I love following the segment design team on dribbble https://dribbble.com/segment
From Show HN to Series D
31–40 of 55 posts
Re: From Show HN to Series D
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Their equity percentage may have gone down but the value of their equity probably went up.
Or looking at it another way, you can stress out for a company for 8 year (in case of segment), or or you can join the company as a c-level exec at year 6 for the same amount of equity
Usually the folks who join a (successful) company as a C-level exec at year 6 are those who previously stressed out for 10+ years, either as a founder or working their way up through multiple successful projects at a big company.
Re: From Show HN to Series D
#33Inspiring. Thanks for posting. Their video from startup school is equally good.
Re: From Show HN to Series D
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or looking at it another way, you can stress out for a company for 8 year (in case of segment), or or you can join the company as a c-level exec at year 6 for the same amount of equity
The sort of person who grows a company from Show HN -> Series D is a very different sort of person than the sort of person who can join as a C Level exec.
There's more overlap than I would've suspected - a lot of the Director/VP types that I saw Google hire from the outside (as opposed to promote from within) were folks who had previously founded a company, sometimes up to 4 companies.
Re: From Show HN to Series D
#35Series D (with 3 seed rounds) and 4 founders....what does the equity shares for each founder look like? 3% maybe?
where did you guess 3% from? even with 4 founders and series D, is that realistic or a bit low?
Re: From Show HN to Series D
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
The sort of person who grows a company from Show HN -> Series D is a very different sort of person than the sort of person who can join as a C Level exec.
There's more overlap than I would've suspected - a lot of the Director/VP types that I saw Google hire from the outside (as opposed to promote from within) were folks who had previously founded a company, sometimes up to 4 companies.
Agreed, but that's different again. Once you've done a job like be the CTO or CEO or an exec role at a high growth startup (like Segment) then getting into a role as an exec at a larger company.
Re: From Show HN to Series D
#37I guess that's how they can afford to give me $25k in credits.
Re: From Show HN to Series D
#38This was both helpful and inspiring to read, thank you for sharing. - after thousands of lines of code, we realized our Edtech startup did not have product market fit, so we pivoted to building a Mixpanel competitor focused on segmentation* - 6 product iterations later, nothing was working. We were trying to decide between a group trip planner and what eventually became Segment. It was a dark time.* I'm curious.. whe…
Thank you! I'd agree with the other commenters that Peter's talk is the best place to go for hearing the in-depth story: https://blog.ycombinator.com/peter-reinhardt-on-finding-prod...
I'd say more generally that finding product-market-fit felt much more like a 'pull' than a 'push' motion. We had been trying for 8 months to convince even a single user to rely on the product we were building earlier, and it just wasn't sticking.
When we launched today's product, we started seeing a lot more pull from customers. We solved one problem that other products did not, which prompted a bunch more requests from customers.
Re: From Show HN to Series D
#39It's surprising given that there's already a plethora of tag managers out there including the big boys like Google and Adobe and specialty players like Tealium who solve this exact problem. Either Segment has secret sauce or it's just a huge market.
Re: From Show HN to Series D
#40Something I'm interested in - how did the move to Boston go? Why move back to SF? I often wonder about the viability of starting a tech company elsewhere. Does being a VC company impact this?
We originally moved to Boston to be close to universities. It seemed like a better location for convincing our professors to use the edtech product we'd started with.
We made the move back to SF to be closer to our customers (since we had shifted to building an analytics product by then). It was much easier to walk them through the product in-person.
I wouldn't say this is strictly necessary today, but SF does have a nice density of startups if you are building a developer tool.