Today 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.
We get into:
- Why 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
- The 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
- Wave, 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
- Why he thinks the most ambitious operators, including a SaaS "legend" he looked up to, are driven by insecurity rather than confidence
- The Norman Borlaug story that convinced a 20-something Spenser to bet his entire career on tech instead of academic research
So much more!
TIMESTAMPS
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01:08) Spenser Skates, Co-Founder & CEO, Amplitude
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01:36) Why video games stopped feeling like real achievement
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08:50) Growing up in Cambridge and hating a life scripted by other people
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15:04) The Norman Borlaug story that convinced him to bet on tech
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20:14) Convincing Curtis to leave Google and co-found a company
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24:55) Playing StarCraft until 2am while pretending to build the startup
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29:04) The exact test for knowing when to kill a startup
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32:30) Why half a founding team's time should go to customers, not code
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35:02) The identity crisis of going from founder to CEO of 800 people
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40:35) Burning the boats on the old Amplitude to go all in on AI
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42:33) Wave: the AI engine that rewrites products using their own data
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48:49) Why insecurity, not confidence, drives the most ambitious operators
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56:01) Betting on his partner Anne and being "single until Series B"
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