sskates

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61.
by sskates 5y ago
The other posts have some great screenshots of our product. Giraffe Graph! That brings me back. The fees are actually the same between a traditional IPO as well as a direct listing. We ended up paying $15M or so all in between everyone. The
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by sskates 5y ago
Thanks Daniel! Sorry, I'm on it right now!
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Tell HN: Amplitude (YC W12) just went public – AMA
408 points by sskates 5y ago|147 comments
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Tell HN: Amplitude's (YC W12) Investor Day
9 points by sskates 5y ago|0 comments
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Amplitude (YC W12) files confidential S-1 to go public(forbes.com)
1 points by sskates 5y ago|0 comments
66.
by sskates 6y ago
The short version is we saw a big gap in the product analytics market when we were building a consumer app. We were going to work on building a company no matter what and it was the best opportunity we found. B2B was much easier than consum
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by sskates 6y ago
As an engineer turned founder, your instinct to jump in and start doing it is correct. It’s hard to learn from books. I never did, neither did the successful engineers turned sales people that I know. The key is learning to read each situat
68.
by sskates 8y ago
An interesting question for me would be if it had been all male co-founders. Would that have stood out?
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by sskates 9y ago
100% agreed on this. Invention is a myth. We don't invent new things, we discovering them through deeper understanding of what's actually going on.
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by sskates 9y ago
Yeah- the truth is always more nuanced. Both product market fit and doing things that don’t scale are required to get something off of the ground. It’s almost never you see a successful startup that didn’t have both of those pieces.
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by sskates 9y ago
Agreed with all the above. Retention is the best long term predictor of success of every business I’ve seen. Growth can be fast or slow- what matters is do you keep your customers around.
72.
by sskates 9y ago
The article made the distinction between criticism of an idea and criticism of the person behind the idea. "Of course we can and should say that ideas are mistaken, but we can’t just call the person a heretic. We need to debate the ac
73.
by sskates 9y ago
As an interviewer, I’ve found that the ability to talk through the problem at multiple layers of abstraction to be one of the strongest indicators of mastery of a subject. This is independent of the topic as well- whether you’re interviewin
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by sskates 9y ago
This is correct. I'm surprised at how much bad information there is in this thread. There hasn't been a clear mandate for a desire to become a state from Puerto Ricans and until that happens Congress has indicated it won't do
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by sskates 9y ago
Agree with everything you're saying about data. Given how hard an analytics system is to set up properly, it's one of the last pieces you should be adding in to get an understanding of how to build your business.
76.
by sskates 9y ago
That's definitely one of these things you have to learn as part of running a business. You tend to over-index on things you can measure and under-index on things that you can't. After a while you realize there's a lot more ra
77.
by sskates 9y ago
Firstly, I'm super biased as I'm the CEO of a product analytics company where one of the value props is getting the data in real time. I agree with this post that people will look at single data points out of context and weight th
78.
by sskates 10y ago
Absolutely agreed. I think the GP's viewpoint was widely shared by "The Elite" for the past 10 years and is what created the backlash that got Trump elected. We (and I use that loosely) have to care because the people who get
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by sskates 10y ago
This took me a year to really internalize- I wish I had read this a while back when we were 20 people. It wasn't until we passed 45 that I really took a thorough look at how I was spending my time. I intellectually understood the trans
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by sskates 10y ago
We've done it with food thanks to the Green Revolution in the 70's. The need to "not waste food" is an artifact from before food was abundant. I'm hopeful like you that we can do it for energy as well.
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by sskates 10y ago
I remember one of the most mind blowing moments for me was the big reveal halfway through Knights of the Old Republic. Dunno if it counts as "changing my worldview" but it was the same feeling I got after watching The Matrix- I di
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by sskates 10y ago
Each individual still has a ~50% chance of being unable to find their name using the query sequence protocol. By agreeing to the same query sequence their success modes and failure modes are now linked. If there's a cycle of 51 or grea
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by sskates 10y ago
This is awesome! I love the competition slide how more startups are mentioned than big companies. I remember back in 2010 a response investors (even YC!) had to almost any idea was "won't Google do that?" Now it's not st
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by sskates 11y ago
CEO of Amplitude here, there hasn't been much in the way of how to use analytics to systematically improve your retention- hoping to change that today. Happy to answer any questions.
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by sskates 11y ago
I think what was missed was that a lot of people feel inequality is inherently bad, independent of the cause. I think both sides are mostly talking past each other on this one. It's possible for the fact that an entrepreneur getting ri
86.
by sskates 11y ago
Not sure that giving liquidation preferences to common stockholders would be fair- the idea with a 1x liquidation preference is that money into the company at least first goes to repaying the principal on the investment first before rewardi
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by sskates 11y ago
Once you get to 0.01% per employee it's not a strictly profit maximizing decision. It's more of a way to align people and make them feel they have ownership. Agreed on the second point.
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by sskates 11y ago
Dilution is unpredictable and what's worse is you have the principal agent problem where employees who are affected don't have a seat at the negotiating table. You're definitely counting on upper management/the board not
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by sskates 11y ago
"Dead equity" is a tricky problem. On one hand, you've granted ownership and ownership is supposed to have significant upside for exactly the case where the company goes gangbusters like this. On the the other it still someho
90.
by sskates 11y ago
Equity has no intrinsic value and I'm glad you recognize you can't pay rent with it. Founders who try to claim otherwise are being deceptive and I wouldn't work for them either. Much worse if you get insulted and called an id

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