John Cutler: preference

Transcript context

…Oh geez. Well, the immense amount of gratitude, definitely, mention that, wonderful people, wonderful customers. Just imagine like if you're a product nerd, one day you're with Amazon, one day you're with Ikea, one day you're with LEGO, one day you're with Intercom, then you're with a two-person startup, and then you're with Figma. So, really, once in a lifetime experience to be able to do that. In fact, if I had been a paid consultant, I never would've been able to do that. Another thing too is that there's this sort of selection bias. If you're a consultant, people come to you to work with you, but often I just had to talk to whatever team wanted access to expertise at Amplitude, not necessarily me. So, I didn't get to dictate A lot of times the conversation. It's like, shit, I'm not doing a very good job here. This person thinks in a very different way to do that. So, yeah, a lot of gratitude. I would say it got really heavy a lot in the sense that my son was born, three months later, I start the job, and then the pandemic kicks in, and every day you're absorbing just attention from teams. You're meeting leaders who are about to leave. Five days later, you're meeting people who are trying to save their team from the pandemic, imploding everything they're doing. Yeah, I'm joke about the product therapy thing, but I would finish the day at 2:00 or 3:00 and then have to do another one. Wake up at 5:00 to do an EMEA workshop, 5:00 to 7:00, be two in workshop, then take a break, then do another two-hour workshop, and then talk to a leader about how everything was going to explode, and then another leader. And then I was still on a team in Amplitude, so I might go to my own meeting where we're working through our own challenges, and then it's 4:00 or 5:00 in the afternoon. I'm done. Oh, to be able to do that. And then I think it also left me with a couple key lessons we could probably go into later when we're doing it. One, you are talking to a bunch of different companies, achieving the almost similar results in very, very different ways. They behave in different ways, the context in the pandemic or the economy. You would see the pandemic kick in and then you would talk to 50 companies that were dealing with the ramifications of it. So, it's kind of funny, I joked with someone at Amplitude, they're like, "We were going through our own shit," and I'm like, "Yeah, and I've seen how 50 other companies are going through their own shit," where this is you're doing it. So, the power of context. The regional differences were so fascinating. I was on with a teen that was based in India and just the passion and curiosity. There was not one jaded person in the room. There was not one person like, "Been there, done that. When's the performance review cycle ending?" or anything like that. It was just all-out passion and hunger for information. So, those days were amazing. as not one person like, "Been there, done that. When's the performance review cycle ending?" or anything like that. It was just all-out passion and hunger for information. So, those days were amazing. So, yeah, you talk a lot about it, but it definitely, it feels like a relief in some ways because the amount of tension to do it. And so, for my next plan actually what I'm doing is I'm going to work at Toast in a couple weeks, and I've been in touch with a leader there, Craig Daniel, for a long time, kind of really liked what he did at Drift. But I think that what I realized over the course of these four years is that I wanted to pivot back to help put most of my energy into helping my own company. They're growing super fast, so the numbers are in the hundreds of everything or in the thousands of everything, and they're not just the POS business. They've got these different businesses, like guest services and back office stuff and things. Amplitude is a super horizontal, if you think about it, it's almost like a diagonal, and so it made your head spin, and I kind of wanted to go back to a vertical SaaS. There's a company here in Santa Barbara called AppFolio that I like working at, and I really had a soft spot for vertical SaaS, but I'm thinking put my energy into an internal team for a little bit to pivot back into that. And so, I'll be helping enable product teams and sort of doing what I was doing, but within a company as well. So, it's going to be an interesting shift. You touched on so many topics that I want to dig further into, and you also talked about where you're heading next, which I was going to ask, so that's great. Thank you for covering all that. By the way, I was just going to also say, lucky Toast, wow, to get John Cutler. Go them.…

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