Fireside Chat with Amplitude CEO & Co-Founder, Spenser Skates

Hello everybody, this is Carlos. I'm the founder and CEO at Product School, and today I'm here with another founder and CEO. His name is Spenser Skates, founder and CEO at Amplitude. Welcome to the show, Carlos.

Fantastic to be here. Hello everyone at Product School, huge fan of the community and what you are all doing for product managers. It's always been— product management is so new as a function, it's always been hard to find great communities, and so just love all the content and all the different folks that are a part of it and very, very excited to come talk to you all today.

Thank you for that. And you've been an OG in the product world as well. I know that you started your company in 2012. So that's what, 11, 12, 14 years ago?

Yeah, when we first started Amplitude in 2012, so 11 years ago, I remember venture capitalists told us there was no market for tools for product managers. Product managers were the smallest function in an organization, lowest budget, and no actual direct authority. We've since proven them wrong with the success of Amplitude and hopefully many more companies after us. And so it's, it's been fantastic to see the change in the industry and how important product management has become.

Well, you proved them wrong. And I believe it's going to keep growing, but I agree, when I started the company, it was a couple of years after you, same thing. People would come to me and say, hey, you cannot teach product management. You need to be a visionary. You need to be born with this type of talent. And clearly now we've seen the rise of the product function, many more companies having chief product officer, many CEOs having a product background. And I think that's only going to keep growing.

Absolutely, absolutely. One of the things we talk about is the product manager is now the general manager of the business. Growth through your digital product is the best way to grow your company, and every single company out there understands that, and product is leading the way.

Spenser Skates, I'm excited to start this conversation with you because it's an incredible journey that I think other product leaders will be inspired by. 2012, early, early days, you have an idea. What is that idea and how did it evolve?

So the first thing we started with was this company called Sonolight, and it was a voice recognition app. And me and my co-founder Curtis had just graduated from MIT. We had known each other there because we were friends, we lived in the same dorm, we liked playing video games together. We also competing competed in this coding competition called Battlecode. And for those of you who don't know Battlecode, it's MIT's largest programming competition. You have hundreds of teams with thousands of people competing together to create this artificial intelligence for a video game. And they battle the AIs against each other, and you see who the top ones that win are. And we ended up winning it my junior year. And one of the really interesting things about it was that there were so many people who had done the coding competition who had gone on to start companies. So the founders of Dropbox came out of it, the founders of BenchLink came out of it, there's a lot of other amazing companies that came out of that competition. And so we said, hey, maybe this is something that we can do too. So we tried out lots of different ideas. The first real one that we did that had any traction was this one called Sonolight. Voice Recognition, and what it was, it was a mobile app where you could send and receive text messages from your phone by talking to it. And we had this really cool demo where I would take my phone, I'd put it in my jacket pocket, and then I'd have a conversation with it. I'd say, "Hey, text Curtis," and then it'd talk back to me, and we'd go back and forth like that. And it was this really amazing demo, and we, as a result of, our demo, we actually had the most— we got into Y Combinator, and then out of Y Combinator at Demo Day, we had the most press out of any single startup coming out of that. So we had something like 10 articles across TechCrunch and VentureBeat and all these other publications. We were called Siri on steroids. We were one of the hottest companies coming out of the batch. The problem was that our users were not sticking around. So they'd use the app, they'd try it out for fun. We got a few hundred thousand downloads, but after a week or two, they drop out of it. And we wanted to know and understand why that was. And so we ended up building our own analytics in-house to figure it out. Long story short, we realized that the technology for voice recognition just was not there enough yet. And so we needed to shut the app down. We ended up starting Amplitude very shortly after, and this was June of 2012. We added my third co-founder, Jeffrey, at the time, and then we started growing and took off like a rocket ship there. Everyone wanted to understand the same insights. What causes users to engage? What features people are using? Where are they getting stuck in the process? There's all these questions about the user journey that they had. That they weren't able to get out of their existing data tools and they came to us for it. So that was kind of the founding story.

So from a BD, from CV for Android pretty much in 2012 to what is Amplitude today?

So we do, we're a digital analytics platform. We have over 2,000 customers, $250 million in revenue. We've since taken the public company public back in 2021. We're the leader in digital analytics. As part of it, we have analytics, CDP, experimentation, and soon-to-be-launched session replay. So an all-in-one stack that allows you to understand what your users are doing, engage with them, and make better decisions and products.

And you've been basically the CEO throughout the entire journey?

Yes, yes, that's right. I'm the founder CEO. And then there's two co-founders, one Curtis and the second one Jeffrey. And the three of us are all hardcore engineering backgrounds and scaled this company from the beginning. I ended up having to learn how to transition from an engineer to a salesperson and then a manager and large company executive. And so it's been quite the journey.

Yeah, well, as, and it's a journey, as you said, it's over 10 years to have an overnight success. And I like the story of like pivoting from something that had some traction, but maybe not enough, considering the other opportunity that you saw as you were building the first product. And I wonder who was wearing that product hat in the early days?

I ended up being on the front lines of product. When you're really, really small as a company, we didn't really need a product management function. And in a lot of ways, we all were product managers. One of the things that we did was spending half our collective time as a founding team talking with customers. I think that's one of the things, especially engineering-centric founding teams, don't do enough, which is talking to their customers, whether that's to understand what they need, to understand what their problems are, whether that's to sell to them, making sure to spend your time on that. After we added Jeffrey, I switched full-time from building the product to just talking to customers all the time and then kind of bringing back feedback to the team. And the basis of that, we'd say Hey, you know, what do we need to do to get the next customer? Well, we got to build X, Y, and Z. And that was effectively our product management in the early days. And we just find more and more opportunities to do that. And it was a very manual effort at first. It was kind of winning one customer at a time. I can name you all the first 10 customers that we had at Amplitude from Super Lucky Casino, which was a slots game, to Keepsafe, photo sharing app, to The Hunt, which was like this social media platform, to Hey Labs, so like, you know, to Ardeo, to QuizUp, if any of you remember QuizUp. So it's just, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out, okay, what is it we need to build?