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The system is set up to extract wealth from Millennials and Gen Z and give it to Boomers: - NIMBY housing laws that make it impossible for first time homebuyers to afford a home. - Student debt that can't be paid off or discharged, leading to permanent wage depression. - State governments in unsustainable levels of debt to civil service pension funds while canceling those benefits for new hires. California pays an average of 102% of final earnings to retiring civil servants. - Proposition 13 lets longtime homeowners pay significantly less property tax than new ones. - Both Medicare and Social Security will not be fully funded starting in 2033. - Politicians are terrified of calling this out because 9 out of 10 people who go to their town halls are Boomers. I talked to one US Congressman who said "coming out too hard against Boomers is an almost sure way to lose an election". They're happy to call out billionaires but terrified to call out Boomers. Once you see it the first time, you see it everywhere.

Excellent recipe for doing great work: Don’t die, don’t quit, run towards the hardest problem, don’t cheat, and be part of something greater than yourself. It’s so easy to beat 99% of people by playing longer term games.

Too many VCs are funding AI companies that should be features. 12+ startups have raised $72.8M in the last few months for AI visibility (SEO for LLMs). We built it in 3 weeks with 3 people and shipped it for free.

The State of AI in SaaS: SaaS is Dead, Long Live SaaS This started as an analysis of Andrej Karpathy's excellent overview of AI's capabilities. Those who deeply understand this will make all the returns and everyone else will lose a lot of money. "Ghosts" is a brilliant metaphor for what we've created. They're not animals, and they're definitely not human. They are imperfect replicas of us. Karpathy describes them as a "statistical distillation of humanity's documents". AI channels that distribution more effectively than any human and can beat us at Go, schoolwork, analyzing medical images, and many well defined tasks. At the same time, it lacks the reward systems that humans use to improve including curiosity, empowerment, play, intrinsic motivation, and culture. As a result, AI's capabilities are limited. If you watch how the best work gets done with AI, it happens in chunks where a human supervises the output and gives iterative feedback to the AI. Large scale autonomous agents are brittle and fail quickly. Watch anyone vibe code an application with any level of novel complexity. AI also faces integration barriers into existing organizations. AI is not capable of pulling a lot of the levers you need to be effective like coordinating with multiple stakeholders, building trust, authenticity, and interacting with different modalities across time and space. You could argue that the average human doesn't either, but people know when they're interacting with an AI and don't allow it the same agency as they do to people. The most successful AI B2B companies actually need more humans to integrate what they've built (forward deployed engineers) than traditional B2B SaaS. What's next? Those who understand AI and its limitations will transform the industry. Incumbents will be killed by those who know how to leverage AI. I've seen countless homepages talk about being the "AI platform for AI agents" but can't even string a demo together. Meanwhile they're trying to pitch a future where fully autonomous entities collaborate in parallel to write all the code and humans are useless. They will be the first to be replaced when they get surpassed by AI native companies. The investors blindly throwing money into companies at 100x multiples are going to lose their money. I spoke with one of the most disciplined investors I know last week. They said they felt they had to play the game on the field even though they knew it didn't make sense. And this was from someone who is closer to the technology than 95% of investors. On the other hand, companies who deeply understand AI will win everything. Cursor, Glean, Decagon, Sierra, Linear, Lovable, Replit, Bolt, and many AI natives are off to a great start. While 90% of incumbents haven't adapted, it is possible. Figma, Notion, Vercel, Box, and Intercom have done a great job of tearing down what they have and rebuilding AI native products. They have teams who are close to the current capabilities of the models. They also understand their problem domain and as new capabilities come out know what capabilities will map well to what problems in what way. They are able to deliver on AI's promise to their customers. Whereas the majority of existing companies will die. In analytics, the door is wide open. In spite of many of our competitors filling up their homepages with the text "AI", I haven't seen a single compelling demo. We're still working like it's 2015. This will change. We have spent the last year at Amplitude rebuilding our team to be AI native. We've learned about what models are capable of, how to write prompts, and how to leverage evals for building great products. We've worked with our customers to see what gets used in practice and what doesn't. We are building a vision for the future of analytics. We are all in on AI at Amplitude. Stay tuned for what's next. We're going to be fast and furious with AI products at Amplitude.

Wtf is this. Why should anyone sign up for the mission if the CEO doesn’t? They’re going to have to drag my dead body out of Amplitude

My Waterloo interns are better than your Waterloo interns

I'm super bullish on AI reshaping SaaS. We acquired 4 companies and re-orged product development twice this year to do it properly. Most SaaS domains can map to AI, it's just a hard product problem to get right. Specifically, the user interface problem is hard. Most SaaS companies I see are slapping a thin layer on top vs rebuilding the interface. The other mistake is companies throwing out the interface and the years of context on the problem it represents. I don't think 100% agentic chat interfaces will work for this reason. Even ChatGPT's interaction model drew on decades of prior art in chatbots. Successful interfaces will 1) build on existing state of the art in SaaS 2) deeply reshape them. See Figma, Notion, Vercel, Box, and Intercom. Even the Cursor team spent over a year trying to figure it out with minimal traction and then needed a model breakthrough to happen at the right time. They had the foresight to build on top of VS Code while everyone else tried to make fully novel approaches work much less successfully.

We're getting 5-6 inbounds per week looking to sell their companies to Amplitude. It's a big increase since the start of this year. If you are looking to sell your company- please don't use a banker! Those go straight to the trash.

I just banned committees (or even worse “steering committees”) at Amplitude. Distributed ownership = no ownership. What happens when there’s something unexpected? Who is supposed to solve it? You also get the average of lots of opinions vs a point of view focused on winning. Single ownership with a clear leader is 10x more effective.

Tomorrow is the start of AI Native Analytics

The system is set up to extract wealth from Millennials and Gen Z and give it to Boomers: - NIMBY housing laws that make it impossible for first time homebuyers to afford a home. - Student debt that can't be paid off or discharged, leading to permanent wage depression. - State governments in unsustainable levels of debt to civil service pension funds while canceling those benefits for new hires. California pays an average of 102% of final earnings to retiring civil servants. - Proposition 13 lets longtime homeowners pay significantly less property tax than new ones. - Both Medicare and Social Security will not be fully funded starting in 2033. - Politicians are terrified of calling this out because 9 out of 10 people who go to their town halls are Boomers. I talked to one US Congressman who said "coming out too hard against Boomers is an almost sure way to lose an election". They're happy to call out billionaires but terrified to call out Boomers. Once you see it the first time, you see it everywhere.

Too many VCs are funding AI companies that should be features. 12+ startups have raised $72.8M in the last few months for AI visibility (SEO for LLMs). We built it in 3 weeks with 3 people and shipped it for free.

The State of AI in SaaS: SaaS is Dead, Long Live SaaS This started as an analysis of Andrej Karpathy's excellent overview of AI's capabilities. Those who deeply understand this will make all the returns and everyone else will lose a lot of money. "Ghosts" is a brilliant metaphor for what we've created. They're not animals, and they're definitely not human. They are imperfect replicas of us. Karpathy describes them as a "statistical distillation of humanity's documents". AI channels that distribution more effectively than any human and can beat us at Go, schoolwork, analyzing medical images, and many well defined tasks. At the same time, it lacks the reward systems that humans use to improve including curiosity, empowerment, play, intrinsic motivation, and culture. As a result, AI's capabilities are limited. If you watch how the best work gets done with AI, it happens in chunks where a human supervises the output and gives iterative feedback to the AI. Large scale autonomous agents are brittle and fail quickly. Watch anyone vibe code an application with any level of novel complexity. AI also faces integration barriers into existing organizations. AI is not capable of pulling a lot of the levers you need to be effective like coordinating with multiple stakeholders, building trust, authenticity, and interacting with different modalities across time and space. You could argue that the average human doesn't either, but people know when they're interacting with an AI and don't allow it the same agency as they do to people. The most successful AI B2B companies actually need more humans to integrate what they've built (forward deployed engineers) than traditional B2B SaaS. What's next? Those who understand AI and its limitations will transform the industry. Incumbents will be killed by those who know how to leverage AI. I've seen countless homepages talk about being the "AI platform for AI agents" but can't even string a demo together. Meanwhile they're trying to pitch a future where fully autonomous entities collaborate in parallel to write all the code and humans are useless. They will be the first to be replaced when they get surpassed by AI native companies. The investors blindly throwing money into companies at 100x multiples are going to lose their money. I spoke with one of the most disciplined investors I know last week. They said they felt they had to play the game on the field even though they knew it didn't make sense. And this was from someone who is closer to the technology than 95% of investors. On the other hand, companies who deeply understand AI will win everything. Cursor, Glean, Decagon, Sierra, Linear, Lovable, Replit, Bolt, and many AI natives are off to a great start. While 90% of incumbents haven't adapted, it is possible. Figma, Notion, Vercel, Box, and Intercom have done a great job of tearing down what they have and rebuilding AI native products. They have teams who are close to the current capabilities of the models. They also understand their problem domain and as new capabilities come out know what capabilities will map well to what problems in what way. They are able to deliver on AI's promise to their customers. Whereas the majority of existing companies will die. In analytics, the door is wide open. In spite of many of our competitors filling up their homepages with the text "AI", I haven't seen a single compelling demo. We're still working like it's 2015. This will change. We have spent the last year at Amplitude rebuilding our team to be AI native. We've learned about what models are capable of, how to write prompts, and how to leverage evals for building great products. We've worked with our customers to see what gets used in practice and what doesn't. We are building a vision for the future of analytics. We are all in on AI at Amplitude. Stay tuned for what's next. We're going to be fast and furious with AI products at Amplitude.

I'm super bullish on AI reshaping SaaS. We acquired 4 companies and re-orged product development twice this year to do it properly. Most SaaS domains can map to AI, it's just a hard product problem to get right. Specifically, the user interface problem is hard. Most SaaS companies I see are slapping a thin layer on top vs rebuilding the interface. The other mistake is companies throwing out the interface and the years of context on the problem it represents. I don't think 100% agentic chat interfaces will work for this reason. Even ChatGPT's interaction model drew on decades of prior art in chatbots. Successful interfaces will 1) build on existing state of the art in SaaS 2) deeply reshape them. See Figma, Notion, Vercel, Box, and Intercom. Even the Cursor team spent over a year trying to figure it out with minimal traction and then needed a model breakthrough to happen at the right time. They had the foresight to build on top of VS Code while everyone else tried to make fully novel approaches work much less successfully.

My Waterloo interns are better than your Waterloo interns

We’re more bullish on going all in on SF now and fully giving up the suburbs. Thanks everyone! I still haven’t come across anyone who has made that move though so we’ll have to be the first that we know of.

I just banned committees (or even worse “steering committees”) at Amplitude. Distributed ownership = no ownership. What happens when there’s something unexpected? Who is supposed to solve it? You also get the average of lots of opinions vs a point of view focused on winning. Single ownership with a clear leader is 10x more effective.

Wtf is this. Why should anyone sign up for the mission if the CEO doesn’t? They’re going to have to drag my dead body out of Amplitude

Watch the Analytics League Championship Grand Finals to crown the world's fastest data analyst! See who can accurately analyze data and share insights in the least amount of time. 📈📊💻⏱️💨 5 time world champion and Amplitude expert Olly Smyth is going up against newcomer Frank Lee using Claude with Amplitude MCP. 👨🏽‍💻🆚👨🏻‍💻🥊🏟️ WATCH LIVE NOW (and check out Amplitude MCP in the thread below):

We're getting 5-6 inbounds per week looking to sell their companies to Amplitude. It's a big increase since the start of this year. If you are looking to sell your company- please don't use a banker! Those go straight to the trash.

Excellent recipe for doing great work: Don’t die, don’t quit, run towards the hardest problem, don’t cheat, and be part of something greater than yourself. It’s so easy to beat 99% of people by playing longer term games.