181–190 of 203 posts
Any alternatives to Optimizely?
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Reading the op's post and your reply, I can only come up with two possible conclusions: 1. The op is lying about his experience. He states he answered NO to question 2, which is what you claim to be looking for. Unless his answer to question 1 was "Work for Optimizely" (which, I guess, someone might say, maybe) then I don't see how you get a contradiction. By your logic, he would have been a hire. 2. The recruiter li…
Surely another possibility is that dsiroker has lied about his experience?
Additionally, I should have considered the possibility that both parties are mis-remembering the interaction. Seems I owe @worldsoup an apology.
@worldsoup I apologize for suggesting you were lying about your experience.
Anyway, if I had to guess as to what really happened, I expect the recruiter told a small, white lie when pressed on why OP didn't get the job.
Probably OP though they'd passed the interview because they got a meeting with the CEO. Or OP thought passing the interview meant they had the job, when in reality there were multiple qualified candidates and Optimizely chose another one.
There's other information in this thread to support this conclusion. I won't rehash it here.
In conclusion: the most charitable explanation is both parties are telling the truth to the best of their memories, and maybe a third party was a bit dishonest in a way meant to spare someone's feelings.
Sounds like they're having financial trouble and needed to sell. I'm hearing this will likely result in nothing for employees.
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24368516 If you don't mind answering, what's the strategy behind a hiring tactic like the one in the link above? It seems cartoonish and not grounded in reality....
Sure, I just responded because you asked so nicely. :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24369766
I worked at Optimizely from before its series A in 2012 until the end of 2016, so I have a unique perspective on this. For most of the time when I worked at Optimizely, the company was all the rage. It appeared at the top of most "hot startup" lists, the Glassdoor reviews were 5/5, revenue was skyrocketing, and for a period in 2014 it became the fourth most valuable YCombinator company (after Stripe, AirBnB, and Drop…
Worth noting that Optimizely is the A/B testing tool of choice for donaldjtrump.com.
(co-founder of Optimizely here) HUGE thank you to YC and the entire HN community for all their support over the years. It was almost ten years ago that we launched here on HN. [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1788634
I remember meeting Dan, the founding CEO of Optimizely, at winter 2010 YC demo day. I had just grabbed my name tag and was walking toward the building when he stopped me outside to give me the pitch. He immediately struck me as a smart, capable guy, but as a former software engineer I couldn't understand why companies wouldn't just build A/B testing themselves. What did Optimizely add? How was it defensible? Dan didn…
BTW, I'm not sure if you would have expected them to get to $100m in ARR either when you passed on them because you were skeptical of the market. There's a lot between $1m to $100m ARR that can go wrong. In this case, I don't think it was the market opportunity.
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I worked at Optimizely for 4 years and can tell you that pivoting to Enterprise has been one of the best company decisions. One of the important distinctions between Optimizely and most developer-first platforms is that experimentation is a hard practice to pick up. Most companies have difficulties getting their programs off the ground and keeping them funded, let alone grow or scale them. Small digital businesses st…
First off, love the username :-). You argue that pivoting from self-serve to enterprise was one of the company's best decisions. If that were true, Optimizely would be considerably more valuable now than it was four years ago, which is manifestly not the case. Moreover, if the self serve model was indeed fatally flawed, then it would not be possible for anyone to build a profitable business serving this segment. Howe…
On the valuation. Optimizely's pre-exit valuation rose in every VC round since changing the focus of the business from SMB (Series B) to Mid-Market (Series C) to Enterprise (Series D). The valuation of the exit took a hit for reasons that were not the enterprise focus. I could say more here, but consciously choose not to.
The self-serve model at Optimizely was certainly flawed. If VWO was able to build it profitably, that's likely because their labor costs, being based in India, are substantially lower than Optimizely's. Keeping a legion of engineers funded in SF has very different unit economics than keeping engineers funded in India.
Now on your last argument, that self-serve customers could acquire enterprise accounts, I certainly agree. If that strategy were better executed, it could have created a valuable pipeline. But the self-serve to enterprise funnel was sorely lacking, and when self-serve was cancelled, the business benefited financially and migrated everyone to the new pricing model for substantial success.
Its easy to look at Optimizely's final fortunes and link that to the enterprise approach, and I won't argue they're completely unrelated, but there were very different factors that caused Optimizely to fold into EPi's acquisition spree.
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> The Episerver acquisition is indeed a bad exit, and I think I will lose >$100k in stock I exercised Based on what information? So far, all that's been publicly confirmed is that the sale price was below $600M, which presumably leaves opportunity for your shares to be worth something.
GP probably got information about the share price offered from current employees and did the math. Once the acquisition is finalized, they'll receive more details since they are a shareholder.
However, if the OP is speaking the truth about the timeframe he got shares from, he is guaranteed to be up. There are definitely people who lost money on this deal, but definitely not Series A people.