Segment raises $64M led by Y Combinator • Hacker News Board

Re: Segment raises $64M led by Y Combinator

#41

Post by irq11 » Thu, Jul 13, 2017, 6:59 PM UTC

hilbertseries wrote: post #40

irq11 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've personally built all of the things you're talking about, on real products, with lots of traffic, and it just isn't that hard. Annoying, yes, but arguably a core competency of any data team, and something you want to think very carefully about outsourcing. Also, most teams won't have to "scale" many of the things you're talking about...that's a problem that you only have to solve when you're the central point of…

You're just too technical and think everyone is on your level. I work for a mobile analytics provider and we once sent a json log lines file format to a customer, who replied that they didn't know how to parse it and asked us for CSV instead. So, if that's the caliber of developer you have, ask again how easy everything you just talked about is.

I'm open to the argument that most development teams are utterly incompetent. I'm just somewhat skeptical of that argument.

Re: Segment raises $64M led by Y Combinator

#42

Post by calvinfo » Thu, Jul 13, 2017, 7:00 PM UTC

jgalt212 wrote: post #28

90% of this money is going straight to AWS.

This comment might be in jest, but we've actually been working on a few different ways to help optimize [1] and manage our AWS spend [2].

That said, there are quite a few places left for us to optimize. We're hoping to share more of the techniques and architecture we've used to get better performance in upcoming blog posts.

[1] https://segment.com/blog/the-million-dollar-eng-problem/ [2] https://segment.com/blog/spotting-a-million-dollars-in-your-...

Re: Segment raises $64M led by Y Combinator

#43

Post by irq11 » Thu, Jul 13, 2017, 7:04 PM UTC

pclark wrote: post #38

irq11 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've personally built all of the things you're talking about, on real products, with lots of traffic, and it just isn't that hard. Annoying, yes, but arguably a core competency of any data team, and something you want to think very carefully about outsourcing. Also, most teams won't have to "scale" many of the things you're talking about...that's a problem that you only have to solve when you're the central point of…

Go tell a marketer that if they use Segment they can onboard new marketing tools and it'll 'just work' without any engineering time, and they'll shit a brick. (the data warehouse part is imho folly.)

Yes, I see this value. But again, that's something that could rather easily exist as an open-source, self-hosted tool, and I kind of wonder why the middleman hasn't been optimized away.

We're in a world where people would rather self-host github to save a few bucks...this is an easier problem.

Re: Segment raises $64M led by Y Combinator

#44

Post by ryanx435 » Thu, Jul 13, 2017, 7:06 PM UTC

Hydraulix989 wrote: post #27

soared wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that surprising. Hn isn't a single being.. it's a bunch of individuals with differing opinions. Some are web devs who like usage analytics, some email from the command line because they're afraid of web browsers.

I'm very confused because you replied to your own comment as if you were a different person.

forgot to switch to his sockpuppet account

Re: Segment raises $64M led by Y Combinator

#45

Post by gricardo99 » Thu, Jul 13, 2017, 7:11 PM UTC

SonOfLilit wrote: post #30

Hydraulix989 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm very confused because you replied to your own comment as if you were a different person.

It's not surprising, soared isn't a single being... :-)

lol! You made my day with that one. Just the right amount of snark and wit.

Re: Segment raises $64M led by Y Combinator

#46

Post by slkdjf » Thu, Jul 13, 2017, 7:35 PM UTC

Not really a segment user anymore but I'm desperately lonely and want someone to reply to me. So i will say something negative about it, hopefully a segment employee will reply.

I was a segment user for years and then analytics.js murdered my pet pig, then bragged about it on twitter. Users worried about the security breach in my young startup all vanished and I received a Series B funding of negative 7.5million, bankrupting my company. Thanks for nothing segment.

Re: Segment raises $64M led by Y Combinator

#47

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jul 13, 2017, 7:52 PM UTC

calvinfo wrote: post #39

Hydraulix989 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Latency can be more or less questionable depending on when the stopwatch button is pressed. For example, in VR, the gold standard is "motion to photon" -- anything else is just not representative of what actual latency means for actual users (i.e. getting motion sick). There are many definitions of latency, so it's important to choose the right one (the one that matters for your users). For us, latency means the time…

Hey, I’m one of the Segment founders. I helped instrument a lot of these metrics and built the status page Peter linked to above. I’m hoping I can help shed some light on some of those numbers. The 44ms you’re referring to is the time it takes our API to respond to an incoming call and ingest an event. It’s certainly not the wall clock time, but it is a good measure of the overall health of the system. Your feedback…

[deleted]

Re: Segment raises $64M led by Y Combinator

#48

Post by pclark » Thu, Jul 13, 2017, 8:00 PM UTC

irq11 wrote: post #43

pclark wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go tell a marketer that if they use Segment they can onboard new marketing tools and it'll 'just work' without any engineering time, and they'll shit a brick. (the data warehouse part is imho folly.)

Yes, I see this value. But again, that's something that could rather easily exist as an open-source, self-hosted tool, and I kind of wonder why the middleman hasn't been optimized away. We're in a world where people would rather self-host github to save a few bucks...this is an easier problem.

open source is basically dead courtesy of SaaS. people would much rather pay a few bucks than self-host. hell, there are entire successful companies that 'just' host open source software and wrap it up in a SaaS experience.

Re: Segment raises $64M led by Y Combinator

#49

Post by cdelsolar » Thu, Jul 13, 2017, 8:05 PM UTC

Hydraulix989 wrote: post #27

soared wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that surprising. Hn isn't a single being.. it's a bunch of individuals with differing opinions. Some are web devs who like usage analytics, some email from the command line because they're afraid of web browsers.

I'm very confused because you replied to your own comment as if you were a different person.

I think it was irony

Re: Segment raises $64M led by Y Combinator

#50

Post by jgalt212 » Thu, Jul 13, 2017, 8:12 PM UTC

calvinfo wrote: post #42

jgalt212 wrote: post #28

90% of this money is going straight to AWS.

This comment might be in jest, but we've actually been working on a few different ways to help optimize [1] and manage our AWS spend [2]. That said, there are quite a few places left for us to optimize. We're hoping to share more of the techniques and architecture we've used to get better performance in upcoming blog posts. [1] https://segment.com/blog/the-million-dollar-eng-problem/ [2] https://segment.com/blog/spot…

yes, sorry for the snark. It was more about, how does one go about spending $94MM in this day and age? And even after reading your well written post on AWS cost control, I still can't figure out how to spend that much money on a software biz other than given the lion's share to AWS. e.g. even if your engineers and salespeople cost (all in) $200K a year. $94MM = 470 person years of expensive staff.