What Founders Have To Unlearn To Become Great CEOs

“I remember being in a board meeting once, you had all these board investor finance people, and you had all these salespeople were like, hey guys, shouldn't you look at this AI thing? Like, isn't that getting hot? Shouldn't you guys do it? And it's like- Yeah, actually, that literally was a question from one of our execs to me. It's like, we got to get our AI strategy. What's our AI strategy, Spencer? And I'm like, this is the wrong way to think about what it is we're doing.”

“With the capabilities of AI, because they're so jagged, it's a technology first understanding of what is possible. And so if you go to your customers and tell them and ask them what they want, they're not even gonna be able to describe what's possible. Yeah, give me a faster horse. Or it'll be asking for something that's not quite possible or possible in the wrong way.”

“We came up with an AI week, and unfortunately, for a bunch of reasons, we weren't able to actually do that until June, but that was a key pivot point. What we did was we got a bunch of the existing leaders in the organization, so our VPs of product, our engineering managers, to use this technology and to see what was possible about it. And then during that AI week, what we do is we train the team. We had one of our product leaders vibe code, like a dark mode for Amplitude in front of the entire organization, which was actually very scary, but actually it happened. They ran into a bug, but they happened to sort it out.”

“We've done two reorganizations in the engineering product and design organization since the start of this year. And so there were leaders and executives and different people who were very much in the SaaS modality, but were not on the bleeding edge of AI that just unfortunately, were not quite the right fit for what we were trying to build in the future. And so ended up having to move folks out of the business. I mean, doing that level of reorganization twice in a year is very disruptive.”

“I mean, honestly, I joke about this, but anything Google is trying to do, I think that Google is the worst B2B company of all time. And there's an incredible opportunity to compete with them. So, you know, I'd look at email, I'd look at a lot of workspace stuff. I think what the Notion guys, for example, are doing as a competitor, Google Docs is very exciting. Institutionally, Google is way too slow and way too conservative to be able to do this.”

“Before Amplitude, we started this company called Sonolight, which was a voice recognition. It was like an early version of Siri. And it had this really amazing demo, actually, where you could- it listened in the background for your voice. And this was before any of the Hey Siri, Hey Alexa stuff. So we did YC with that. We did, went through the whole batch, did demo day, did this amazing demo on stage. We got tons of press written about us, but the product and the tech, it was just not good enough. And so we ended up right after demo day deciding to shut that down.”

“The number one misconception I had was like, this would be something you learn out of a book or on a website or you kind of read about. But one, you have to do it, and two, you just want to get someone who's good at coaching you. So we worked with this guy, Mitch Mirando, who coached, was a sales exec who had gone on to coach a bunch of other companies. And then he would just come in once a week and just beat me up and just being like, hey, you don't really, what's the customer pain? And I'm like, oh, they want some dashboards or charts. Like Spencer, it's not a business pain.”

“I read Founders at Work, and one of the really clear takeaways from any of these journeys is there is a point that you get to a year, maybe two years in, where from a rational standpoint, you probably should quit. But for whatever reason, those successful ones don't. And so that is the number one filtering criteria.”

“You have to be much more disciplined about your time and say no to most stuff. And then what you realize is you become the person you hate. You'd always make fun of big company executives for not doing any work for themselves and just like judging other people's work all the time. But there's a reason for that. And you have to embrace that reason. And so it's this very hard, that is a very hard thing to unlearn.”