Amplitude went public at a $5.6 billion valuation. Now its CEO is rebuilding all 800 employees around AI

Automate Compliance (and get $1,000 off!!) - https://vanta.com/lubaToday I walk with Spenser Skates, co-founder and CEO of Amplitude. Spenser shut down his first startup, a voice-to-text texting app called Sonalight, a year after it got into Y Combinator, spent years going through what he calls an identity crisis moving from founder to CEO, and has grown Amplitude into a public company of roughly 800 people, and now he's rebuilding it around Wave, an AI engine that rewrites products using their own data.We get into:Why he and his co-founder Curtis intentionally shut down Sonalight a year after Y Combinator, even after a Demo Day that got them press and tens of thousands of downloadsThe customer research rule he now enforces at Amplitude: talk to 30 teams before writing a line of the original product, and only build if a real chunk of them say yesWave, Amplitude's new AI engine that scans a product's own data and rewrites its features, including one fix that tripled a customer's AI usage overnightWhy he thinks the most ambitious operators, including a SaaS "legend" he looked up to, are driven by insecurity rather than confidenceThe Norman Borlaug story that convinced a 20-something Spenser to bet his entire career on tech instead of academic researchSo much more!TIMESTAMPS (00:00) Trailer(01:08) Spenser Skates, Co-Founder & CEO, Amplitude(01:36) Why video games stopped feeling like real achievement(08:50) Growing up in Cambridge and hating a life scripted by other people(15:04) The Norman Borlaug story that convinced him to bet on tech(20:14) Convincing Curtis to leave Google and co-found a company(24:55) Playing StarCraft until 2am while pretending to build the startup(29:04) The exact test for knowing when to kill a startup(32:30) Why half a founding team's time should go to customers, not code(35:02) The identity crisis of going from founder to CEO of 800 people(40:35) Burning the boats on the old Amplitude to go all in on AI(42:33) Wave: the AI engine that rewrites products using their own data(48:49) Why insecurity, not confidence, drives the most ambitious operators(56:01) Betting on his partner Anne and being "single until Series B"(1:05:00) OutroFollow Spenser LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/spenserskatesX: https://x.com/spenserskatesFollow Luba Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lifeoflubaa/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yudasinal/