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Segment raises $64M led by Y Combinator

segment.com

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Re: Segment raises $64M led by Y Combinator

#61

Post by jdotjdot »

Segment is one of my favorite products, and I consider it a core part of our stack. It's enabled us to be leaps and bounds ahead of other companies our size as far as analytics tracking, distribution, analysis in our warehouse, and more. We use pretty much every piece of it--even the esoteric options like their embedded pixel API. It's such a core part of my day that I sometimes actually spend time daydreaming about new features I'd add to the product rather than actually doing my job :)

All I need now is for them to add the ability to push my events in real time to my Kafka cluster. (Please add that!)

Re: Segment raises $64M led by Y Combinator

#62

Post by jdotjdot »

andrenotgiant wrote: post #55
tonydiv wrote: post #14

Had nothing but problems with their product over the years. In 2012, they had a bug in their analytics.js which resulted in me losing about 10k new users. Last year, I was experiencing multi-day delays between an event and it appearing in Mixpanel, Intercom, etc. Prior this year, I was using Branch and then realized how many sacrifices you make when you use Segment – they will never be up to date with all the most re…

Just to offer perspective from the other side, we've been using their product since 2015, we send millions of events through Segment every day without a problem. There was one short outage I can remember in 2015, the only other issues we ever had, we traced back to misconfiguration on our side. I think Segment's core code is _really solid_, it shows in how fast a relatively small company is able to iterate, update an…

I agree here--we've never had any availability problems like this, and using Segment has been delightful.

I think judging a 6-year old startup based on what its product was one year into the company is rather unreasonable. To put this into perspective, 80% of the company's lifespan has occurred after the grandparent's negative experience. Things change dramatically in that period of time.

Re: Segment raises $64M led by Y Combinator

#63

Post by pkrein »

jdotjdot wrote: post #61

Segment is one of my favorite products, and I consider it a core part of our stack. It's enabled us to be leaps and bounds ahead of other companies our size as far as analytics tracking, distribution, analysis in our warehouse, and more. We use pretty much every piece of it--even the esoteric options like their embedded pixel API. It's such a core part of my day that I sometimes actually spend time daydreaming about…

thanks jj! happy to get you into the kafka beta — shoot me an email peter at segment.

Re: Segment raises $64M led by Y Combinator

#64

Post by dookahku »

pkrein wrote: post #63
jdotjdot wrote: post #61

Segment is one of my favorite products, and I consider it a core part of our stack. It's enabled us to be leaps and bounds ahead of other companies our size as far as analytics tracking, distribution, analysis in our warehouse, and more. We use pretty much every piece of it--even the esoteric options like their embedded pixel API. It's such a core part of my day that I sometimes actually spend time daydreaming about…

thanks jj! happy to get you into the kafka beta — shoot me an email peter at segment.

So if I'm reading Segment's page correctly, Segment is a service that reads other API data and warehouses it into a single place to be read later?

I feel like I'm missing a lot of the picture. :)

Re: Segment raises $64M led by Y Combinator

#65

Post by aloisbarreras »

I work at Astronomer, another company in the clickstream and data integration industry, so I am very familiar the problem they are trying to solve. From an engineering perspective I can attest that they are tackling some huge and very complex problems, especially with the massive volume of events they process.

I have been very impressed with the content of their engineering blog lately, and am not surprised to hear they are doing well. They have an awesome team, and a lot of developers really respect them.

Some other comments in here mentioned having a bad experience with their product, but I think that was back in 2012 when they were still a small start up. In my experience, their product is solid.

Re: Segment raises $64M led by Y Combinator

#66

Post by ktamura »

Hydraulix989 wrote: post #26
pkrein wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shoot. I'm sorry this happened. I'd love to chat more about your experience with Branch SDK/APIs recently. I found your email in another HN comment and will reach out shortly. On the other two issues... Analytics.js launched on HN in December 2012. It had some bugs in its early form, but it has certainly become a lot more stable in the five years since then. Today it runs without issue on 500m+ browsers and hundreds…

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…

>For us, latency means the time between when the _event_ actually occurs in real life (user clicks on a button) and when it showed up in all of our analytics integrations (Mixpanel, Intercom, etc.). As developers, this is the definition of "latency" that really matters for us because it represents the minimum time before we can take action on our users' behaviors.

This. I call it "end-to-end latency" and it doesn't get nearly as much attention as it should. This is, by the way, why it's a bad idea to use most OLAPs (like Redshift) as a backend for Segment if you want "real-time" analytics. Column-oriented OLAPs are not designed for real-time ingest because either they don't support streaming inserts (Redshift) or it's not particularly reliable (BigQuery).

Re: Segment raises $64M led by Y Combinator

#67

Post by rjbwork »

jzebedee wrote: post #24

We used Segment for application analytics and exception reporting in an enterprise setting. Their .NET libraries were abysmal and had some show-stopper bugs that we wrestled with, particularly broken dependencies. I eventually had to fork the Analytics.NET repo and fix them myself. It was months before I heard any response to the issues or PRs, although they did eventually get merged in. It was just disappointing ove…

Usually these kind of startups that produce native libraries for use in other software produce poor .NET libraries. (see sendgrid) I wouldn't place the blame totally on them - you often have 1 person supporting multiple libraries in multiple languages, and .NET is not often used at these sorts of startups. On the other hand, a few thousand dollars for a consultant to get their situation in order would not be a bad investment to get them out of the situation, because a bad experience like this festers in the community for years.

Re: Segment raises $64M led by Y Combinator

#69

Post by jackgolding »

bendavis381 wrote: post #34
irq11 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep going back and forth between understanding the value of this product (dashboard for marketing to add integrations w/o dev time; better integration of analytics), to wondering why technical people pay for this. It doesn't seem cheap, and you're throwing a lot of control over latency-sensitive data to a black box. The founder straight-up admits in this article that the problems they're solving are largely simple…

Snowplow is open-source, although certainly not trivial to set up. https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow

yup snowplow's devops requirements and lack of evangelism are hurting them IMO but these are probably the challenges every open source product has.

Re: Segment raises $64M led by Y Combinator

#70

Post by danenania »

dookahku wrote: post #64
pkrein wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

thanks jj! happy to get you into the kafka beta — shoot me an email peter at segment.

So if I'm reading Segment's page correctly, Segment is a service that reads other API data and warehouses it into a single place to be read later? I feel like I'm missing a lot of the picture. :)

I'm not a Segment user, but my understanding is that it allows you to track events via a single API, and then push those events to lots of other services. So instead of needing to have js script tags/tracking codes/event calls for Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Optimizely, etc. etc., you just send your events to Segment, and Segment sends them on to wherever you want.
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