James Hawkins
Co-Founder and Co-CEO, PostHog. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutive@james406 ↗LinkedIn ↗jefhawkins.com ↗
James Hawkins is the co-founder and co-CEO of PostHog, an open-source product analytics and developer toolkit platform launched through Y Combinator's W20 batch. He steered the startup through multiple failed pivots before scaling it into a developer-first platform known for extreme transparency.
Everything James Hawkins said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
B2B brands should be weird enough to polarize audiences intentionally
“Like, it needs to be so weird that it polarizes. Every day we'll get a whole bunch of people talking about that website, and we monitor all our brand mentions online, and it's going to be like either this is literally the best thing I have ever seen, and we al…”
Sales leaders provide poor signal-to-noise ratio for product feedback
“Building for salespeople Or sales leaders in particular. I feel the signal to noise ratio is pretty poor because they're really quite willing to hop on quick calls and are very, very positive and kind of very friendly people.”
Friendly customers refusing to buy proves a product is just nice-to-have
“Because then kind of what happens when we started charging for all of these products, you would find that, oh, I'm not failing this because I don't have a relationship, or I'm like, I'm kind of friendly with this customer at this point, and they still don't wa…”
In fundraising, having an opinionated plan is better than playing it safe
“If you're trying to raise money, it's better to have a plan than it is to necessarily Be like somewhat correct, like be it either very clearly right or wrong, because you'll learn something from that.”
PostHog is building a desktop app that autonomously fixes bugs via PRs
“At the moment we're working on like a desktop app, for example, that ships pull requests based on your customer data. So we'll look across all your session recordings or your analytics or your error tracking, your LM traces, go, Hey, these are the issues we ca…”
PostHog is expanding product breadth rather than moving upmarket
“So instead of kind of going up market, we're going just across more of kind of the customer data that people are generating.”
Legacy analytics tools were built for product managers, not engineers
“We felt all the products were built for kind of product managers to force engineers to go implement, but it's like reasonably technical, especially my co-founder is a very technical co-founder was just getting annoyed at like, I can't, I want to write SQL.”
Selling a $50/month SaaS subscription takes as much effort as $100k deals
“Like in my previous job we used to sell, like, enterprise software for millions of dollars a year, and I can remember multiple times thinking I'm having to work kind of as hard to sell a, like, 50 dollar a month SaaS subscription, as I was to sell, like, a 100…”
PostHog pitched 160 seed investors versus 20 to 30 for later rounds
“I think the statistics are something like, I think we met a 160 different firms in the seed round. I think for like, if I added up the total number of people, number of firms I've met for the series A, B, C, D and E, Probably like 20 in total, like 30 in total…”
AI has created a step-change increase in software market competition
“There's more software appearing. It's getting just more and more competitive. I think it's got, it's become a step change more competitive with AI.”
Funny content generates 1,000x more reach than useful technical posts
“If I just write something I think is funny, it can sometimes go a thousand times further in terms of reach, so if I'm just trying to raise awareness, it has to be funny and that's actually the primary thing we want to get across”
B2B billboards compete with phones and radio, not rival software
“It feels like you're competing against B to B software because like there's all these like AI billboards that are quite similar to each other. But I think the reality is if you want people to pay attention, it's like, no, you're competing with like what they'r…”
PostHog has 160 employees and around 300,000 total customers
“Yeah, so we're about a 160 people around 300,000 customers across, like, free and a lot of free customers unpaid. We have several thousand paid. We have, I think, 16 or 17 products, kind of, in production or in development.”
PostHog raised its $75M Series E by pitching just one investor
“We spoke to one investor for this round. We raised him in peak 15 this one called Shalendra that is the main partner, but also Arnav is involved as well.”
PostHog launched on Hacker News in the final weeks of YC
“We started with just open source products analytics on Hacker News. We spent like the last four weeks of the batch desperately trying to get that out of the door. And then we pivot, we iterated, I would say, afterwards, and now we're all cloud-based with multi…”
14 of 15 interested sales leads never clicked PostHog's early prototype
“I got about 15 sort of series B, C, D sales leaders queued up saying they wanted to use this. Well, they said they wanted to use it. We got the first version done in a couple of weeks, send them the link to create an account of the 15 14 of them didn't even cl…”
The other half of the tape: James Hawkins's own voice is left out of every number here. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →
Statements about James Hawkins, by other people (1)
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens James's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 Y COMBINATORLEDGER | Co-Founder and Co-CEO, PostHog | 1 | 16 | — | full record on the Y Combinator Startup Podcast → |