8 ms·
Vijaye Raji to become CTO of Applications with acquisition of Statsig
- ChrisArchitect 1y agoRelated Statsig post: https://www.statsig.com/blog/openai-acquisition https://www.statsig.com/blog/openai-acquisition
- gchadwick 1y agoThe CTO of applications reporting to CEO of applications (who reports to the actual CEO) is kinda weird? I figure you're either the actual CTO or you're not a C-level exec and should have another title. Just more title inflation I guess. Maybe in same way you see VPs of X everywhere in some organizations we'll be starting to see CEO/CTO of X lower and lower down the org chart.
- giancarlostoro 1y agoI'm just sitting here wondering what in the world "Applications" is, is that a subsidiary or what?
- therealbilliam 1y agoApparently that's what they call ChatGPT, Codex, etc ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- kridsdale1 1y agoA thing that uses a model to have customers.
- neom 1y agoIt's signaling P&L responsibilities. It's not that weird, at least not unheard of at all, just that it's typically done through "EVP" - So EVP Applications, VP of Applications Engineering, etc. - I'm guessing that the line items those "C"s who are not Sam are responsible for, are bigger than most F500 executives, and they're using titles to reflect that reality.
- geodel 1y agoThis C level thing is happening for decades. There are many with CTO title who manage groups sometime as small as 5-10 people. And they are not startups but large corporates.
- nerdsniper 1y ago“CTO” makes sense as a signal that “the buck stops here” for technical issues. They are the highest-ranking authority on technical decisions for their silo, with no one above them (but two CEO’s above them for business decisions) If Mira Murati (CTO of OpenAI) has authority over their technical decisions, then it’s an odd title. If I was talking with a CTO, I wouldn't expect another CTO to outrank or be able to overrule them.
- atty 1y agoIt would be quite strange indeed for Mira Murati to have a say over their technical decisions, considering she does not work for OpenAI :)
- prasadjoglekar 1y agoJust look at any media agency (OMG as an example). There are CEOs up the wazoo, one for North America, one for EU etc. In practice, these are just internal P&Ls.
- citizenpaul 1y agoSounds to me like another phase in the growth of the "Unaccountability Machine" https://www.amazon.com/Unaccountability-Machine-Systems-Terrible-Decisions-ebook/dp/B0CGFWBFD6 https://www.amazon.com/Unaccountability-Machine-Systems-Terr... Oh the CTO approved it so we should blame them. No not that CTO the other CTO. Oh so who decided on the final out come. The CTO! So who is on first again?
- hugedickfounder 1y ago[dead]
- mikert89 1y agoOpenAI is going to start competing with a ton of SAAS companies. I think we are going to see products 10x better than legacy saas products, many companies wont be able to compete.
- flappyeagle 1y agoI mean they can try. They’re not gonna be very good at it
- nojvek 1y ago> competing with a ton of SAAS companies A a ton of companies will compete with OpenAI while their focus is divided amongst a 100 things. May a thousand flowers bloom!
- tty456 1y agoWho the heck is Vijaye Raji?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- swyx 1y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45108493 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45108493 sister [deleted] comment said "He’s an extremely well-known and deeply respected engineer, leader, and founder in the Seattle metro region. This is a key hire for OpenAI, and a good one."
- esafak 1y agoThe Statsig CEO, of course.
- s5300 1y ago[dead]
- jijapiopq 1y agoSome ex-facebook employee who developed a product for ... guess what - tracking users activity on websites to provide "analytics".
- skaaoanfj12 1y ago[dead]
- kevinastone 1y agoLooks like Fidji is reconstituting her Org from Meta
- kridsdale1 1y agoIt was extremely effective while it was running. I was there.
- mxstbr 1y agoInitial Show HN four years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26629429 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26629429 Congrats to the Statsig team!
- morkalork 1y ago1 comment - 13 points. Guess you should never feel bad if your own Show HN doesn't take off, it's not the end of the world!
- utyop22 1y agoTBH this is looking more like an acqui-hire (Im sure they don't want the key people of Statsig to go away....), similar to Windsurf. Consider the fact that the CEO of Apps at OAI worked closely with the CEO of Statsig at Meta.
- behnamoh 1y agoAre we supposed to post every blog/news post of OpenAI and keep fueling the AI hype? I think at this point people should know that OpenAI is just like any other company.
- MontgomeryPy 1y agoThis seems like a big shift for OpenAI into an enterprise applications vendor to me.
- rchaud 1y agoWhat else could they have been? Microsoft didn't give them $10bn to build out their B2C homework autocomplete service.
- LudwigNagasena 1y agoA skunkworks shop that aims at 100x returns by producing cutting-edge AI tech, not another B2B BigTech company. Isn't that the very image they cultivated in the media?
- boringg 1y ago1.1 B talent acquisition comp I saw somewhere. That cant be right is it - not sure what the underlying company tech is.
- kridsdale1 1y agoStatSig is a reimplementation of Meta’s analytics and growth systems. The best in the world and how they’re able to enter and dominate markets and scale to billions in under a year.
- actualwitch 1y agoAnthropic must be miffed![0] [0] https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/claude-code/data-usage#telemetry-services https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/claude-code/data-usage#te...
- chambers 1y agoHats off to Statsig. They built a stellar product. Superior to many of their industry competitors like Optimizely. Back when I was on an internal Experimentation platform, we were impressed how they balanced dev velocity & stat rigor https://www.statsig.com/updates https://www.statsig.com/updates These guys ship. Business-wise, I think getting acquired was the right choice. Experimentation is too small & treacherous to build a great business, and the broader Product Analytics space is also overcrowded. Amplitude (YC 2012), to date, only has a 1.4B market cap. Joining the hottest name next door gives Statsig a lot more room to explore. I look forward to their evolution.
- debarshri 1y agoAt peak amplitude's market cap was 10B
- utyop22 1y agoAmplitude is on track to be delisted lol
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- barapa 1y ago[flagged]
- stavros 1y agoIt gives Statsig a lot more room to explore how our cursor movements and keystrokes can train LLMs to emulate humans browsing the web, you mean?
- asdev 1y agocurious to hear people's experience using Statsig
- bertil 1y agoCurious to hear about how they feel about many key StatSig people walking away, and Vijaye going to lead a different product. OpenAI bought it for internal use. They plan to put the public-facing product into more of a maintenance mode.
- Hansenq 1y agoHow come this acquisition gets to go through, but Windsurf didn't? There might be antitrust review here too, and Microsoft might also lay a claim to Statsig's IP due to their contract with OpenAI. Maybe Statsig didn't care that Microsoft would have access to the IP?
- barrrrald 1y agoWindsurf didn't not go through because of regulatory or MSFT issue – that was always a fig leaf. OAI walked.
- _2d30 1y agoSo there will be at least two separate technical organizations within OAI. Pretty small company (HC and product surface wise) for that. Is Brockman now CTO over research specifically or is there going to be a weird dotted line?
- _2d30 1y agoAlso, best of luck to current statsig customers lol
- arthurcolle 1y agoLike Anthropic
- gavmor 1y agoData/ML and Apps split seems pretty normal to me, even in a company of ~20. What makes a group of coworkers into "an org"? That they don't attend one-another's retros?
- _2d30 1y agoEven if Data/ML and Apps are split, in a company of 20, they would almost certainly go to the same CTO. Here you will have what appears per this article to be 2 but as I looked more into it, there are 3 (!!) CTOs (see here: https://x.com/snsf/status/1962939368085327923 https://x.com/snsf/status/1962939368085327923) one of which (B2B CTO) seems to be reporting to the COO. So in this context, you have 3 (!!) engineering organizations that don't terminate in a single engineering leader. "Apps" terminates at the "Apps" CEO (Fidji), research org terminates (??) at Sama (Overall CEO) and then B2B terminates at the COO. So either you have weird dotted lines to Brockman for each of these CTOs OR you are going to have a lot of internal customer relationships which don't have a final point of escalation. That's definitely not common at this size and, unless these are all extremely independent organizations from a tech stack perspective (they can't really be since surely they are all reliant on the core LLMs...), then there will be a lot more weird politics that are harder to resolve than having these organizations all under one technical leader. Of course another alternative is OAI is handing out titles for retention purposes and "CTO" will be heavily devalued as a title internally.
- apetresc 1y agoCan someone ELI5 what Statsig actually is? Their landing page is full of gems like "Turn action into insights and insights into action" and "Scale your experimentation culture with the world's leading experimentation platform" so I have no clue. It appears to be another analytics + A/B testing platform, but surely that can't be worth $1.1B to OpenAI?
- jijapiopq 1y agoA buzz word driven company with a product meant to track users, their mouse movement, keyboard usage across the internet. Of course to help make the world a better place .... for shoving advertisements.
- laichzeit0 1y agoTell me you've never used Statsig without telling me you've never used Statsig. It's an online controlled experiment platform. You know like when you want to figure out if a blue button gets more clicks than a red button or a green button, and you want to avoid the situation of some tech-bro calculating the average clicks on all 3 groups and going "this one is higher, so it must be better" because they have zero background in statistics and don't know how to correct for multiple comparisons or what power analysis is, etc.
- Brajeshwar 1y agoI'm of the opinion that the marketing gimmicks that we see on some products but ends up either being acquired big or gets those big elusive contracts, is that they did those messaging on purpose to steer the general onlooker something else. However, their internals or when a customer talks to, say, the founders, they would narrate and then show such things that are 100x better than what we see in the open.
- navs 1y agoHave implemented Statsig in two companies as alternatives to LaunchDarkly and loved it both times. Going to be interesting how their other big customer deals with this purchase i.e. Anthropic
- iamleppert 1y agoThe problem with A/B testing, and anyone who has ever done it at scale can tell you, beyond the banal basic stuff that people are already aware of like making things accessible and discoverable, once you get to a certain point, people just have no opinion. The default opinion is no opinion. It's why every mass consumer product devolves into a feed or a list of content delivered by an algorithm. Once you reach a certain point, you come full circle and even that doesn't matter anymore: users will happily consume whatever you give them, within reason. A/B testing platforms are mostly used by an odd collection of marketers and "data driven" people who love to run experiments and drag out every little change in the name of optimization. In the end, it all completely doesn't matter and doesn't tell you anything more than just talking to an average user will. But, boy, are they sure a great way to look busy and dress up an underperforming product!
- beeon 1y agoMaybe the industry you work in is relevant here. In e-commerce, A/B testing the position and color of "add to cart" button can yield legitimate revenue multipliers. People's opinions are irrelevant in that kind of A/B test, all that matters is the likelihood they continue down the funnel.
- iamleppert 1y agoThis is always the straw man A/B testing people reach for. When in reality, this only works on the worst possible designs or bizarre layouts, that no one really uses. It's a myth that you can somehow ring out extra few % by making tiny changes to fonts and colors -- in every case, they simply stop the experiment when the results tip in their favor. The ONLY time I've ever seen it used successfully was to make changes to the layout of ads, making them look like more organic content or likely to be accidentally clicked. You can see this at work if you've ever clicked on an ad by mistake, or maybe you were trying to close the ad and noticed someone has "optimized" the close button placement using one of these A/B tools. There it is, that's the market for these tools. That represents the vast majority of the these companies use-cases, revenue and usage. Anyone else who implies an innocent intent is either ignorant or inexperienced.
- GOD_Over_Djinn 1y agoI wonder what this means for statsig employees? Paper money converted to a different kind of paper money? Are they now OpenAI employees? Will there be layoffs?