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From Show HN to Series D

segment.com

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Re: From Show HN to Series D

#41

Post by brandnewlow »

tootie wrote: post #39

It'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.

I think it’s a huge market and it just wasn’t known how crappy and dev-unfriendly the existing players were. I wonder if the Segment guys had even heard of them when they launched or if they had and then cleverly categorized their product as analytics management or whatnot vs “tag management”.

Re: From Show HN to Series D

#43

Post by ktamura »

witcherchaos wrote: post #4

Series D (with 3 seed rounds) and 4 founders....what does the equity shares for each founder look like? 3% maybe?

Realistically, if it's equal splits, they probably each own ~5% of the company (By that stage, the founder shares can be down to ~20%)

If they are raising $175M, their dilution is probably in the ~15% range, putting their valuation a bit north of $1B.

So, each founder probably is worth, on paper, around $50M right now. Again, this assumes equal splits. It's possible that the CEO has more shares by virtue of assuming greater responsibilities.

Re: From Show HN to Series D

#45

Post by pkrein »

brandnewlow wrote: post #20

The thing that jumped out to me was how well the team managed their psychology. They state that after several pivots they were in the dumps and running out of money...yet their launch copy for Segment was peppy, optimistic and ambitious.

Peter, co-founder/CEO of Segment here... I'm not sure it felt that way in the moment. On December 11, 2012 we were in pretty bad emotional place. I was on the verge of quitting at several points during the prior month, and was hospitalized twice earlier that fall due to stress and anxiety during our search for product market fit.

Obviously, the Show HN on December 12, 2012 turned that around. But it still took us several months to realize we had a tiger by its tail and begin to recover psychologically.

So... for those of you searching for product market fit and not finding it yet, hang in there.

Re: From Show HN to Series D

#46

Post by pkrein »

tootie wrote: post #39

It'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.

Peter, co-founder/CEO here... tag managers from all these players only solve the issue on websites, but only 30% of the data we manage comes from websites. The rest comes from mobile apps, payment systems, helpdesks, CRMs, email, push notifications, etc. So tag management is an antiquated/web-specific category that we've been ripping-and-replacing now for a few years.

It is also a huge market, with lots of interesting adjacencies that are equally whitespace. https://segment.com/protocols is starting to push into some of those areas.

Re: From Show HN to Series D

#47

Post by brogrammernot »

kgraves wrote: post #12
whalesalad wrote: post #9

Always been a huge fan of Segment. At one point I think I had a tiny little mention on the Readme of their Ruby client for fixing an issue w/ Unicorn. I jumped head first into event sourcing after their blog post demonstrating how overkill websockets are most of the time. I consider them to have their shit together. Then I applied to become an engineer there and had one of the worst experiences of my life with a proj…

That sucks, perhaps you were rejected based on culture fit? I wish that these VC funded startups would just admit that they're looking for FAANG engineers and be done with it. That way we wouldn't be wasting our time applying to do free work at a startup just to get a rejection at the end of it. 2c

I’d rather build something or do a case study (since I’m on the product side now, RIP sweet mechanical keyboard) then walk through white boarding problems.

I don’t mind a take home assignment that has a reasonable due date, but they should only be given deep enough into the recruiting process IMO.

Big fan of Segment, been wanting to transition some of our stuff over and tap into the kinesis pipeline connectors

Re: From Show HN to Series D

#48

Post by brandnewlow »

pkrein wrote: post #45
brandnewlow wrote: post #20

The thing that jumped out to me was how well the team managed their psychology. They state that after several pivots they were in the dumps and running out of money...yet their launch copy for Segment was peppy, optimistic and ambitious.

Peter, co-founder/CEO of Segment here... I'm not sure it felt that way in the moment. On December 11, 2012 we were in pretty bad emotional place. I was on the verge of quitting at several points during the prior month, and was hospitalized twice earlier that fall due to stress and anxiety during our search for product market fit. Obviously, the Show HN on December 12, 2012 turned that around. But it still took us sev…

Thanks for sharing this, Peter! S11 represent. I think this sort of thing is tremendously encouraging to hear as everyone that's started a company has gone through phases like this. I know a few having that experience now!

Re: From Show HN to Series D

#50

Post by LeonM »

yegle wrote: post #42

Sorry but PiHole blocked you. And I can see from PiHole's log, your domain is the most blocked one.

So there is the tip: if you ever do any kind analytics project, make sure the reports are send to a different hostname than your marketing/landing page is. Because the analytics host is bound to become blocked by all adblockers and privacy plugins sooner or later.
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