Optimizely

“So for example, a few years ago, I invested in a set of companies based solely on the fact that I would have used them at my first startup. I would have used Stripe for payments. I invested in Stripe. I would have used Mailgun for email, and so I invested in M…”

“I then made my first investment. It was in a company called Optimizely, and it was just small angel investment. And I thought this A-B testing platform could come in pretty valuable, could come in pretty handy.”

“That is the one where in that moment I should have just said, okay, we're going to crush them and do product analytics. I think too much of my ego is associated with that. I should have been more Zuck like and just said, okay, they didn't accept our offer. Let…”

“But Starbucks, you know, Starbucks.com, a guy there who's in charge of optimization and conversion for Starbucks.com, had that experience, and he saw forgiveness, not permission to put, you know, to run our product. For 79 dollars a month, he put our A-B testi…”

“I have 10 years I put into my last company and I can recognize that really Only three or four things that we did made the difference in the success or failure of the company.”

“With 20 people today, I feel like we're having a greater impact and ship faster than we ever could with a 120 people and software engineers at Optimizely.”

“Another example is segment. That's something, another area where it was adjacent to what we're doing. We tried to acquire them. They were later stage. Then they said, no, they ended up being successful.”

“Many, many examples of this, you know, from moving to the enterprise too quickly, to sort of not recognizing the core of what we had, to sort of abandoning The core problem of solving churn”

“I tried to buy Amplitude when there are four people. In fact, they were about to raise their, I remember we're sitting at, I think at Chipotle and Soma with Spencer. And I, to this day, I'm so impressed with, I just, I was offering him insane amounts of money,…”

“The caliber of person that I can hire today is far, far better than the person I could have hired, you know, when I started optimizing. So I do think that's a huge factor as well. You can hire much better if you, and certainly if your first company did okay, d…”