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 35 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
Segment co-founder Ian Storm Taylor predicted a massive business behind Analytics.js
“I think there's a big business behind Analytics.js, which is this routing library.”
Reinhardt thought building a business on Analytics.js was his co-founder's worst idea
“And I was like, that is literally the worst idea I've ever heard. Like, it's 500 lines of code. You've grown a little bit. It's 500 lines of code and it's already open source. I have no idea how you build a business around that.”
Reinhardt: True product-market fit is unmistakable and creates uncontrollable growth
“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…”
Reinhardt: Reaching product-market fit through multi-year iterative grinds is extremely rare
“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…”
Reinhardt: Finding initial product-market fit is not a repeatable process
“The problem with the first product
And product market fit is that you can move the product and you can move the market because it's fit between these two things.
And so what's unclear and they move in some crazy multidimensional space.
And so what's the issue …”
Reinhardt: Waiting until $10M in revenue to hire experienced executives is disastrous
“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 …”
Reinhardt: Traditional CRMs are inadequate for modern digital customer interactions
“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…”
Reinhardt: Experiencing genuine product-market fit feels like you are losing control
“And it feels very much like losing control, right? Like, Previously, you're like building a thing, and you roll it out, you're building a thing, and you're pushing it out, and all of a sudden you like put a thing out there, and people start running away with i…”
Reinhardt: Founders enter a death spiral when iterating for inactive users
“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, …”
Reinhardt: Direct customer conversations teach a thousand times more than landing pages
“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.”
Reinhardt predicts that third-party data brokering will eventually die out
“There are plenty of other companies out there that, that do stuff like that. It's gonna go away and die eventually.”
Segment's revenue grew from $2.5M to $10M after launching its Redshift connector
“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.”
Reinhardt: Early MVP tests are cheap and always worth running
“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…”
Reinhardt: Startup idea tests designed solely by optimists are invalid
“So in other words, if you have an optimist and a skeptic, and they both agree on what a valid test is, then I think you actually will end up with a good test. But if you have three optimists in a room who all agree on what a good test is, I don't believe that …”
Reinhardt: Effective enterprise sales require upfront qualification, not flashy product demos
“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…”
Reinhardt: Minor messaging tweaks will never create product-market fit
“I don't think minor changes that it will make the difference. Now, once you have product market fit, then sure you can optimize the messaging.”
Reinhardt: Validating second products is far more repeatable than finding initial fit
“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…”
Reinhardt: Segment's best salespeople relentlessly ask 'why' to the point of discomfort
“The best salespeople at Segment ask why, to the point of uncomfortableness from everyone else on the team, including myself.”
Reinhardt: GDPR severely damages third-party data brokers lacking direct user consent
“The biggest impact broadly on the sort of overall ecosystem is it really negatively impacts third-party data and third-party data brokers because they have no real consent path to the user for sharing and buying and selling their data.”
Reinhardt: High pricing quotes rarely offend enterprise customers in live conversations
“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…”
Reinhardt: Anchor pricing aggressively high to discover how enterprise buyers value software
“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.”
Reinhardt: Evaluate customer feature requests strictly against your long-term product vision
“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…”
Reinhardt: Almost no one actually uses Segment's open-source version
“So almost no one actually uses the open source version.”
Segment raised $600K at YC Demo Day for a failed classroom tool
“We were actually even raised money at demo day with this idea about 600 K.”
Reinhardt: Investors refused Segment's offer to return $600K in seed funding
“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…”
Segment spent a year building a web analytics tool without getting customers
“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.”
Segment processed hundreds of thousands of user actions per second in 2018
“I think now we're processing, you know, hundreds of thousands of user actions per second.”
Segment open-sources client SDKs but keeps its core data pipeline proprietary
“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.”
Reinhardt: Segment relies on the MEDDIC sales qualification framework
“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.”
Segment enables automated user data deletion across connected third-party tools
“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.”
Segment hired a part-time CFO around its $15M Series A
“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.”
Segment organizes internal customer interaction data to improve customer experience
“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.”