sskates

I believe Eric Vishria is the best Series A board member of this generation. I've learned more from him about it what it means to be a great CEO over the last 10 years than anyone else. I haven't heard of another founder who has spoken as highly as their Series A investor.

I've been meaning to write up my story with him. Now is a great time with all the horror stories on others that have been coming out.

He sticks through his companies for over a decade, which is rare in this business: https://x.com/ericvishria/status/2051459386372149506

Drew was the original inspiration for me to get into startups. He was a few years ahead of me at MIT and did MIT's Battlecode competition as well. He introduced me to Hacker News, Paul Graham's writing, YC, and the Silicon Valley ecosystem. What he built with Dropbox was the first proof point of the YC model. I'm tremendously appreciative of what he's done for the next generation of enterepreneurs.

I love the launch! Automated observability that feeds back into the product development process is the future of this category vs having to spend a lot of time configuring and managing the infrastructure yourself.

It's something we've thought a lot about at Amplitude. We'd love to talk.

Chase- thank you for what you've done in creating Watsi to impact 33,000 lives! It also made me believe in the potential for non profits to create a positive impact again.

Generative Engine Optimization. Probably needs a better name. We go back and forth between that and AI Visibility.

Norman Borlaug's story is amazing. He brought modern farming practices to Mexico and created a new strain of high yield disease resistant dwarf wheat at quadrupled wheat production in the country. Did the same in India, Pakistan, and Africa. Saved a billion lives as a result. Solved food as a limited resource for the first time in human history. We've now gotten to transcend food scarcity as a society.

It's super cool that the US Mint is commemorating his work.

Being a farmer was worse!

Congrats to you both!! Paras- you guys were always one of the ones we looked up to when starting Amplitude way back in 2012.

That's too bad that the TC article read that way. They returned more money to investors than what was put in, which puts them in the top ~20% for acquisitions of this scale. The crazy part is even a lot of the 1B+ privates aren't able to do that (eg Lacework)

The current plan is to port all existing functionality to Amplitude's platform as quickly as possible. We'll then migrate everyone over in a way that doesn't break existing functionality and continue running it indefinitely. We're working through the details now.

I share your skepticism of B2B companies making claims of being AI driven! Most stuff I see is a thin wrapper around an existing workflow where the AI isn't adding any meaningful functionality (also see: crypto).

We've been very deliberate about integrating AI functionality in a way that's additive: recommendations, proactive insights, and summarization are all areas that are a leap forward in the data space. What the CommandAI team has done is legit- it's their fastest growing functionality in terms of usage. We'll have more here soon.

Relevant TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTFHap9QW/

Amplitude CEO here. To clear a few things up:

The number that was reported in term sheet / pro rata did not include any stock, which was a big part of this deal. The total consideration for CommandAI was north of $45M. We're working with them to issue a correction. Long story how the wrong number got reported- mostly too much telephone. It was also a good outcome for their investors in that they were able to return more than what was raised.

We at Amplitude approached the Command AI founders about joining Amplitude. They had a bunch of runway and good growth numbers. They were initially planning to raise another round of fundraising to continue to scale their business instead. It took some time on both sides to figure out what the win-win combination would look like.

We're honored that they decided to combine with Amplitude and are excited about what the combined products look like.

Wow- a lot of similarity to what's important with analytics today! Depth of analytics and speed of queries were their key competitive differentiators. Those are still ones we hammer at Amplitude. Also individual visitor history drill-down (we call it user timelines) is one of the most used features in Amplitude today.

I have a huge amount of respect for the Urchin team. They had to figure out everything for the first time on their own with nothing to go off of while going after a much smaller and earlier market.

Public company CEO here. One of my rules that has served me well is "don't ever be on the other side of a transaction from private equity". They have blatantly anticompetitive playbooks where they buy up all the competition in a market and then raise prices as a cartel. Mostly recently, the DOJ has opened a criminal probe into RealPage for price fixing in real estate. What a scourge on capitalism.

Wow, really cool! Could you apply this to the behavior dataset that we have at Amplitude? I'd love to talk more.

I am thinking about this problem at Amplitude. The holy grail of the martech space has always been to predict someone's next action based on what they've done before. What's exciting is that we have one of the largest datasets to be able to do that. Done right you could have products proactively do those actions/change itself to make those actions easier. If anyone is interested in this problem, please reach out!

More on it here: https://amplitude.com/blog/AI-powered-product-development

We’re working on it! Free up to 10M events, more to come later this year.

What would reasonably costed look like to you?

More on my view on real-time analytics here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15380607

Ferruccio and Enzo- congratulations on the launch of June! I've been very impressed by what you've built with June. I love that you've gone deep with the B2B use case- I think there's a lot of depth to that well. The leverage you're getting out of AI is an early preview of where I believe insight generation in this space will go. The combination of the two is powerful.

It'd be great to catch up sometime.

I'd love for you to add Amplitude (amplitude.com) to your guide. Ensuring we have the same easy out of the box experience GA does is a top priority for us this year. Let me know how I can us get added!

Glad to hear you’ve been happy with Amplitude. We’ve been doing a lot RE helping customers federate data to data lakes/warehouses. If I can ask- what data lake you using and what data from Amplitude are you looking to get into it? (Raw dump of analytics data or something else?)

They have our Twitter handle! We gotta fight them to the death for the namespace- there can only be one.

In all seriousness I love them although haven't had time to play any since Endless Space. I'm excited for Humankind though!

Thanks for the feedback. Yeah, it's not ideal today, particularly for companies in your situation. The problem is we're applying the same GTM motion across everything. It works very well for the enterprise but to your point a heavy sales approach doesn't make sense for SMB. We're going to be making some changes here to improve it in 2022 and break out how we organize our SMB business from the other parts.

Can you send me a note at spenser@amplitude.com with your thoughts on what you'd like to see? Thanks!

Yes- this is the wave we're riding at Amplitude! The revenue center in companies is changing from sales and marketing to the product organization. That's where all your customers are going and the pandemic is just accelerating this trend. As a result, we're seeing the Chief Product Officer becoming the most important role in the enterprise. We're in the very early stages of this trend and I'm excited about the long term potential.

Our SVP Product Justin is a member of the collective as well!

I'm glad we can push forward the state of the art for customers together!

It's very difficult to impossible to measure the impact of PR on the company. I can say that broadly we've not been well known since we started Amplitude and it's driven me crazy as CEO. There are a lot of conversations about product data we just never end up in as a result.

We didn't have someone managing it internally until recently. We just hired some phenomenal communications people and they've done an outstanding job with PR for our public listing (incredible work Darah, Jenna, and JJ!). I'll update you on the results but hopefully we're in many more conversations!

Having a strong point of view helps a lot. You have to find your voice on it. My views on direct listing which is a new hot topic certainly helped a bunch.

We heard the pitch from a number of bankers and it was clear Morgan Stanley's expertise on the process was the best. The fact that they did Asana as well as most other direct listings helped too.

I came to wanting to do a direct listing for Amplitude through my own study of the options. The path of least resistance would have been a traditional IPO.

Your goal during the process is to minimize volatility of your stock. Jumps in the price from imbalances in supply and demand make people unhappy because it means someone is getting a raw deal and there is imperfect information (which is the biggest part of why I don't like traditional IPOs). There was definitely a bunch to learn from previous direct listings where there was higher volatility.

Alright, I'm back 24 hours later to finish out my responses!

RE going public- yes, there was a lot of alignment between everyone internally about the advantages of being a public company. The main downsides are 1) cost 2) distraction to the rest of the company. Huge credit to our CFO Hoang and the internal team for getting it done in record time which minimized the distraction. The main debate was whether to do a direct listing vs traditional IPO which I've covered elsewhere.

We sold about 25% in the seed, another 25% in the Series A (cumulatively 45%), 18% in the Series B, and then 10% in the Series C, D, and E, and 5% in the Series F. We also did a lot of employee grants along the way and were more generous than the median company. It adds up! It's not so much about fairness, it's about what sets up Amplitude to win. You can see the full cap table in our S-1: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001866692/000119312...

I wouldn't have done much differently- you can see my reply in some of the other threads for mistakes in not talking to customers enough or with people.

Our first one was intro from a prospective investor. Second sent me an email after we launched on TechCrunch. The third one sent us the following email:

"Hello — we are a Mixpanel customer and evaluating alternatives right now and came across the TC article. We also use RJ metrics, so what you guys are offering is really compelling.

I do have a question about what "custom integration" means on the feature breakdown by tier. Let me know if there is some more information about what that includes that I could review."

After that I can't remember. Ex-Zynga product people were an early sweet spot for us and we're lucky we got on a few of their radars. It was then about finding our way into more similar situations.

It's possible to do and we've tried a few variations but it's so unwieldy that for 98% of cases we strongly recommend against it. Instrumentation isn't actually the hard part- it's managing your taxonomy. You're going to do that work at some point, and trying to sort through auto-generated events is much more difficult than manually instrumenting upfront. Maybe the technology has changed enough to make it possible though! I'll have my head of product reach out to compare notes as we'd love to talk more.

We're going big after the Chief Product Officer in the enterprise. We're in 26 of the Fortune 100 today and are going to figure out how to get to a majority.

The levers you have available as a public company are different and I'm still learning them. Employee stock purchase plans are one thing we've already implemented that helps align incentives with company success. You can also be more aggressive about rewarding top performers with cash which is great. Sidebar: I've never met a great account executive who couldn't use more cash. If you want to make a lot of money in the next few years, come work with us as we take the market!

I feel good about the massive market as well as our differentiation. The #1 challenge is getting the right team in place to execute successfully against the opportunity. When you're growing 50-60% YoY, you have an entirely new company every 2 years. There is such a high degree of variation between people that just because you're a high functioning organization today does not guarantee you will be tomorrow. My biggest lever on it as CEO is the leaders we bring into the business and so I spend a lot of time thinking about how to get that right.

No, I started a company to maximize my positive impact on the world. Maximizing my economics/ownership/control was secondary so there was no question we'd raise venture capital if it would help us scale (and it did to massive effect!)