are we talking? How fast can the average developer build these internal tools? >> Well, we've been doing a fun thing at our booth where we ask people what a problem is and build a tool for them while we're there. So for something lightweight, you can build it in 10 minutes. For something a little more complex, it can take up to a few weeks depending on what the requirements are. But we all have people who will be on a call with us introducing them to our software for the first time and they'll start telling us about their problems and in the background we'll be building it and then at the end we're like, is this what you meant? And they're like, we'd like to add that to our cart. And obviously, it's a platform so you can't do that. But we've been able to build applications on a call before while people are telling us what they need. >> So fast is fast. >> I would say very fast, yeah. >> Now how do you price? >> Right now, we have a couple different plans. We actually have a motion where you can sign up on our website and get started. So we have a free plan, we've got plans for startups, and then we've got plans all the way up to the enterprise. >> Right. And that's a subscription pricing kind of thing? >> Subscription model, yes. >> So I get a subscription to the platform and then what? Is there also a consumption component? >> Exactly. So there's a consumption component as well. So there's access to the platform and then you can build as many applications as you need. Or build as many workflows. >> When you're having customer conversations with prospects, what do you define as Retool's superpowers? You're the sales leader. What are some of those key superpowers that you think really differentiate Retool? >> I do think, well, the sales team first and foremost, but that's not a fair answer. I would say that people are a bit differentiator though. We have a lot of very talented people who are have a ton of domain expertise and care a ton about the customer outcomes, which I do actually think is a little more rare than it should be. But we're one of the only products out there that's built with a developer first mindset, a varied code first mindset, built to integrate with your software development life cycle but also built with the security and robustness that enterprise companies require. So it's able to take an enterprise grade software with a developer first approach while still having a ton of agility and nimbleness which is what people are really craving as the earth keeps moving around them. So I would say that's something that really sets us apart from the field. >> And then talk about some of the what developers are saying, some of the feedback, some of the responses, and maybe even, I know we're just on day one of the show, but any feedback from the booth so far? >> We've had a few people swing by our booth and show us their Retool apps, which is incredibly cool. That's my absolute favorite thing is encountering a Retool application in the wild which happens a lot more than I would've thought, which I shouldn't say, but is incredibly rewarding. But people love it. It's the reason I joined is I'd never heard someone have a product that customers talked about the way they talk about Retool because Retool enables them to do things. For some folks who use it, it enables them to do something they previously couldn't do. So it gives them super powers in their job and to triple their impact. And then for others, it just makes things so fast. And it's a very delightful experience. It's very much built by developers, for developers. And so it's built with a developer's first mindset. And so I think it's quite fun to build in Retool. Even I can build and Retool, though not well. And then it's extremely impactful and people are able to really impact their business and delight their coworkers which I think can be really meaningful. >> Absolutely. Delighting the coworkers directly relates to delighting the customers. >> Eleanor: Exactly. >> Those customer experience, employee experience, they're like this. >> Eleanor: Exactly. >> They go hand in hand and the employee experience has to be outstanding to be able to delight those customers, to reduce churn, to increase revenue- >> Eleanor: Exactly. >> And for brand reputation. >> And it also, I think there is something as someone who is customer facing, when my coworkers and developers I work with build tools that enable me to do my job better and feel better about my own performance and my ability to impact the customer experience, it's just this incredibly virtuous cycle. >> So Retool.com is where folks can go to learn more and also try that subscription that you said was free for up to five users. >> Yes, exactly. >> All right. I guess my last question, well couple questions for you. What are some of the things that excited you that you heard from Adam Selipsky this morning? Anything from the keynote that stood out in terms of- >> Dave: Did you listen to the keynote? >> I did not. I had customer calls this morning. >> Okay, so they're bringing- >> East coast time, east coast time. >> One of the things that will excite you I think is they're connecting, making it easier to connect their databases. >> Eleanor: That would very much exciting. >> Aurora and Redshift, right? Okay. And they're making it easier to share data. I dunno if it goes across regions, but they're doing better integration. >> Amazing. >> Right? And you guys are integrating with those tools, right? Those data platforms. So that to me was a big thing for you guys. >> It is also and what a big thing Retool does is you can build a UI layer for your application on top of every single data source. And you hear, it's funny, you hear people talk about the 360 degree review of the customer so much. This is another, it's not our primary value proposition, but it is certainly another way to get there is if you have data from their desk tickets from in Redshift, you have data from Stripe, from their payments, you have data from Twilio from their text messages, you have data from DataDog where they're having your observability where you can notice analytics issues. You can actually just use Retool to build an app that sits on top of that so that you can give your support team, your sales team, your account management team, customer service team, all of the data that they need on their customers. And then you can build workflows so that you can do automated customer engagement reports. I did a Slack every week that shows what our top customers are doing with the product and that's built using all of our automation software as well. >> The integration is so important, as you just articulated, because every, you know, we say every company's a software company these days. Every company's a data company. But also, the data democratization that needs to happen to be able for lines of business so that data moves out of certain locked in functions and enables lines of business to use it. To get that visibility that you were just talking about is really going to be a competitive advantage for those that survive and thrive and grow in this market. >> It's able to, I think it's first it's visibility, but then it's action. And I think that's what Retool does very uniquely as well is it can take and unite the data from all the places, takes it out of the black box, puts it in front of the teams, and then enables them to act on it safely and securely. So not only can you see who might be fraudulent, you can flag them as fraud. Not only can you see who's actually in danger, you can click a button and send them an email and set up a meeting. You can set up an approval workflow to bring in an exec for engagement. You can update a password for someone in one place where you can see that they're having issues and not have to go somewhere else to update the password. So I think that's the key is that Retool can unlock the data visibility and then the action that you need to serve your customers. >> That's a great point. It's all about the actions, the insights that those actions can be acted upon. Last question for you. If you had a billboard that you could put any message that you want on Retool, what would it say? What's the big aha? This is why Retool is so great. >> I mean, I think the big thing about Retool is it's changing the economics of software development. It takes something that previously would've been below the line and that wouldn't get prioritized because it wasn't customer facing and makes it possible. And so I would say one of two billboards if I could be a little bit greedy, one would be Retool changed the economics of software development and one would be build operations software at the speed of thought. >> I love that. You're granted two billboards. >> Eleanor: Thank you. >> Those are both outstanding. Eleanor, it's been such a pleasure having you on the program. Thank you for talking to us about Retool. >> Eleanor: Thank you. >> Operations software and the massive impact that automating it can make for developers, businesses alike, all the way to the top line. We appreciate your insights. >> Thank you so much. >> For our guests and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live, emerging, and enterprise tech coverage. (gentle music)