Scaling Amplitude to $300M ARR with Co-founder and CEO Spenser Skates

The Peel with Turner Novak

Turner Novak

Technology

4.6 • 11 Ratings

🗓️ 1 May 2025

⏱️ 104 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Spenser Skates is the Co-founder and CEO of Amplitude.

Our conversation gets into the importance of data in product design and company building, how Amplitude is thinking about AI, and the future of user responsive software.

We also get into the early days of building Amplitude, when to go multi-product, how to construct your board as a startup, hiring executives at various company stages, lessons from closing three acquisitions, lessons scaling to $300 million in ARR, inside Amplitude’s 2021 IPO, and what most people get wrong about Founder Mode.

Thanks to Numeral for supporting this episode, the end-to-end platform for sales tax and compliance. Try it here: https://bit.ly/NumeralThePeel

Timestamps:

(4:45) Using data to build great products

(8:31) Why data is existential to every business

(13:14) How to go multi-product

(15:48) Every startup becomes a distribution company

(19:29) Lessons from three acquisitions

(29:09) AI hasn’t changed B2B SaaS yet

(31:24) Challenges of incorporating AI in B2B SaaS

(33:09) Amplitude’s AI experiments

(36:29) Navigating technology hype cycles as a public company

(39:40) Amplitude’s opportunity in LLMs

(43:08) User responsive software

(46:16) Surprising things that slow your speed of execution

(51:27) What people get wrong about Founder Mode

(59:48) Pivoting into Amplitude after YC

(1:04:42) Nine months to raise Amplitude’s first round

(1:08:31) Surprises from closing the first customers

(1:12:46) Two sales lessons for technical founders

(1:13:44) Scaling to $300M+ ARR

(1:17:14) How to choose board members

(1:19:55) Inside Amplitude’s IPO

(1:21:56) “Stock price is an output of the business”

(1:26:36) Evolving from startup founder to public company CEO

(1:31:54) How hiring execs changes as you scale

(1:34:32) Why DEI is important at Amplitude

(1:39:46) Relevance of gaming and startups

Referenced

Try Amplitude: https://amplitude.com/

Careers at Amplitude: https://amplitude.com/careers

Moxie Marlinspike’s web3 article:https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

Sheep Logic: https://www.epsilontheory.com/sheep-logic/

Follow Spenser

Twitter: https://x.com/spenserskates

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/spenserskates

Follow Turner

Twitter: https://twitter.com/TurnerNovak

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/turnernovak

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Transcript

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0:00.0	So the problem with software today is that me, Spencer, gets the same set of code for a website
0:06.4	as you Turner, as the same as anyone else out there. We're all running the same piece of software.
0:12.3	But that makes zero sense because there's so much data in how we interact with that software
0:17.9	and what our preferences are that that that software should be adaptive
0:21.1	to who we are as end users. And there's really small ways that people are starting to customize
0:26.0	software on a per person basis. Like, you might have a favorites list or a recent list or, you know,
0:30.3	recommended algorithm, recommended feed. You open Netflix and it like, yeah, you kind of knows what
0:34.8	you might want to watch. That's right. That's right. But it should go a lot deeper than that. Like the UI, like, first, features that you like should be surfaced to you. That's a really easy one. Features you don't use should not be surface to you. And then you go kind of a level deeper than that. And it's like, okay, actually the whole interface, you could customize and change on a per person basis. And then you go even further than that, you could actually build features that you think will resonate with a particular user. And all of a sudden, you kind of take this to the limit, you get to the state where software is being completely customized in a per user basis. And that's what I'm really excited. Call that self-improving
1:11.8	products at Amplitude. And that's the vision of where we're taking this company, is that we want
1:17.2	the ability for software to be customized on a per person basis. Welcome to the PEO. I'm your host,
1:22.7	Turner Novak, founder of an in Capital. Today's guest is Spencer Skates, co-founder and CEO of Amplitude.
1:27.7	We do product and marketing analytics to help you understand what your users are doing in your product.
1:32.6	Our conversation gets into the importance of data in product design and company building.
1:37.3	The problem of data in your product is a lot deeper, more complex, and more important of a problem to the success of your digital
1:47.5	product than businesses give it credit for.
1:49.8	Lessons from scaling amplitude to 300 million ARR, like when to go multi-product.
1:54.3	Really, what you're architecting the entire company around is a pipeline to a set of buyers.
2:00.5	What he's learned from closing three acquisitions.
2:02.7	There's a reason, you know, they say 90% of acquisitions fail is because it's so easy
2:07.3	to screw this up.
2:08.5	How he's thinking about AI.
2:10.3	B2B application SaaS has not figured out how to crack AI use cases yet.
	...

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