The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 13 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Skates: B2B companies rarely fail if they build what customers request
“One of the wonderful things about SAS and B to B is your customers will literally tell you what they want and then pay you money for it when you build it. So if you use this as your north star, build what your customers ask for, it's hard to go around. It's ha…”
Skates: CEOs must isolate new product teams from mature company processes
“All of those things that help a central product team be successful are huge distractions, ah, for your early innovative team. And so, as a leader, your job is actually to sequester them off from the rest of the organization and protect the team, ah, from those…”
Skates: Acqui-hires are a phenomenal mechanism for product innovation at scale
“Aqua hires are actually a really phenomenal method if you're at the scale of a company where you can bring in a bunch of talent. We've done this twice at Amplitude once with ClearBrain and once with Iteratively, and it's been a great success for us.”
Skates: Late-Stage Executives Must Hire Other Leaders Rather Than Do Work
“At this stage, you are no longer hiring executives who are doing the work themselves. You are instead hiring executives whose job is to hire other leaders who then do the scaling work and building out the teams.”
Skates: Scaling CEOs Must Evaluate Performance Rather Than Lead by Example
“The right way to do it, you don't need to create a set of dashboards to justify that they're good or bad at forecasting. You can just share the feedback, and if they can't fix it, you know, you need to up-level them. And having that confidence in your evaluati…”
Skates: Transitioning to Large-Org Executive Is a Founder's Hardest Shift
“Making the mental switch. This is actually the hardest part of changing from an early stage founder to a large organization executives. It is not a natural thing. They're very, very different roles.”
Skates: Innovation stalls at 50 engineers without deliberate organizational restructuring
“Almost every CEO that I talk to that goes past about 50 engineers runs into exactly this problem, and they realize they haven't spent enough time on this, so I can't overemphasize it, spending enough time on this.”
Skates: Reaching $1B ARR requires expanding beyond a single core product
“Pretty much every company that is, that has gotten to a billion or more in, in annual recurring revenue has been able to do this successfully.”
Skates: Amplitude attrition spiked to 30% after crossing 200 employees
“As we got past that 200 milestone, I no longer could be in the weeds in every single thing, and so what happened is we went from 10% attrition overnight to 30% attrition. A 4.9 glass door score to like a three something. All these organi- what was happening wa…”
Skates: CEOs must force executives to resolve peer conflicts directly
“One of the things that is absolutely wild to me as you grow as an organization is people won't give the feedback to each other directly. They'll have one-on-ones with lots of, with you, with lots of other people complaining about, well, this person didn't do t…”
Skates: Amplitude assigns single-threaded pillar leads across EPD for each product area
“The model that we have at Amplitude is we have deep functional experts that are supposed to be the single responsible person for each of these areas. So for governance, for data platform, for CDP, for analytics, for growth, for experimentation product, we've, …”
Skates: Amplitude's Warehouse Native product started in a hackathon
“Recently we shipped Warehouse Native Amplitude, and that actually started at a hackathon four years ago where someone wanted, thought, hey, what if there was a version of Amplitude where I could use SQL queries to connect to a database versus using the data st…”