No Reset Button: Reinventing Amplitude in a Post-AI World (Spenser Skates)

Innovation is the biggest driver of long-term growth. Amplitude's core advantage is we built a machine that can out-innovate any of the competition out there, getting a lead in a very crowded market as a result. As a founder CEO, you are always leading from the front. As large company executives though, it flips. Your mentality shifts from how do I lead from the front to that wasn't really good enough. You guys got to do a better job on this. That's really, really hard. Look at the roles. Of what a king is across different societies. You have to be the chief general, the chief justice, and you have to be the chief priest. Fast forward to modern times and what the role of CEO or executive is at a company is actually quite similar. You have to say, where are we going? What's the strategy? And then you need to rally and inspire people.

Welcome to Grit. I'm Juven, partner at Kleiner Perkins, a show where we go beyond the highlight reel and explore the personal and professional challenges of building history-making companies. Today we have Spenser Skates, the CEO and co-founder of Amplitude, the man who turned a data problem into a billion-dollar business when he was 22 years old, coming out of MIT. In 2021, he took Amplitude public, and now a ton of people use it. But more interestingly, Spenser has become very philosophical and thoughtful about the way he thinks about being a CEO and founder. Enjoy the episode. You come from the internet and cloud era of SaaS companies.

We do. Yeah.

You know?

Yes.

And it's almost like that era is a bit of the redheaded stepchild right now.

Yeah. You know, technology cycles always come in waves. I think you had the, you know, so you had Yeah, cloud applications and SaaS, you had big data, you had mobile, all of which we're a part of. Um, and then more recently you've had crypto. Um, and then most recently, of course, you'd have AI. And so, you know, this stuff comes in waves and it, um, goes. The interesting part is that there's a lot— I think AI is still very early in the data space. If you look at what AI is great at, it's sifting through and understanding large data sets. And surprisingly, there's not been actually much activity within our domain. So if you look at data, data analytics, understanding of user behavior, there isn't really anything actually. There's nothing. And so I think there's an exciting opportunity for us done right, but it's early days on it.

Do you think that Do you worry that the person that's going to write the data story in your category is going to be some upstart AI company that fundamentally builds this from the ground up within your tech stack?

Yeah, we're very— architecture— we're very paranoid about that. The thing that's different about this space though is that the ChatGPT, all the text-based models, Midjourney, all the image-based models, they're all based on open-source datasets. So those are widely available on the internet. When you start thinking about user data or customer data, there's only a few companies that have large datasets on that, and we're one of them. So we have trillions of data points across billions of users doing all sorts of things and lots and lots of different web, mobile apps, other types of applications. And so there's not this open source dataset that you can just create a model and train on. And so we're one of the few companies that's in a position to do something like that, which is a very exciting place for us to be. Now, does that still mean that some other company can't come along and potentially do it? Like, no, like, yeah, so we're paranoid about that. So we did this acquisition at the end of last year, Command AI, where their team is working on parts of that. We're going to be coming out with an agent later this year that does a whole bunch to help you understand, explore, act on the dataset that you have in terms of your users. Because product— I'm getting the whole pitch for Amplitude, but Software is this static thing. Like, Jubin, the copy you get of an application is the same as the one as I get, is the same as one as every person in the world gets. But really, software should be customized on a per-person basis. That gives us an ability to create a product experience that's customized for you or customized for me or customized for every single person out there. So we're in the very early days of that, but we're in a special position because we have this dataset., that's not, you know, there's no open source equivalent. No, it's not widely available.

Yeah. Like the, maybe a reframing of that is that as the incumbent, you have a data advantage. However, as the incumbent, you have an architectural disadvantage. Absolutely. Because of the 8 years of baggage that you've been building for 13 years, 13 years of baggage, in this case, baggage that you've been building on a tech stack that might look very different in the future. Yeah.

Right. Yes. Yes, absolutely.

Like that's, that's the kind of the question in the industry right now.

Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. And like, and don't get me wrong, I mean, running a $300 million public company, it's like, you know, my brain's like pulled in all sorts of directions. You gotta, you know, make sure we have good quarters, you gotta report on the results, you gotta manage the organization. So I am not a lot— it's very hard for me to be singularly focused in a way an early-stage company can be singularly focused on solving a single problem. So I strongly agree.

Totally. Like in some ways, Do you ever feel the urgency of a refounding of this company?

I think the way you drive innovation in a larger organization is you have a team that's insulated from the rest of the company that's focused and dedicated to it. So it's not like we're trying to throw out our existing business or redo that or rebuild that. It's like, we have this product that does a lot of amazing things for our customers and analytics and experimentation and a whole bunch of other things. But, you know, you have this effort that you want to drive where you want to get the best people working on it, focused on it. And they in a lot of ways need to be insulated from this other thing that you've built. And so that's what I think a lot about, which is like how do you create the right environment for this group that's, that's driving a whole bunch of innovation?

Yeah. And is it something as simple as like put them in an office that's different from your office?

Oh, that— I mean, that, that's a good way people do it. I think one of the ways that I'm thinking a lot about is how do I find founders who are working on this problem, acquire them into Amplitude, and then drive, bring that mentality because they've been immersed into this problem for, they're looking at it, they're immersed in AI for years and they have a very different perspective. And the key is to disconnect the rest of their efforts from the main company. Let me give you one example of the thing that happens is whenever you have a hot new initiative, AI agents in our case, every single existing person in the company is like, I want to be a part of the hot new thing. And so you have meetings with salespeople and marketers and ops people and finance people. I mean, everyone, they just want to be part of corp dev and they, they want to be part of the hot new thing. And you actually have to insulate their efforts from the rest of the company because they can't be— they have to be hyperfocused. They can't be thinking about, well, what's our strategy to synergize with Amplitude's existing, you know, product or organization or efforts. It's like, no, no, they just have to be immersed in their world building this thing from the ground up. And so this, um, yeah, it took us a while to get that right. Um, like it's happening now in AI. I just got off— part of the reason I was late is I just got off a call with my CRO and, you know, they weren't in the loop on some meeting we're having with the Anthropic team. And it was like, oh well, you know, who's in charge of this thing? And part of it's like Hey, I actually kind of want to insulate this team from you and from what you're trying to do. So, um, but you know, he, you know, there is stuff. And so one of the, one of the things we did on a, on a, uh, on a previous innovation is like, okay, there's a once every 2 weeks meeting. And other than that, you're not allowed to access that group. You know, don't pull them into anything because you'll be distracted with all this existing company stuff. So that, that's actually the thing I think a lot about, which is how do you create an environment that's similar to an early-stage startup where this group can hyperfocus on a problem and get immersed in it and not be distracted by everything happening and the complexities at a larger organization. Right.

But then if you're working on the core product, you know, you're thinking about your career, you want to be able to have the talk track of, I built the AI agent for product analytics at Amplitude. You know, you're bringing in new blood. To go do that stuff creates friction. I mean, it's a management problem.

It is. So one of— we actually just had this happen in the last year at Amplitude where we've been focused on going from an analytics company to adding all these other capabilities. AI agents, one of them, but also experimentation session, if you play guides and surveys. And so the people working on analytics are like, "Oh, are we important too?" I actually, I, I made a, I, I joked a little bit about it at a Halloween celebration where we did, where I dressed up as, uh, Old Man Analytics for the company. And that was, that was a little too on the nose in retrospect. Um, we got a lot of, a bunch of folks working on it. Uh, the point though, the point, the point that I made to that group though is that analytics is always the core thing at Amplitude. And so by working on that, you were working on the flagship product for the company. It's like if you're at Oracle and you're working on databases, Oracle has never forgotten it's a database company. And there might be some new flavor of the month or of the year, like, oh, now AI's hot, or now cloud's hot, or now our Workday competitor is hot, or now whatever, our ERP thing is hot. But the people working on the database at Oracle know they are working on the most important thing at the business. And so I made that point to the analytics team because that's why we win. If you see why someone buys Experiment or buys Session Replay or buys guides and surveys, because we have the best analytics, not because we have the best experimentation or we have the best guides and surveys. And it'll be the same on the AI thing. The reason we'll be great there is, as the point I made earlier, is because we have great data and great analytics, not the other way around. And so You have to, yeah, you have to understand that, yeah, there, you know, there's a tension of working on the hot new thing, but like, look, this thing has no traction, you know, no success to speak of. You know, you're working on a zero, you know, you're going from working on a $300 million business working on a $0 business. And so there's, it's, one's not better or worse, it's just, it's just trade-offs. And, and part of my point is that there's really exciting, attractive things of working on the most important, yeah, the most important piece of Amplitude's success. Yeah.

It's just, we're in a really weird space in time right now where AI companies, as defined by whatever, but like this era of AI companies are getting a 30% premium to—

A lot more than 30%. It's nutty, you know, to see some of the valuations, as I'm sure you know.

Yeah. I mean, like even, you know, like some of the companies we've already talked about are, you know, are getting valuations higher than yours. Like, I think you're trading at $1.5 billion. Yep. With maybe a sixth of the revenue.

Yep. Or even less than that. I mean, you'll get companies that'll be— that, that, that will have a billion-dollar-plus valuation that will be— have, you know, $10, $20 million in, in revenue. And you're just like, you know, okay, cool. Good luck, guys. You're gonna have to grow 10, 15, 20x just to get, you know, to the same place that we already have here at Amplitude. Absolutely. Does that frustrate you? Um, I, I think a little bit, a little bit, but you can't, you know, at that, you know, it's, it's— well, Warren Buffett says the market's a voting machine in the short term and a weighing machine in, in the, in the long term. So, you know, that'll all come out. I do think our stage, so a few hundred million dollar companies, either private or public, is undervalued right now. If you look at any metrics, any of the typical metrics where you look at multiples relative to growth rates, that stage in particular is undervalued compared to the, say, billion-plus publics or compared to the really early-stage stuff. So that makes it harder to operate in some ways because your equity, you can't spend equity quite the same way as companies at other stages, but that'll correct over time. And it's just what it is. Markets always go through cycles.

How big revenue-wise was Amplitude when you went public?

About $150 million in ARR. Pretty early. Yeah, yeah. We went, we went public very early.

And at the time when you went public, which was what, like 4 or 5 years ago? 3 and a half. 3 and a half years ago. Was it also considered early then?

Yes, we were. We were. I mean, it used to be way back in the day in the '90s, like if you go back, you know, companies with sub-$100 million would go out. Then it wasn't okay, like after Sarbanes-Oxley and all the compliance overhead that that introduced. You had to be $100 million-plus to do it. And then most recently, companies have been— Stripe's the canonical example, but there have been lots of other companies that have put off going public for a very, very long time that are in the billions or even more of revenue. And I think personally that's a mistake. I think I think the complaint I always hear on it is, "Oh, the regulators and the bureaucrats will take over," which is true. You're going to add a lot of regulators and bureaucrats as you go public, but you cannot forget it's not their job to lead the business. It's your job as the CEO, as the founder, to talk about what the trajectory is. I mean, Jeff Bezos never let that stop him. Steve Jobs never let that stop him. Gates never did either. Ellison never did either, you know, and they all, you know, went public relatively early on in the life cycle of their businesses. And so it's really a leadership problem where you have to be really clear about where you're going and why, and not let the, you know, next quarter stock price mentality dominate your thinking, which frankly, a lot of weaker CEOs and weaker leaders let let that happen when they go public.

Yeah, I think there is an argument to be made that is made about morale and stock price and how that influences the vision. However, I also think there's— so like what the Collison brothers would say, which is what they said recently, was, oh, I don't need like a junior analyst from Morgan Stanley, you know, like telling me how I should run my business or whatever. That's fine.

Like, that's like I don't. I agree. I agree with him. We would all agree with that.

I agree with him.

Yeah.

Then there is the third camp, which is let's take a Databricks, for example, or a Rippling, where they want to continue to make big product bets that are heavy investments in R&D that just take time to play out. That maybe the public markets aren't the right place for that?

Yeah, I mean, there's—

Do you buy that argument?

So first, I think I actually agree, you shouldn't let analysts tell you how to run your business. And I think that's one of the things that people do get wrong about who's leading— I have this phrase, who's leading who? It's your job as the CEO to say, here's where we're going and why., and the people who want to follow that can, and the people who don't, that's on them. So we're talking about taking a business public, but let's look at another aspect of building a company, which is building a great product. Since the rise of cloud and SaaS, and in particular for cases like Stripe, you're building that in public and you can get criticism from lots of people online about crappy things they love, hate, want to change, or whatever about your product. That doesn't mean you have to listen to them, but it's input and it's valuable and it has its place and it's part of building a product in public. Building a business in public is no different from that. You can get input from analysts, junior analysts at Morgan Stanley or this, that, and other people on WallStreetBets forum or whatever, but it's still your job to say where this is going and why and and to lead that. People who want to be a part of that can select in and people who don't can select out. So I don't buy the argument that exposing your business to the public markets all of a sudden degrades your ability to lead it. In fact, for great leaders, it should enhance it because now you're getting feedback. One of the best examples of this is actually Meta. Zuckerberg got pressure from public markets at different points in time. First, when they first went out, in terms of the revenue growth and their ability to catch the mobile wave. Then secondly, more recently in the last few years on getting more operationally efficient. I think that was actually a good thing for them to get that feedback. Zuck responded in— It's not to say he said, "Okay, he's abdicating his leadership and he's just following what these guys say," but it was good feedback for him and the business to hear and how they constructed it. We're so used to building products in public where anyone on the internet can use it, take it apart, criticize it, copy it, change it, whatever. Building a business is no different. You're just doing that with kind of opening up the books in your kimono to everyone out there, and now you have to be able to withstand the feedback and criticism and opinions that come along with it.

Do you feel like there is an argument about markets being open and closed, meaning periods of time? Like right now, people— there's a lot of conjecture about what it means for a market to be open or closed. Sometimes I wonder if that just means like founders just don't want to go out.

You know, I think, well, I, you know, I'm old school, so like I'm going to give you my view on this, which is not necessarily the correct view. An implicit promise you are making when you raise venture capital, particularly at a Series A, is that you at least try to take the company public at some point. You'll try. Not to say, yeah, vast majority never go public, die or get acquired or whatever, but at least you'll take the shot at it. So if you're going to go do that and you want to be part of the venture high-growth ecosystem, part of the implicit promise you're making to the new owners of your company, aka venture capital, is that you're at least— or to your employees or to whatever stakeholders that own your equities, you're at least going to try to take the company public at some point in the future so that they can get liquidity and receive a return on their investment. And without going public, You can't do that. And there's other constructions, but they're worse. You can do secondaries, but how do you even know that that's the fair price for that equity to trade at? We have these wonderful systems, exchanges that trade in many things, including the equity for public companies. And you know by trading it, you're getting a fair price on that equity. And without doing that, how do you know that the price is correct for ownership of your company? It's made up. You guys see it at Kleiner Perkins where you're just like, "Okay, hey man, if I could sell equity at some crazy valuation, someone just did a round, I would," because you know that you have a strong view that that's not going to materialize. And so you don't get strong price signals without that. And so my view is that if you're playing that game where you're a high-growth technology company raising venture capital and giving out equity and options to employees, you're making an implicit promise to get your company liquid at some point.

I think that's fair.

Yeah. And do you feel like—

like, let's just— can we take the, like, bull and bear case of you being the incumbent?

Yeah, no worries.

Like on the, on the, like if this plays out great and you have a data advantage as an incumbent in AI, like this is going to be a huge company. Absolutely. If it doesn't play out great and you're architecturally inhibited, whatever, whatever reason it is, some upstart beats you to the punch. Like if you're Sketch and Figma comes around.

Yeah. If you're Figma and Canva comes around. Yeah. Yeah, I don't— so one of the things that I have always said in Running Amplitude is that innovation is the biggest driver of long-term growth, because I think the, the vast majority of our category still has yet to be built. And the reason I say that is because I'm terrified of exactly the point you make, where As organizations get larger, their ability to innovate dramatically slows. Um, there are some, some things which you do get more resources in scale, but as a gen— in general, as a company, you can only focus on— no matter how many resources you have, you can only focus on, on a few things at once. And yeah, we, we still need to build the vast majority of what has to be done in analytics and AI agents and experimentation and the whole category of what Amplitude is built around. And so I'm incredibly paranoid about that. Um, and I think about that all the time. And so I'm the top— I think of Amplitude's core advantage is not that we had any amazing insight about the product or the market or the data architecture. It's that we built a machine that can out-innovate any of the competition out there. You know, we ended up ended up winning in, uh, or at least getting a lead in a very crowded market as a result. Um, and so I agree, it's not like I can't take it for granted that like some innovative new company will come along and build something better and faster than us and take the mantle on the, and the, you know, early lead that, that we build now. Um, and so I'm hyper paranoid, and so that's why I always come back to Innovation's the biggest thing, uh, the biggest driver of long-term growth for Amplitude and for this category. And so I'm always thinking about what are impediments to that and how can I drive that, how can I make sure we have top talent, um, great engineers and great people in product development to continually drive and build that innovation. Um, I think a lot about how do you structure the organization to allow them to ship very quickly Uh, it's been a controversial thing since starting Amplify. People are like, oh, ship fast, that means low quality. It's like, no, no, shipping fast means you get through more iterations, and number of iterations is the best predictor of quality for any process. Um, yeah, and, and we're always watching the market and what else is going out there because there's lots of brains out there that are also thinking about creating innovations in this category. And so we know we're not the smartest people out there, and so we want to make sure that that doesn't catch us off guard and we can learn from things that, that companies have built too. And so I agree, like, that's, that's the thing that keeps me up at night.

Does it actually keep you up at night?

It does, it does, it does. It, especially as you get larger as an organization and things naturally slow down, like the stereotype for most SaaS companies between $100 million and $1 billion is that the innovation slows, which is why your example on Intercom is so amazing. You know, that they're going to such an extreme and talking about refounding the company. Because you have a thing that's working, just do that and more and more scale, you get to a billion and, you know, nobody wants to rock the boat. Um, and it's hard, you know, the more larger an org gets, there's all— there's a lot of reasons ownership gets diluted, um, you get more complexity and constraints. And so it's incredibly hard to keep that innovation muscle on. Um, and so I, yeah, I'm always like— I just started this thing up last year, which is I do a, uh, uh, 2-hour product review, um, with the team every week to just be able to cut through with that and just say, hey, here's where we need to make changes. Like, one example is we had a, uh, we had a 12-step signup process which was— had all sorts of crazy stuff in it. Like, you had to create a URL for your org, and you had to do email verification, and you had to, like, fill out, like, a 15-question questionnaire and all this shit that's like, why are we asking new users to do this? This doesn't make any sense. But the reason is, is because no one owned that whole experience. They got diluted. It's like, well, this team owns the email verification, we have to do that for security, right? And the marketing team wants all these questions to come in so that their leads are qualified. But it's like, no, no, no, this is not a great signup experience. And I want to get this down to 3 screens, create a username password, get in your data, see charts. That's what I'm looking at. We shouldn't be asking anything else out of users. And so that had gotten calcified over 5 or 6 years. And so I ended up working with my chief product officer, François, to create a weekly meeting to cut through that. And we made very big changes over the course of 4 or 5 months. And launched, relaunched the product, and it was, it was great. And so I, yeah, so yes, I do, I do stay up at night thinking about how is it that, like, it's not just an expression in driving innovation.

It keeps me up at night.

Yeah, it's not like, okay, let me, let me, let me tell you, let me tell you how it manifests for me. I, I have a spreadsheet that every week I write down what stresses me out at the company. Because just putting that to paper and articulating it helps you control it. And if you look at that spreadsheet going back years, there's so much— a lot of it's people stuff, frankly. But a lot of it is about, "Hey, we're not moving fast enough to make this change I think we should be making in the business." That's the core. If you had to pick out the top theme running through it, that would be the one. You write that every week for years? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

It's very helpful. How many things in a week show up on that spreadsheet?

3 to 6 or 7.

Is it just like a sentence or is it a full sentence?

Yeah, a sentence, a phrase. 3 to 7. 3 to 7. Yeah. So It's actually been a very helpful tool for managing my psychology because the biggest reasons— I'll tell you about this. So one of the things, one of the patterns I noticed is that even among successful companies, somewhere around 10 years in, the founders will leave. And this happened, if I look at the peer group for Amplitude right before, you look at Optimizely, Mixpanel, PagerDuty, Intercom's actually an interesting case too, founders all departed. If you talk to them about why that is and you get them to open up about it, it comes back to their frustrations around the people and their frustration with managing such a large organization with all these opinions that conflict with theirs and their ability to affect change through it. So one of the tactics I've used, and I don't know, I should look at it, it's actually probably like 6 or 7 years I've been doing this now. Wow. Is, well, I'll write down what stresses me out. And most acutely, that'll be around, tends to be around some interaction from a people standpoint. And where that blocks me from affecting whatever change I want as fast as I want to. And so that helps naming it. I can't remember where this came from, but there's this mantra that's like naming something gives you control over it. So by writing it down, the stress goes from floating around in my head to in the spreadsheet on the screen, And that allows it to be managed. It's like, okay, now the spreadsheet has the stress.

I don't have the stress. Yeah. Do you think if you looked back at that spreadsheet, how much of the things that you actually stressed about even materialized? That's a good question.

Like, are they real? I think a lot of them.

Or are they just like figments of your imagination?

No, no, no. Most of the time they're real. You know, let me— let's pull it up.

Let's pull it up. And while you pull that up, I'll tell you, I have the same spreadsheet. It's in my notes. It's just a note. It's just a note. And every week, every time something stresses me out or makes me anxious, I just add that thing to the notepad. It's the same. It's the same reason that— it's the same reason that, that you do it.

Yeah. Are you reading through it? Yeah, I'm looking at it. Yeah, I'll just read some of these to you. I won't say names. Feedback to executive, different executive role, feedback on building trust and vulnerability. And then the third thing is how to hold people accountable. And then the fourth thing is a third executive interfacing with leadership team. So anyway, just to give you a flavor of— and so writing it down, Um, yeah, allows, allows me to take the stress out of my head onto the spreadsheet on a screen. Um, and that gives you much greater control over it, and that makes it so that you can compartmentalize that much more effectively.

That's super interesting. And are all—

are you— you're married?

Yes. No, no kids. Is When you think about stress, does it start with work and then work backwards into how things in your life, whether it's work-related or apartment-related, influence your work?

For sure, work is by far— is, is the stress in my life. This other personal stuff, moving apartment, like, that's like—

like, is moving apartment stressful for you because it's like then it takes away from work?

Um, yes.

So yes, I'll tell you, like, the calories that you spend dealing with moving apartments is being dislodged from work. Yeah.

And that stresses you out. Really early on, I did this exercise of what would the ultimate founder look like, and Here's what I came up with, which is no other commitments outside of work. So no family, no debt to pay off, no like, "Hey, I have this hobby." No nothing, like nothing, singularly focused on that. No attachment to money, so willing to live very cheaply and not spend anything. Obsessively curious about the work. So like just obsessed with and really curious about whatever. To build a successful business, you got to do X, whether that's hiring executives, building product, learning technology, whatever, recruiting a team, you know, raising from investors. Um, No willingness to work for very long periods of time with no success, and so no ego attachment to the success of what you're building. And so just having humility about where you are and what success you've had. So anyways, it's all these very, very extreme things. I remember reading this thing Peter Thiel was like, "Yeah, notice CEO pay is anti-correlated with has a weak anti-correlation, like it's oppositely correlated with the success of the company. I'm like, "Okay, that's easy. I don't pay myself anything." Okay, to the extent that's causal, that'll help. And so it was a very extreme, almost like a fanatical archetype that you drew. Yeah. And so I said, "Okay, the more I can be this person, the more likely it is I will build a successful company." And so that's how I wired my brain. Before you started the company? Yeah, right around when I started. This was like when I was This was 2011 when I was 22 years old, just leaving my job to come build a company. So I kind of wrote all these things. I'm like, "Okay, I have to be this person. The more I am this person, the more successful I will be. And what's interesting is the vast majority of people out there are not willing to change who they are mentally to go do this. And so I'm going to have an advantage over them." And that was That was one way I attacked building a company is very— and trying to be almost too extreme on all the dimensions I just outlined. Fast forward, we're now 14 years later, and that served me well. I'm more successful than my wildest dreams on Amplitude and what we've built. Way further. I mean, yeah, I'm still shocked at— if you actually ask me to sit down and think in retrospect about it, I don't really have time to, but if you force me to, I'd be like, "Yeah, that is kind of crazy." So I'm incredibly lucky with the success of it. And then you get to this stage and you realize life is longer, there's other facets to it. You know, I've been almost pathological about building this business for over a decade. And so, you know, it's okay to make space for other things, and that makes it sustainable, and that allows you to go from doing it for 10 years to doing it for decades. So that's the change. That's the change. And so, you know, things like, hey, I got to move my apartment, whatever, like, you know, it's fine. Like, there needs to be space in my life for other things— my wife, my family, my my living setup, what have you, and that allows you to sustain even longer. We were just joking about this, a lot of myself and Curtis and Jeffrey and some of the early folks at Amplitude, it's like, yeah, we work way less hard now in our 30s than we did in our 20s back then. And that's part of being more mature and evolving in life. And so you shouldn't just try to keep being, you have to evolve into what the new thing is in order to make it sustainable and long-term. We also joked about like, man, we got to We got to get more folks who are kind of pathological like we were when we were in our 20s.

Are there any things on that list that you— okay, so like apartment, great. You like increase size and space.

Yeah.

You also like have more money, so it's easier to do that now than when you were like 22 living in your co-founder's room. Yeah. Are there things that you're not willing to relinquish?

From that identity? This takes up a huge amount of my life. This being Amplitude? Yeah, building a company, Amplitude, the business, me being a founder, CEO. And I thought at some point I would have to relinquish that to focus on building a family, getting married, having kids. I was lucky enough to meet someone, my now wife, Anne, who we've been together almost 10 years now, who actually embraced that aspect of me, the fact that I was so obsessive about building a business and the craft of doing it and just intensely focused on that. That means I don't actually have to relinquish that. That part of my life. And so now other stuff has changed, like the money thing. That was a very long, very long, very long disagreement between me and Ann, and I realized I was overly stubborn. You should pay yourself, basically. Well, yeah, I should pay myself a reasonable amount, where I realized I was being stubborn.

Can I ask how much you were paying yourself that would frustrate you?

It was really bad. I mean, you know, at first it was like $30,000 or $45,000 a year. Well, first it was nothing for a while, and then it was like $30,000, $45,000 a year, like a tiny amount. And then eventually I got to like closer to market, but still on the low end, you know, as I get to $100K, you know, now, now I like pay myself $450K a year, which is still in like the bottom 10% of comparables if you look at public company CEOs in my position. But I was like maniacal, you know, where I'd be like, I'll stop paying myself anything, you know, and we had like a very small living space and, you know, we It was— it just made— I, I was attached. I was in love with the religion of, of not making money, where it's like it forced you to be scrappy and focused, and you don't have all these things to, you know, like to say more money more problems. You don't have these problems and other aspects of your life to, to deal with. But I, I realized that was, that was overly— that was, you know, it was too much, um, for its own sake versus, hey, it helped me be—

and you're trying to set an example for the company, right?

Totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You lead by example on that, that If you're the most overpaid CEO, then everyone's going to be asking you for raises. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's— there's also a lead by example part of it. But then, you know, I ended up realizing that was just stupid on my part. And, you know, there's actually, you know, there's things that unlocks too. You know, you have more resources to save time in ways and to get help with other things in your life. And, you know, and there is a part of you that does genuinely enjoy nicer things sometimes. So I just, you know, that was an example of a where I was— I would call myself pathological on it, and I needed to— and it was— I should have changed my mind earlier on it. Is there anything else? Took me time. Um, I mean, just making— you know, I've gone from 95% of my life space for building a company to maybe like 70%. So still, still the vast majority of it, but you know, you have a little bit of room in your life for, uh, family and for relationships and for other piece— parts of your life, and you know, for other interests. Um, so yeah, you know, it, you know, but I'm still working.

Can I ask you an honest question?

Yeah.

The, from the 95 to the 70.

Yeah.

That 25%. Yeah. Do you enjoy it as much as you enjoy work?

Do you genuinely—

the other stuff, the things that you've opened up that space for? Yeah. I don't know what it is, whether it's exercise or hanging out more and doing dinner. Do you, do you, do you actually enjoy it more or do you feel like you should be doing that?

No, no, no, no, no. I, if I didn't want to do The other thing, there are elements of— Well, let me kind of categorize a few different things. No, there are other parts to my life and I genuinely enjoy them. I will say it's easier to just be a zealot and to just be like, "Hey, I'm focused on this no matter what." You just don't have to think. It's just like, "Okay, what is the thing that's going to make Amplitude successful? Do that, block out everything else." It is easier.

It's actually less cognitive load.

It's much less.

It's much less. It's like why Jobs wore a black turtleneck every day.

Totally. Just eliminate the load. You don't have to think about it. So it's easier in a lot of ways to be a zealot. It's much more straightforward. You don't have to make those calculations. So that part is harder. But that balance is what allows you to go much further and much longer. I think we have an amazing opportunity and potential, and that's real. I'm not just saying that. I genuinely do believe that. I want to set up to go do it and take advantage of it. And to do that properly, that's a many more decades thing. And so in order to do that, you have to construct your life in a way that's sustainable where you do have space for other things. I remember when I was 22, I remember I would compare myself to— I would think about people who had way worse life situations because that made it easy for me to be fanatical about building a company and the stress and life change that came with. I remember if you go back a generation, our parents, you know, you— or at least here in the US, you'd be drafted to go fight in Vietnam. It's like, man, hell, compared to, yeah, being a conscript in a war, yeah, this is easy, you know. If we're successful, we get paid for it. Or like, you know, if, if, uh, there are people who give up all their, their possessions and go become a monk in a monastery, it's like, hell yeah, starting a business is way easier than doing that. Um, so I just, you know, I channeled a little bit of that energy just thinking about like, okay, let me Yeah, you know, let me be that person or compare myself to that person and think about, okay, this is actually— yeah, as bad as the problems I think I have are, this is, this is easy, um, compared to all of that stuff. And that helped me be crazy and fanatical and everything else. And now, you know, you fast forward 14 years later, it's like, okay, you know, you— do you want your entire life to be only that? No, probably not. You know, there are other aspects to it that are important too, and so it's good to make space for those.

Did you feel like you were misunderstood? Were other people like, dude, 'Let it go. Relax.' Did you feel like maybe it was your wife with some specific things, maybe it was people that you would hire, did you feel ever frustrated that people thought you were trying to be somebody for the sake of being somebody? And in your mind you're like, 'Yeah, that is what I'm doing. I'm trying to be the person that I want to be.

Yes. And it's very uncomfortable. Um, so with my wife, actually, the reason I'm incredibly lucky is because she values that part of me. And so, like, frankly, I guess that's a whole nother story. But I got lucky in, in her finding me, um, and her valuing that part of me. And so I never I've never ever felt like I've had to apologize or change who I am or whatever. And that's to say, you know, you obviously make compromises in any relationship, but that core part of, of who I wanted to be, like, there's no question. Um, I remember when I was in my early 20s, I was obsessed about it and so obsessed about what it took to build a company. And so that would be the only thing I would talk about with anyone. I talk about the stories of other entrepreneurs or what I'm working on or what I'm trying to figure out and learn. And not everyone's interested in that stuff. I remember a bunch of folks who were at MIT had this joke, they'd call me Startup Spenser because that's all I would talk about and they'd kind of joke about it because it would grate some of them sometimes that literally I was like a I had only one gear and that was it. Um, so, but one of the advan— one of the advantages is like, you know, I just like, part of me didn't, you know, it just doesn't care. Like, didn't care. Like, this is what I want to do. And so like, I'm very comfortable going to do that. And, you know, that's not a thing that every— a lot of people are interested in. Um, and so, um, yeah, I, I was— I've always been a person, you know, I've always been a little bit of an obsessive personality. And building a business was a good thing, great thing to attach it to. Um, you know, it's just— we had a joke sometimes with my wife. It's like, man, if we're gonna be stressed and anxious anyway about stuff, might as well be about something worthwhile.

So, right, right. I feel the same way. When, um, when you were a kid, were you this obsessive?

Um, I've always had, I've always had traits that are, you know, what they call on the spectrum. You just had to get really interested in certain things, um, and just, you know, kind of block out everything else and, you know, space out about the rest of the world.

So did your parents recognize that? They did, yeah, they did.

Are your parents like that?

They are, they are. So you were raised that way? Yes, yes. And when Maybe if it's too personal, you can tell me.

No, I'm happy to talk about this stuff.

But are your parents still around?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're still great. They live in Boston.

They're doing well.

Do they want grandkids? They do. Or no, they've always been clear. They've always known that I'm going to do whatever it is I want to do. And so their ability to They know their ability to guide that or change that or whatever is not going to happen. So, you know, they definitely do. My brother, actually my younger brother has a 5-year-old Sterling who's wonderful and they spend a bunch of time with, you know, and eventually Anna and I will have kids. So you think so? Oh yeah, for sure.

Yeah. You don't worry that that might take you away from the business?

Oh, I worry about it all the time. But you do? We'll figure it out.

Do you imagine yourself in situations where something's going on with the child and you have a problem at work and you have to choose the child and than you let something slip at work?

Yeah. I mean, people have had the— how do you make clear choices between your work and your family? And that's been a dilemma for thousands of years. And there's lots of different ways people have constructed that for themselves. So I'm confident Hannah and I will be able to figure out a way for us to navigate it ourselves. Now, the tension is real there. I think actually the biggest trouble people get themselves into is there's this whole, what I call, hesitate to say work-life balance, but idea that it's like, "Hey, you don't have to make any compromises in between your career and your family." It's like, "No, you absolutely do." You absolutely have to make choices. Your time is a limited resource, the most limited resource that every single person has, and you have to choose where you spend it, your time, your energy, your focus, your brain. And so this idea that there's no tension, there absolutely is a humongous amount of tension. And we spend a lot of time, I think a lot of people get in the trap where they pretend there's none and they think they can do everything and that gets themselves into all sorts of trouble. I think it was Ruth Bader Ginsburg that had this, that said it, which is, "You can have it all, but you can't have it all at once." So we'll have to figure out the choices. We want to have kids, we want them to have a great life. And so yeah, we'll have to figure out what the trades are with what we do on the work side. The part that's wonderful that I'm incredibly lucky to have is that my wife Anne, is very much of the same mind of what the two of us are trying to do in life. And so I have confidence that as we navigate it, we'll figure out.

In many ways now there's 22-year-olds at MIT or 18-year-olds at MIT that are studying you. Yeah. Figuring out what their archetype is going to be. Is there anything that you would have added or subtracted from the list knowing what you know now 14 years later?

Absolutely not. It was— that was— that was spot on. You think you were spot on? Yeah. Like I looked at you have to remove other constraints from your life. If you have a lot of debt or you have a lot of other obligations, it's going to be tough to impossible to start a business. You have to be obsessed about it. You have to have a curiosity that drives and you have to be willing to do it for a very long period of time. All of those are fundamental to being a founder that is going to start a successful business. And you can find counterexamples here and there on it, but generally that, that was correct. The part that I think I was late to, and I think a lot— most founders are late to, is the transition between going from a founder to a large company executive. And I feel like I've just figured that out in the last few years. Um, but I wish I had— I wish I had done that earlier. Like, the same way I obsessively studied what it meant to be a successful founder, I should have studied what it meant to be a large company executive versus just showing up being like, "Oh, shit, you have all these people with egos and problems and they want to be compensated and this, that, and the other thing." And I should have studied how do you actually make that transition and be good at it.

So do you have a new archetype now of the public company executive Spenser?

Oh, dude, I do. And I hesitate to even share it because— It's psychotic? In a lot of ways, you have to become the person you hate. So let me give you an example. As a founder CEO, you are always leading from the front. And so if there's a hard business challenge or hard people challenge or hard technical, whatever, the hardest thing you got to go do yourself because you're not going to ask anyone to do anything you would not do, whatever the thing is, whether it's on sales or product or or PR or whatever, or culture, you have to lead the best by example. And that's good because why would you follow someone who's not willing to do— Michael Jordan had this thing, he wasn't going to ask anyone to do something that he wasn't willing to do. So he realized in order to win a championship, he was too skinny, and so he needed to hit the weight room and bulk up. And he led and inspired the other teammates around him to do the same, like Scottie and others. And that was a huge part of them winning 6 championships. As a large company executive though, it flips because there's too much to do. You can no longer be the best at everything. You can no longer lead by example at everything. You don't have time. Business is too large, there's too much complexity. Now I have— there's thousands of customers, many different products, and lots of different functions with an amplitude. I can't go lead by example. On even a few of them. And so your mentality shifts from, how do I lead from the front, to, hey, it's my job to kind of become the jerk executive, manage and deploy people or resources against a problem and evaluate its impact. And you kind of feel like a jerk because like, oh, instead of being in the trenches with them trying to solve the problem, you're just being like, hey, that— A good delegator. That wasn't really good enough. You guys got to do a better job on this. And so you become this stereotype of an executive and the person you hate, which is like, "Oh, now I'm just the one crapping on everyone else's work and telling them it's not good enough." Anyway, so that's an example of a switch you have to make from a founder to a large company executive that's really, really hard. I'll give you another example of one. Compensation. You cannot delegate who gets compensated what to someone else. As the king, it's your job to say who gets how much gold. And so you have to become an expert at compensation. I had the mentality for a while, I don't pay myself anything. I don't give a shit about how much I earn. Like, why should I have to worry about how much you earn either? Like, you know, let's give it to some comp consultant HR team and they, you know, run some numbers and figure out what's fair and just give everyone— yeah, let's move on from this. But it turns out choosing who gets paid what and what the company values is an incredibly important part of a CEO's role. Like, you cannot delegate that. You can get help on it, you absolutely should. You should get benchmarks and, you know, input from others, you know, but You have to make the decision of what someone's worth or value to the company is, um, and there's, there's no getting around— you have to make a judgment about that. And that judgment, one of the ways you express that judgment is in compensation, um, and so you can't delegate that to someone else. Um, you know, there's, there's this thing, there's this ancient history thing where if you look at the roles of king, what a king is across different societies, There's like 3 of them. You have to be the chief general, you have to lead the troops in the field to win the battles. You have to be the chief justice, so you have to arbitrate disputes between your nobles throughout the realm. And you have to be the chief priest, which means you're the person in charge of asking the gods for their blessing for whatever it is you're trying to do, like you need rainfall for your next crop. And so you kind of fast forward to modern times and what the role of a CEO or an executive is at a company is actually quite similar. You have to say, "Hey, where are we going? What's the strategy? We need to go take this hill or we need to go build this product." You need to arbitrate disputes, you need to break ties, and then you need to rally and inspire people and get them excited about and get them excited for the future for all your stakeholders. Anyway, but that's a very different mentality from a founder CEO where you're kind of like the scrappy— you're the leader of the scrappy outfit that's trying to win this mission against— impossible mission against all odds. Now you're in charge of running a kingdom and that looks very, very different and your mentality has to be different. Anyway, this long way of saying I wish I had I wish I, in retrospect, I started learning about the large company executive mentality earlier, um, and gotten in front of that versus all of a sudden you show up one day and you have all these large company problems and it's like, okay, these two executives don't get along, how do you solve it? Or, you know, hey, this person feels like they're not getting enough gold, or, you know, hey, this person, you know, the troops don't feel like they're inspired, or what have you.

Do you, um, do you think that The types of problems on your worry list have meaningfully changed, like in broad stroke categories from 5 years ago to now, or do you think they remain relatively constant? Meaning, did you worry as much about the tension between people and executives 7 years ago as you do now? Um, or is that the point of reigniting a new identity?

So before, I did not have a framework and skills, or more importantly, the mentality on how to handle that, those. How do you act as a chief justice and arbitrate disputes? Well, it turns out there's actually a lot of good ways. You don't go one-on-one, you get all the people in the room and you force them to talk it out and then you navigate through it. Actually, one of my favorite phrases is if someone complains to you about someone else, what I immediately say back to them is, "What did that person tell you when you gave them that feedback?" Because it sets a whole bunch of expectations. One, don't come to me with this, you got to give that person the feedback first. Two, You can't just give the feedback, you have to hear what their response is. 90% of the time, that second part doesn't even happen where they're like, "Oh, well, I don't know." And it's like, "Okay, well, go." And so there's all these things that you learn about how to be the chief justice. And so before, I would get these problems and then be very stressed about them because I don't know how to handle them and problems almost overwhelmed me. Now it's like, They still stress me, but it's like, okay, here's the method for resolving them and I know how to get to an effective resolution that's going to be best for the company. Now, the interesting part is that in terms of what we have to do as a business, it's the exact same it was 5 years ago, 10 years ago, 14 years ago when we first started Amplitude. It's build a great product, convince customers to use it. You're just doing the same loop again and again and again, and, but you're scaling it up. The part, and, and so the intuition around how to do that well, that's, that served me. And so it's, it's the dynamics of that problem haven't changed much. You know, it's like, okay, then once in a while there's like, okay, now we have AI, you know, and how does that change things? But the fundamental motion is the same thing. It's, it's, it's, it's been roughly the same, you know, how do you build a great product or how do you convince customers to use it that has not changed. And so the knowledge I built up over 14 years allows me to have the instinct I do about how to do that effectively. The part that changes is the, okay, what does it mean to be a large company executive and running a large org that is dramatically different.

Do you, um, do you worry that some of the things that you want to transform into are just things that are not a part of who you are? It's not a part of your core identity. It's not the way that you were born. It's not the way that you're wired to become, let's just say, the priest in that example of rallying the troops. Maybe that's just like not who you are.

I I love being the priest and the general. Justice sometimes can get grating, but the priest and the general are fun. Inspire people and show them what's possible, that's great. I've been doing that from when I was obsessive about building companies at 22, so I enjoy that. It's different. You got to speak on stage to hundreds of people. We were just in New York at an investor day last week where we were reintroducing Amplitude to the public markets, and so it was fun to share. With them about what the changes in the business and what we were doing. The one part that does get— one of the transitions I'm still learning how to navigate is, so when you're the startup founder, you are singularly dedicated to the cause and you're asking kind of everyone else on the team to be so as well. Because you're fighting this battle against all odds and you need every bit of help you can get. At a larger company, there's not the same level of fanaticism. And so for all sorts of— ownership gets diluted, things get more complicated. There is part of me that misses out on that. But again, it's just different. You get people who are much more specialized in their functions. And so the picture of, hey, what the company's trying to do overall and the fanatical dedication to it, you don't get that as much. And there's part of me that misses that.

Mm-hmm. Are you tired 14 years later? Like, like, do you think part of the reason why founders end up leaving after about 10 years is just like they're tired?

Definitely.

So yes, absolutely.

Um, yes, absolutely. What? Sorry, that the reason founders leave after 10 years, a big element is they're tired. I'm not, I'm not. Um, there have been points in time where it's, it's gotten rough, but I've actually— part of, you know, going from that 95% to, you know, call it 70%, is that, um, yeah, you, you do have more space and more room for recovery. And we have— I have more help and more resources. Like, I have phenomenal— I'm very lucky to work with the executive team that I have, and the co-founders, and the board, and the, the team we have broadly at Amplitude. And so you're no longer having to lead from the front on everything. I think a lot of reasons why founders get tired is because the company gets bigger, they feel like they still got to lead from the front on everything and it's impossible and they burn themselves out. You have to understand the transition in your role. One of the advantages of that transition as well is that because you're working through other people, you actually have a lot more leverage and so you no longer— the company is not dependent on you personally and the pace that you set. It's important you set the tone of how fast you want to go and you demonstrate that and hold people accountable to that, but it's not bottlenecked. So it's important you set the standard, you have to set the standard, but it's not important you're the one driving it all the time anymore. And so that allows you to set up something much more sustainable longer term.

What were the things that you missed constructing this person? What were the things that you felt like, "I actually do feel like I'm missing out"?

In terms of being a successful founder or in terms of just being a person?

Being a successful founder. What were the real and tangible trade-offs of becoming the archetype?

Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I mean, I'll tell you a few right off the bat. First, no money for a while, a very long time. And you felt that? I didn't care. I rewired my brain not to care.

But it comes up.

You actually didn't care? No. What's money?

I already feel—

Didn't you want to go on vacation? No. I already feel I am— When I was 22, I already felt incredibly rich beyond my wildest dreams because yeah, there were certain things that weren't accessible to me, like couldn't buy a house, can't fly first class. But You can travel relatively cheaply. I'm lucky I didn't have other dependencies in life. Just being in San Francisco, you can eat amazing food from around the world for relatively cheap. I look at the luxury we have compared to previous generations, it's incredible. I have a smartphone that's smarter than going back 40 years or 50 years, all of computing ever. And so it's just, whatever. That comparison to the conscript in war or to the monk, that's what I think about. And so I'm like, "Yeah, I'm incredibly wealthy. I don't worry at all." So that's very real. Now, did other people worry about it? Yeah, for sure. I remember my mom, My mom's— so she's Chinese Malaysian. Chinese communities, you're always comparing your kids among the relatives. It's like, "Oh, my kid's making such and such money at this thing and my kid's making—" So I did a year in finance where I was making hundreds of thousands of dollars to now unemployed startup founder. It's like, yeah, she can no longer brag to her cousins about how well her son is doing and she worries about that.

You're an algorithmic trader making hundreds of thousands straight out of MIT. And then you go into complete obscurity trying to start a company.

Complete obscurity starting a company. But I knew I was comfortable with that bet and I had no concern on it. But yeah, other people worried about it. What are the trade-offs? The one honestly I feel the worst about, so money wasn't that big of a trade-off. Now it's later, now that we're trying to start a family and all of that, you feel it. But at the time it was nothing. The one I feel the most and I regret the most, it was the right choice, but I did miss out on part of that part of life is just having friends and being social in your 20s. It's not to say I didn't have any friends or anything, but I didn't focus on that part of my life and so I didn't build strong relationships with people. And so yeah, missed out on that part of life experience. And I feel bad I wasn't as good of a friend to—

Like, if, for example, on a Friday or Saturday night, if your friends were going out to dinner, going to grab drinks, going bowling, whatever, go to a basketball game, you'd intentionally say no to that stuff?

Most of the time, yes. Yeah, yeah. I'd go out once in a while, you know.

What's once in a while?

What was once in a while? I don't know, like, you know, every, you know, every It changed actually. Early on when I was first out here, I'd actually still go out quite a bit. I'd go out once a week on the weekends with some group of friends. But then as the company ramped up and stuff got more intense, it was less and less. And then I swore off romantic relationships for a while too because it was like everyone's like, "Hey, Spenser, you're too intense on this thing. All you think about—" I remember I was on I was on one date, this is way before Anne, where I was like, I always am so obsessed about the startup stuff, that's all I talk about. I need to make a point of not talking about anything startup related. I'm going to just try that. So I went out on this date with this woman and got to the end of the date and she made this comment to me. She was like, man, Spenser, everything is like career with you. And I'm like, what the fuck? Like, I made a point not to talk about any of this shit. Like, what the fuck? But it had infected my brain to such a degree. Like, I was talking about— I think I was helping my brother go to a coding boot camp at the time and trying to set him up for success. You know, it's just, you know, typical, typical, you know, 20-something-year-old that just had entered the rat race and was trying to figure it out, that like it imbued. So after that, I was like, all right, whatever, I give up. Like, I'm just— I'm not even going to try for a while on this. And then I got very lucky because Anne and I had become friends and she actually valued that part of me. And I told her very early on, I was like, "Hey, this is incredibly important to me and I'm not in a place in my life where I can compromise on it right now and you've got to be okay with that." And the vast majority of people I know are not. But she was very gracious and actually valued that part of me, and so it ended up working out. Here we are almost 10 years later. So yeah, that was one of those where it came at the time you least expected and you actually got to have this very fulfilling part of life that's even better than you expected because you get someone who values you for who you are and you value them for who they are and you have the shared vision of what you're going to go do together.

Yeah. And now do you feel like the— like, was health a trade-off for you?

It was. It was for the first few years. I was very reckless on that in terms of not eating well, drinking soda all the time, not getting sleep. Then after a while, I realized that, you know, keeping your health up actually makes you more effective on that stuff. And so it was actually good to regularly get sleep, to cut sugar. To take care of your body, to exercise. So that actually, you can go a year or maybe even a few years without doing that stuff, but it ends up being a net negative in terms of if you were just to pathologically look at your output for a company, even then, taking care of your health is a— There might be short sprints where you might not, but in general, it's a net negative for that output if you don't.

Do you feel the ramifications of not nurturing a community of friends now? Is that why you regret it?

No, I want to be clear. I don't regret it in the sense, it's the right decision in retrospect. I feel bad. I feel bad about it in a bunch of ways, but that was the choice I made. Why? Oh, because I want to be a good friend to all these folks who are friends with me and I value my relationships. And when you say bad friend, you don't respond if they text you or something? No, I'll respond now. And I'll be clear, these days it's gotten different from how I was like that. I meant like in the prime. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I remember like I'll just call him out. Like one of my close friends from school, this guy named David Chen, and he was always incredibly gracious with me. You know, he would go out of his way to check in on me and see how I'm doing. And I deeply appreciated it and I felt like I couldn't reciprocate at the same level. But he was so gracious, he even recognized that and was like, "Hey, I just want to make sure you're okay," and all of that sort of stuff. And we hang out once in a while when I go to New York and I'll see him. I texted him about this. We're both into watching StarCraft, competitive StarCraft online, and so I texted him this thing the other day on it. So anyway, I feel bad that I haven't lived up to my half as a friend to him, but he's been He's been gracious about it and I value his friendship.

Is there anything that surprised you to the upside or downside of the things that you did or didn't do that most surprised you looking back as most effective or most harmful in becoming the founder CEO that you wanted to be?

I mean, first, I'm just blown away by how far we got. I would've been happy if we were running some crappy little tiny business that, you know, somehow I'd managed to survive by a shoestring. Um, and so the fact that, you know, we've not just done that but gotten to lead the category we're doing and turn it into a multiple hundred million dollar business, you're just like, shit, like, dang, like, markets are large. Um, yeah, I never thought we'd have a fraction of the success. Um, I think I was slow to shift in terms of parts of the mentality, as I said. And then I think there were aspects that I was kind of pathological around, like not paying myself for a while. I thought it would get us more success, and in retrospect, it didn't actually get us that much success. I mean, it set the tone for who I was and that was helpful, but it caused a bunch of pain on a bunch of fronts that I could have avoided. But those are all so minor. Those are all so minor. I think it's one of these things where it's like you look at the data points, "Hey, if you change yourself into this person," and I read a lot of Paul Graham's essays, "You can find a startup and have some success." And you're like, "Great, that sounds like a great bet." And you're kind of not sure until you actually see it play out. And then you see it play out and you're like, "Wow." My gut wasn't sure if this was the case, but it turned out way better than, than you could have possibly expected.

Yeah. I appreciate you doing this. Of course. I appreciate you being so candid. I really do.

Okay. I hope I'm candid.

I can't tell. No, I think you're very candid. Are you hiring? Oh, absolutely. Are there any key roles that you want to shout out?

Any general departments? So much. We're looking for Oh, so much. I would say if you're at the bleeding edge of leveraging AI to mess around with large datasets, we want to talk to you on that. I want to personally talk to you on that because there is so much opportunity we're in such early days on and there's not many companies who have what we have on that. And so I'm personally trying to figure that out as CEO. When you hear the word grit, what do you think of? If you're willing to endure pain for a long period of time in the service of something greater, that quality trumps almost anything else. You guys have talked to lots of people on this podcast already, but anyone who's done anything worthwhile, that's the lesson through and through. And so the wisdom's out there. The hard part, I think I see most people, they'll make small adjustments in their life. They'll be like, "Oh yeah, be a little more grittier, work harder, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." But if you can rethink about who you are to think about, "Hey, I'm a gritty person. I am willing to go without pay. I'm willing to not have success. I'm willing to be obsessively curious about a problem to the exclusion of all else." They don't reframe to that extreme. So honestly, I got lucky in that I was like, "Okay, let me take that word to the extreme and see what the outcome is." And it turned out pretty good.

I appreciate you, Spenser.

Thank you.

Of course. That's it for now. If you like the episode, please leave us a review or go back into the archives where we've done more than 200 episodes with some fantastic folks. This podcast is a Kleiner Perkins production, and I'm Jubin. Thanks for listening.