Hats off to Statsig. They built a stellar product. Superior to many of their industry competitors like Optimizely. Back when I was on an internal Experimentation platform, we were impressed how they balanced dev velocity & stat rigor https://www.statsig.com/updates These guys ship.
Business-wise, I think getting acquired was the right choice. Experimentation is too small & treacherous to build a great business, and the broader Product Analytics space is also overcrowded. Amplitude (YC 2012), to date, only has a 1.4B market cap.
Joining the hottest name next door gives Statsig a lot more room to explore. I look forward to their evolution.
Can someone ELI5 what Statsig actually is? Their landing page is full of gems like "Turn action into insights and insights into action" and "Scale your experimentation culture with the world's leading experimentation platform" so I have no clue. It appears to be another analytics + A/B testing platform, but surely that can't be worth $1.1B to OpenAI?
I'm of the opinion that the marketing gimmicks that we see on some products but ends up either being acquired big or gets those big elusive contracts, is that they did those messaging on purpose to steer the general onlooker something else. However, their internals or when a customer talks to, say, the founders, they would narrate and then show such things that are 100x better than what we see in the open.
A buzz word driven company with a product meant to track users, their mouse movement, keyboard usage across the internet. Of course to help make the world a better place .... for shoving advertisements.
Are we supposed to post every blog/news post of OpenAI and keep fueling the AI hype? I think at this point people should know that OpenAI is just like any other company.
Statsig is big enough that its acquisition is interesting in its own right. Or maybe I'm biased because I spent quite some time setting up a Statsig integration at $FORMER_EMPLOYER. But if I've done that, odds are that a lot of the other people here have too...
A skunkworks shop that aims at 100x returns by producing cutting-edge AI tech, not another B2B BigTech company. Isn't that the very image they cultivated in the media?
IIRC, the pitch was AGI would allow OpenAI to print money by replacing humans in any industry and siphoning whatever was being spent on payroll for pennies on the dollar.
Agreed. There are dozens of startups and established companies providing analytics-y software. The fact that this one is being acquired by OpenAI doesn't make it any more newsworthy to anyone other than the people who are getting some OpenAI equity...
The CTO of applications reporting to CEO of applications (who reports to the actual CEO) is kinda weird? I figure you're either the actual CTO or you're not a C-level exec and should have another title. Just more title inflation I guess. Maybe in same way you see VPs of X everywhere in some organizations we'll be starting to see CEO/CTO of X lower and lower down the org chart.
“CTO” makes sense as a signal that “the buck stops here” for technical issues. They are the highest-ranking authority on technical decisions for their silo, with no one above them (but two CEO’s above them for business decisions)
If Mira Murati (CTO of OpenAI) has authority over their technical decisions, then it’s an odd title. If I was talking with a CTO, I wouldn't expect another CTO to outrank or be able to overrule them.
It's signaling P&L responsibilities. It's not that weird, at least not unheard of at all, just that it's typically done through "EVP" - So EVP Applications, VP of Applications Engineering, etc. - I'm guessing that the line items those "C"s who are not Sam are responsible for, are bigger than most F500 executives, and they're using titles to reflect that reality.
just gonna point out that Google has done this as well and its not so much title inflation as it is just acknownledging the fact that if the unit they command was a standalone business they would well be worth the CEO/CTO title.
Oh the CTO approved it so we should blame them. No not that CTO the other CTO. Oh so who decided on the final out come. The CTO! So who is on first again?
This C level thing is happening for decades. There are many with CTO title who manage groups sometime as small as 5-10 people. And they are not startups but large corporates.
How come this acquisition gets to go through, but Windsurf didn't? There might be antitrust review here too, and Microsoft might also lay a claim to Statsig's IP due to their contract with OpenAI. Maybe Statsig didn't care that Microsoft would have access to the IP?
Data/ML and Apps split seems pretty normal to me, even in a company of ~20. What makes a group of coworkers into "an org"? That they don't attend one-another's retros?
Even if Data/ML and Apps are split, in a company of 20, they would almost certainly go to the same CTO.
Here you will have what appears per this article to be 2 but as I looked more into it, there are 3 (!!) CTOs (see here: https://x.com/snsf/status/1962939368085327923) one of which (B2B CTO) seems to be reporting to the COO.
So in this context, you have 3 (!!) engineering organizations that don't terminate in a single engineering leader. "Apps" terminates at the "Apps" CEO (Fidji), research org terminates (??) at Sama (Overall CEO) and then B2B terminates at the COO.
So either you have weird dotted lines to Brockman for each of these CTOs OR you are going to have a lot of internal customer relationships which don't have a final point of escalation. That's definitely not common at this size and, unless these are all extremely independent organizations from a tech stack perspective (they can't really be since surely they are all reliant on the core LLMs...), then there will be a lot more weird politics that are harder to resolve than having these organizations all under one technical leader.
Of course another alternative is OAI is handing out titles for retention purposes and "CTO" will be heavily devalued as a title internally.
Have implemented Statsig in two companies as alternatives to LaunchDarkly and loved it both times. Going to be interesting how their other big customer deals with this purchase i.e. Anthropic
StatSig is a reimplementation of Meta’s analytics and growth systems. The best in the world and how they’re able to enter and dominate markets and scale to billions in under a year.
Curious to hear about how they feel about many key StatSig people walking away, and Vijaye going to lead a different product. OpenAI bought it for internal use. They plan to put the public-facing product into more of a maintenance mode.
sister [deleted] comment said "He’s an extremely well-known and deeply respected engineer, leader, and founder in the Seattle metro region. This is a key hire for OpenAI, and a good one."
OpenAI is going to start competing with a ton of SAAS companies. I think we are going to see products 10x better than legacy saas products, many companies wont be able to compete.
Hats off to Statsig. They built a stellar product. Superior to many of their industry competitors like Optimizely. Back when I was on an internal Experimentation platform, we were impressed how they balanced dev velocity & stat rigor https://www.statsig.com/updates These guys ship.
Business-wise, I think getting acquired was the right choice. Experimentation is too small & treacherous to build a great business, and the broader Product Analytics space is also overcrowded. Amplitude (YC 2012), to date, only has a 1.4B market cap.
Joining the hottest name next door gives Statsig a lot more room to explore. I look forward to their evolution.
It gives Statsig a lot more room to explore how our cursor movements and keystrokes can train LLMs to emulate humans browsing the web, you mean?
At peak amplitude's market cap was 10B
Amplitude is on track to be delisted lol
Imagine working for 13 years and creating something only worth 1.4B dollars. What pathetic losers
lol, lmao even
thanks for the laugh
decent satire
Sarcasm is lost on this crowd lmao
Can someone ELI5 what Statsig actually is? Their landing page is full of gems like "Turn action into insights and insights into action" and "Scale your experimentation culture with the world's leading experimentation platform" so I have no clue. It appears to be another analytics + A/B testing platform, but surely that can't be worth $1.1B to OpenAI?
I'm of the opinion that the marketing gimmicks that we see on some products but ends up either being acquired big or gets those big elusive contracts, is that they did those messaging on purpose to steer the general onlooker something else. However, their internals or when a customer talks to, say, the founders, they would narrate and then show such things that are 100x better than what we see in the open.
A buzz word driven company with a product meant to track users, their mouse movement, keyboard usage across the internet. Of course to help make the world a better place .... for shoving advertisements.
Initial Show HN four years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26629429
Congrats to the Statsig team!
1 comment - 13 points. Guess you should never feel bad if your own Show HN doesn't take off, it's not the end of the world!
Are we supposed to post every blog/news post of OpenAI and keep fueling the AI hype? I think at this point people should know that OpenAI is just like any other company.
Statsig is big enough that its acquisition is interesting in its own right. Or maybe I'm biased because I spent quite some time setting up a Statsig integration at $FORMER_EMPLOYER. But if I've done that, odds are that a lot of the other people here have too...
This seems like a big shift for OpenAI into an enterprise applications vendor to me.
What else could they have been? Microsoft didn't give them $10bn to build out their B2C homework autocomplete service.
A skunkworks shop that aims at 100x returns by producing cutting-edge AI tech, not another B2B BigTech company. Isn't that the very image they cultivated in the media?
How do you monetize cutting edge ai tech? Sell it. Who has money? Businesses.
IIRC, the pitch was AGI would allow OpenAI to print money by replacing humans in any industry and siphoning whatever was being spent on payroll for pennies on the dollar.
In reality, it's going to be enterprise and ads.
This is it. Does OpenAI have consumer DNA or enterprise DNA? It is very difficult to have both.
place I work - Notion - does
It was almost certainly purchased just for internal usage. See: Rockset
Agreed. There are dozens of startups and established companies providing analytics-y software. The fact that this one is being acquired by OpenAI doesn't make it any more newsworthy to anyone other than the people who are getting some OpenAI equity...
The CTO of applications reporting to CEO of applications (who reports to the actual CEO) is kinda weird? I figure you're either the actual CTO or you're not a C-level exec and should have another title. Just more title inflation I guess. Maybe in same way you see VPs of X everywhere in some organizations we'll be starting to see CEO/CTO of X lower and lower down the org chart.
“CTO” makes sense as a signal that “the buck stops here” for technical issues. They are the highest-ranking authority on technical decisions for their silo, with no one above them (but two CEO’s above them for business decisions)
If Mira Murati (CTO of OpenAI) has authority over their technical decisions, then it’s an odd title. If I was talking with a CTO, I wouldn't expect another CTO to outrank or be able to overrule them.
It would be quite strange indeed for Mira Murati to have a say over their technical decisions, considering she does not work for OpenAI :)
It's signaling P&L responsibilities. It's not that weird, at least not unheard of at all, just that it's typically done through "EVP" - So EVP Applications, VP of Applications Engineering, etc. - I'm guessing that the line items those "C"s who are not Sam are responsible for, are bigger than most F500 executives, and they're using titles to reflect that reality.
just gonna point out that Google has done this as well and its not so much title inflation as it is just acknownledging the fact that if the unit they command was a standalone business they would well be worth the CEO/CTO title.
Yep. CEO of YouTube, Google Cloud, etc.
Sounds to me like another phase in the growth of the "Unaccountability Machine"
https://www.amazon.com/Unaccountability-Machine-Systems-Terr...
Oh the CTO approved it so we should blame them. No not that CTO the other CTO. Oh so who decided on the final out come. The CTO! So who is on first again?
Just look at any media agency (OMG as an example). There are CEOs up the wazoo, one for North America, one for EU etc.
In practice, these are just internal P&Ls.
This C level thing is happening for decades. There are many with CTO title who manage groups sometime as small as 5-10 people. And they are not startups but large corporates.
I'm just sitting here wondering what in the world "Applications" is, is that a subsidiary or what?
A thing that uses a model to have customers.
Apparently that's what they call ChatGPT, Codex, etc ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
How come this acquisition gets to go through, but Windsurf didn't? There might be antitrust review here too, and Microsoft might also lay a claim to Statsig's IP due to their contract with OpenAI. Maybe Statsig didn't care that Microsoft would have access to the IP?
Windsurf didn't not go through because of regulatory or MSFT issue – that was always a fig leaf. OAI walked.
So there will be at least two separate technical organizations within OAI. Pretty small company (HC and product surface wise) for that.
Is Brockman now CTO over research specifically or is there going to be a weird dotted line?
Data/ML and Apps split seems pretty normal to me, even in a company of ~20. What makes a group of coworkers into "an org"? That they don't attend one-another's retros?
> What makes a group of coworkers into "an org"?
Reporting lines that ladder up to a line in the P&L.
Even if Data/ML and Apps are split, in a company of 20, they would almost certainly go to the same CTO.
Here you will have what appears per this article to be 2 but as I looked more into it, there are 3 (!!) CTOs (see here: https://x.com/snsf/status/1962939368085327923) one of which (B2B CTO) seems to be reporting to the COO.
So in this context, you have 3 (!!) engineering organizations that don't terminate in a single engineering leader. "Apps" terminates at the "Apps" CEO (Fidji), research org terminates (??) at Sama (Overall CEO) and then B2B terminates at the COO.
So either you have weird dotted lines to Brockman for each of these CTOs OR you are going to have a lot of internal customer relationships which don't have a final point of escalation. That's definitely not common at this size and, unless these are all extremely independent organizations from a tech stack perspective (they can't really be since surely they are all reliant on the core LLMs...), then there will be a lot more weird politics that are harder to resolve than having these organizations all under one technical leader.
Of course another alternative is OAI is handing out titles for retention purposes and "CTO" will be heavily devalued as a title internally.
Also, best of luck to current statsig customers lol
Like Anthropic
Looks like Fidji is reconstituting her Org from Meta
It was extremely effective while it was running. I was there.
Have implemented Statsig in two companies as alternatives to LaunchDarkly and loved it both times. Going to be interesting how their other big customer deals with this purchase i.e. Anthropic
Anthropic must be miffed![0]
[0] https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/claude-code/data-usage#te...
1.1 B talent acquisition comp I saw somewhere. That cant be right is it - not sure what the underlying company tech is.
StatSig is a reimplementation of Meta’s analytics and growth systems. The best in the world and how they’re able to enter and dominate markets and scale to billions in under a year.
curious to hear people's experience using Statsig
Curious to hear about how they feel about many key StatSig people walking away, and Vijaye going to lead a different product. OpenAI bought it for internal use. They plan to put the public-facing product into more of a maintenance mode.
Who the heck is Vijaye Raji?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45108493
sister [deleted] comment said "He’s an extremely well-known and deeply respected engineer, leader, and founder in the Seattle metro region. This is a key hire for OpenAI, and a good one."
Some ex-facebook employee who developed a product for ... guess what - tracking users activity on websites to provide "analytics".
The Statsig CEO, of course.
Related Statsig post: https://www.statsig.com/blog/openai-acquisition
OpenAI is going to start competing with a ton of SAAS companies. I think we are going to see products 10x better than legacy saas products, many companies wont be able to compete.
> competing with a ton of SAAS companies
A a ton of companies will compete with OpenAI while their focus is divided amongst a 100 things. May a thousand flowers bloom!
I mean they can try. They’re not gonna be very good at it