Meet Spenser Skates, CEO and Founder at Digital Analytics Platform: Amplitude

Amplitude is a digital analytics platform. We help companies unlock the power of their products. Today, nearly 2,200 customers rely on Amplitude to gain self-service visibility into the entire customer journey. Amplitude serves as a guide, ensuring that our customers have trust in their data, clear, accessible insights, and ways to easily take action on those insights. We believe nothing is more critical to driving revenue growth.

How did you come up with the idea for Amplitude?

Interestingly, the idea for Amplitude actually came about from a failed startup attempt. One of my eventual Amplitude co-founders, Curtis Liu, and I tried to build a different company called Sonalight, a text-to-voice app like Siri. The only problem was, we were too early for that market. But it wasn’t all for nothing. While building Sonalight, we made an important discovery: most companies had no idea how their customers were using their products.

We had built a platform to give us visibility into which Sonalight features our users liked, where they were getting stuck, etc., and we realised that the solution was actually more valuable than Sonalight itself. So we shut down Sonalight and put all of our focus into the solution – Amplitude.

How has the company evolved over the last couple of years?

Since Amplitude’s founding in 2012, we’ve come a long way. In the past two years alone, we’ve launched new products like Amplitude Experiment, our product experimentation platform, and Amplitude CDP, the industry’s first insights-driven customer data platform. In September 2021, we took Amplitude public via a direct listing on Nasdaq, which celebrated a huge milestone for our team. But in many ways, our next chapter of growth has only just begun. We have just under 2,200 global customers including ClearScore, Well Pharmacy, Atlassian, and Under Armour. We continue to grow our global employee base as well with more than 750 employees around the world and offices in San Francisco, New York, Vancouver, London, Paris, Amsterdam, and Singapore.

While the company has seen tremendous evolution over the past decade, there are some things at Amplitude we’ll never change. For one, our values. At Amplitude we operate under three guiding values: humility, ownership, and growth mindset. Our team really rallies around these values, and they are embedded in our leadership framework. Second is creating a culture of transparency. I want to make sure our employees know the why behind our decisions, understand our business priorities and earnings, and feel empowered to speak up when they have an idea.

What can we hope to see from Amplitude in the future?

We want to continue to help companies everywhere build amazing products that power growth and help them win their categories. This means making Amplitude even more accessible to any user—whether they’re an analytics veteran or a first-time user. We know that the companies that invest in their product now will build long-term durability and differentiation in their markets. We want to give them all the tools they need to see just how those product investments are supporting their business goals.