How Amplitude Went From Skeptics to “All In” on AI

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.

(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.

Absolutely. Good to see you here, Harj.

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.

People got mad at you for that?

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?

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?"