Optimizely

“Think of, you know, tools like Optimizely. That's a SaaS tool that, you know, when I first moved to San Francisco, I remember how big they were and everyone's talking about Optimizely and, A B testing. And it's like, well, this is the future of that auto resea…”

“At Optimizely, the hardest part of building our first product was building this website editor. That would work with any other website and would allow a non-technical person to go in and build an A-B test without writing code. And that ended up taking us at le…”

“I realized the acquisition was this amazing moment where there's gonna be all these great people who are suddenly looking for a new gig. And if there was a place I could gather them up, like it would just be this incredible shortcut to hiring. You could speed …”

“For example, at Optimizely, we used a tool called Built With to figure out whether prospects were using analytics tools and JavaScript frameworks. Because those were signals that a company was relatively sophisticated and cared about their website.”

“When Dan and I started building, we booked demos with all of our competitors, and every single one of them used a dummy website to show what it was like to use their products to run A-B tests. And we thought this was really lame. So we spent weeks building a f…”

“The single biggest mistake that founders make is thinking that implementation is the customer's job.”

“In fact, we closed six-figure deals with customers that were excited about our product, and then we discovered a year later when it was time for them to renew that they hadn't run a single A-B test with Optimizely.”

“We actually had this example at Optimizely where we were building software to help companies run A-B tests. But at the earliest stages, we got companies to pay us just to go in and manually build A-B tests. For them. Right. And so we're making money. The first…”

“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.”

“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…”

“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”

“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…”

“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.”

“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,…”

“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…”

“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.”

“The wedge is cost-cutting, but the upsell is analytic, because basically, if you had walked optimizely 10 years forward in an ideal world, that's this.”

“I love sort of interesting analytics plays because retention is pretty high in that you are not judged based on performance, unlike marketing tech or sales tech or any of that, like you're tied to performance except for analytics, right? Nobody gets rid of Goo…”

“That being said, it was like a niche inside an industry as opposed to a large TAM problem. And so I think we just fundamentally hit a TAM ceiling here. We, Had a great product for a great market. That was very narrow.”

“If I look back at the things that I did at Optimizely, my last company, the vast majority of my time and effort was wasted. What really mattered was like getting two or three things right. That ultimately led to our success.”

“You know, I still, when I talk about optimizing, I like to say I reached a hundred twenty million in ARR and 450 employees.”

“We're a team of 20 at Rewind, and we're more productive. We ship faster than we ever did when I had a team of 400 at my last company.”

“My gut says we should do A, somebody else thinks we should do B, and it turns out poorly. There are plenty of times we said I should do A, and it turns out poorly. I don't remember any of them. The ones I remember are like these deep existential, my intuition …”

“Today we have 20 people and rewind we had 450 and I feel like with 20 people we're able to do more and execute faster and be More tightly aligned than and ship than we ever did at Optimizely.”

“And had I chosen one or the other, it didn't even matter which one it was, we would have been massively successful one or the other. I mean, there's now huge companies that are, have been built and been successful by doing that. So I know we would have been mu…”

“Whenever we started trying to compete head to head with Optimizely, it just totally flopped. They had a nice WYSIWYG interface, and they sold to marketers. We sold to developers. But if we got in a sales cycle against them, it just completely disintegrated.”

“This company optimizely went through YC on winter 10, and they put this prototype literally in a couple of days, and the reason why is that they had applied with YC with a very different idea. They started with a Twitter referral widget, and that idea didn't w…”

“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.”

“And so I think this is a company that may have, you know, kind of the most leverage, maybe, of all the companies we've invested in, which is, it's sort of an opportunity to make the whole world better.”

“We're lucky to have both Obama and Romney use our platform in 2012.”

“I never started the company thinking this is a ubiquitous problem. In fact, we got more lucky than good there, realizing that the problem we faced in the campaign of wanting to do A-B testing, enabling non-technical people to do A-B testing, was actually a pro…”

“Today, the best products are bought. They're not sold. People come to Optimizely, and they try our product, and they convince themselves of the product before they even talk to a salesperson on our team”

“Every org chart at Optimizely, the manager's at the bottom of the org chart, not at the top of the org chart.”

“Every meeting at Optimizely, the notes from that meeting, including the board meeting we had last week, get sent to the entire company.”

“So in 2012, ah, we became the number one most adopted website optimization platform in the world. We actually had Obama And Romney using us extensively, which is great.”

“We didn't have features that people assumed were, ah, must haves, things like multivariate testing. We didn't have that for a year and a half.”

“Adobe you know, has a product that, you know, has been evolved through acquisitions, which turns what they're offering into what our customers tend to describe as a Franken-sweet. It's a bunch of products that don't really integrate well with one another.”

“They've seen 70% of the decision gets made before sales person is involved. So they use Optimizely. They've got a team of hundreds of people doing A-B testing, optimization every single day that don't require developers to be involved in the process.”

“Dan raised a series A when I think you were already ten million dollar run rate. He went from a million to ten million on almost no capital.”

“If you haven't implemented Optimizely, we would actually proxy your website and inject Optimizely into it, so that you get that sort of visceral magical feeling of making a change to your website without requiring a developer.”

“If I had to give myself advice to a past version of myself, I think a lot about that, and I think about optimization. I think that it would have actually served us better to be more narrowly focused on a set of customers and deeply empathize with their biggest…”

“I interviewed the first hundred people at Optimizely, and that means I also interviewed probably the other, you know 209 hundred, whatever people that we didn't hire.”

“Why did we start so early codifying our culture? It started really with this pragmatic need to be consistent. We would interview a bunch of people, ah, on a day, and at the end of the day, the interviewers would get together and do a sync meeting. And soon I'd…”

“We try to seek missionaries, not mercenaries. So people who are really focused on title as part of that process, ah, to me is a red flag. It means that they're about trying to make their LinkedIn profile look good, not how to make our customers wildly successf…”

“Now, the values are different from the behaviors. The values of transparency, for example, I think are pretty, ah, universal. Behaviors within the organization, such as an early one that we had, which was that every time we'd have a meeting of two more people …”

“I think when we invested at the A, your payback period was three or four months.”

“I'd rather somebody With a chip on their shoulder, who wants to have an opportunity in our company to prove that they can do great things, ah, than somebody who has the pedigree or resume that says they've done it before.”

“I think early on, ah, and still, even to this day, ah, we're very underpriced. People look at our product and, you know, when they're thinking about renewing, they're looking at the millions of dollars of Lyft they're getting, ah, and maybe the hundreds of tho…”

“Looking back, what I would, wish I had done differently is, is have a small team of folks working on getting six reference customers who are using the product, paying for the product, and are willing to be public spokespeople for the product as a way, ah, to r…”

“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 think a good example of someone who's using a company people have heard of is Optimizely. Optimizely uses us to one, understand people who are in their trial flow and onboarding flow to help get up and running, start creating experiments. Their team can get …”