Vijaye Raji to become CTO of Applications with acquisition of Statsig

https://openai.com/index/vijaye-raji-to-become-cto-of-applications-with-acquisition-of-statsig/

by tosh • 11 months ago

176 79 11 months ago

Related Statsig post: https://www.statsig.com/blog/openai-acquisition

gchadwick• 11 months ago

The CTO of applications reporting to CEO of applications (who reports to the actual CEO) is kinda weird? I figure you're either the actual CTO or you're not a C-level exec and should have another title. Just more title inflation I guess. Maybe in same way you see VPs of X everywhere in some organizations we'll be starting to see CEO/CTO of X lower and lower down the org chart.

giancarlostoro• 11 months ago

I'm just sitting here wondering what in the world "Applications" is, is that a subsidiary or what?

therealbilliam• 11 months ago

Apparently that's what they call ChatGPT, Codex, etc ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

kridsdale13• 11 months ago

A thing that uses a model to have customers.

neom• 11 months ago

It's signaling P&L responsibilities. It's not that weird, at least not unheard of at all, just that it's typically done through "EVP" - So EVP Applications, VP of Applications Engineering, etc. - I'm guessing that the line items those "C"s who are not Sam are responsible for, are bigger than most F500 executives, and they're using titles to reflect that reality.

swyx2• 11 months ago

just gonna point out that Google has done this as well and its not so much title inflation as it is just acknownledging the fact that if the unit they command was a standalone business they would well be worth the CEO/CTO title.

geodel• 11 months ago

This C level thing is happening for decades. There are many with CTO title who manage groups sometime as small as 5-10 people. And they are not startups but large corporates.

nerdsniper• 11 months ago

“CTO” makes sense as a signal that “the buck stops here” for technical issues. They are the highest-ranking authority on technical decisions for their silo, with no one above them (but two CEO’s above them for business decisions)

If Mira Murati (CTO of OpenAI) has authority over their technical decisions, then it’s an odd title. If I was talking with a CTO, I wouldn't expect another CTO to outrank or be able to overrule them.

atty• 11 months ago

It would be quite strange indeed for Mira Murati to have a say over their technical decisions, considering she does not work for OpenAI :)

prasadjoglekar• 11 months ago

Just look at any media agency (OMG as an example). There are CEOs up the wazoo, one for North America, one for EU etc.

In practice, these are just internal P&Ls.

citizenpaul• 11 months ago

Sounds to me like another phase in the growth of the "Unaccountability Machine"

https://www.amazon.com/Unaccountability-Machine-Systems-Terr...

Oh the CTO approved it so we should blame them. No not that CTO the other CTO. Oh so who decided on the final out come. The CTO! So who is on first again?

mikert89• 11 months ago

OpenAI is going to start competing with a ton of SAAS companies. I think we are going to see products 10x better than legacy saas products, many companies wont be able to compete.

flappyeagle• 11 months ago

I mean they can try. They’re not gonna be very good at it

nojvek• 11 months ago

competing with a ton of SAAS companies

A a ton of companies will compete with OpenAI while their focus is divided amongst a 100 things. May a thousand flowers bloom!

tty456• 11 months ago

Who the heck is Vijaye Raji?

swyx2• 11 months ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45108493

sister [deleted] comment said "He’s an extremely well-known and deeply respected engineer, leader, and founder in the Seattle metro region. This is a key hire for OpenAI, and a good one."

esafak• 11 months ago

The Statsig CEO, of course.

jijapiopq2• 11 months ago

Some ex-facebook employee who developed a product for ... guess what - tracking users activity on websites to provide "analytics".

mxstbr• 11 months ago

Initial Show HN four years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26629429

Congrats to the Statsig team!

morkalork• 11 months ago

1 comment - 13 points. Guess you should never feel bad if your own Show HN doesn't take off, it's not the end of the world!

utyop228• 11 months ago

TBH this is looking more like an acqui-hire (Im sure they don't want the key people of Statsig to go away....), similar to Windsurf. Consider the fact that the CEO of Apps at OAI worked closely with the CEO of Statsig at Meta.

kevinastone• 11 months ago

Looks like Fidji is reconstituting her Org from Meta

kridsdale13• 11 months ago

It was extremely effective while it was running. I was there.

behnamoh• 11 months ago

Are we supposed to post every blog/news post of OpenAI and keep fueling the AI hype? I think at this point people should know that OpenAI is just like any other company.

MontgomeryPy• 11 months ago

This seems like a big shift for OpenAI into an enterprise applications vendor to me.

rchaud• 11 months ago

What else could they have been? Microsoft didn't give them $10bn to build out their B2C homework autocomplete service.

babelfish• 11 months ago

It was almost certainly purchased just for internal usage. See: Rockset

drewda• 11 months ago

Agreed. There are dozens of startups and established companies providing analytics-y software. The fact that this one is being acquired by OpenAI doesn't make it any more newsworthy to anyone other than the people who are getting some OpenAI equity...

tibbar2• 11 months ago

Statsig is big enough that its acquisition is interesting in its own right. Or maybe I'm biased because I spent quite some time setting up a Statsig integration at $FORMER_EMPLOYER. But if I've done that, odds are that a lot of the other people here have too...

boringg• 11 months ago

1.1 B talent acquisition comp I saw somewhere. That cant be right is it - not sure what the underlying company tech is.

kridsdale13• 11 months ago

StatSig is a reimplementation of Meta’s analytics and growth systems. The best in the world and how they’re able to enter and dominate markets and scale to billions in under a year.

LunaSea• 11 months ago

StarSig had $40 million of revenue.

Hardly billions.

actualwitch• 11 months ago

Anthropic must be miffed![0]

[0] https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/claude-code/data-usage#te...

chambers2• 11 months ago

Hats off to Statsig. They built a stellar product. Superior to many of their industry competitors like Optimizely. Back when I was on an internal Experimentation platform, we were impressed how they balanced dev velocity & stat rigor https://www.statsig.com/updates These guys ship.

Business-wise, I think getting acquired was the right choice. Experimentation is too small & treacherous to build a great business, and the broader Product Analytics space is also overcrowded. Amplitude (YC 2012), to date, only has a 1.4B market cap.

Joining the hottest name next door gives Statsig a lot more room to explore. I look forward to their evolution.

debarshri• 11 months ago

At peak amplitude's market cap was 10B

utyop228• 11 months ago

Amplitude is on track to be delisted lol

stavros• 11 months ago

It gives Statsig a lot more room to explore how our cursor movements and keystrokes can train LLMs to emulate humans browsing the web, you mean?

pjmlp• 11 months ago

Really? I never heard of them.

Meanwhile Optimizely is a new partner in our agency portfolio.

asdev• 11 months ago

curious to hear people's experience using Statsig

bertil• 11 months ago

Curious to hear about how they feel about many key StatSig people walking away, and Vijaye going to lead a different product. OpenAI bought it for internal use. They plan to put the public-facing product into more of a maintenance mode.

Hansenq• 11 months ago

How come this acquisition gets to go through, but Windsurf didn't? There might be antitrust review here too, and Microsoft might also lay a claim to Statsig's IP due to their contract with OpenAI. Maybe Statsig didn't care that Microsoft would have access to the IP?

barrrrald• 11 months ago

Windsurf didn't not go through because of regulatory or MSFT issue – that was always a fig leaf. OAI walked.

_2d303• 11 months ago

So there will be at least two separate technical organizations within OAI. Pretty small company (HC and product surface wise) for that.

Is Brockman now CTO over research specifically or is there going to be a weird dotted line?

_2d303• 11 months ago

Also, best of luck to current statsig customers lol

arthurcolle• 11 months ago

Like Anthropic

gavmor• 11 months ago

Data/ML and Apps split seems pretty normal to me, even in a company of ~20. What makes a group of coworkers into "an org"? That they don't attend one-another's retros?

_2d303• 11 months ago

Even if Data/ML and Apps are split, in a company of 20, they would almost certainly go to the same CTO.

Here you will have what appears per this article to be 2 but as I looked more into it, there are 3 (!!) CTOs (see here: https://x.com/snsf/status/1962939368085327923) one of which (B2B CTO) seems to be reporting to the COO.

So in this context, you have 3 (!!) engineering organizations that don't terminate in a single engineering leader. "Apps" terminates at the "Apps" CEO (Fidji), research org terminates (??) at Sama (Overall CEO) and then B2B terminates at the COO.

So either you have weird dotted lines to Brockman for each of these CTOs OR you are going to have a lot of internal customer relationships which don't have a final point of escalation. That's definitely not common at this size and, unless these are all extremely independent organizations from a tech stack perspective (they can't really be since surely they are all reliant on the core LLMs...), then there will be a lot more weird politics that are harder to resolve than having these organizations all under one technical leader.

Of course another alternative is OAI is handing out titles for retention purposes and "CTO" will be heavily devalued as a title internally.

i386• 11 months ago

What makes a group of coworkers into "an org"?

Reporting lines that ladder up to a line in the P&L.

apetresc• 11 months ago

Can someone ELI5 what Statsig actually is? Their landing page is full of gems like "Turn action into insights and insights into action" and "Scale your experimentation culture with the world's leading experimentation platform" so I have no clue. It appears to be another analytics + A/B testing platform, but surely that can't be worth $1.1B to OpenAI?

jijapiopq2• 11 months ago

A buzz word driven company with a product meant to track users, their mouse movement, keyboard usage across the internet. Of course to help make the world a better place .... for shoving advertisements.

laichzeit0• 11 months ago

Tell me you've never used Statsig without telling me you've never used Statsig. It's an online controlled experiment platform. You know like when you want to figure out if a blue button gets more clicks than a red button or a green button, and you want to avoid the situation of some tech-bro calculating the average clicks on all 3 groups and going "this one is higher, so it must be better" because they have zero background in statistics and don't know how to correct for multiple comparisons or what power analysis is, etc.

Brajeshwar• 11 months ago

I'm of the opinion that the marketing gimmicks that we see on some products but ends up either being acquired big or gets those big elusive contracts, is that they did those messaging on purpose to steer the general onlooker something else. However, their internals or when a customer talks to, say, the founders, they would narrate and then show such things that are 100x better than what we see in the open.

ygouzerh• 11 months ago

It seems a mix of analytics + session-replay (e.g MixPanel) and feature flags platform (e.g Growthbook)

chambers2• 11 months ago

Statsig's core value is their experimentation platform— the automation of Data Science.

Big Tech teams want to ship features fast, but measuring impact is messy. It usually requires experiments and traditionally every experiment needed one Data Scientist (DS) to ensure statistical validity, i.e., "can we trust these numbers?". Ensuring validity means DS has to perform multiple repetitive but specialized tasks throughout the experiment process: debugging bad experiment setups, navigating legacy infra, generating & emailing graphs, compensating for errors and biases in post-analysis, etc. It's a slog for folks involved. Even then, cases still arise where Team A reports wonderful results & ships their feature while unknowingly tanking Team B's revenue— a situation discovered only months later when a DS is tasked to trace the cause.

Experimentation platforms like Statsig exist to lower the high cost of experimenting. To show a feature's potential impact before shipping, while reducing frustrations along the way. Most platforms will eliminate common statistical errors or issues at each stage of the experiment process, with appropriate controls for each user role. Engs setup experiments via SDK/UI with nudges and warnings for misconfigurations. DS can focus on higher-value work like metric design. PMs view shared dashboards and get automatic coordination emails with other teams if their feature is seen as breaking. People still fight but earlier on and in the same "room" with fewer questions about what's real versus what's noise.

Separating real results from random noise is the meaning of "statsig" / "statistically significant". I think it's similar to how companies define their own metrics (their sense of reality) while the platform manages the underlying statistical and data complexity. The ideal outcome is less DS needed, less crufty tooling to work around, less statistics learning, and crucially, more trust & shared oversight. But it comes at considerable, unsaid cost as well.

Is Statsig worth $1B to OpenAI? Maybe. There's an art & science to product development, and Facebook's experimentation platform was central to their science. But it could be premature. I personally think experimentation as an ideology best fits optimization spaces that previously achieved strong product-market fit ages ago. However, it's been years since I've worked in the "Experimentation" domain. I've glossed over a few key details in my answer and anyone is welcome to correct me.

siva7• 11 months ago

If such platforms are the result of what facebook is today, it's not exactly an advertisement for these products.

navs• 11 months ago

Have implemented Statsig in two companies as alternatives to LaunchDarkly and loved it both times. Going to be interesting how their other big customer deals with this purchase i.e. Anthropic

iamleppert2• 11 months ago

The problem with A/B testing, and anyone who has ever done it at scale can tell you, beyond the banal basic stuff that people are already aware of like making things accessible and discoverable, once you get to a certain point, people just have no opinion. The default opinion is no opinion.

It's why every mass consumer product devolves into a feed or a list of content delivered by an algorithm. Once you reach a certain point, you come full circle and even that doesn't matter anymore: users will happily consume whatever you give them, within reason.

A/B testing platforms are mostly used by an odd collection of marketers and "data driven" people who love to run experiments and drag out every little change in the name of optimization. In the end, it all completely doesn't matter and doesn't tell you anything more than just talking to an average user will.

But, boy, are they sure a great way to look busy and dress up an underperforming product!

beeon• 11 months ago

Maybe the industry you work in is relevant here. In e-commerce, A/B testing the position and color of "add to cart" button can yield legitimate revenue multipliers. People's opinions are irrelevant in that kind of A/B test, all that matters is the likelihood they continue down the funnel.

iamleppert2• 11 months ago

This is always the straw man A/B testing people reach for. When in reality, this only works on the worst possible designs or bizarre layouts, that no one really uses. It's a myth that you can somehow ring out extra few % by making tiny changes to fonts and colors -- in every case, they simply stop the experiment when the results tip in their favor.

The ONLY time I've ever seen it used successfully was to make changes to the layout of ads, making them look like more organic content or likely to be accidentally clicked. You can see this at work if you've ever clicked on an ad by mistake, or maybe you were trying to close the ad and noticed someone has "optimized" the close button placement using one of these A/B tools.

There it is, that's the market for these tools. That represents the vast majority of the these companies use-cases, revenue and usage. Anyone else who implies an innocent intent is either ignorant or inexperienced.

GOD_Over_Djinn• 11 months ago

I wonder what this means for statsig employees? Paper money converted to a different kind of paper money? Are they now OpenAI employees? Will there be layoffs?

Vijaye Raji to become CTO of Applications with acquisition of Statsig

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