What's GEO?
Generative Engine Optimization. Probably needs a better name. We go back and forth between that and AI Visibility.
Readit Newssskates commented on Show HN: Free Geo (SEO for LLM) amplitude.com/ai-visibili... · Posted by u/0xferruccio
Norman Borlaug's story is amazing. He brought modern farming practices to Mexico and created a new strain of high yield disease resistant dwarf wheat at quadrupled wheat production in the country. Did the same in India, Pakistan, and Africa. Saved a billion lives as a result. Solved food as a limited resource for the first time in human history. We've now gotten to transcend food scarcity as a society.
It's super cool that the US Mint is commemorating his work.
Dan, thank you! I has been fun competing with you.
I remember the golden days :)
I've been following your journey post Optimizely! Hope your new ventures turn out to be equally fun and fulfilling.
Congrats to you both!! Paras- you guys were always one of the ones we looked up to when starting Amplitude way back in 2012.
sskates commented on Command AI Bought by Amplitude command.ai/blog/command-a... · Posted by u/jshchnz
People want to save face. Some more than others. I also read the TC article and thought they were trying a bit too hard to make this seem like a good outcome.
Nothing against the founder. It's just how the game is played. And there's little to gain from deviating from the norms.
Edit: It benefits not just the founder’s ego but also the future career prospects of the employees. Big difference in your engineers being able to say “I worked at X all the way until they got acquired!!” and “I worked at X but the product was so unsuccessful we had to have a fire sale.”
That's too bad that the TC article read that way. They returned more money to investors than what was put in, which puts them in the top ~20% for acquisitions of this scale. The crazy part is even a lot of the 1B+ privates aren't able to do that (eg Lacework)
sskates commented on Command AI Bought by Amplitude command.ai/blog/command-a... · Posted by u/jshchnz
> First, some context for our customers: the Command AI product remains operational and will continue to be indefinitely. Over time, we will be migrating key infrastructure to Amplitude, so you may see some changes, but all of those will be communicated with plenty of lead time. There will be no disruption for your users; in fact, we think in the near term things will be getting better for them.
How long is indefinitely in this case?
The current plan is to port all existing functionality to Amplitude's platform as quickly as possible. We'll then migrate everyone over in a way that doesn't break existing functionality and continue running it indefinitely. We're working through the details now.
sskates commented on Command AI Bought by Amplitude command.ai/blog/command-a... · Posted by u/jshchnz
would be interested to know if the "AI" in this is anything further than an OpenAI wrapper and RAG
I share your skepticism of B2B companies making claims of being AI driven! Most stuff I see is a thin wrapper around an existing workflow where the AI isn't adding any meaningful functionality (also see: crypto).
We've been very deliberate about integrating AI functionality in a way that's additive: recommendations, proactive insights, and summarization are all areas that are a leap forward in the data space. What the CommandAI team has done is legit- it's their fastest growing functionality in terms of usage. We'll have more here soon.
Relevant TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTFHap9QW/
sskates commented on Command AI Bought by Amplitude command.ai/blog/command-a... · Posted by u/jshchnz
Interestingly, according to Axios, the price was pretty limited: "Amplitude (Nasdaq: AMPL) acquired CommandAI, an SF-based software user experience startup, for $20m (net of cash). CommandAI (fka CommandBar) had raised around $23m from Insight Partners, Itai Tsiddon, Thrive Capital, and BoxGroup."
I would be curious to learn more about the rationale to sell the business as I understand the strategic value to Amplitude. Interestingly, these next-generation digital adoption platforms have generally been pretty challenged.
Amplitude CEO here. To clear a few things up:
The number that was reported in term sheet / pro rata did not include any stock, which was a big part of this deal. The total consideration for CommandAI was north of $45M. We're working with them to issue a correction. Long story how the wrong number got reported- mostly too much telephone. It was also a good outcome for their investors in that they were able to return more than what was raised.
We at Amplitude approached the Command AI founders about joining Amplitude. They had a bunch of runway and good growth numbers. They were initially planning to raise another round of fundraising to continue to scale their business instead. It took some time on both sides to figure out what the win-win combination would look like.
We're honored that they decided to combine with Amplitude and are excited about what the combined products look like.
Wow- a lot of similarity to what's important with analytics today! Depth of analytics and speed of queries were their key competitive differentiators. Those are still ones we hammer at Amplitude. Also individual visitor history drill-down (we call it user timelines) is one of the most used features in Amplitude today.
I have a huge amount of respect for the Urchin team. They had to figure out everything for the first time on their own with nothing to go off of while going after a much smaller and earlier market.