The Wisdom Wall

“So for new products and new companies, I would argue, month to month is great. Um, because your customers can try at any time, uh, which means you'll get the, the hard, uh, reality to hit you in the face and you can't ignore it, you know, which is a problem when you have, so you say you sell one year, three year deals.…”

“it works great for some use cases, but you need to handhold the users a lot more. Like, users don't necessarily know exactly what to ask for and how to ask for it, or what to go next, you know, once they've asked a question.”

“it's, it's very hard for what we do, uh, to lead with, you know, AI, uh, because you, you're bound to disappoint, because the generic case is very, very hard to solve”

“when you ask, when we first visited customers, Um, to figure out what they wanted from our product. When you ask them to, to pick between a false positive and a false negative, um, they'll say, oh, give me the false positive, I'll decide if it's right, but I want to know. It's not true. Uh, you give them two false…”

“the people who are used to scaling the products that work ignore the negative part, whereas it's the only part that's, that's worth listening to.”

“every time you add productivity, you add complexity, meaning that you have less and less of an understanding of what it is you're doing... So a lot of the value shifts from just creating that thing to understanding how it's going to behave, how it's changing over time, uh, what its, um, uh, failure modes are, what the…”

“the most important, when you do things like that, is to not generate false positives. Um, so these systems tend to generate more false negatives than false positives. Basically, if the system is not sure, uh, it's probably not going to tell you anything, because if it tells you, uh, um, things are going wrong twice and…”

“In the end, uh, we ended up hiring full-time engineers, uh, who are also interested in journalism, and those people exist, um, and, uh, have them basically focus on research and, um, uh, writing and we have a team basically that's built that way. It reports into engineering, it doesn't report into marketing, and that's…”

“to grow, uh, to a large independent company, you, one of the hardest thing to do is to not sell on the way.”

“you actually have to take your customers where they are and, um, talk to them in terms that they understand in terms of their, their existing categories, their existing spend, existing solutions.”

“the, the biggest challenge with observability is that, um, any application can generate any, any arbitrary large, uh, uh, amount of logs. Um, and so the data volumes grow much faster, um, Uh, then our customers revenue”

“it's a category that is not necessarily super interesting on its own, you know, because it tends to be a bit commoditized, um, and, you know, it's a little bit high churn, uh, but it actually makes a lot of sense as part of a broader platform, which is what we offer. So when you have a broader platform, the churn issue…”

“when you hire a sales team, you, you need to have all that sort of in place. Otherwise the sales team is not going to figure it out for you. You still need to do that yourself.”

“most of the work you do there, um, is really to prepare for the 18 months that, that follow the IPO.”

“if their plan is to do whatever you're doing, or a fraction of whatever you're doing, ah, four years later, ah, that's not where your competition is going to come from. Your competition is going to come from people who are trying to do it differently, and Are going to have a different approach, and, ah, that's how…”