Jeffrey Wang: evaluation

Transcript context

…So that's the future of Amplitude. And a lot of people here probably want to start companies and whatnot. So maybe you want to give a 60 seconds of why you started Amplitude and what the story was like and maybe the first three to six months, what the challenges were. Yeah, of course. It's funny that we talk about this because the start of Amplitude is actually almost more AI than the current state. And so actually my two co-founders, Spencer and Curtis, they went through YC originally with not Amplitude, but SonaLite, which was a text-by-voice company. So it was kind of before the era of Siri and those types of technologies where they wanted to build something that would read text messages to them, that's easy, but also do voice recognition so that you could send text messages, say when you're driving, without having to pull out your phone. And so they worked on it and it was really popular back when they were doing it. After they finished YC, they realized the big innovation that they needed to figure out in order to make that successful was being really good at voice recognition, which was a different problem. They're awesome software engineers, but they don't come from an ML background. And so it's like, okay, are we going to spend the next five years solving voice recognition? Not really the thing that they had in mind when they were building product. But one thing that they happened to stumble upon as they were working on that was they spent a lot of time thinking about, hey, what was hard about that product? What made users churn? What made users really love it and engage? And they built a bunch of analytics tools to help them understand that. And they were really kind of shocked that those tools didn't exist out there in the market or they were like much more primitive than they wanted. And it turns out a bunch of other people in their YC batch felt the same. And they were like, hey, that analytics thing you're building, we want that. For you to text by voice, we want your analytics product. And so they're like, okay, fine. We will pivot, natural language and voice recognition isn't really our thing. And so we'll do distributed systems and analytics instead. That's where I came in. I'm a distributed systems and analytics guy. And so I happened to get in touch with them just through some mutual friends at the time. And then, yeah, we kind of went on it. The funny thing about a lot of things in technology is that the most forward thinking companies with respect to a lot of technologies are gaming companies. And so a lot of AmpliG's early start was either gaming companies or companies with founders that came from gaming backgrounds, where in gaming people have always been very, very rigorous about product data and optimizing engagement loops and all of that. And so they look for the best tools. We went to Zynga 15 years ago. It's like, that's where product analytics originated. And so a lot of those founders of new startups who had left Zynga were like, hey, that thing that you're building, that's trying to figure out patterns and user data and use that to make better products. That is exactly what we want after leaving Zynga. And then from there, that was Amplitude. Yeah, I think famously other gaming companies would be like Slack, right? Mr. Butterfield tried to make a gaming company and failed and made Flickr. Then he tried to make another gaming company and failed and made Slack. And now look out to see what he does next. Discord as well. That's right.…

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