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Twilio set to acquire Segment for $3.2B

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Re: Twilio set to acquire Segment for $3.2B

#81

Post by fblp »

alexjray wrote: post #43
dmix wrote: post #22

I follow(ed) Segment’s GitHub branches and always felt they adopted the latest and best front end tooling. I usually let them being the testing ground at a real company in between the stuff they developed themselves. This goes from using Metalsmith early for their single page web sites, some coding practices (mono vs micro), some CSS frameworks and design patterns and other library choices when there always seemed li…

Most of that is Ian Storm Taylor. This is what happens when software is treated as a first class citizen and the co founder(s) are technical. It's a specific class of companies like Stripe and Square. The business itself is treated as a software product, internal influences external.

Ian Storm Taylor departed the company in ~2013 i think - but was all a technical team with strong opensource culture.

Re: Twilio set to acquire Segment for $3.2B

#82

Post by fblp »

tootie wrote: post #19
tosh wrote: post #2

Twilio feels like a great fit for Segment, all the best to the team and the next steps. Show HN: Analytics.js (2012) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4912076 via @rauchg https://twitter.com/rauchg/status/1314709848030756864

It's kinda nuts. They have some videos on startup school. They basically just threw spaghetti for months building random products for markets they barely understood until they landed on analytics and it just snowballed. This isn't even a brilliant idea. They entered a crowded market with a solution that was just a bit better than everyone else and now have a $3B exit.

How was this market for customer data platforms "crowded" in 2012?! :)

Re: Twilio set to acquire Segment for $3.2B

#83

Post by tomnipotent »

soumyadeb wrote: post #80
tomnipotent wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we don't store any data Which means your platform can't replay historical data to new sources, which offers a LOT of value for both onboarding new platforms as well as testing tools before signing a contract (since it lessens the cost of getting actual data into a tool to see if it's a good fit).

Yes, we can :) But we require you to provide an S3/GCP bucket where to dump all the data for replay. We are also working on a functionality where we can replay from your warehouse too.

This is brilliant. I much prefer being in control of the data, so this gives best of both worlds.

Re: Twilio set to acquire Segment for $3.2B

#84

Post by joshjdr »

rubyfan wrote: post #30
peter_mcrae wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed really good fit. I bet a large % of Segment's customers were using Twilio endpoints. Really nice combination of a data hub / last mile across multiple channels...fully expect they will continue moving up the stack towards a CRM / Marketing automation solution.

Who’s a likely candidate for CRM acquisition? Seems like the space is a bit crowded and Salesforce is the big dog and lots of second tier but who’s a good fit for Twilio?

Airtable

Re: Twilio set to acquire Segment for $3.2B

#85

Post by texasbigdata »

bleonard wrote: post #51
texasbigdata wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what’s the end state solution? The tools change and/or mature slower than a fast company will grow. Where are you going from here? Are you eventually running your own cluster? Or, are you paying per Gb per second how GCP bills with decoupled compute / memory / storage? Or maybe with a little bit more overhead with the orchestration cost on top of consumption with how azure bills for ADF. Just from reading blog pos…

We are building Grouparoo ( https://www.grouparoo.com ) because we think you should be able to do this yourself and own/control the data - without the incentive structure being messed up from the cost pressure.

Do y’all have pricing info?

This post [0], and the open job requisitions suggest you’re using a bit of cash to do this. What is your business model?

0: https://mobile.twitter.com/grouparoo/status/1292844163617239...

Re: Twilio set to acquire Segment for $3.2B

#86

Post by XCSme »

tootie wrote: post #19
tosh wrote: post #2

Twilio feels like a great fit for Segment, all the best to the team and the next steps. Show HN: Analytics.js (2012) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4912076 via @rauchg https://twitter.com/rauchg/status/1314709848030756864

It's kinda nuts. They have some videos on startup school. They basically just threw spaghetti for months building random products for markets they barely understood until they landed on analytics and it just snowballed. This isn't even a brilliant idea. They entered a crowded market with a solution that was just a bit better than everyone else and now have a $3B exit.

I am currently working on a self-hosted analytics platform, and even though the space seems crowded, there are only a few good players. The thing is everyone started creating an "analytics platform", only that they just do it for money, thinking it's really easy to implement and don't care about the actual product, user experience or quality in general.

My point is, yes, the analytics market is crowded, but it's mostly crowded by low-effort players or archaic products. That being said, someone reading this will probably think it's a good idea to enter the market, thus leading to another below-average product.

Re: Twilio set to acquire Segment for $3.2B

#87

Post by tootie »

fblp wrote: post #82
tootie wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's kinda nuts. They have some videos on startup school. They basically just threw spaghetti for months building random products for markets they barely understood until they landed on analytics and it just snowballed. This isn't even a brilliant idea. They entered a crowded market with a solution that was just a bit better than everyone else and now have a $3B exit.

How was this market for customer data platforms "crowded" in 2012?! :)

The original product was really just a javascript utility allowing you to instrument your site and funnel data to other analytics platforms like GA or Adobe. The industry was coalescing on another approach (data layer) which still exists and probably has wider adoption. Segment used their position as a middleman to add more and more value as they matured and acquired customers.

Re: Twilio set to acquire Segment for $3.2B

#88

Post by polote »

XCSme wrote: post #86
tootie wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's kinda nuts. They have some videos on startup school. They basically just threw spaghetti for months building random products for markets they barely understood until they landed on analytics and it just snowballed. This isn't even a brilliant idea. They entered a crowded market with a solution that was just a bit better than everyone else and now have a $3B exit.

I am currently working on a self-hosted analytics platform, and even though the space seems crowded, there are only a few good players. The thing is everyone started creating an "analytics platform", only that they just do it for money, thinking it's really easy to implement and don't care about the actual product, user experience or quality in general. My point is, yes, the analytics market is crowded, but it's most…

Currently analytics is a fraud, analytics is useless, it is what you do about that data which is important. Most of analytics/ab testing software are just giving data (which is sometimes not even accurate) to customers, so that the people in the analytics team have a job to do. But the reality is that only a very small fraction of those teams know how to use the data to drive more revenue. So if you want to work in analytics there is this HUGE market which today is not addressed by anyone, its how to make more revenue from a website.

Segment is not even doing analytics, it has created its own market because no players in analytics has any interest if you want to make more money on your website. As website owners spend their time changing analytics tool, why not make a tool to make changes tool easier ? And that's Segment, they are even more useless than an analytics tool but well yeah nobody see it

Re: Twilio set to acquire Segment for $3.2B

#89

Post by XCSme »

polote wrote: post #88
XCSme wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am currently working on a self-hosted analytics platform, and even though the space seems crowded, there are only a few good players. The thing is everyone started creating an "analytics platform", only that they just do it for money, thinking it's really easy to implement and don't care about the actual product, user experience or quality in general. My point is, yes, the analytics market is crowded, but it's most…

Currently analytics is a fraud, analytics is useless, it is what you do about that data which is important. Most of analytics/ab testing software are just giving data (which is sometimes not even accurate) to customers, so that the people in the analytics team have a job to do. But the reality is that only a very small fraction of those teams know how to use the data to drive more revenue. So if you want to work in a…

> Currently analytics is a fraud, analytics is useless, it is what you do about that data which is important

This is like saying food is a scam and useless and that it's only important when you eat it.

I do agree that just tracking analytics, without doing anything with the data, is useless, just like storing food in the basement and letting it rot.

Disclaimer: I have never used segment before, nor I had the need for a similar tool.

Segment is targeted towards enterprises, their price is too high for the average business, plus most of those businesses probably don't even use any analytics tools (or maybe just Google Analytics and look at visitors number only), so the integration offering doesn't really make sense for them.

> As website owners spend their time changing analytics tool, why not make a tool to make changes tool easier?

As far as I know, changing analytics tools for the average business involves just changing a JS snippet on their site, nothing complicated.

As a personal note, my bigger goal is to make self-hosting and integration of web applications (in general) a lot easier for the average user, so anyone can spin up a self-maintained server running their favorite application with one click. So it's more about allowing anyone to use whatever tool they want, wherever they want, instead of just focusing on allowing them to select between a very limited selection of tools.

Re: Twilio set to acquire Segment for $3.2B

#90

Post by polote »

XCSme wrote: post #89
polote wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Currently analytics is a fraud, analytics is useless, it is what you do about that data which is important. Most of analytics/ab testing software are just giving data (which is sometimes not even accurate) to customers, so that the people in the analytics team have a job to do. But the reality is that only a very small fraction of those teams know how to use the data to drive more revenue. So if you want to work in a…

> Currently analytics is a fraud, analytics is useless, it is what you do about that data which is important This is like saying food is a scam and useless and that it's only important when you eat it. I do agree that just tracking analytics, without doing anything with the data, is useless, just like storing food in the basement and letting it rot. Disclaimer: I have never used segment before, nor I had the need for…

(I'm only talking about Enterprise)

> This is like saying food is a scam and useless and that it's only important when you eat it.

Yes but everyone knows it for food, for analytics people expect it to solve their problem, which it will not do by itself

> As far as I know, changing analytics tools for the average business involves just changing a JS snippet on their site, nothing complicated.

Well not really, first except Session replay tools and everything recorded tool (ContentSquare, Heap) (and even for them it is far for being the case), changing analytics tool is a huge step, you need to recreate all your events, teach your users, install on your website (for an enterprise website, installing an analytics js tag is a huge thing)

> my bigger goal is to make self-hosting and integration of web applications (in general) a lot easier for the average user

To me self hosting and average user is not compatible especially in analytics where the average user barely knows how to use a computer.

Apart from that, it is not really clear to me what you are trying to achieve

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