I believe Eric Vishria is the best Series A board member of this generation. I've learned more from him about it what it means to be a great CEO over the last 10 years than anyone else. I haven't heard of another founder who has spoken as highly as their Series A investor.
I've been meaning to write up my story with him. Now is a great time with all the horror stories on others that have been coming out.
Drew was the original inspiration for me to get into startups. He was a few years ahead of me at MIT and did MIT's Battlecode competition as well. He introduced me to Hacker News, Paul Graham's writing, YC, and the Silicon Valley ecosystem. What he built with Dropbox was the first proof point of the YC model. I'm tremendously appreciative of what he's done for the next generation of enterepreneurs.
I love the launch! Automated observability that feeds back into the product development process is the future of this category vs having to spend a lot of time configuring and managing the infrastructure yourself.
It's something we've thought a lot about at Amplitude. We'd love to talk.
Chase- thank you for what you've done in creating Watsi to impact 33,000 lives! It also made me believe in the potential for non profits to create a positive impact again.
Norman Borlaug's story is amazing. He brought modern farming practices to Mexico and created a new strain of high yield disease resistant dwarf wheat at quadrupled wheat production in the country. Did the same in India, Pakistan, and Africa. Saved a billion lives as a result. Solved food as a limited resource for the first time in human history. We've now gotten to transcend food scarcity as a society.
It's super cool that the US Mint is commemorating his work.
That's too bad that the TC article read that way. They returned more money to investors than what was put in, which puts them in the top ~20% for acquisitions of this scale. The crazy part is even a lot of the 1B+ privates aren't able to do that (eg Lacework)
The current plan is to port all existing functionality to Amplitude's platform as quickly as possible. We'll then migrate everyone over in a way that doesn't break existing functionality and continue running it indefinitely. We're working through the details now.
I share your skepticism of B2B companies making claims of being AI driven! Most stuff I see is a thin wrapper around an existing workflow where the AI isn't adding any meaningful functionality (also see: crypto).
We've been very deliberate about integrating AI functionality in a way that's additive: recommendations, proactive insights, and summarization are all areas that are a leap forward in the data space. What the CommandAI team has done is legit- it's their fastest growing functionality in terms of usage. We'll have more here soon.
The number that was reported in term sheet / pro rata did not include any stock, which was a big part of this deal. The total consideration for CommandAI was north of $45M. We're working with them to issue a correction. Long story how the wrong number got reported- mostly too much telephone. It was also a good outcome for their investors in that they were able to return more than what was raised.
We at Amplitude approached the Command AI founders about joining Amplitude. They had a bunch of runway and good growth numbers. They were initially planning to raise another round of fundraising to continue to scale their business instead. It took some time on both sides to figure out what the win-win combination would look like.
We're honored that they decided to combine with Amplitude and are excited about what the combined products look like.
Wow- a lot of similarity to what's important with analytics today! Depth of analytics and speed of queries were their key competitive differentiators. Those are still ones we hammer at Amplitude. Also individual visitor history drill-down (we call it user timelines) is one of the most used features in Amplitude today.
I have a huge amount of respect for the Urchin team. They had to figure out everything for the first time on their own with nothing to go off of while going after a much smaller and earlier market.
Public company CEO here. One of my rules that has served me well is "don't ever be on the other side of a transaction from private equity". They have blatantly anticompetitive playbooks where they buy up all the competition in a market and then raise prices as a cartel. Mostly recently, the DOJ has opened a criminal probe into RealPage for price fixing in real estate. What a scourge on capitalism.
I am thinking about this problem at Amplitude. The holy grail of the martech space has always been to predict someone's next action based on what they've done before. What's exciting is that we have one of the largest datasets to be able to do that. Done right you could have products proactively do those actions/change itself to make those actions easier. If anyone is interested in this problem, please reach out!
Ferruccio and Enzo- congratulations on the launch of June! I've been very impressed by what you've built with June. I love that you've gone deep with the B2B use case- I think there's a lot of depth to that well. The leverage you're getting out of AI is an early preview of where I believe insight generation in this space will go. The combination of the two is powerful.
I'd love for you to add Amplitude (amplitude.com) to your guide. Ensuring we have the same easy out of the box experience GA does is a top priority for us this year. Let me know how I can us get added!