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Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver

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Re: Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver

#61

Post by dsiroker »

hitekker wrote: post #55
BurntBunting wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't. The founders pushed people who trusted them to work hard and value the company over their own needs. While the founders and their friends were able to pull out equity, every one else was told that they had to wait their turn, which never came. If Dan and Pete were nice guys, they would have take care of the employees that built their company. The employees wouldn't have been millionaires, but they might be a…

Wasn't Dan or Pete forced to step down on account of gross incompetence? I recall there being some internal drama about their departure.

Haha, certainly no drama and no one forced us or even asked us to step down. I wrote a blog post about it: https://link.medium.com/mHgtiQ3bu9

Re: Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver

#62

Post by ssharp »

roasm wrote: post #20
ssharp wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Optimizely's pricing makes no sense for small teams but VWO and Optimize cannot compete on features that start to become very useful as your experimentation and personalization efforts increase. Any roll-your-own experimentation platforms take considerable resources to make accessible to those in the organization interested in using it (product, marketing, etc.)

In my experience, I agree the core functionality (variant management, remote config, etc.) is relatively small amount of effort compared to the interfaces to make it accessible to those non-technical orgs, like you mention. However, we found that those interfaces only allow very limited, shallow tests and you very quickly outgrow them as an organization. In other words, once you reach diminishing returns on button co…

I wasn't really talking towards the WYSIWYG editors. Those are trash on all platforms and fall apart quickly for all but the most simple tests.

Metric + page management, results analysis, segmentation, etc. all work better in Optimizely than they do in other platforms.

Re: Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver

#63

Post by kirillzubovsky »

tptacek wrote: post #60
richardfeynman wrote: post #19

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…

I have a sort of general question about this narrative, which seems to apply to lots of startups that begin as self-service, developer-focused projects and end in enterprise hell. Is it not the case that these startups begin developer-facing, get market traction, are lavishly funded, and then discover that the self-service offering they've built simply can't satisfy the projections they've made to justify their valua…

To piggyback on this question, I am also curious - would Optimizely choose to go this Enterprise sales route if it weren't for their sky high valuation back in the day. How much of this change was driven by the customers' need vs. a perceived opportunity to grow the company?

Re: Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver

#64

Post by [deleted] »

BurntBunting wrote: post #51
designium wrote: post #18

I hope the founder exited well. I remember working with him at Google when he was the PM for Google Optimizer. Nice guy.

I don't. The founders pushed people who trusted them to work hard and value the company over their own needs. While the founders and their friends were able to pull out equity, every one else was told that they had to wait their turn, which never came. If Dan and Pete were nice guys, they would have take care of the employees that built their company. The employees wouldn't have been millionaires, but they might be a…

[deleted]

Re: Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver

#65

Post by pc »

twunde wrote: post #56
pbreit wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why Stripe will likely win: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24067211 Continuing self-service while expanding "up market" into the enterprise. If AWS can be self-service, pretty much any service can be.

Stripe may expand "up market" at some point, but at the moment they're pretty enterprise unfriendly and don't seem interested in becoming enterprise friendly. You can't pay for phone support, their PCI compliance can cause some enterprise customers to blink and even if you're funneling millions through them they won't negotiate on price like other payment gateways. Also many of their more advanced features, just aren…

Appreciate the feedback. You can pay for phone support (indeed, you get it for free, though you can pay extra for a premium support package if you like). We think that our PCI compliance functionality is best-in-class. And we do negotiate price for larger accounts, as indicated on stripe.com/pricing.

More broadly, Stripe now works with a long list of businesses that are processing more than $1B/year or more, and that list is growing quite quickly. Indeed, there are more enterprises using Stripe than Adyen, which is often cited as an ostensibly enterprise-focused competitor. Larger companies using Stripe include Amazon, Shopify, Instacart, and Peloton. (There's a longer list at https://stripe.com/customers). That's all to say: we're very invested in this enterprise thing.

If any enterprises you work with have had a bad experience, would welcome any details. patrick@stripe.com

Re: Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver

#66

Post by will_lam »

jmacd wrote: post #32
richardfeynman wrote: post #19

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…

Speaking as a customer, it feels like this is exactly what is happening to Mode Analytics right now.

As a customer of Mode, why not give Taplytics a shot? :)

Re: Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver

#67

Post by reggieband »

tptacek wrote: post #60
richardfeynman wrote: post #19

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…

I have a sort of general question about this narrative, which seems to apply to lots of startups that begin as self-service, developer-focused projects and end in enterprise hell. Is it not the case that these startups begin developer-facing, get market traction, are lavishly funded, and then discover that the self-service offering they've built simply can't satisfy the projections they've made to justify their valua…

> then discover that the self-service offering they've built simply can't satisfy the projections they've made to justify their valuation?

I suspect a lot of startups sell their investors on enterprise from the get-go. Self-serve can be seen as a foot in the door, a way to prospect potential enterprise opportunities. They watch self-serve sign-ups for a bigcorp.com domain and then hand it over to account sales and swing for the fences.

I think a big problem is differentiating your self-serve from your enterprise offering. You don't want bigcorp.com to feel happy enough with your $20/month foot in the door offering. And at the same time enterprises aren't stupid money fountains and they don't just sign $100k/year contracts unless they see major value. I think this creates a volatile business where a dozen or so enterprises make up the lions share of revenue for a startup and the thousands of self-serve customers are just kind of there like background noise.

Re: Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver

#68

Post by petermelias »

dsiroker wrote: post #31

(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

Still remember first time used original Optimizely product for my own startup. Was amazing

Re: Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver

#69

Post by totallynotabot »

kirillzubovsky wrote: post #63
tptacek wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a sort of general question about this narrative, which seems to apply to lots of startups that begin as self-service, developer-focused projects and end in enterprise hell. Is it not the case that these startups begin developer-facing, get market traction, are lavishly funded, and then discover that the self-service offering they've built simply can't satisfy the projections they've made to justify their valua…

To piggyback on this question, I am also curious - would Optimizely choose to go this Enterprise sales route if it weren't for their sky high valuation back in the day. How much of this change was driven by the customers' need vs. a perceived opportunity to grow the company?

You know the answer to this question. Rationalizations may have included lines like “pivoting to enterprise will help us help even more customers” but it’s all about growth and TAM.
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