Spencer Skates
CEO & Co-Founder, Amplitude. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveinvestor@spenserskates ↗LinkedIn ↗amplitude.com ↗
Spenser Skates co-founded Amplitude in 2012 and took the digital analytics platform public on Nasdaq in 2021 via a direct listing. An MIT graduate and former algorithmic trader, he leads Amplitude's strategic direction and product integration.
1shows
1appearances
23statements
1resolved
1supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
Everything Spencer Skates said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Skates: The hype around AI killing SaaS is way overblown
“This is why I think a lot of the hype in that, AI killing SAS is way overblown because particularly for a lot of business workflows, like very high guarantees on performance are fundamental to it. You know, if you put a record into your CRM, that stuff better …”
Skates: Basic AI visibility will rapidly commoditize into free lead generation
“I think the real business has to be downstream of AI visibility. It's a valuable, there's value in it, like, you know, just like there's value in, in the SEO world, but it's so easy to do. You know, we did it, you know, as I mentioned in, in, in probably more …”
Skates: Google is the worst B2B company of all time
“I think that Google is the worst B to B company of all time, and there's an incredible opportunity to compete with them.”
Skates: Being a large-company executive is much easier than being a founder
“It's much easier In my mind, I think, to be a large company executive, because you have all these resources, you have all this leverage, you actually work less hard in your product market fit”
Skates: Amplitude is building a 'Cursor for analytics' product
“We're gonna go much, much bigger in December, January, and February where we are gonna be coming out with what we call the cursor for analytics, which I'm incredibly excited about, and I think will dramatically change how people use and leverage analytics”
Skates: AI product building must be technology-first, not customer-driven
“With the capabilities of AI, because they're so jagged, you, it's a technology first understanding of what is possible. And so if you go to your customers and tell them and ask them what they want, like, they're not even going to be able to describe what's pos…”
Skates: The top filter for founders is persisting when quitting is rational
“One of the really clear takeaways from any of these journeys is there is a point that you get to a year, maybe two years in, where From a rational standpoint, you probably should quit but for whatever reason those successful ones don't, and so that is the numb…”
Skates: Most successful founder CEOs leave after a decade due to scale
“Even if you look at the successful founder CEOs, after about a decade, most of them leave. And in my mind, it's actually for this very reason, because being a large company executive is different.”
Skates: SaaS is the best business model of all time
“SaaS, I mean, it's the best business model and the best product delivery system of all time.”
Skates: OpenAI's Sam Altman is the best salesperson of this generation
“I think Sam Altman is the best salesperson of this generation by no bar none.”
Skates: AI-native startups wrongly ignore a decade of SaaS domain expertise
“On the flip side, I think what a lot of these AI native teams are really missing is they haven't learned the product and the problem and why things are solved the way they're solved. And so like they try to create these new interfaces from scratch without draw…”
Skates: Vertical AI agents will outcompete generalized agent builders
“I think there's a lot of very generalized agent builders, and I think picking a particular problem and a particular buyer is gonna be a much more successful way of building a business.”
Skates: Startups have a massive advantage over incumbents in adopting AI
“It is hard as a larger company to reorient and rebuild your company to use AI well. And this is, I think to your point, the huge advantage that a lot of earlier companies that can build from the ground up in this way.”
Skates: AI model capabilities remain jagged across different tasks
“I think if you look at the capabilities of any of these models, It's like, they're very, very jagged. So there's some things they're exceptional about and there's some things that they're just absolutely terrible about.”
Skates: Self-improving software is arriving much sooner than 10 years out
“We've always had this vision at amplitude of a self-improving product where you have a product that dynamically responds to your user feedback. So it knows what features you like. It knows when you're getting frustrated and stuck. It knows how to change things…”
Skates: Amplitude's AI Visibility launch doubled weekly free plan signups
“That product launch doubled new signups to Amplitude, which is wild.
You know, like, every week, it's like, we're getting twice as many
signups to our free plan as we did from before our AI visibility launch”
Skates: Amplitude reorganized its product team twice in one year for AI
“We've done two reorganizations in the engineering product and design organization since the start of this year. And so, you know, there were leaders and executives and different people who were very much kind of in the SAS modality, but were not on the bleedin…”
Skates: Multi-stakeholder products inherently require an active sales motion
“There are some products that you can adopt without selling and that like people just, you know, they have single player mode, you know, cursors, a great example. Slack's a great example. But there's some where you need to convince multiple people at the same t…”
Skates: Amplitude generates $350M in annual revenue and spends nearly that much
“We're three hundred and fifty million in revenue, and, you know, we're deploying close to that in terms of total spend every year”
Skates: Most public company CEOs are too conservative to post publicly
“There's still, you know, there's still an aperture you're constrained to as a public company CEO, but most are just so conservative. They're not putting anything out there.”
Skates: It took Amplitude a full year to onboard its team
“It's still taken us a full year to get the team kind of fully on board and ramped and like believing and seeing and building.”
Skates: Amplitude hosted an internal 'AI Week' to train leaders
“I started working with James the founder, CEO of Command, as well as Wade our engineering leader to figure out how do we train the organization on AI, and then we came up with an AI week, and unfortunately for a bunch of reasons, we weren't able to actually do…”
Skates: Amplitude is launching an 'Ask AI' chat interface in January
“We're going to be launching in January, which is we're going to launch a, what we're going to call ask AI, which is a global chat interface, very much like cursor, where you will be able to chat with yeah, chat with AI and ask it to pull certain charts for you…”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Spencer'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 | CEO & Co-Founder, Amplitude | 1 | 23 | 100% 1/1 | full record on the Y Combinator Startup Podcast → |