Segment

“The, when they wanted to close an enterprise contract, they would buy a billboard right in front of that office and they would put their ad on that billboard addressing that company specifically. And it would be like the cheapest way to close a six, seven digi…”

“Segment is a funny business in that where we started was building these integrations, right? And so it's like, oh, you need to wire up, like, the same data going to, like, Mixpanel and Kissmetrics and Google Analytics, et cetera. And I think just writing that …”

“So astronomer focused on the airflow company started in 2018, and it kind of grew out of previously astronomer. The company had started before, and we were focused on something else. We were building a clickstream product. So if you know, like the company segm…”

“Segment was very good at what they did. And we were always playing catch up. And when your job is to play catch up, you know, that's not something that makes it feel very sustainable. It doesn't really give you that much room to innovate.”

“We talked to segment five years ago. And they were one of the first pioneers of this stuff. And they had some small startup in India with like, 3000 dollars in their business, in their account. They turned on Segment, and then they sent them a bill at the end …”

“It's just, I mean, it's just not worth, it's not worth it without having 30 people saying, yes, I need this one very specific thing.”

“So the insight was, charge by person, or they called it monthly tracked user, or MTU, because Google Analytics has that concept... And so they were like, well, that's something that's familiar to them. So that's where some of the art over the science comes in,…”

“They applied to YC with this idea. It was to let professors who were giving a lecture, like, poll their students, and, like, no one wanted this.”

“I met both of them at the Series A, and both of them told me the entire story in like five or 10 minutes. And it was super clear. And at the end of the five or 10 minutes, I couldn't think of any questions to ask because they had already answered any question …”

“It hasn't been able to make segment, make any money. Which it's paid billions of dollars for.”

“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.”

“Segment was kind of like that at the beginning, and they ended up going upmarket. Often when that happens, a void is left behind because the original concept That was more for engineers and it was flexible and simple. That concept was still right. It's still r…”

“Monetization comes first, open source for acquisition comes second. Other way around is, like, super hard, my opinion, huh?”

“That's what we found at Segment. Really crazy attribution logic, where we found engineers across jobs by, and that's the unique lesson, keying not on the link, not on the email, because the email changes, domain changes, not on the name, that's not relevant, o…”

“I have one example. Zapier did that for very, very long. I talked to the Zapier founders. I talked to Mike when I was at Segment, and I wanted enterprise features, and he said, gee, we love you, but I'm sorry. We're not going to build those features. I'm like,…”

“And I have never seen a companies I've worked with, neither at Segment or at Drift, Gorgias, or Ram, and not in one of the companies I engage with, where we were able to get to fifty million on one channel. Not one.”

“I think one of the things that we've learned at segment is that the faster you ship, the faster you learn all of the ways in which you were wrong. And all of the ways in which you can make it right. Reality and customers and procurement teams are very unforgiv…”

“At Segment we had a bunch of really technical founders, right? So we had four very talented, very product-focused, and very technical founders. We also brought in product-focused engineering leaders early on. We never really had a CPO in the traditional sense.”

“In the early days, that segment would swing pretty wildly between, you know, 90, 10, zero, really honing our, the quality of our core product in the early days to really periods of innovation where we're trying to Expand, build new products, and really solve n…”

“And so I think there were periods where, you know, we weren't investing the right focus in integration quality. And I think that ended up showing up in some really hard conversations that we had with customers and realizing that we had probably been too focuse…”

“I think if you looked at Realized, it would probably GitHub or Segment. If you look at Unrealized, maybe Benchling or Monzo,”

“At Segment, there was a lot of pressure, and we did also in a positive way, learn lots of lessons from Stripe, but we were very different to Stripe, even though we would develop a sole product. And too much of the Stripe lesson was Detrimental actually to bein…”

“You know, talking to customers is very powerful, but in this case, just that simple use of kind of connecting and threading those technologies together could really get a good picture of that without needing to engage customers.”

“Companies like in the reverse ETL space, like census and high touch are effectively reinventing the CDP reinventing data movement tool like segment on top of the data warehouse.”

“The low price was signaling to their customers that maybe their product wasn't valuable, or it couldn't be trusted in the long term.”

“So while they didn't actually get the thousand x price increase, they were able to increase their price a 150 times from a 120 dollars a year All the way up to 18,000 dollars a year. And it wouldn't have happened if they didn't ask for the higher price.”

“What they actually did was we work with them and we kind of identified that monthly tracked users, what was a much better metric into how customers perceive value. And that was the more fairer metric for customers. Like if you're tracking more users in segment…”

“I was actually rejected when I first interviewed at segment because one of the pieces of feedback was, well, you came from Google. We don't think you're likely to be that scrappy.”

“Do not ever build a process or a structure or a team or anything until you know what problem you're trying to solve.”

“Selling into a new category is really challenging. It's a different type of challenge retools, a new category segment was a new category. You're not just selling a point solution. You're not just selling a product. You have to create budgets. You have to creat…”

“With Segment, we, you know, we went about this exercise as, you know, is there a category that truly reflects exactly what we do? And we went down a path, you know, for a number of years where we said, we're actually not a CDP. We are not a customer data platf…”

“In marketing most of my team members know this they actually carry a number, and we are just so focused on just, you know, the entire funnel conversion we forecast our MQLs, we look at conversion rates, you know, from MQLs to, you know, sales qualified leads t…”

“What I tell my team is, hey, let's make sure whether it's 10% or 20%, I want you to take that budget And innovate. And we actually put, you know, OKRs around innovation, so that way you don't run the risk of just channel fatigue”

“Forget, you know, all of our, you know, other tactics by far recipes you know really convert well and, you know, people over and over again. Ask for more. So that engagement is huge.”

“We just went straight to the top of Hacker News, got hundreds of upvotes, thousands of stars on GitHub, thousands of email signups.”

“I guess the way I approach things is very depth first. I think using a narrow curiosity to maximum benefit to just go insanely deep, In an area. So like, for example, if I have a meeting on diversity, equity, and inclusion, I'll go try to like read a few piece…”

“Yeah, one way is to black box it and basically say, what is the outcome of great marketing? What's the outcome of great engineering? And measure the black box and not bother to inspect inside as to whether the box isn't, like, being done well internally, right…”

“I think if someone lacks humility, at least on some of those dimensions, yeah, they're not going to grow, so they're stagnant in their capacity, whatever that is. So to me, it's a huge warning sign, actually. If there's someone in the company or one of my dire…”

“No, you know, it took Jeff about 18 months to convince me that it was the right thing to do.”

“Identify a critic in the company. Identify a sign that would either, that would even convince the critic that there's something here. If you can't hit that sign within a period of time, you should move. So, like, don't trust The faith of the optimist, like, tr…”

“There's no foreign key that ties these two systems together. There's no way to deal with different user identifiers. You would have to just go to your engineering team, And ask them to copy that data in all these different places, and then you deal with other …”

“The most traditional will with what most of our customers do is they pay us on a per customer per month basis. So basically account holder. And that's for our kind of end-to-end platform.”

“We have institutions as small as, you know, two or three hundred million in assets to institutions that are in the top 50 in the country.”

“So we charge anywhere from like a five to six cents based on what features are using in our product all the way up to 15, 20 cents per month. And that's on a per account basis. And it's also scales based on how many account quarters I have.”

“Oh, we raised, we've raised over thirty million dollars.”

“So we have very small amount of direct customers, so we don't, again, we work with channels, so we probably have about a dozen or so institutions that we work with directly, but beyond that, we have, you know, over 50 institutions, if you're looking at that, i…”

“We have 24 people.”

“What we're doing on the library side is we're categorizing all that data, so we're seeing, you know, billions of transactions a year, and so we see those transactions and we're categorizing them both by the technology that we built, but”

“A simple example is like, we're going to connect our application, our calendar, our payment app, which is Stripe, Datanize that enriches data, and we're going to send all this data to a tool called Segment.”

“Today we're running about 300 different microservices, which are kind of piping together various Kafka topics and reading and writing, transforming this data, getting it to where it needs to go and our backend is primarily written in Go.”

“I think 90% of node shops run on some part of his code.”

“For us we don't have any set process that teams have to follow at segment kind of individual engineering teams, sort of like what Spotify does are able to self-organize. They're able to run however they want. If they want to do sprints, that's cool. If they wa…”

“Kind of the trick that I've started using is in one-on-ones actually asking each person what they think will happen over the next three or four weeks. And what I find asking one to one is that one people don't anchor against each other's answers. So you get a …”

“So while we grew remote from about the first, I don't know, 10 or 15 hires, we then only grew locally through about the next 70, and then only recently started opening remote backup.”

“I think if I were to start again today, actually I'd build two or three versions, which I just intended to throw away. Maybe this is biased on prior experience, but I think the fact that you can get reps in a very safe manner, where then when you're really rea…”

“Segment helps companies give their customers a better customer experience, and we do that by helping them organize all of their internal data about all their interactions with the customer.”

“But now the world is moving much more to a Warby Parker kind of world where you're not interacting with a person. So a CRM doesn't even make sense. It's like not the right technology for understanding what interactions you're having with the customer, and inst…”

“At the very beginning, we actually launched as an open source library on Hacker News. And it took off there, blew up basically overnight.”

“So almost no one actually uses the open source version.”

“We were actually even raised money at demo day with this idea about 600 K.”