AMA w/ James Evans (Command AI) -- What it's like to be acquired
@chrismessina Honestly one of the weirdest parts of being acquired is you have to keep the process private from the team for a really long time, which felt awful. so we didn't have much time to "prepare" per se.
I think the key decision we made was week 1 to set this day as our launch deadline, which just created a sense of urgency that meant we just had to figure out how to collaborate and we couldn't over-think it. Parkinson's law lol
@aumvats work in progress :)
the hardest thing honestly is that as a founder you can shape your company around yourself. you hire everyone, you can fix any problem (collaborating with the owner on the team), etc. that's no longer true.
but I am trying to keep the founder lens. it's just instead of barreling forward with solutions, fixing, etc it's more of a collaborative approach. "hey this seems broken -- why is it being done this way? who owns this? can I help?"
I'll go a little deeper into a more sensitive topic: Money.
What is the acceptable amount for you to say yes to a acquisition?
@busmark_w_nika Shouldn't be sensitive! it should be a gating question for any acquisition -- is the price fair for the team, investors, and founders given the current state of the business?
answer will be different for every business -- are you floundering and founders are burned out? are you crushing it and never considered an acquisition? I suggest every group of co-founders to check in periodically on your "sell now" price.
then if you have a buyer that hits that price, you obviously need to diligence whether you'd be excited to team up because it's very unlikely in software that you'll see a business without joining the company
@busmark_w_nika one session by the founder of carry.com that i attended, he had a very beautiful answer to it. Sell when you don't feel the need to sell, that's when you'll get the best offers for your startup.
Congrats! How long did you work on Command AI before the sale? What was the vision you saw at Amplitude? Was iut something you couldn't do without Amplitude or an acquirer involved?
@steveb about 4 years! what excited us most was teaming up with a best-in-class analytics product since pretty much all of our customers were using Cmd in combination with analytics
@gerome24 definitely trying to create a category in the beginning was the wrong choice. https://every.to/thesis/why-you-should-disrupt-categories-not-create-them
What's the experience been like building in collaboration of Amplitude vs building just for Command AI? Curious if resources are increased but shipping pace decreased, etc.
@gabe just way more scale. we had a sales team of 7. amplitude has a sales team of 200. but i've actually been surprised that the basic physics of shipping + selling are the same.
What acquisition stories do you look to emulate?
Feels like 95% of acquisitions end up failing. Acquired products get shut down, the team fails to integrate meaningfully into the acquirer leading to stagnation, or the acquirer tries to force an incompatible vision on the acquired product (resulting in the product totally falling apart).
What stories inspire you? @Instagram + @WhatsApp? @Slack?
@mikekerzhner good question. honestly I can't think of many at our size/scale (instagram and Slack are obviously way bigger)
Big transitions always have doubts. Hope this move felt right in the long run.
Congrats! What's the most surprisingly challenging part through the process?
@kissonlin integrating the whole team across every function into Amplitude has definitely been a lot of work to get right, make sure everyone has the right scope, etc
What challenge did you initially expect to be easy but turned out to be the most difficult during the acquisition or implementation phase?
What did you do really well during diligence and negotiation? What could you have done better? What would you tell other founders about how to proceed during diligence / negotiation for a potential M&A event?
@steveb I think we were very up front with our requirements (price, structure, etc) which helped simplify negotiations a lot. we also focused on aligning on terms before going super deep on diligence, which would have helped save time in the event we weren't aligned on terms. Amplitude could have been our competitor had we not agreed to the acquisition, so we wanted to make sure the other side was sufficiently serious before providing access to e.g. our customer data.
Congratulations! Not sure if you'll have the time. But how did the whole process of the acquisition started? Did Amplitude come to you or is this part of an exit strategy?