Yes, but they later pivoted into SaaS and have gone on to dominate enterprise CMO budgets. It's one of the most impressive business model changes by a large company.
2,211 karma · joined October 27, 2010
RE startup raises these are all what I call champagne problems (is it possible to win too much?). My philosophy is to aim for a little above (eg 20-30%) "market price" for what similar companies are raising at. If you go too much beyond that (eg 2-3x) then it can start to set the wrong expectations and it can get difficult to beat in the future even if you're doing well. It's not great to have misalignment with your shareholders (eg the investors who are now partial owners of your business). There is another train of thought that says to get the highest valuation you can, investors are professionals and will deal with it. So maybe I'm not bold enough. Either way, funding markets, particularly for startups now, are incredibly rich. They're probably 3x the valuation when we did venture/growth stage funding so you'll be in great shape no matter what.
Product managers drive a lot of it, I expect that group to be spending at least 50% of their time talking with customers. They'll then bring in engineers when you have a higher priority or more technical issue as it's appropriate with customers. For particular features we have what we call "Customer Development Partners" who are the alpha/beta users for a feature as we develop the feature before we get to general availability and they'll interface with engineers. Shadi, our SVP of engineering, is also working on more ways to make this happen!
1) The number of software engineers is growing quickly, but the market for software is growing even more quickly. So engineers are becoming more scarce relatively speaking and that pushes prices up. I don't know that I'd call that an inefficiency so much as markets working properly! OTOH, that's also why you see the explosion of coding bootcamps and alternative paths into the industry. Both my brother and sister in law did a coding bootcamp and 2x'd their salaries in 6 months! I don't think there's any sort of career investment you can make that comes close. So yeah- we haven't reached an equilibrium yet, there needs to be a lot more software engineers, and everyone is struggling to hire.
2) The market is not efficient at pricing top engineering talent in particular. It's hard for most companies to tell who the top engineers are (pg has written extensively about this). As a result, top engineers are underpaid by and large across the industry and companies that figure that out can get an edge. I've always said I'm for paying 10x engineering talent 2x above the average as you're getting 5x the value! You see a lot of FAANG taking this approach as well which is why salaries for the top end for engineers is growing at an outsized rate relative to engineers as a whole.
I'm so glad we did it- so many ex-employees are able to participate and celebrate with us this week because they didn't have to worry about giving up their options after leaving. The arguments for the old method of a 90 day window were so stupid. 1) I don't want to keep someone in indentured servitude if they don't want to be here 2) top talent is very savvy and more attracted to places that don't screw them over.
I hope we can see the same for other innovations like more companies doing direct listings in the future. If you're a YC company figuring out how to go public, please choose a direct listing!
No question that the economics of FAANG is way better than an average YC company. That's an easy one. I don't have the data, but the economic outcome is easily 2-5x, maybe more.
Following cohorts of engineers are a fraction of what I outlined so the economics are different. It's too hard for me to do the work to get an exact calculation, but probably the next cohort of 10 engineers is something like 1/2 that, and then subsequent ones are down to 1/3 or 1/4. They're joining years later and so taking on much less risk at that point.
Anne and I are not that flashy. Probably get a nicer house. Give some to family. Hermes handbags is as luxury as it gets for us.
You'll get better at evaluating what directions will result in traction as you go through more ideas and spend more time.
We went through 6 or 7 different ideas, including: outsourcing website, website for finding photographers, alumni map for MIT students, Sonalight voice recognition, before landing on Amplitude.
Here's our application to TechStars for one of them when we were very early on which is funny to watch now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PIM5wWut5Q
One other place where it was correct to not listen to- everyone hated our market, particularly investors. We didn't listen to them. It was very clear to me that there was a big opportunity: usage of mobile phones was exploding, apps and web 2.0 was so different it would require a totally new form of infrastructure and tooling. Zynga, Facebook, Netflix were already embracing this approach and it was only a matter a time before everyone else did as well. I remember one very prominent venture capitalist told us they'd fund us but IFF we stopped working on Amplitude. We didn't listen to them, thank goodness!
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 there. One of the things that most resonated with me was one of the Airbnb founders talking about how they were having the same dilemma as you. But then they saw someone who had started a company and realized the only difference was that they had made the decision to start a company and that's what made them realize they could make the same choice. I wouldn't recommend it if you have other life circumstances like debt or significant family obligations that constrain you. But if you don't have that I think it's a great path.
Better: Markets are way bigger and so the ecosystem has adapted around that. Funding is incredibly abundant (kids these days...). Information on how to start a company is more widely available. There's much more experienced help available. Tooling is much easier. What's crazy is people said the funding market was too hot in 2014: https://techcrunch.com/2014/09/05/its-time-for-vcs-to-run-to...
Worse: Hiring is harder. There is a lot more competition but I think it's outweighed by markets being bigger. I think talent is still the rate limiting factor overall for the growth of the ecosystem.
There's a lot of ways people find us: events, online search for our content, our free plan, partners, customer referrals. We're still figuring this out as we scale!
RE traditional IPO vs Direct Listing, you hit my rant!
The traditional IPO process sets you up to massively underprice your stock. Instead of selling your stock directly on the open market, investment bankers sell it for you. They're incentivized to give public market investors a "good deal" by advising you to price your stock low (because they do repeat business with them even though we're the ones paying for their services!). As a result, on average in 2020, companies that went through the traditional IPO process underpriced their stock by 50%.
As a CEO I could never sell a dollar for 50 cents. It's against my fiduciary responsibility to my shareholders. I once heard one public company CFO call it "the largest arbitrage opportunity in all of finance". Why would I want to be on the other side of that?
I strongly encourage all other CEOs at taking their companies public to go through this path.
IPO underpricing data: https://site.warrington.ufl.edu/ritter/files/IPOs-Underprici...
Probably our worst failure was our 2016 outage where we were down for an entire week. I remember thinking we would lose a big portion of our customer base. What we did really well was our outage response and customer communication. We proactively reached out to customers, fully owned the mistake, and were very transparent about what was going on. As a result we didn't churn a single customer! I later heard that some investors passed on our Series B as a result of our outage. Which is so funny to hear that now because it's such a stupid criteria to evaluate a company. It just goes to show how much sheep mentality there is in the investing world. Here's the retro: https://amplitude.com/blog/amplitude-post-mortem
Product/product management is a new buying center in the enterprise. There will be a giant company built around selling to that function.
Even before you have any customers or a product, my #1 recommendation is to get engineers regularly talking to people who could be your customers. They will get so motivated to build something that will solve their problems (at least if you have the right engineers). Potential customers love talking to engineers as well as they're the ones who can actually solve their problem. Once you get a win with an engineer solving a potential customer problem, that starts a virtuous cycle where the team wants to get even more wins. I always tell people our best salesperson at Amplitude is actually our best engineer- my cofounder Jeffrey.
Ask for money for your product, even if it's incomplete. We didn't start asking for money until a year in because our egos felt we needed to have a fully functional product before charging customers. You'll get a lot of no's initially which is great because it allows you to focus on the very few yes'. If you're an engineer, make sure you're spending 50% of your time talking to customers because you'll always lean towards building product.
I'm 60/40 on the duck, it's less confusing and more clear click target.
1) It's not talked about much but this is an AMA so let's do it. Having to change our management team as we scaled. You have so much loyalty to people who made you successful it is brutal to have to hire a different set of people as you change as a company. This is true for almost every founder CEO scaling a fast growing business. Here's Larry Ellison talking about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzZOfoHzju4
2) Set your life up so that you can stick with building a startup for a very long period of time. If you're not ready to make that level of life commitment then I recommend you don't do a startup! One of the things I found when I was researching what it took to be successful was almost every great startup would go through a period in the first few years where rationally they should give up (eg Airbnb founders selling cereal). For whatever reason they didn't and went on to find massive success as through sheer persistence. We spent a year on voice recognition app Sonalight and it didn't work out. There was no question though that we would keep going with Amplitude. It doesn't matter where you start out as a founder, by sticking around enough you end up learning so much and getting more formidable over time. Eventually you outlast most other founders who quit and go on to find success.
3) I need to think more about this one. Most of the stuff I agree with, the challenge comes in understanding what it means in practice. What mantras are you curious about?
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 as founders (MIT engineers, winners of the Battlecode programming competition) to convince the first set of VCs to come in.
Once we started showing traction (0-$1M in ARR in 9 months) we went like hotcakes in our Series A and beyond.
The real test is do customers buy. If you can show that everything will follow. VCs are weak predictors of market success. There's some signal, but they get it wrong almost as often as they get it right. If you close 3-4 paying customers I guarantee you they will change their tune. The incumbency argument is pretty weak IMO, particularly in B2B. Markets are so massive these days it's easy to carve out a large niche. For example, Freshworks went public last week even though Salesforce "dominates" cloud CRM.
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 deal more generous than the median company: https://amplitude.com/blog/employee-equity-is-broken-heres-o...
Someone on the FAANG side can figure out what the apples to apples comparison is. There's no question that in 90% of cases FAANG compensation is way better. If you are optimizing for how to make the most money over a few years you should absolutely choose FAANG. The real benefit of startups comes from other forms. If you asked that group of 10 I think they'd respond that being an early engineer at a start that IPOs gives you way more career capital and long term earning potential than FAANG.
There are 3 main reasons we decided to go public:
1) The market opportunity is massive and we believe we are entering the "inside the tornado" phase where there are increasing returns to leadership. We're seeing more mainstream adoption of Amplitude as well as more companies giving a similar sounding pitch to us and we want every advantage we can have. Being public helps contribute towards that. As an example, we've gotten more press in the last 24 hours then we have in all of Amplitude's existence.
2) Having a liquid currency for our stock allows us to be much more aggressive about acquisitions and other similar moves.
3) You really should take your company public once you reach 100M in ARR. The expectation for performance across the board goes up and good companies rise to meet the moment. You're expected to do a better job of forecasting and planning your business, telling your story, sharing your long term vision, ensuring proper financial and legal oversight, and a lot else. Companies staying private so much longer has been bad for the them and for the ecosystem IMO.
We hired Morgan Stanley as our lead investment banker. As we were meeting with different banks, they were the only ones who really understood my frustration with the traditional IPO process. They also have the most expertise by far with direct listings. I was expecting a lot of resistance to my views from everyone involved in the process but talking to them was like finding a partner who I wouldn't have to constantly fight to run the public listing process "my way". Colin Stewart at MS is also probably the single most knowledgable individual on IPO/DL capital markets in the entire world.
I'll reply to some of the other questions in another comment.
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) It was a great way to grab attention from Mixpanel and others in a crowded market. 2) A lot of those companies become large customers over time when their needs become bigger and more complex. Doordash, Instacart, and Rappi all started out that way and are now huge customers. 3) A lot of those companies and people at those companies get acquired by larger companies over time. Under Armour, Capital One, and Twitter were all companies where Amplitude was brought in through acquisition of a smaller company. 4) It's not that expensive relative to your overall cost base. I believe 8% or so of our server costs go to our free plan, which is significant, but worth it.
We've never received pressure to do that, our venture capital shareholders are very aligned towards winning the market over the period of decades. We did get some stupid (IMO) questions about gross margin as we went public but no one ever gets down to the level of messing around with your pricing plan and free tier. If we were owned by private equity though it'd be a very different story. Those guys are experts at wringing blood from a stone.
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 reason some banks push you to a traditional IPO is that their real clients- public market investors like hedge funds who to repeat business with them, get a good deal on your stock.
I heard all the expected ones: not having control over your price, wanting a monotonically increasing stock price, having the price trade up on the opening for good press. It's all bullshit, if you read any of the coverage on Amplitude we were able to achieve all the goals we wanted to: https://www.google.com/search?q=amplitude&tbm=nws
My absolute favorite argument was that if you price too high, you price out people who will stick with you, and that will cause your price to be lower in the future than it would have been otherwise. Luckily, I did a year in the finance world in high frequency trading so they couldn't pull this one on me. That logic is the opposite of how pricing in a market works. High prices now are a signal that prices in the future are expected to be higher. If you want your price to be higher in the future, having it be higher in the present will increase the likelihood of that outcome. The thinking reminded me of Yogi Berra's famous quote: "Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded."
I know a bunch of other companies planning to go public were watching our direct listing to see if it was a viable path and I hope our results convince them. Please reach out if you're a CEO and trying to figure this out!