71–80 of 154 posts
My question is to HN partipicants.
Does anyone feel like the stock market is about to tank?
I have a feeling we are going to see a lot of private companies jumping in before they can't. (This last sentance is not a question.)
1. What are you most looking forward to (product/tech-wise, impact, financially for you, financially for the organization, etc.) that may not have been possible just a few years ago?
2. What do think are the greatest challenges you will have to face in your role as a founder-CEO and as a company in AMPL's next phase?
3. If you were starting over today, what ideas might get you excited enough to go at it again for the next decade?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm going to try to answer the question without divulging how anyone individually did. I took a look at the initial 4 year option grants for the first 10 engineers (this doesn't count refreshers or other follow on grants). The average value at $50/share (yesterday's opening price) is just over $10M. The group varied in experience from just out of school to a few years working when they joined. I feel we were a good d…
While joining a FAANG in the past was most likely the richest path, that may not be true today.
Not everyone cares about the money though. After a certain point you get tired of politics and process and just want to build things. A successful startup culture seems like a win win.
I'm really surprised this thread isn't more active! CEO of a newly public startup opened a thread and is active in the comments. This is great stuff. - Just rewinding back to when you decided to get started - how did you convince yourself to leave a (presumably) comfortable, reasonably paying job to starting your own thing? It's that leap that scares me the most, so curious of your take. - If you have anything you'd…
I was doing high frequency trading before starting Amplitude. It was a great job: incredibly smart people, rewarding problems, great money and career progression. The only thing I didn't like was the ethos of secrecy in the industry. It was clear the long term potential of positive impact on the world was way greater through building a company than anything else. And if you didn't quit you were very likely to get the…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's great to have you as a customer. Make sure you give product feedback to our team! Most of the money in SaaS is in large clients in the enterprise. Almost all large SaaS businesses have been built that way (Salesforce, Adobe, ServiceNow, Workday). Once you figure that out monetizing smaller companies goes way down in priority and it's a better strategy to give your product away for free. For us in particular: 1)…
To be fair Adobe IPO'd in 1986, long before SaaS was a thing. I wouldn't say they quite fit the bill of "built by selling large enterprise software contracts".
Hi Spenser! Congratulations by the way to you and your team. I've been working quietly on a project which I hope to turn into a product. When I speak with potential customers and users, they're very excited, but when I work with VCs, I receive the tired argument of "but XYZ incumbent pretty much dominates the market." That's fine, and I feel that I am differentiated enough, but I'd love to hear how in the early days…
Almost all of SV passed on Amplitude at one point or another. I remember one of them made a comment like "analytics companies pop up like mushrooms after a rainstorm". Raising our seed round was brutal. It took 6 months end to end and was one of the lowest points for me personally. I was trying to scrape together $1M in $50k chunks from any angel who would give us money. We ended up having to lean on our background a…