Spenser Skates: How Amplitude Rewired Itself Around AI

1. 0:00 – 3:40

   Intro

   1. SSSpenser Skates0:00

      There is a point that you get to a year, maybe two years in, where from a rational standpoint, you probably should quit. But for whatever reason, um, those successful ones don't, and so that is the number one filtering criteria. The best advice I can have is, be clear in your own head about what you're trying to learn and then, you know, be open to where it comes from. And that's w- I think people fuck that up a lot. They don't get really crystal clear on why they're trying to build a startup or what they need to do to be successful. There is going to be a reinvention of analytics, uh, in the next few years. And, you know, we, we want to be the ones to go lead it.

   2. HTHarj Taggar0:36

      (music) Welcome back to another episode of The Light Cone. Today, we're really excited to be joined by Spencer Skates, CEO and co-founder of Amplitude. So, Amplitude went through YC in winter 2012. Amplitude is one of the world's leading analytics platforms, and they're used by some of the biggest companies in the world, like Cursor, DoorDash, and Walmart. Thanks for joining us, Spencer.

   3. SSSpenser Skates0:57

      Absolutely. Good to see you here, Harj.

   4. HTHarj Taggar0:59

      So, I was really excited to have you here because both of us made people on the internet angry recently, specifically on X or Twitter. Um, I made them angry because I said that a lot of the reason incumbent tech companies can't build AI products is that the engineers are kind of grumpy and don't believe in AI and its capabilities, so they don't want to build the products.

   5. SPSpeaker1:21

      People got mad at you for that?

   6. HTHarj Taggar1:22

      Yeah, people got really mad. Turns out that, like, there are actually a lot of grumpy engineers (laughs) that don't believe in AI. So, I was curious to hear for you, as like a, a company that started well before the AI wave and is now, um, trying to move in, is moving into AI and building more AI products, how has that change been for you and what have been some of the challenges you faced?

   7. SSSpenser Skates1:40

      It is hard, um, as a larger company, to reorient and rebuild your company to use AI well. Uh, and this is, I think to your point, the huge advantage that a lot of earlier companies that can build from the ground up in this way. Um, I'll, I'll just tell you the, the Amplitude story. So we, we were frankly skeptics on AI for a while too, so started to become relevant in 2022. Uh, 2023, um, there's discussion but we, we didn't really do that much. And it wasn't until, uh, late in 2024 that we're like, "Okay, we need to get serious because I think this is, has the potential to reshape analytics and what we're doing." Um, I, I think, you know, to just to defend the skeptics for a second, I think... I, I remember being in a board meeting once. You had, like, you know, all these, like, board investor finance people and you had all these salespeople who were like, "Hey guys, shouldn't you look at this AI thing?"

   8. SPSpeaker2:33

      (laughs)

   9. SSSpenser Skates2:33

      Like, "Isn't that getting hot? Shouldn't you guys do it?" And it's like...

   10. SPSpeaker2:35

       "What's your AI strategy?"

   11. SSSpenser Skates2:36

       Yeah, exactly, exactly.

   12. HTHarj Taggar2:37

       (laughs)

   13. SSSpenser Skates2:37

       Yeah, actually that literally was a question, like, from one of our execs to me is like, "We gotta get our AI strategy. What's our AI strategy, Spencer?" And I'm like, "Th- this is the wrong way to think about (laughs) what it is we're doing."

   14. SPSpeaker2:49

       (laughs)

   15. SSSpenser Skates2:49

       It's like, "You guys think it is, you guys think you can figure it out, go do it." And I remember one of my co-founders, Geoffrey, um, actually was the most frustrated because I think he saw a lot of grifting happening in AI being like, "Oh, it's gonna replace all these jobs and, like, you know, it's gonna do all these things and we're not gonna, you know, it's gonna create this world of abundance and it's, it's just gonna totally reshape how we're building products and shipping them and how our customers are using them." But the, uh, the reality was if, if you use any of these models at this point, it's like, it was not, it was not clear at all. I think if you look at the capabilities of any of these models, it's like they're very, very jagged. So there's some things they're exceptional about, uh, and there's some things that they're just absolutely terrible about. I think the frustrating part is to be told by someone who has no clue about, you know, what bu- what stuff falls in what buckets, like, "Oh yeah, you should do more of this AI thing." Um, it was very, very

2. 3:40 – 11:00

   Embracing AI at Amplitude

   1. SSSpenser Skates3:40

      fr- it was that, that, that was, that was frustrating. And so I think there was, uh, there was frankly skepticism on my part, there's, there's skepticism on the part of, of my co-founders, um, and, and some of the broader team with an Amplitude about what was actually gonna be possible with it. Um...

   2. SPSpeaker3:53

      But something changed.

   3. SSSpenser Skates3:55

      Yes. Well, I think you, you saw the transformative effect that AI had on software engineering. Like, no question if you were using... I mean, started by Cursor, but then, you know, all these other amazing tools, Claude Code, Codex, like, tons, t- you know, tons and tons of others. It was, it was very clear that you would be a lot more productive using these things. Um, and so that was kind of the first of us saying, "Okay, there's something there there and let's go after this." Um, so we really, uh, started on this path in earnest in, around October of, uh, 2024. And kind of two things happened then. One, I hired a new engineering leader, this guy Wade Chambers who's a Silicon Valley legend. The other is, uh, we acquired this company, Command.ai, also a YC company. Uh, in both their cases they were kind of the change agents that Amplitude needed. So Wade, uh, had been working on AI, uh, t- in his previous company and had known a bunch of, uh, people who were on the bleeding edge of leveraging the capabilities of models. They had been building a product where they were trying to... They're, they're doing a bunch of different things, but they were trying to, uh, smartly trigger guides, uh, to end users just based on if they were confused. Uh, and they, you know, created this, this chatbot that, uh, uh, very much like an Intercom Fin that would, uh, yeah, interact with users and help them answer support questions and, and stuff like that. And, um, they had been, you know, on, on leveraging a bunch of model capabilities. That was kind of the, the first point that we started to, to get serious about it. And then since then, it has been a very... I'd like to think we're kind of coming up and we just launched, uh, a whole bunch of AI products in the last few weeks. Uh, we did AI Feedback, we did AI Visibility, we did, uh, our MCP server and then we're gonna go much, much bigger, uh, in December, January and February, um, where we are gonna be coming out with, uh, what we call the Cursor for Analytics, which I'm incredibly excited about and I think will dramatically change how people, uh, use and leverage analytics. But it, it's, it's taken, um, to transform, you know... Amplitude as an organization, I like to think we're still small. We're about 800 people, product engineering and design. Uh, that organization is about 200 people. So, you know, it's like.... you can know most people, um, in it, and, and change pretty quickly. It's still cha- taken us a full year, uh, to get the team, uh, kind of fully on, on board and ramped and, like, believing and, and seeing and building.

   4. HTHarj Taggar6:25

      ChatGPT launches, AI starts taking off, um, and it sounds like your investors and board members and maybe people who aren't in the day-to-day are sort of like, "Hey, what are you doing with this AI thing?"

   5. SSSpenser Skates6:33

      Yeah.

   6. HTHarj Taggar6:33

      What about in t-

   7. GTGarry Tan6:33

      They read about it in TechCrunch or something.

   8. HTHarj Taggar6:34

      Yeah, exactly.

   9. GTGarry Tan6:35

      Yes, yes. Exactly, exactly.

   10. HTHarj Taggar6:36

       Um, what about internally? Like, what was the vibe internally at Amplitude on the team? Like, w- was there anyone internally asking, "Hey, like, should we be building AI products or doing something with AI?"

   11. SSSpenser Skates6:45

       There were a few, uh, people that were kind of testing out ideas, but I, I think we're so focused on our regular motion. Like, we were coming out with a lot of other products outside of analytics. We were doing... You know, we launched Experimentation, we were building Session Replay internally, we were building this thing, uh, Activation, which targets your users based on their behavior. And so there, there was a lot to do that was just kind of right in front of us, um, that was clear, like, "Okay, hey, we can be much more competitive with, uh," You know, and, and there's this revenue that's just sitting here if, if we go build these things. You know, there were a few folks that were messing around with it, and there, there were some people that had used Cursor and other things, but th- the, the organization as a whole did not have... Uh, it's not like it was conscious and aware of this change, this, this-

   12. HTHarj Taggar7:34

       Hm.

   13. SSSpenser Skates7:34

       ... this massive change that was about to happen. I give a lot of credit to Wade, and I give a lot of credit to the Command team of being the tip of the spear in terms of showing people what is possible, um, and then getting the organization to, to embrace. By, uh, early 2025, I was convinced, and I was like, "All right, we have to be very aggressive on this." Um, so the first order is to train the organization of what the capabilities of AI are, specifically engineering and product.

   14. HTHarj Taggar8:00

       What was the... What was, like, the light bulb moment for you? When did you flick into, "This needs to be my priority?"

   15. SSSpenser Skates8:04

       It's hard to say that there was, there was one moment. Um, we've always had this vision at Amplitude of a self-improving product, where you have a product that dynamically responds to your user feedback. So it knows what features you like, it knows when you're getting frustrated and stuck, um, it knows how to change things based on your input as a user. Um, and I'd always thought this vision was, like, you know, 10 years out, if, if, if, you know, if, if even that close. And one of the things that was becoming clear, it was actually a lot closer. Uh, that, that moment was actually probably a lot closer than we had realized, uh, because of what we saw happening on, uh, the coding side with AI. I said, "Okay, look. We, you know... Whether or not a self-improving product is going to be possible, it's clear at least a step towards it. We're going to have to go do it." So... And the way to do this is we're going to have to train the, the organization on this. I started working with, uh, James, uh, the founder CEO of Command, as well as Wade, um, our engineering leader, to l- figure out how do we train the organization on AI, and then we, we came up with an AI week. And unfortunately, for a bunch of reasons, we weren't able to actually do that until June, but that was a, that was a key, uh, pivot point. What we did was we got a bunch of the existing leaders in the organization, so, you know, our VPs of product, our engineering managers, to use this technology and to see what was possible a- about it. And then during that AI week, what we'd do is we'd train the team. We had our, like, our, one of our product leaders, you know, uh, vibe code, like, a dark mode for Amplitude in front of the entire organization. It was actually very scary, but actually it, it happened, you know, they ran into a bug, but they happened to sort it out. Um, it was actually kind of a cool moment because the entire, uh, engineering product and design organization saw what was... It's like, "Wow, okay." You know, all of the leaders within Amplitude are saying this is the thing, and they're showing how they're doing it, and, you know, "I better get with this as well." And then the rest of the week, you know, so we did training for about two days, um, and then the rest of the week was just, you know, like a hackathon. Work on stuff you're already doing, except, you know, do it faster and better, uh, by, you know, getting set up with Cursor, uh, as well as a bunch of these other pieces of tooling.

   16. HTHarj Taggar10:13

       So step one is b- was actually not like, "Here's what we need to build at Amplitude with AI." Step one is just get the existing team using tools and-

   17. SSSpenser Skates10:20

       Yes. Yes.

   18. HTHarj Taggar10:20

       ... being bought in and, and believing in them.

   19. SSSpenser Skates10:22

       This is the core difference between building product in SaaS and building product with AI. In SaaS, SaaS, I mean, it's the best business model and the best product delivery system of all time. You go to your customers, you ask them what they want and what they're going to pay for, you prioritize that list, and you start building it. You get them to those customers, and then you just do the whole thing over and over again. That's the delivery loop that Amplitude has mastered over the last decade. And you know, that's, that's our core competitive advantage, you know, as, as an analytics company is we're better at that than, uh, anyone else. The key is you can go to your customers, they can tell you what they want. Um, with the capabilities of AI, because they're so

3. 11:00 – 15:32

   Product roadmap, AI native priorities

   1. SSSpenser Skates11:00

      jagged, you ha- It's a technology first understanding of what is possible. And so if you go to your customers and tell them and ask them what they want, like, they're not even going to be able to describe what's possible. You know, you'll get-

   2. GTGarry Tan11:11

      Give me a faster horse.

   3. SSSpenser Skates11:12

      Yeah, "Give, give me a faster horse." You know, or, or it'll be asking for something that's not quite possible or possible in the wrong way, or like, "Hey, I," you know, "I want something that ships insights to me and, you know, does it in this particular way," and you'll get all sorts of different visions of it. Um, and what's much more important is you, you have to be familiar with the capabilities of the models and then how those can map back into what your product does.

   4. HTHarj Taggar11:36

      The thing I just find really surprising about this is usually the way it works with new technologies is, like, the engineers are the early adopters, and they are usually, like, bugging their, like, company, "I really want to use, like, this tool." And like-

   5. SSSpenser Skates11:50

      Mm-hmm.

   6. HTHarj Taggar11:50

      And it's like the companies that are resisting, saying, "Well, it's not, like, tested yet, it's not safe." But, like, it seems to be a more common pattern with AI that it's, like, going the other way.

   7. SSSpenser Skates11:57

      Yeah, it's tops down.

   8. HTHarj Taggar11:58

      Yeah, like, why do you think that's happening?

   9. SSSpenser Skates12:00

      Um, I, I mean, it's going to sound extraordinarily reductive, but I, I think, I think Sam Altman is the best salesperson of-... of this generation, by f- no, bar none. Like, I think he has done an exceptional job stating a very ambitious vision, getting a lot of people rallied behind it at OpenAI, um, showing what's possible and convincing, you know, the entire world of the impact that this technology's going to have. And so you have these, you know, exec- investors already bought in, executives are bought in, you know, world leaders are bought in. Like, you know, as a society, we... you know, the, the, the people in power have said, "Hey, this technology matters." And the reality is, the capabilities are still trying to catch up and it's not clear if they'll catch up to those aspirations. Um, and so you have, to your point, Harj, the opposite disconnect happening where, you know, yeah, you have a lot of desire for this thing to happen but, you know, it's not clear if the capabilities are, are there yet. And so this is why, you know, you had a lot of frustration. You know, in, in Amplitude as a case study, you had a lot of frustration from engineers being like, "Man, I see just to- tremendous..." what they feel is grifting in AI where it's a lot of talkers-

   10. HTHarj Taggar13:05

       (laughs)

   11. SSSpenser Skates13:06

       ... but not many doers. Uh, you know, it's, it's not till the last year that, you know, okay, hey, we think the capabilities are here for it to transform the, uh, the business that, that we're in, in analytics.

   12. SPSpeaker13:17

       One thing that comes to mind is this mode of running the company more like founder mode is even more present.

   13. SSSpenser Skates13:25

       Yes.

   14. SPSpeaker13:25

       I mean, there's a story of the transformation with Kstacks, where it was just founder led to do that transformation. Sounds like this is what's going on with, uh, Amplitude too. It's coming from, from you.

   15. SSSpenser Skates13:35

       Absolutely. So, I've had to learn over the last 10 years how to be- go from being a founder to being a large company executive. There is no way to understand what is possible than being... using the technology and being on the front lines of it. And so, you know, that's why it's like, yeah, you train the entire organization and it's a much more bottoms-up thing on what is possible. And so out of that AI week came basically all the AI stuff that we're working on now. So, uh, our MCP server, which we didn't even plan for, like, that was actually one of our engineers, uh, Bryan Jory, who was incredibly excited. You had, uh, one of our engineers, this, this guy named Leo Zhang, who built AI visibility and he just wanted to... He was actually gonna leave Amplitude to start a company and we're like, "Look, just come here, stay here, learn how to do this while getting paid, and we'll, we'll, we'll teach and coach you and then, you know, we'll fund when you... whenever you do go something." And I didn't even want him to do AI visibility but he was like, "Oh, I think that there's a huge opportunity here, uh, to, like, build something for free and g- give it away." And, you know, now that's... Now, like, w- you know, there's... It's been this explosion. Like, we have that laun- product launch doubled, uh, new sign-ups to Amplitude.

   16. HTHarj Taggar14:43

       Mm-hmm.

   17. SSSpenser Skates14:43

       Which is wild.

   18. HTHarj Taggar14:45

       (laughs)

   19. SSSpenser Skates14:45

       You know, like, every week it's like we're getting twice as many, uh, sign-ups to our free plan as we did, uh, from before our AI visibility launch, um, all the way to what we're going to be launching in January, which is we're going to launch, um, a... what we're going to call Ask AI, which is a global chat interface, very much like Cursor, where you will be able to chat w- uh, with, uh... yeah, chat with AI and ask it to pull certain charts for you or do analysis or figure out why something has happened to you for, uh... within, uh, uh, within, you know, your data, uh, and pull that back out to you, to our agents, to, like... So many different things have come out of this, uh, from... Uh, but it's, it's all been very bottoms-up and then it's about, you know, for me and for Wade, um, to, to sculpt, okay, how do we set these up in the organization for success?

4. 15:32 – 18:40

   Org changes & hierarchy

   1. SPSpeaker15:32

      So, not many, uh, large companies like yourself have been able to do this transformation. A lot of them-

   2. SSSpenser Skates15:37

      It's extraordinarily hard.

   3. SPSpeaker15:38

      ... are still stuck and it's been probably very painful to overcome. What are things that you had to give up to get to where you are right now?

   4. SSSpenser Skates15:46

      I mean, we've done two reorganizations in, uh, the, the engineering product and design organization since the, th- since the start of this year. Um, and so, you know, there were leaders and executives and, and different people who were very much kind of in the SaaS modality, but were not on the bleeding edge of AI that just, unfortunately, were not quite the right fit for what we were trying to build in the future and so ended up having to move folks out of the business. I mean, doing that level of reorganization, you know, twice in a year is very disruptive. We've also acquired, uh, other companies so, uh, we brought in, uh, the Kraftful team and Yana, who's been phenomenal, and we brought in, uh, uh, Eric, uh, and Frank, uh, from Inari. Uh, we brought in also a YC company, we brought Enzo and Ferruccio from June also, I think, YC?

   5. SPSpeaker16:33

      Mm-hmm.

   6. SSSpenser Skates16:33

      YC company? Yeah. So, so we've, we've brought in all these great YC founders, um, uh, and then kind of melded them with a lot of, uh, longtime Amplitudeers, um, and that combination has been very, very special.

   7. HTHarj Taggar16:45

      What are, like, the, um, the specific differences? Like, for people who are really successful, I, I, I think especially engineers, like, who were successful in sort of pre-AI SaaS world, kind of grew up in that environment, and then you compare... Like, what are sort of the things that they're... I don't know if lacking is the right word, but what are the things that they can't see or they're not as naturally adept at as people who came up in sort of post-AI world and are, like, AI native engineers and, and believe in it deeply? T- to say the more, uh, uncomfortable thing-

   8. SSSpenser Skates17:12

      Yeah.

   9. HTHarj Taggar17:12

      ... like, is it an age gap?

   10. SSSpenser Skates17:14

       Is it an age gap? It's not an age thing per se, it's a mentality thing. Like, in the SaaS world, you can take... You can do that loop I talked about earlier. Talk to customers, ask them what they want, prioritize that list, build it, deliver it, do it again. Like, you, you, you kind of... I don't know. It feels very cliche to say but you, you want to take kind of the state-of-the-art in whatever field you're building for and then start to say, "Okay, if I were to redo this in an AI native way, why?" On the flip side, I think what a lot of these AI native teams are really missing is, they haven't learned the product and the problem and why things are solved the way they're solved. And so, like, they try to create these new interfaces from scratch without drawing on the previous, you know, expertise that's happened over the last decade on whatever problem that they're solving. And so, you know, if you try to build an analytics interface from the ground up where you're just, uh, say, you know, starting with questions and you're not seeing your data, it's actually... That's actually has its own set of challenges. And so I, I think, um, you know, what I'll say with w-... the Amplitude team is like, there's some incredible engineers there. I think the ones that have adapted the best have always been very in tune with, okay, the code is not an end in itself, it just, uh... Like, shipping it, th- that's just a side effect of solving whatever problem for the customer. And then, hey, now I need to get up to speed with this new technology, and if I can marry those two things, then I'm going to create something amazing.

   11. GTGarry Tan18:38

       I guess one of the weird things that I've noticed in my own behavior

5. 18:40 – 23:30

   “AI killing SaaS”, changing the Amplitude roadmap

   1. GTGarry Tan18:40

      is, um, we have an internal agent infra at YC, and it has access to all our, you know, databases and everything like that. And then Jared recently told me, I'm like sort of a super user for it. And then what I realize is, uh, I don't... Basically, it actually fails most of the time still. (laughs)

   2. SPSpeaker18:56

      Yeah. (laughs)

   3. GTGarry Tan18:56

      But I just, like, try and ask it in a different way. I try, you know, if it failed with Gemini 3, then I'll try it with, you know, Claude, I'll try it with GPT-5.1. Like, I'll change the reasoning levels, like, and then eventually I figure it out and it's like, and it works. So whereas, like in B2B SaaS and/or building, you know, sort of standard Web 2.0 software, it's like, man, if it broke even once, like, this thing is a piece of crap and I'll never use it again. So-

   4. SSSpenser Skates19:24

      (laughs)

   5. GTGarry Tan19:24

      ... it's like a weird... Yeah, you have to, like, rewire your brain to be... It's like working with a child-

   6. SSSpenser Skates19:29

      Yeah.

   7. GTGarry Tan19:29

      ... right now.

   8. SSSpenser Skates19:30

      Th- this is why I think a lot of the hype in that AI killing SaaS is way overblown, because particularly for a lot of business workflows, like, very high guarantees on performance are fundamental to it. You know, if you put a record into your CRM, that stuff better be there. You know, you don't want it, "Oh, well, it put this in with 80% probability." It's like, you want it to be there. And SaaS does a great job of that. It actually took a set of existing workflows that were handled on prem or by paper and just moved them to the cloud. And so it wasn't really like, it wasn't any workflow transformation. And this is where I think, um, Andrej Karpathy's point is totally right, where a lot of these businesses are trying to overshoot the mark and just say, "Okay, well, hey, we'll just have this agent handle this workflow end-to-end." Actually, the editing and redoing it, like you, like you talk about, Garry, is actually incredibly important. And so how do you create a product that allows you to do that really well, I think is the key challenge that a lot of, uh, AI B2B companies are figuring out.

   9. SPSpeaker20:30

      Speaking of things that you had to give up in order to do this, what happened to the existing Amplitude road- roadmap? Like, you had all these other things that you were working on before the company got AI fervor.

   10. SSSpenser Skates20:38

       (laughs)

   11. SPSpeaker20:38

       Did you throw out the whole roadmap, only like half of it? (laughs) How are you thinking about, like, allocating resources between these new AI bets and the, like, existing stuff that makes the money?

   12. SSSpenser Skates20:46

       It's not like there's, there's totally separate products. Like, the goal of, for example, uh, our, uh, what we're calling Ask AI, which is the chat interface in, in Amplitude, is to make it easier to use the existing product. Um, and so, you know, as we've looked at next year, there are four big priorities we have. One is rebuild Amplitude to be AI native. Uh, the second is make it much easier to use. The third is make sure our other products outside of analytics have parity with the competition. And then the fourth is, uh, serve marketers really well so that we can take on, uh, a bunch of the legacy MarTech guys. There's still, like, basics that we're doing or, or foundational things we're doing on our session replay product, on our experimentation products, on our guides and surveys product. Um, like, you know, for example, one big thing that we're going to be coming out with in session replay in the next few months is zoning, which is this way where you can look at a web page and then see the analytics overlaid on top of it, which is super cool functionality. And so that we're still doing, uh, in the same way. I think what getting the team to embrace, uh, AI from the, uh, uh, from the ground up has happened, has allowed us to do is, one, you know, they're a lot faster and more productive so they're shipping a lot more, which is absolutely amazing. Uh, and then two, uh, they are looking at these problems with this lens. Um, and so the, the, the big change we did organizationally is, uh, we had a lot of these A- these AI projects as kind of side projects for a bunch of people, and we said, "Okay, let's have a dedicated team that kind of goes after them." But the existing team is still going to do, uh, you know, work on making the Amplitude product great, and that work is, is, is just as important because I, I th- I think the timeline for change in the business world is, the cycles are just much, much, much longer.

   13. SPSpeaker22:28

       And how do you allocate people between the teams working on the new AI stuff and the more traditional SaaS stuff? Did they self-select into different groups? Is, like... (laughs) Is there like a, like a, like a challenging cultural divide-

   14. SSSpenser Skates22:40

       Mm-hmm.

   15. SPSpeaker22:40

       ... there that you have to navigate?

   16. SSSpenser Skates22:41

       No. You know, I think by doing the AI week and make it clear... We had this whole, uh, metaphor, we talked about burning the boats, like, we're all in on this. Um, and there were some people that got even more into it, and they very naturally self-selected, uh, into a bunch of, uh, a bunch of this work. Like, we... And it's, it's crazy. It's like, it's not just, hey engineers, it's like designers too. Our very best designer at Amplitude, uh, this guy named Will Newton, we actually had him spread among way too many projects and he was like, "No, I got to focus in." Like, (laughs) "Let's, like, say no to some of these for, for a little bit so I can go really deep on this chat interface, um, at, uh... you know, and, and make sure that when we launch this thing in early next year, it's, it's gonna be awesome." Um, so yeah, people will naturally kind of self-select in, um, or out and, um, you know, it's, it's a 200 person org, so you get a, you get a whole spectrum of this.

6. 23:30 – 32:14

   The “features, not companies” debate, advantages for incumbents

   1. HTHarj Taggar23:30

      Can we talk about the thing that you said that made people angry on the internet?

   2. SSSpenser Skates23:33

      Yeah. Which one?

   3. HTHarj Taggar23:35

      (laughs) I think, yeah, that's a good question.

   4. SSSpenser Skates23:37

      There's been a lot of them.

   5. HTHarj Taggar23:37

      I think it was, it was the AI visibility tweet, right? I think it, like... Generally, I think you were making the point that, um, the... a lot of these startups are sort of like features, not companies. Um, and obviously, like at YC we're going to take the other side of it and-

   6. SSSpenser Skates23:52

      Hell yeah.

   7. HTHarj Taggar23:52

      (laughs) ... would argue that, um-

   8. SSSpenser Skates23:53

      You guys have a, have a visibility company it feels like every batch, right?

   9. HTHarj Taggar23:56

      Yeah, it's, it's a point... It's become, uh, a popular idea. That is true.

   10. GTGarry Tan23:59

       We fund founders, not ideas.

   11. SSSpenser Skates24:01

       I love it.

   12. HTHarj Taggar24:01

       Um, but I think AI visibility aside, I guess you- you've gone through the whole journey. Like, you, you were in the batch, you started a company, now you're running a public company. You know, I mean, I think we would argue the side of just, um...... that the start- the advantage that startups have in general is just, like, they- they don't have an existing customer base-

   13. SSSpenser Skates24:16

       Totally.

   14. HTHarj Taggar24:16

       ... they don't have revenue, they can, like ... Their customers are going to be more forgiving if the thing doesn't work yet, and these s- seem like advantages for, like, new startups attacking incumbent companies with, like, an AI product, um. But from your perspective, what are- what are, like ... What are the advantages that, like, incumbent companies have over them? Is h- how do you think about it?

   15. SSSpenser Skates24:34

       I think the real business has to be downstream of AI visibility. Uh, it's a valuable ... There's value in it, like, you know, just like there's value in- in the SEO world. But it's so easy to do. You know, we- we did it, you know, as- as I mentioned, in- in- in, uh, sp- probably more like, uh, a few months than a few weeks, but we- we did it r- very quickly, um, and gave it away for free, and it's been this incredible lead generation for us. Um, and so, th- the commoditization is gonna happen real, real fast. I mean, you talk about ... Like, you know, people talk about, uh, "Hey, S- uh, SaaS going away because of AI," I think that's a great example of it. Um, and so in contrast, if you look at, I think, businesses that have done very well here, so like, uh, there is a business, I think, that is very viable here, which is what AirOps is doing, where they're ... Yes, they have some visibility aspects, uh, but they have, uh, a whole content generation business to help you create blog posts and other material, um, on that, you know. And- and that's their r- that's their real business. And so, I think all of these visibility businesses, like, y- you can- you can get it for free from us. You can get it, you know, f- you're gonna be able to get it free from a lot of other places, and you're gonna have to construct a real business, kind of downstream. And t- maybe to give the flip side o- of it, like, um, you know, I- I think innovation in this space is great, you know, it's already moved a lot in the last few months. One of the advantages we have is because we have an existing revenue base of hundreds of millions, we can give away this for free, you know, and- and just y- uh, and that's- that's great because, you know, now a lot more people can get visibility without having to, you know, go through all the hoops of- of paying a company and get, like, you know, tons of, uh, tons and tons of value out of it.

   16. HTHarj Taggar26:10

       You have, like ... You- you were Spencer the founder, like, right out of college, started a company, now you're like public company CEO. Let's say ... And so you have all this knowledge from seeing, like, what things look like at scale. Um, let's say you went out and started another company again, and you were looking at, like, markets to go into and you were thinking about, like, where are- where are markets where you would imagine, like, "Oh, like this incumbent's actually really good and, like, uh, we should just stay away and AI is not gonna give us an advantage," and- and which are ones where you'd be like, "Oh, yeah, like actually, you know, that's totally vulnerable and, like, they're not gonna ... Like, we could really compete with them"?

   17. SSSpenser Skates26:42

       I- I mean, h- honestly, I- I joke about this, but anything Google's trying to do, I think that ... Google is the worst B2B company of all time-

   18. HTHarj Taggar26:51

       (laughs)

   19. SSSpenser Skates26:52

       ... and there's an incredible opportunity to compete with them. So, you know, I'd look at email, I'd look at a lot of the Workspace stuff. I think what the Notion guys, for example, are doing as a competitor to Google Docs is- is very exciting. Institutionally, Google's- Google's way too slow and way too conservative, um, that ... To be able to do this, and so it's only when other companies start to innovate that they get their stuff together. You know, same on this coding thing. You know, they- they've proven it can work from a technology standpoint, but bringing it to market, selling it to customers, um, making it work from a product standpoint, I think is very ripe for disruption. Honestly ... So we've seen it in coding, we're starting to see it in support. We're seeing ... You know, we think there's a massive opportunity in analytics that- that we're uniquely positioned for. Um, I think it ... You know, there's gonna be a cursor moment in analytics in the next two years, no question in my mind, where people are gonna use analytics with AI and you're gonna be like, "Why did we ever do it the old way?" And I can't even imagine going back. I think there's a lot of very generalized agent builders, and I think picking a particular problem and a particular buyer, um, is gonna be a much more successful way of building a business. You know. Yeah, there's a general- ... You know, there's probably multiple generalized agent builders every YC batch now too, um, and so, um, having a- a strong point of view for a particular buyer that cares about some things, like ... One of the ones, um, I saw recently was like ... I- I think, you know, there's all these studies being like, "Hey, enterprise is failing to adopt AI," and if- if you look at ... when you kind of dig into the why behind it, um, there's all these security and compliance concerns, and so, okay, I think there's a huge opportunity to solve those, uh, to get much faster adoption of these products. There has to be a Uber for tech support. When I was in high school, I ran my own IT support business, just helping people around the neighborhood fix their computers, 'cause it's like, "Set my wifi network up, set my printer," you know, whatever. And the fact there's still not a scaled solution, it just blows my mind for this. Like, you have a lot of people that, you know, are older, that are not native to technology, that, uh, have a bunch of money and want this stuff to be set up, and you have this young generation that desperately needs money that has a ton of expertise on technology, and so a business that matches those ... That's kind of supply and demand-

   20. HTHarj Taggar29:06

       I mean, we also spend a lot of time, um, helping people figure out the idea actually, in ... And obviously, like, Amplitude is a-

   21. SSSpenser Skates29:11

       It's hard. It's really hard. It's extraordinarily hard.

   22. HTHarj Taggar29:14

       Um, I don't think everyone realizes h- how Amplitude started out. Could you maybe talk about your journey to actually finding the Amplitude idea, and maybe reflections on it a decade later?

   23. SSSpenser Skates29:22

       So, before Amplitude, um, we started this company called Sonalyte, which was a voice recognition, uh, it was like an early version of Siri, and it had this really amazing demo actually where you could ... It listened in the background for your voice, and this was before any of the "Hey, Siri," "Hey Alexa" stuff, um, and so it, like, listened in the background on an Android phone, and as far as we could tell, we were the first to come out with the technology. We didn't know anything about what made for a successful product or business or company, and we were just kind of taking our shot on that. Um, we were just two kids out of- out of college, um, that were like, "Okay, what's a problem that seems barely at the edge of possible?" That's- that's ... You know, that's probably an interesting place for us to- to go to, um, you know, and we ended up choosing- choosing voice recognition, not because we were passionate about the space. So we- we did YC with that, we did ... Uh, went through the whole batch, did demo day, did this amazing demo on stage, we got tons of press wr- written about us, uh, but the product and the tech- it- it was just not good enough. It wasn't a good enough, uh- uh, product, and so we ended up right after demo day deciding to shut that down, um, and then ...... we had always, uh, built our own analytics in-house, uh, you know, because, like, it's what you do as an engineer. You're always like, "I want to build this in- instead of paying Amplitude money." Because it was very clear to us the ... this was the right way to build product. It was, you would look at what people did in your product, you would understand them deeply, and you could build and iterate on a better product. Um, and so we ended up, when we showed what we had done in the analytics side to a lot of other companies, they were like, "Hey, we want this." And so that, uh, right after, uh, uh, YC Winter 2012 Demo Day, uh, we ended up, uh, pivoting to- to Amplitude. And that was, I think that was June of- of 2012.

   24. HTHarj Taggar31:00

       But analytics was a pretty crowded space at- at that point.

   25. SSSpenser Skates31:02

       Oh, extraordinarily crowded.

   26. HTHarj Taggar31:03

       Like, what ... Like, did that factor into your thinking about getting into it at all?

   27. SSSpenser Skates31:07

       A little bit, you know, and so you- you have to ask yourself, it's like, "Okay, why do you think you're different?" We knew this was a particularly good problem for ... Uh, compared to voice recognition, you know, and a lot of this AI stuff frankly, that w- those were probabilistic problems so you could not get a right answer, and we were a bunch of algorithms engineers coming out of MIT, um, and so this problem of how do you ... Analytics, it seems amazing because it's like, okay, you build this really scaled distributed system and you can get a right answer, and it's just about doing it better and faster. That sounds great and amazing, uh, in comparison to voice recognition. I think in retrospect, you know, we got lucky that we were particularly suited for- for that problem. And then the other part of, the other point of view I think I had was that I'd see all these great engineers and these great founders who, uh, built these amazing pieces of technology but just did not really understand how to- how to get it in the hands of customers and sell it and all that. So I'm like, "Okay, I'm going to go full, I'm going to go all in on learning how to do that." I don't even think I do that particularly well, uh, but just because we were willing to do that and kind of build the next thing, and build the next thing, and build the next thing, you know, you compound that 10 years later and- and- and now you're the leader in the space.

7. 32:14 – 38:09

   Finding good mentors, hyper focus

   1. GTGarry Tan32:14

      Do you have, like, a method for learning these things? Like, one of the things I remember was, um, once you went to Amplitude then it was, you know, B2B sales, and then you got really good at it, but you didn't know anything about it.

   2. SSSpenser Skates32:24

      I- I am not good at B2B sales, to be clear. I still feel an imposter to this day.

   3. GTGarry Tan32:29

      But being able to do it, uh, at all, like, from an engineering background, I mean, and being willing to learn how to do it and realizing like, "Oh, this is actually my go-to market and I have to do it this way."

   4. SSSpenser Skates32:39

      Yeah. A- a- analytics, uh, I- I think in particular, there are some products that you can adopt without selling in that, like, people will just, you know, they have single player mode. You know, Cursor's a- a great example. Slack's a great example. But there's some where you need to convince multiple people at the same time that you're gonna go do it, and that requires a sales motion. The number one misconception I had was like, this would be something you learn out of a book or on a website or, you know, you kind of read about, but one, you have to do it, and it's like two, you just want to get someone who's good at coaching you. So we worked with this guy, Mitch Morando, who coached, uh, you know, he was a- a- a- f- f- a sales exec who had gone on to coach, uh, a bunch of other companies, um, and I just happened to randomly, uh, meet him through- through, uh, uh, the Sensor Tower guys actually, um, and I was like, "Okay, this is the expert I need. You know, teach me everything (laughs) you know about sales." Um, he's like, "Whoa, whoa. Slow down." And then he would just come in, uh, once a week and just beat me up and just being like, "Hey, you don't really, you know ... What's the customer pain?" And I'm like, "Oh, they want some dashboards or charts." He's like, "Spencer, that's not a business pain. Like, what's the pain?" And so after a while I'd, like, finally get the message. Um, it's very much like learning a sport or to play an instrument in a lot of ways. You're not gonna do it reading a book. You want to just do it, and then get a little bit of advice and f- coaching on the side. Like, that's the, that's the much, much better approach.

   5. GTGarry Tan33:54

      I mean, you said this several times even in this hour that, um, you know, you find certain people who are really, really great. If you could, uh, you know, give your- s- the 20-year-old version of yourself, like, the cheat sheet on what you learned about finding those mentors. Like, are there, you know, is there, is it like, "I know it when I see it," or, you know, there's a track record, or...

   6. SSSpenser Skates34:14

      Oof, it's so hard. I mean, I've been extraordinarily lucky. And this is one of the great parts of Silicon Valley is there is such a positive sum, help others, pay it forward mentality. I mean, Mitch was an amaz- YC's an amazing one. Um, you know, was very clear. I mean, the best advice I can have is be clear in your own head about what you're trying to learn and then, you know, be open to where it comes from. So you first need to be clear on what you're trying to do, and that's where I think people fuck that up a lot. They don't get really crystal clear on why they're trying to build a startup or what they need to do to be successful, and then from there, you know, how you get the, how you get the mentorship or advice may come from a- a lot of different directions.

   7. GTGarry Tan34:52

      Can I ask, like, one more kind of meta question? Hearing you speak about your experience at Amplitude, uh, it's just really inspiring to me 'cause, like, you go all the way into the details. You have this ca- capability to, like, hyperfocus and then, I guess, like, how do you direct it? Like, how do you know that you're hyperfocusing on the thing that, you know, really is the number one thing? Like, do you have, like, a cycle in the back where you're like, "I just, you know, spent 10 minutes thinking about blah," but, like, is that actually the most important thing or not? Like, how do you, you know, prevent just like rat holing on something?

   8. SSSpenser Skates35:25

      It's hard. O- one of the things I did before starting a company was getting re- real clear in my head as to what I wanted to do with my career and why, and one of the takeaways I had was, uh, you know, you want to dedicate yourself to a mission that's greater than yourself, um, and you be part of contributing something larger to humanity, and what I knew how to do was to, you know, build software and sell it. And so I'm like, okay, what's the best way I can do that? You know, starting a company. And then from there it's just, you know, y- like, you kind of, y- the goal t- you know, you create a goal tree that- that goes down from there. Okay, let's, uh, let's figure out what product to build. Let's figure out how to sell that product. You know, and then it- it just, it kind of falls into place. I- I- I find that where people get screwed up the most on that is they are not clear. And by the way, speaks s- starting a company, it's extraordinarily emotionally painful. Like, I do not recommend it for the vast majority of people. I mean, there's so many times, like, every few years I've gotten to a spot where I feel like I want to quit.... um, the business, and you feel that deeply. Um, and the best counter to that is I kind of go back to the why, why I kind of came into this business. And so, I think if you get that top node really right, you can always kind of anchor or go back to that. You always know, okay, look, if I just continue to see this through, somehow, I don't know necessarily how, it'll lead back to, hey, I'm going to create a, you know, build technology and, and make the world a, a, you know, a better place in my own little way. Um, so I, I just, I, I, that would be my number one advice for, you know, anyone that, that's coming out of school or thinking of starting a company, is get really clear on that. I think the worst, I, I see, you guys see it all the time, which is like, hey, you know, I'll do it and if it takes off, I'll, I'll double down. If not, I'll go back to grad school or a job or whatever. And that's like the freaking worst of this because you have to put up with uncertainty for long periods of time. You have to have all these existential questions hang over your head. It's, it's, um, you're not gonna get through it. Like, if you look, one of the big takeaways, like I, I read, uh, Founders at Work, um, and one of the really clear takeaways from any of these journeys is there is a point that you get to a year, maybe two years in, where from a rational standpoint, you probably should quit. Um, but for whatever reason, um, those successful ones don't. And so that is the number one filtering criteria. Now, not to say, you know, that, you know, there's no guarantees. Getting that, that top node really clear so that you can anchor on it, um, over very long periods of time is the most important I found.

   9. GTGarry Tan37:55

      Intrinsic motivation.

   10. SSSpenser Skates37:56

       Yeah. If you're, if you're doing it for like recognition from others or, or you know, hey, you know, because you going to get paid a lot or whatever else, you'll, your, your ability to last through is going to be much, much worse than someone else's.

   11. GTGarry Tan38:08

       I mean,

8. 38:09 – 41:52

   The difference between being a founder vs a big company executive

   1. GTGarry Tan38:09

      embedded in that, you know, I'm taken by earlier you were saying like at every point of Amplitude, there's sort of a moment where you have to learn how to do something and like grow into that. Uh, and then being a public company CEO is one of those things. Walk me through like the, you know, how you started, like the, you know, the intrinsic motivation and now it's like, it feels like you have a really big responsibility on your back.

   2. SSSpenser Skates38:30

      Yeah.

   3. GTGarry Tan38:30

      It's like, you know, people look to you for leadership and, you know, you were the leader of a great many people and they have families and lives and-

   4. SSSpenser Skates38:37

      Totally. Oh, yeah.

   5. GTGarry Tan38:38

      ... you know, hopes and dreams.

   6. SSSpenser Skates38:38

      Yeah, I mean, they're betting their careers on, on what we're doing here. It's, it's a, it's a, it's a very deep responsibility. As a founder, your job is always to run to the most difficult problem in the business and lead from the front. And so if there's an incredibly difficult piece of code, uh, a difficult product or design problem, a difficult customer, um, you know, a difficult employee problem, whatever, you need to go. The great founders will go headfirst into it and lead from the front, and they will rally the, the rest of the team behind them. Even if you look at the successful founder CEOs, after about a decade, most of them leave. And in my mind, it's actually for this very reason, is could, because being a large company executive is different. Um, and because you, you, you can't lead by example everywhere all the time. There are places you can, but you can't do it universally because it's like, okay, you got to do it in sales, you got to do it in marketing, you got to do it on people, you got to do it on, um, the product, you got to do it with customers, you got to do it with the press. In fact, it's like the list goes on. There's just too much. You have to be much more disciplined about your time and say no to most stuff. And then what you realize is you become the person you hate. You'd always make fun of big company executives for not doing any work for themselves and just like judging other people's work all the time. But there's a reason for that, and you have to embrace that reason. And, and so it's, it's this very hard... that is a very hard thing to unlearn. Another thing which still trips me up to this day and I hate, and I try to run Amplitude differently, but there's truth to it, is like hierarchy.

   7. GTGarry Tan40:07

      Mm-hmm.

   8. SSSpenser Skates40:07

      There is a reason for hierarchy.

   9. GTGarry Tan40:08

      Oh, yeah.

   10. SSSpenser Skates40:09

       It's like-

   11. GTGarry Tan40:09

       I've learned that the hard way many, many ways.

   12. SSSpenser Skates40:11

       You need to have people who own certain things and who are responsible for leading certain teams and other people within the business. It's much easier, in my mind, I think, to be a large company executive because you have all these resources and you have all this leverage.

   13. GTGarry Tan40:22

       Well, you have product-market fit.

   14. SSSpenser Skates40:22

       You actually work less hard. You have product-market fit.

   15. GTGarry Tan40:24

       (laughs)

   16. SSSpenser Skates40:24

       You're running, you know, like, you're deploying... Like-

   17. GTGarry Tan40:26

       Yeah.

   18. SSSpenser Skates40:27

       ... you know, we're 350 million in revenue and, and, you know, we're deploying close to that in terms of total spend every year. So you have a lot of resources to do stuff. Now you're learning about how do you actually deploy those resources effectively. So, so, uh, so there's levers that you have as a large company executive that you don't as a founder, which is awesome, and, you know, it... But it's a different, very different tool set and a very different, um, set of skills in order to, uh, build a business successfully. Um, and that's been the hardest transition by far.

   19. GTGarry Tan40:56

       I think this will be really interesting next couple years then because like sort of this flies a little bit in the face of the most facile view of what founder mode is. Like the most facile view is like you have to be all the way in the weeds 100% of the time, which is like obviously-

   20. SSSpenser Skates41:09

       You do.

   21. GTGarry Tan41:09

       ... not possible when you have 800 employees, right? Yeah.

   22. SSSpenser Skates41:10

       Well, you can't do it everywhere. You have to be clear on where you're doing it.

   23. GTGarry Tan41:13

       Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, there's just like a lot more nuance to-

   24. SSSpenser Skates41:16

       Yeah.

   25. GTGarry Tan41:17

       ... how to do it.

   26. SSSpenser Skates41:17

       Yeah, I mean, you know, it's one of these like, you know, there's like a million management books about this thing and, you know, they kind of all try to abstract it into some framework and it's... none of them are really right.

   27. GTGarry Tan41:26

       Yeah.

   28. SSSpenser Skates41:26

       You go through it and experience it yourself and get coaching from others who do and that, that's how you end up figuring it out. But that, that transition to large company executive, that one's a really hard one.

   29. GTGarry Tan41:35

       Well, in the immortal words of, uh, Bob Marley, uh, one good thing about product-market fit is when it hits, you feel no pain.

   30. SSSpenser Skates41:41

       Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
9. 41:52 – 44:21

   Outro

   1. SSSpenser Skates41:52

      actually very appreciative, Gary, uh, that you, um, and PG and Jessica and others are doing is just helping people tell these later stage stories. One of the things I think YC has done exceptionally well is like, you know, to the extent you can have a playbook for what is like the early stage, stages, you guys have, you know, written and talked about it and, and made everyone out there aware of it so they, they know what the path is and what it looks like. Still incredibly hard, but you know, now it's like, okay, you at least have some guidance. Doesn't exist for a lot of the later stage stuff as you grow up, so I'm very-

   2. GTGarry Tan42:23

      Working on it.

   3. SSSpenser Skates42:23

      ... appreciative of that, uh, that, that you guys are building that.

   4. GTGarry Tan42:26

      There's levels to it, but thank you for sharing your levels.

   5. SSSpenser Skates42:29

      No, of course.

   6. SPSpeaker42:29

      Do you feel like we could turn what you did with Amplitude into the playbook for how SaaS companies should reinvent themselves in the AI era?

   7. SSSpenser Skates42:35

      You know, I still feel like an imposter on this thing to this day, but I, I'm very happy to contribute. You have to get very judicious with your time. There are a lot of people who want your time. Um, you know, and you could spend infinite time within people in the organization with customers, with, you know, partners, with, you know, investors, whoever. And so you have to think about like, like no one owns your time but you. As a founder, you're just like, nobody cares and so you're just desperate for anyone to give you attention. So if they do, you're like, okay, this is great. But as, you know, large company, it's like, no, no, no. Like you have to be very, very judicious. One of the things I am deliberately trying to do is just be more out there and vocal. Um, so you see it on Twitter, you see it, you know, I'm just trying to be unfilled. There's still, you know, there's still an aperture you're constrained to as a public company CEO, but most are just so conservative, they're not putting anything out there. And so, you know, I'm at least trying to kind of share my story, put it out there, put my hot takes on, you know, politic- (laughs) politics, religion, whatever, you know, uh, products, uh, companies out there so at least, at least others, you know, can, can learn and, and benefit from that too. And honestly, it's like, it's just who I am, you know. Ultimately, I want to be able to express who I am. I don't want to have to be this-

   8. SPSpeaker43:39

      And argue with people on the internet. (laughs)

   9. SSSpenser Skates43:40

      I, I don't want to have to be this other persona that, that I'm not, you know, or try to represent something I'm not, you know. If I believe and I have conviction in something, I want to be able to say it.

   10. GTGarry Tan43:48

       Spencer, thank you so much for spending time with us. This is super illuminating and can't wait to see Amplitude AI, the new resurgence coming in-

   11. SSSpenser Skates43:57

       Hell yeah.

   12. GTGarry Tan43:57

       ... to every company-

   13. SSSpenser Skates43:58

       Hell yeah.

   14. GTGarry Tan43:59

       ... in the world.

   15. SSSpenser Skates43:59

       There is going to be a reinvention of analytics in the next few years and, you know, we, we want to be the ones to go lead it. So thank you guys.

   16. GTGarry Tan44:06

       You heard it here first. We'll see you guys next time.

Episode duration: 44:21