Thomas Hansen was born and raised in Denmark. He's also lived in South Africa, Thailand, Turkey and then Seattle. He is married to his wife Ingrid, with 3 older kids. His real passion is wind surfing, which he started when he was 14 years old. He even engaged in the support at the semi professional level as a teenager. His favorite spot is in Maui, which includes all the wind surfing options you could want. He also spends an hour in the gym every morning to start the day with endorphins.Thomas was introduced to his current venture through an early investor in the company. He met with the co-founder, Spenser, and sparks flew. There was a great fit and chemistry between them, and he was invited on board to push the company forward to new heights.This is Thomas's creation story at Amplitude.SponsorsRapyd CloudSpeakeasyQA WolfSnapTradeLinkshttps://amplitude.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomasneergaardhansen/Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.com* Check out Vanta: https://vanta.com/CODESTORYSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
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Just continue to have your optimism and your belief in what you're doing and just apply tenacity, full speed ahead. Don't give up. If you believe in it, full speed ahead. Of course, as you go along and as you get feedback, you tweak, you learn, you build a better widget, whatever it is you build. But just Don't give up on that enthusiasm, that energy, that optimism.
That is what's going to enable you to power through. That is what I've seen from the amazing founder CEOs that I've had the opportunity to work for, to work with, and to get to know over the years. That is the one common thread across it, their belief in what they're doing, their enthusiasm, their energy, and their tenacity. My name is Thomas Hansen, and I'm the president of Amplitude.
This is Code Story. A podcast bringing you interviews with tech visionaries. Who share what it takes to change an industry.
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Keeping scalability top of mind. All that infrastructure was a pain. Yes, we've been fighting it as we grow. Total waste of time. The stories you don't read in the headlines. It's not an easy thing to achieve. Took it off the shelf and dusted it off and tried to begin. To ride the ups and downs of the startup life. You need to really want it. It's not just about technology.
All this and more on Codestory. I'm your host, Noah Lappard. And today, how Thomas Hansen is helping you chart your path to growth using analytics and insights to drive action. This episode is sponsored by Speakeasy. Grow your API user adoption and improve engineering velocity with friction-free integration experiences.
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With over 100 five-star reviews on G2 and customer testimonials from SalesLoft, Rada, and Autotrader, you're in good hands. Join the Wolfpack at QAwolf.com. Thomas Hansen was born and raised in Denmark. He's also lived in South Africa, Thailand, Turkey, and then Seattle, US. He's married to his wife, Ingrid, with three older kids.
His real passion is windsurfing, which he started when he was 14 years old. He even engaged in the sport at the semi-professional level as a teenager. His favorite spot is in Maui, which includes all the windsurfing options you could want. He also spends an hour in the gym every morning to start the day with endorphins.
Thomas was introduced to his current venture through an early investor in the company. He met with the co-founder, Spencer, and sparks flew. There was a great fit and chemistry between them, and he was invited on board to push the company forward to new heights. This is Thomas' creation story at Amplitude.
The company got started roughly 15 years ago by our three co-founders, Curtis, Jeffrey, and our CEO, Spencer. And what we do, it's very straightforward. We offer a digital analytics platform, and we help companies unlock the power of their products by providing clear insights into their customers' behavior, so they can take action faster.
Essentially, it allows our customers to build better products and to better monetize their customers. That's it. I got introduced by Sequoia Capital, who was an early investor into Amplitude and still is on our board.
They called me one day and said to me, hey, we know you're not really ready to go and do something else, but we really would like to go meet this incredible CEO of Amplitude, Spencer. So Spencer and I met for a coffee and something happened. We both realized that there was a really good fit between the two of us. that we could really complement each other. We continued dating over a month or so.
We met four times face to face over a month. We spent close to 15 hours together. And that may sound like a lot, but listen, in the type of role that he's in and I'm in, that type of partnership, you just gotta get it right. You gotta get it right in terms of really having complimentary type of relationship. You've got to make sure that there's trust.
You've got to make sure that there's mutual accountability and room for both people in the relationship to feel that they can contribute with their strengths and can count on the other person to complement them where perhaps they're not the strongest. And look, that's what Spence and I have done two and a half years together now so far.
And we committed to working together for at the very least five years together. So it's a great partnership, something I really have enjoyed.
Normally, I ask about like, tell me about the MVP of the product, right? The MVP, you know, was built kind of prior to your time. I'm curious about what was your MVP, Thomas? When you joined the company, what was your first thing that you took on and what sort of state it was in and what sort of tools you were using to get started?
So when I joined in the summer of 22, so yeah, two and a half years ago, I came in and I saw a company that had at its core product analytics. But it was missing a broader strategy of tying that together with its other offerings. So very early on, what I worked on with Spencer and the team was to transform myself into a platform company where analytics is at the core.
And then around the analytics, we have a number of complementary type products and solutions, including experimentation, session replay, guides and surveys, a CDP, and a number of other product capabilities. And I think that's been the big change in the company in the last two and a half years that I've had a small role to play in.
So in that, tell me about certain decisions and trade-offs you've had to make, right? You got to work through different things when you're trying to deploy something, when you're trying to take something on, you've got to work through how you're going to even approach the problem. So tell me about some of those hard ones you had to work through and how you cope with those decisions.
With all decisions, product and non-product decisions, you've got to make tough choices where you have to prioritize and sequence what you work on. Earlier on, as one example, we had some opportunities to go in and build new capabilities. One of those capabilities I mentioned earlier on is session replay.
So we realized the session replay was a capability that our customers really was looking for and that we wanted to bring to market. That meant that some of the work we wanted to do, say, some time back around data governance, for example, RBAC, we had to delay by a quarter or two to go and prioritize the session replay. And that was a tough one, Noah.
We have 3,500, nearly 3,500 enterprise customers globally. And one of the things that many of them were asking for was RBAC or role-based access control. So making that trade-off and realizing we had to do that a little bit later to prioritize session replay earlier, that was a tough decision. The good thing is, as we sit here today now, we have it all done. So I feel good about that.
But at the time, it didn't feel good to push RBAC back. But those are the tough choices you have to make, right?
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Visit speakeasy.com slash codestory to get started and generate your first SDK for free. Okay, let's move forward then. So you've stepped into the company, you're getting settled in and you're pushing forward. How have you matured and progressed the company? How have you matured and progressed the bigger offering, the platform that you mentioned?
And I'm curious about how you go about building a roadmap, but I'm curious about how you decide what's the next most important thing to build or to address with Amplitude.
One of the strengths, and this comes straight from our three co-founders, is the voice of the customer and the attitude has an overweighted input onto our roadmap. We want to make sure that what we do is what the customers really, truly want and need. So we spend a lot of time making sure we do interlocks between our product management and our go to market or sales organization.
And that has a number of aspects. You have the input from the sellers, you have the input from the sales engineering folks. And we do that interlock to ensure that we get all the core opportunities into what can be done further on the product recorded and then have intelligent discussions around how to prioritize it.
That's a key process that really has worked well for us to make sure that the voice of the customer really gets heard.
Okay, so I hear you saying we in that description. I'm curious about how you go about building your team. And how do you and how does Amplitude decide, okay, this is the winning horse to join the team?
When you think about building a team, you gotta think about where you are at yourself in your career and the people working for you, where they are in your career. I'm very fortunate to be at the spot where I'm at in my career, and I have a group of C-level folks that are working together with me. So given their seniority, I really believe in empowerment,
but of course also in holding people accountable. And I'm not going to do someone's job for them. I'm going to set expectations and then let my folks, my colleagues lose to make amazing things happen. And I think in that regard, trust has to be the foundation of everything. It has to be implicit from
the beginning some folks will say that trust is earned which may have some truth to it it's not really how i operate i found that teams and individuals consistently perform better when they already have your trust from day one you gotta set them to them free and i think in that context people will shine they'll really perform well another item that comes to mind is when you're building a team you gotta realize first of all what are your own strengths and errors development
And then you've got to build a team that is diverse and where everybody can complement each other. And essentially the old saying of one plus one becomes three, right? So you've got to make sure that you get that diversity into your team in terms of experiences and skills so they can really complement each other and have each other's back.
Early in my career, I would say to you, fear of failure was holding me back. I've operated in environments where you really had to be not just in the detail, but you had to have every single thing, dot every single I and cross every single T correctly. I have changed in the last 10 years in a very significant way. First of all, I just don't use the F word anymore. The failure work, that is.
I believe in, let's rather think of work as a rapid experiment. You go and do some stuff and if it's not working or if it needs to perform better, then you tweak or you stop it, right? I'm a huge believer that set the right tone with the team.
and hopefully often they'll succeed sometimes they'll go through experiments that are not working and the difference here that comes in is how you as a leader react to the successes or the learnings or experiments failing and that will determine the trajectory of the team so i don't think you gotta run at 100 perfection before you go and do something i i think that there's a point at 65 to 75 percent
With many decisions in business, perfection, it's a fallacy. You've got to go and test things, experiment, learn from it, tweak, stop, start new things. And that's how you get to a good outcome.
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And have there been any interesting stories where you've had to fight it as you've grown?
Spencer and I and our board are huge believers in the notion of having stage appropriate leaders that can not only operate the business as it is today, but also have the capabilities and the experiences and competencies to scale beyond where we are today. To go from say our current roughly $300 million of revenue to a billion dollars and beyond.
Then the second thing that comes to mind is thinking about scale relative to our customers. When Amplitude started out and when Spencer, Curtis and Jeffrey got the first company, you were talking about an event of volume in the millions. When we talk to large customers today, we talk about event volume with our very large customers in the trillions and trillions of events.
That, of course, means that as you move along from a product perspective, you've got to make sure that the product not only scales, but also performs at that scale. And that takes ongoing engineering investments.
And then you also got to make sure that you make the appropriate investments into ensuring that your cogs or your cost of goods sell are not scaling proportionally with the event volume or the volume of your customers, but are actually done in such a way that you can get to some real scale and production of cogs as you grow the business, right?
Those are probably some of the items that comes to mind as you talk about the word scale.
So as you step out on the balcony and you look across all that you've built at Amplitude, what are you most proud of?
There's two things that comes to mind. In order of priority, our platform. So the platform we have today and the way we're able to offer a consolidated one pane of glass for our customers to serve all of that digital analytics needs. It's a one of a kind in the industry. I'm incredibly proud of the progress we made there. And then, of course, the second part that I'm proud of is the team we have.
So the team we have today is world-class, incredible leaders, incredible contributors based all over the world and working super collaboratively together. That stands out to me as the two highlights.
Let's flip the script a little bit. Tell me about a mistake you made and how you and your team responded to it.
As a leader, me personally, I have a lot of conviction and courage. And very quickly, I'm able to express an opinion on a matter. And given the role I have, my opinion typically carries weight. And one of the things I keep on iterating with all of my colleagues, however senior or junior they may be, is let's have a conversation and let's discuss.
So just because I may have expressed a point of view on a matter, push back on me. As much as I may have strong opinions and a lot of conviction and courage on a given matter, I'm also very quick to eat my own words and turn 180 and go a different direction based on an intelligent discussion. So just as late as yesterday, I was talking with one of my incredible leaders in marketing.
We were discussing some naming convention for a product we're going to launch in the first week of February. And after, frankly, a good intelligent discussion, I accepted her point of view because it was the right one. And I went 180 on my original idea. So you've got to be humble. You've got to be open. You have to listen carefully and invite people to have a conversation and to push back on you.
If you don't do that, then you often end up with very costly mistakes. I will add on one more story. So this is also quite a personal story. This is from my early days in my career. I started my career as an SDR, then I became a seller, and then eventually I got my first sales manager role. And that was for Dell in South Africa. So this goes back to, gosh, you know, 96, 97, 97.
And so I'm in my first role as a front-line sales manager in South Africa. One day, one of my colleagues who worked for me as a seller, he pulled me aside and he was late at career and had a lot of experience. And he basically said to me, hey, Thomas, I just want to give you some feedback. I'm finding that your style is very one-dimensional.
And it's all about you and the way you want things to get done. My experience of working with you, Thomas, is it doesn't empower me. And it doesn't really put me in a place where I want to go out and push the envelope and be creative. And I think you're missing different perspectives. And I think you need to be open to there's many different paths to getting through.
There's many different ways of getting things done. I realized that I hadn't really fully made the transition from being an individual contributor to being a manager. I realized that I was trying to tell people how to do things as opposed to trying to coach and enable my team to get to the desired end results.
That drove a significant change for me in terms of how I work with my team and that piece of feedback has stayed with me ever since.
This will be interesting. It'll be actually really fun to hear your passion come through this question. What does the future look like for Amplitude, the product and for your team?
On the product, we'll continue to build out our digital analytics platform. So we'll continue to add more features and functionalities to what we have built across the different types of products that are on the platform. And we'll continue to add more products to the platform. An example of that is last month, we acquired a company called Command.ai, an incredible team.
And based on the IP that they built, we're in the process of porting that IP onto our platform. And in early February, we'll be launching our guides and survey offering on our platform. Now, that's been done through an acquisition. At other times, we'll go and build additional products for our platform, as we just did over this past year with Session Replay.
And there's more offerings, more new products that we'll continue to add to our platform. And then, of course, also continue to enrich the platform with AI, which goes without saying, no conversation without AI. I'm incredibly excited by the progress we made in building out this platform and how our customers but also prospects are responding to what we're doing.
So that's given a little bit of a kick in the step, a positive bounce in everybody's step in the company. Although it's been a tough market in the enterprise software industry over the last few years post the COVID, a high. We are encouraged. We are seeing re-acceleration in our business. We are seeing customers responding incredibly positive to what we're doing with our platform.
From a morale perspective, we feel good about it across the company and Amplitude. It's fun to be part of this journey.
Thomas, let's switch to you. Who influences the way that you work? Name a person or many persons or something you look up to and why.
I have been so fortunate to have exposure to incredible leaders over the years. They have brought many different dimensions and aspects to how I think about things and how I operate. Earlier in my career, I will say that one person that impressed me was the then CEO of NASPERS, Kurs Becker.
His incredibly innovative way of thinking on how do you find product market fit, that really inspired me to always remember to optimize for product market fit. Another big influence that some people will be critical of, but I think he has done incredible things, is the former CEO of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer. Steve Ballmer took a company and over plus a decade,
Not only grew the business incredibly, but operationalized the business to a very high degree of global perfection. Put the foundation in for a lot of future growth that Microsoft has realized post his departure. And set a tone of caring, deeply caring for the company and deeply caring for every single person in the company. Very inspiring to see how he did that.
In more recent times, a person that I continue just to be so impressed with is Spencer. Spencer is our co-founder and CEO here at Amplitude. What impresses me is, despite the fact that his earlier career, how he is just so engaged and so open and so humble in terms of how to get better, not just for himself, but also for the company.
That sets a really good tone for the company and one I try to follow.
Okay, you know, we talked about a mistake earlier, but this is a little different spin. If you could go back to the beginning of your time at Amplitude, what would you do different? Or where would you consider a different approach? It doesn't have to be a mistake. It could have been something that worked, even worked well. But maybe you'd tweak it a little bit.
The only thing in hindsight is, I would say, is move even faster. So we've moved incredibly fast since I've joined Amplitude in terms of the work we've done on our platform. And in terms of building out our team, if I could go back in time, I would find ways to make things move even faster in terms of making decisions both on our product platform as well as around our team.
Look, if I go back a little bit further in time and I reflect on my career and what I've done, I would say I wouldn't change anything because I am where I am today because of what I've done, so to speak. But as I reflect now of having worked for startups in the Bay Area for the last 10 years or so, There is something special about the startup environment in the Bay Area, in Silicon Valley.
If you have an opportunity to get exposure to that early in your career, I would encourage anyone to go get that exposure at the heartbeat of innovation and tech in the Bay Area. That to me, the last 10 years has just been so fascinating for me at a more personal level. It's just where the innovation happens. Just incredible.
That is not to say that there's no incredible innovation happening in other parts of the world. In my last role and company for UiPath, which is Romanian-founded by Daniel Dines, I was so impressed to see the innovation that had come out of Romania and and Daniel and the team. So you see that.
You also see amazing startups, of course, coming from Europe, from Israel, from the East Coast, from Asia. So I'm not belittling that, but there is still something magical happening in Silicon Valley in the Bay Area. And if I could talk to my younger self, I would probably say, go and get exposure to that. The earlier, the better.
Last question, Thomas. So you're getting on a plane and you're sitting next to a young entrepreneur who's built the next big thing. They're jazzed about it. They can't wait to show it off to the world. They can't wait to show it off to you right there on the plane. What advice do you give that person having gone down this road a bit?
I would say to the person, just continue to have your optimism and your belief in what you're doing and just apply tenacity full speed ahead. Don't give up. If you believe in it, full speed ahead. And of course, as you go along and as you get feedback, you tweak, you learn, you build a better widget, whatever it is you build. But just don't give up on that enthusiasm, that energy, that optimism.
That is what's going to enable you to power through. That is what I've seen from the amazing founder CEOs that I've had the opportunity to work for, to work with, and to get to know over the years. That is the one common thread across it. Their belief in what they're doing, their enthusiasm, their energy, and their tenacity. That's what I would emphasize.
I think that's fantastic advice. Well, Thomas, thank you for being on the show today. And thank you for telling your creation story at Amplitude. You bet. Thanks for the invite. Really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you. And this concludes another chapter of Code Story. Code Story is hosted and produced by Noah Laphart.
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