Hi there. Thanks for reading my piece. I was delighted when one of my teammates informed it was trending on HN today. Then I noticed there were 7 comments and I got pretty anxious. I was nearly too afraid to click and read them. But now that I'm here, wow, I don't know what to say. I'm tearing up, flooded with relief, filled with gratitude that people seem to understand not only I what I was trying to say, but a little bit of what we are trying to do with Keen. Thank you.
It's probably an overshare, but this is one of the first things I've published since returning from maternity leave. I was feeling more vulnerable than usual, and the support from the community means a lot to me personally. Thanks again.
So moved by this post! I wish more CEOs had the courage to post their feelings about how tough it is to keep things together in the face of adversity. This is well thought out, well worded, and completely amazing. THANK YOU for putting a spotlight on what is something most CEOs are afraid to talk about for fear that it makes them look weak. Bravo! Keep it coming. Keen.io is an amazing product and I wish you and your team all the best!
I think the reason this is effective is not so much that you've given yourself permission to fail, but rather realising that failure isn't as big a catastrophe as you initially felt it to be.
Congratulations on your new arrival! Ours is ten weeks old today and it certainly adds a different kind of stress / happiness to just about everything! :)
I've just posted a longer reply to one of the other comments on here, and so to keep this one brief, hats off to you for writing this and posting it, it's so important (and hard) to get these types of internal comms right. Our angel investors were great for helping remind us of the benefits of being more open internally.
May I add my Congrats on the new addition as well (ours is six weeks now).
Also, thank you for the post - it's high time we remembered an Enterprise used to be a single goal, a time limited quest that brought people together and then disbanded them.
We should out live our organisations - and they should serve us. Not the other way round.
I think we're almost all in agreement that pitch video doesn't do a very good job explaining Keen IO. I mean, it was posted on HN three years ago as an example of a bad pitch :).
The idea for the service was at its infancy and Kyle's ability to articulate it to pg in front of 300 people just wasn't there yet. If you'd like a more up-to-date answer, here's one I wrote to the question "Why wouldn't I just roll my own" that someone else asked in this same thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9378228
[note: I work at Keen and have a lot of biases :)]
The main alternative to Keen IO is to build your own backend. Some developers will always prefer that, but many folks don't have the time & resources to devote to constructing & maintaining an analytics backend. Here are some things that people appreciate about Keen IO:
- The ability to start collecting & querying their event data immediately & easily
- Keen's uptime and reliability (transferring backend ops from their pager to ours).
- Not having to worry about scalability. For customers who are collecting billions of events per month and planning to double in less than a year, data challenges are less trivial.
- A point and click query interface that can be used by some non-devs to run analysis, create graphs, extract data, etc
- Query & visualization libraries that allow you to create reporting interfaces (websites/dashboards/customer-facing-analytics) much more quickly
- A growing inventory of features & open source tools that build on the API (scoped keys, caching, notifications, dashboard templates, etc)
IMO the benefits of seeing the company's reaction to one's lifestyle far outweight the risks of making the interview process slightly uncomfortable for risk-averse interviewers.
A lot of what you are saying rings true, but you may be underestimating just how small San Francisco is and how large the tech entrepreneur population is here. The number of new companies being started here is what makes San Francisco feel special. There is no other city on earth where you can overhear someone's new business idea at the cafe, the bakery, a restaurant, and the subway. And the crazy thing is that no one rolls their eyes at these ideas like they would in Chicago. It's pretty bizarre, sometimes unsettling, sometimes wonderful. It wouldn't happen at this frequency in Santa Cruz or Raleigh, or even New York or Austin or Boulder.
I think it would. Is there something special about SF in particular, or is it just the people? If you moved the people to Chicago or even Detroit, I have a feeling it would be exactly the same. If it's an issue of city size relative to the number of tech workers, look at smaller cities like Knoxville, Grand Rapids, or Madison. These conversations don't happen there because the people holding them don't live there. San Fran is almost a million people. The last two cities I've lived in clocked in around 200k. I think you're underestimating just how big San Francisco is.
I would gladly live in Silicon Valley if it weren't in San Fransisco. I don't think I would have the stomach to live in a city where the local people and politicians were that hostile to me.
And I still haven't heard anyone say that the local population doesn't totally hate everyone who works in tech. All I'm hearing is "yeah they hate us but look at how good it is for me". That's pretty awful.
Impressive, but not quite a impressive as the title alludes. Should be $100M Annual Revenue Run Rate (projected revenue) vs actual revenue in 2014. WSJ has corrected the title on their site. Twilio truly blazed a trail for API companies. Thank you for that, Twilio :)
I'm a data scientist that works with companies on their analytics problems every day. This article is spot on.
By far the biggest factor influencing the success of an analytics project is that the company has a human who has the time and inclination to think and reason about the business. They figure out what questions are important to ask and then go look at the data to see what they find. Collecting the data is the easy part. There is no analytics product that asks & answers your most important business questions for you.
I enjoyed the jab at predictive modeling; it's almost comical how many companies dream about predictive when they haven't yet got basic tracking in place for what's _already_ happening in their business.
Exactly - the human with domain knowledge is vital. I get scared when I see people trump up black boxes. Black boxes don't help with "Which questions should we be asking?" and "What are the missing variables?"
Domain knowledge is also really useful for spotting bugs. I recently worked on a project where I had very little domain knowledge. So anyway I wrote my code, ran my tests, crunched the data, double checked that all the results seemed reasonable, produced the pretty pictures and everything looked spot on. However once I started showing the results to a domain expert it took him 30 seconds to point to one of the outputs and go "that's impossible, you have a bug in your code". Sure enough I did. As a generalist the results looked fine to me (right size, seemingly reasonable relationship to surrounding values etc.), but to a domain expert the error stuck out like sore thumb.
Not doing data analytics but selling software that has forecasting with a model that we build and calibrate. We have fairly good performance, recalibrating the same model tales a few seconds but building the model or changing it is never quick.
The effect of these marketing campaigns on would be clients is terrible. They start going after crazy crackpot solutions to gain revenue while they haven't addressed the simplest easy to reach low risk revenue gains. In a a lot of cases integrating complex side effect data costs a lot and provides only marginal revenue gains.
I don't think it's realistic to strive for an environment where bias does not exist at all. Biases are implicit, part of human nature, and built into our subconsciousness. What makes me feel more comfortable is a place where people _admit_ their biases, where leaders say and act like they want the team to be more inclusive, and we all at least _try_ to make a more diverse workplace.
An inclusive work place also points out and immediately acts when teammates do things that are NOT inclusive e.g. racist or sexist jokes. That's a way of showing that you care about your teammates and their work environment.
We love you Firebase! Your company and culture are an inspiration to all and your platform in particular is a role model to other cloud database companies. Best wishes from me personally and your many fans at Keen IO.
It's probably an overshare, but this is one of the first things I've published since returning from maternity leave. I was feeling more vulnerable than usual, and the support from the community means a lot to me personally. Thanks again.