Amplitude CEO Spenser Skates built a product-analytics company from a 2012 YC batch to over $100M ARR, serving 20 Fortune-100 firms. He tells founders to play offense by shipping weekly and commit to the long game. Hiring people with humility, ownership, and growth mindset matters more than pedigree.
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Yeah, hi, I'm Spenser Skates, CEO, co-founder of Amplitude. For those of you who don't know us, we do product analytics, so we help companies understand how users are using their product end-to-end. We started the company back in 2012, were part of Y Combinator's Winter 2012 batch, launched in 2014, and have since grown it to over $100 million in annual recurring revenue with 20 of the Fortune 100 and a potential IPO on the horizon soon. Advice for YC founders starting today. The biggest thing I'd say is to think of this as a long-term journey. You know, I know that that's a little cliché, but before we started Amplitude, we had done research and we had looked at companies, you know, the success of companies based on how long they had been at it. And one of the things that was really clear to us was that there were a lot of people and a lot of companies that had given up after 6 months or 9 months or 1 year of working on what they were doing. You know, none of them were successful. On the other hand, every company and every founding team who had stuck it out for at least 2 or 3 years past the start of the company had found success in some form, whether that was through, you know, building a great company, whether it's through acquisition, whether it's finding other great opportunities out there. It really is a long multi-year journey. I've been doing startups, I've been doing startups for about 10 years now. If you look at any successful, very successful company, you'll see the exact same thing there. Where it's a decade-plus long journey. And so you have to be ready for that. And that's the sort of life commitment you're making. And if you can do that, then you'll go on to find great success. I've always found that that's what separates the best founders and the best teams from everyone else. If I think back to 2012, a long time ago, what was one thing that I learned at Y Combinator? I would have to say always, always be playing offense. That was the biggest thing. It's, you know, we'd have office hours every week with our partner and the question was, what have you gotten done since last week? And what was interesting was seeing the success or the trajectory of success of different companies throughout that batch. So the companies that were able to always be shipping something new or always be talking to their users or always be moving, making progress every week ended up way more successful at the end than the ones who wouldn't. Even companies that came into YC with a lot of success, if they weren't playing offense during the entire time, you know, they would go on to stall out and kind of stagnate and not find future success. So taking that mindset and really applying it to the rest of the startup journey, YC is a very intense 3-month period. But if you can take that same focus and attention you've applied to building a business there and apply it to how you build a business over the long term, you'll end up being very, very successful. It's hard. It's hard to do. It's not for everyone. You know, there's a reason most people don't end up starting— the vast majority of people don't end up ever starting companies because it, you know, there's— it's just, it's another level of difficulty. But if If the, in some ways the easiest part is just making that choice. All you have to do is choose to do it and you can be successful. Yeah, so we're hiring now at Amplitude. We have 3 core values: humility, ownership, growth mindset. And I'm sure you've heard the sort of pitch from lots of other companies. The really interesting part to me is how those values show up in what the company does day to day. So for us, we've had a very, very lean team from the start because we believe in every single individual at Amplitude being an owner of a huge amount of stuff. And so besides starting a company, there's no better way to learn the most. If your goal is to learn the most and grow the most in your career and take on the most responsibility really quickly, then Amplitude is a great place for you to do that.
