Segment

“I think it's really hard to offend people with price, at least if you're sitting in the same room or on the phone. It's probably Not a good idea to share pricing information via email. If you do that, then it's really easy for them to hang up, but if you're on…”

“My feeling is that that's extremely rare and that, again, this is a really dangerous place to be because you can stay in this iterative mode for years. And it is unlikely that the iterations are going to get you to a good place. So I remember very clearly earl…”

“A dozen at most.”

“When you actually go and talk to a customer, if you have that conversation in the right way, you'll learn a thousand times more from that conversation than you will from than from putting up a landing page.”

“And in fact, what will happen is when they say that's crazy, then you say, why? And then they'll explain to you how they actually value the product, and then you say, okay. And then you value it according to their logic, and you ask for that price.”

“The best defense against that is having a clear product vision for where your product is going to go long term. And if you have a clear product vision for where it's going long term, it's a very simple question of, is this thing in that picture long term or no…”

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

“I think now we're processing, you know, hundreds of thousands of user actions per second.”

“So it's actually now a feature of segment that we can go to those 20 systems and delete whatever user is requesting it. And clean up that record across all those different systems.”

“So we hired a part-time CFO around the time that raised our series A. So we were about, at about a million in revenue and we raised a fifteen million dollar series A.”

“So we went from literally zero management experience, aside from what had been picked up along the way, growing from zero to 50 people, to having someone who really knew it, or two people who really knew what they were doing. That was hugely impactful, and we …”

“The best salespeople at Segment ask why, to the point of uncomfortableness from everyone else on the team, including myself.”

“Well, we had just gotten wires for these checks, for this money, like literally a week before, right? So we called back all the investors, And we were like, well, it turns out this is a terrible idea. So what do you want us to do with the money? And almost all…”

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

“I think that it becomes more repeatable when you are Finding a second product. So at that point, you've mostly locked the market side, right? Because you already have a buyer. You already have a go to market motion. You already have like an area of interest, w…”

“Usually that test is so cheap to run that it's worth running even if you decide that it was inconclusive and you should go a step deeper. But I also think that the way you framed it is actually an excuse that a lot of founders use for not doing the cheap early…”

“Our JavaScript library is open source, our iOS SDK is open source, our Android SDK is open source, so you can sort of collect data from anywhere, and those collection libraries are open source, but the sort of core infrastructure pipeline is, is not.”

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

“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…”

“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.”

“Frankly, I think the really big product market fit moments for every company are pretty unmistakable. Like, the Dropbox founders have called it stepping on a landmine. I just, I really don't think you can mistake it. It really happens in a way that you lose co…”

“And we discovered at the beginning of class, about 60% of students were on Facebook and by the end about 80% were on Facebook.”

“I think a lot of founders get caught in this sort of like all the death spiral of user feedback. Where they keep going and showing someone their product and asking them for feedback. They give them, you know, some feedback about how they could make it better, …”

“We'd grown revenue from zero to two and a half million in the first year. And then we launched this Redshift connector and the next year went from two and a half to 10.”

“The way good sales works is you do qualification up front. So you have some method of understanding the customer's problem better than they understand it themselves, and then you do the computation in your head as to whether your product is a fit for their pro…”

“There are plenty of other companies out there that, that do stuff like that. It's gonna go away and die eventually.”

“We spent about a year building the infrastructure necessary to do the analytics and really we're not succeeding in getting any customers during that time frame.”

“The methodology that, that we use at Segment is, is one called Medic, M-E-D-D-I-C. It's literally just a list of sales qualification criteria.”

“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 …”

“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…”

“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…”

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 …”