{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"The Luba Show","title":"Amplitude went public at a $5.6 billion valuation. Now its CEO is rebuilding all 800 employees around AI","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":3786,"description":"Automate Compliance (and get $1,000 off!!) - https://vanta.com/luba\nToday I walk with Spenser Skates, co-founder and CEO of Amplitude. Spenser shut down his first startup, a voice-to-text texting app called Sonalight, a year after it got into Y Combinator, spent years going through what he calls an identity crisis moving from founder to CEO, and has grown Amplitude into a public company of roughly 800 people, and now he's rebuilding it around Wave, an AI engine that rewrites products using their own data.\nWe get into:\nWhy he and his co-founder Curtis intentionally shut down Sonalight a year after Y Combinator, even after a Demo Day that got them press and tens of thousands of downloads\nThe customer research rule he now enforces at Amplitude: talk to 30 teams before writing a line of the original product, and only build if a real chunk of them say yes\nWave, Amplitude's new AI engine that scans a product's own data and rewrites its features, including one fix that tripled a customer's AI usage overnight\nWhy he thinks the most ambitious operators, including a SaaS \"legend\" he looked up to, are driven by insecurity rather than confidence\nThe Norman Borlaug story that convinced a 20-something Spenser to bet his entire career on tech instead of academic research\nSo much more!\nTIMESTAMPS\n\n(00:00) Trailer\n(01:08) Spenser Skates, Co-Founder & CEO, Amplitude\n(01:36) Why video games stopped feeling like real achievement\n(08:50) Growing up in Cambridge and hating a life scripted by other people\n(15:04) The Norman Borlaug story that convinced him to bet on tech\n(20:14) Convincing Curtis to leave Google and co-found a company\n(24:55) Playing StarCraft until 2am while pretending to build the startup\n(29:04) The exact test for knowing when to kill a startup\n(32:30) Why half a founding team's time should go to customers, not code\n(35:02) The identity crisis of going from founder to CEO of 800 people\n(40:35) Burning the boats on the old Amplitude to go all in on AI\n(42:33) Wave:...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/YqzaHw3n0IkFjbaJ3P1-kJdgx8xK8KM9hpwhFomu37c/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS8yNTdk/NDE1ZWFmMmZiMGJk/YWZmODg0ZDZmMDYy/M2Q1Mi5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}