Let's go ahead and get started. Look, I'm just delighted to have Andrew Casey, the CFO of Amplitude. Thank you. ... joining us here today. In the spirit of full disclosure, I do own it in my personal account. Not enough. Not enough. Not enough. Yeah, I do. Not enough. Not enough. I mean, Andrew has a fantastic background, and part of, I think what makes the Amplitude story so interesting is the fact that he decided to take this job. We're gonna spend, you know, I don't know, five minutes going through your... maybe seven minutes going through your- That's the way. That's That's a nice way of saying I'm old. ... distinguished resume. and then talk about what you saw Uh-huh ... you know, at Amplitude. Then we have a bunch of questions about the current day business. All right. We can open it up to the audience as well. Sounds good. Okay. First of all, where are you from? Where were you born? I was born in Lawrence, Kansas. Really? I was an Air Force brat, moved around a lot. Ah. My father was military intelligence for a long time, and then became the Air Force historian. If you ever go to Randolph Air Force Base down in Texas, the Air and Science Museum is actually named after him. Come on, that's so cool. Yeah. What was his name? He was- Is he still alive? No, he passed away. No. Dennis Casey. No way. Yep. I grew up in a lot of places- Dennis Casey, yeah. ... but a lot of it was, you know, Southern California for a long time, and that's where I went to high school, then ultimately college. I was an Army brat for three years, right, and lived in four different cities in Germany on different army bases, but your... That was your entire childhood, moving around? Like- Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. When I mean, funny story from my wife. When I met my wife and we moved in together, she said, "Where's all your stuff?" I said, "What do you mean? I have my two boxes. Yeah. What do you mean two boxes?" I go, "Well, that's how much we were given when we had to move. That's what you got. Okay, you went to University of Redlands. Mm-hmm. I was at Claremont, so we used to play you guys. Yeah, yeah. Um- I went to Claremont later. Did you? Yeah, grad school. Oh. Peter Drucker School of Business, yep. Oh. Oh, oh. How'd you like it? Loved it. Yeah. Loved it. That's where I met my wife, so I have to say I loved it. Oh, yeah, you do. Was she in the grad school too, or was she? Yeah. She went to grad school. Wow. How big is that class? Oh, God it was. Not big, right? Not big. Yeah. Yeah. I always tell her she walked into the classroom and I knew that I wanted to go talk to her. Really? Oh, yeah. Okay. She thought I was a jerk. I was a good study buddy. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. by the way, you know- She's a CFO now, too. Did you know that? I didn't know that. Where is she at? She's at Sonos. She was, before she was at Apple, right? Apple, she was She was like the number two executive. Yeah ... in the finance department at Apple. That's right. Yeah. That's right. ... it's a power couple. Power couple. Okay, then 1996, first real job, nine years at Sun Microsystems. Yeah. A lot of people don't even realize what Sun Microsystems was. Yeah. Among many other things, it was the second largest software company on the planet. That's right. in the year 2000. That's right. Yeah. They're the ones who came up with the phrase, "The network is the computer." You know, so many great people worked at Sun. I think that I learned a ton from Mike Lehman, who was the CFO at the time. I've run into him a couple different times afterwards and told him how much he influenced my own thought process of what the CFO should be. just really great people. At there, rotation was a way of life, so lots of different jobs. I remember I was on finance and accounting track, and I've got my accounting credential, and I remember Mike convinced me to go into investor relations. Everybody around me was saying that was a dumb idea. Yeah. It's PR, it's, you know, it's not. It's kicking you off the finance and accounting track. The one person who kept telling me I should do it was Mike. The reason he told me that was because he said, "If you wanna be a CFO someday, you should see what we actually have to do. You should help me be a better CFO, and that will make you a better CFO." He was so right. Yeah, 'cause here you are. That's right. Right? Here you are. That's right. nine years at Sun, and then 2005 you go to Oracle, only for two years. What was going on at Oracle in 2005? So funny thing was, at Sun. Oh You know, Sun was this really great place. Yeah ... that every couple of years we'd transform. We were a workstation company, we turned into a server-based company, into a systems-based company, and the crown jewels, as you said, was software. Yeah. Jonathan Schwartz took over for Scott, and that was a big transition, and there was a lot of things that, at that point in time, I was in corporate finance and I was trying to help with us to really shift more towards a software company. It was just one of those situations where I thought that if we weren't gonna transform again, that that was gonna be a problem. Yeah. Oracle came along calling. At that point in time, they had big aspirations to do a lot of acquisitions, and so I came right at the tail end of PeopleSoft. Yeah. I was running corporate finance, and I was really supposed to enhance our earnings processes and forecasting, but what I just spent a lot of time doing was working with corp dev on acquisitions. On it, yeah. ... and integration. Yeah. And so- It was Safra the CFO back then? Safra was the CFO. She was? Okay. All right. Yeah, yeah. Safra's great, by the way. I mean, there were so many big personalities there that were not so great. Yeah. I can remember Larry screaming at me one morning after I worked all night on the Hyperion acquisition- Yeah ... and Safra stood up for me. Safra was great. Wow. I left there because of the culture and went to Symantec. Yeah. Symantec had a bunch of people from Sun who went over to Veritas, and Symantec acquired Veritas. They didn't know how to bring it together. I helped that and then took on the enterprise business. The funny story I was telling you earlier is that, after four years there, I was really trying to push James Beer and Enrique Salem, who was the CEO, to move to a subscription-based model. Yeah. That was before Adobe ripped the Band-Aid. Yeah. They just didn't have the desire to do it, but it was one way in which we could have transformed Symantec. I got frustrated there, and HP had came calling about their software business, and I, little unbeknownst to me, they were right in the middle of the Autonomy acquisition. Mm. They called me and said, "Look, we made you an offer for this job, but we're gonna put it on hold." That's a bummer. They said, "But there's this bigger job. We acquired EDS and we don't know how to integrate it, and we actually don't know how to run a services business. Can you help us with that?" When I first came to Symantec, I helped get the services business back to profitably running. It was like $500 million. I thought, "Wait a minute. Can I apply the same things to a $30 billion business?" We did. You know, two weeks after I joined HP, Léo Apotheker was fired, the person who ran services got fired. I found myself the next day, talking to Meg and a few other people and getting yelled at for the services business being wrong. I partnered up with an EDS vet named Dennis Stull, and we got that business humming again. Much that HP wanted to sell it. Hmm. I told Meg that I was not interested in selling it and sticking around and frankly, becoming Cathie Lesjak. Which Cathy was a great CFO, I just didn't see myself doing that. I went and talked to a friend of mine on Sand Hill. This is 2014 now. Yeah, this is 2014. Yeah, 2014. He said, "Look..." He had, you know, a lot of different companies that he introduced me to. He said, "Hey, there's this one company that's actually public. They really need an operational finance leader like you to pair with the go-to-market leader. They're a great technology, about $400 million though." I said, "That's too big. I want something smaller." He goes, "No, I think you should go talk to them." I said, "All right, who is it? Yeah. Oh, don't tell me yet. Today they are doing... Where is my note? $16 billion. Yeah. That's right. It was $400 million. It was $400 million. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That was ServiceNow. I said, "Who's that?" Actually, you know, I went and talked to Frank, I went and talked to Mike Scarpelli, Dave Schneider. People ask me all the time, "What was the best interview?" I said, "It was actually with Frank." Frank's walking me out to the parking lot and he says, "Well, it's gonna be great working with you. You really... You know, you need to join." Mike and Dave are out in the parking lot, Mike Scarpelli and Dave Schneider in the parking lot, and they're arguing, and they're arguing about who I'm gonna report to. Mm. I told them, "Hey, I'm a big boy. I can make this work. I've seen dysfunctions when, you know, operations leaders come in and they don't mesh with finance. I'll just report to both of you." Mike said, "I'm good," and he got in his car and left. For six years, I reported both to Dave and Mike. That's great. We scaled the business. That's great. ServiceNow 2014-2020. Mm-hmm. It's $400 million to where was it? What was it at in 2020? Well, it was, four and a half billion I think it was. Wow. 10x. Yep. Um- They, I told you about. At that point, you're you are golden, right? Yeah, I was. When John came in, he added a whole new spectrum for ServiceNow. Then John was leaving and Bill was coming in, and Mike had already left and they were running the CFO search. John asked me, and Bill asked me to participate in the process. I loved it. It was a great process. John did tell me that the board wanted somebody who's already been a CFO. Yeah. We went through the process. The board chose and executive chose, Gina. Gina's a great CFO, don't get me wrong. She's fantastic, yeah. John and Bill both told me, "Hey, we really want you to stay to help Gina scale up the business. The board really loves you, and you know the business very well." I told them, "Look, I went through this process. I don't really wanna be it." I wanted to be the CFO of ServiceNow. Yeah. I told them I need to think about it. I did. Financially, I probably should have stayed. The reality is, by their criteria, when Gina decides to retire, I still wouldn't have been qualified. Yeah. That's when I left. That's interesting, yeah. You gotta check that box at some point. Yep. WalkMe comes along. WalkMe comes along. Yeah. You know, we were a customer of WalkMe at ServiceNow. We're one of the launch ones. Just out of curiosity, does anyone here know what WalkMe is? All right. John does. Yeah. It's a Guides and Surveys product effectively. You know. Yeah ... if you're in an in-app application and you see a pop-up come up that says, "Oh, you click here and click here to follow the process," that's WalkMe. Yeah. It was super frustrating. Super charismatic founder. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I really like Dan. Yeah. got its start in like training applications. Yeah ... and then business process automation. This was a tough one. It was. Yeah, this was a tough one. It was... I mean, I joined March 2nd of 2020. Yeah. You know, two weeks later, the COVID hit, CEO had to go back to Tel Aviv, 'cause his father had contracted COVID and eventually died, unfortunately. He never came back. You know, most of the business is in the U.S., and we had to figure out how to manage. Yeah. We did. A funny thing happened through the summer of 2020, customers frankly bought more WalkMe because they needed to figure out how they operated remotely. Yeah. That buoyed our business. By October, the board was asking me to get the company ready to go public and told me I had two months. I told them they're nuts. We need much longer. The company wasn't mature, and we didn't even have an independence on the board. Yeah. We had to move fast. It was a great time to raise money, as you can imagine. We got it out in June of 2021. Did you know? Yep. Then SAP bought it. SAP bought it. That was a win. It was. That was a win. Yeah. I had actually left by then because a funny thing happened in August or call it the beginning of summer 2022. Frank Slootman, Dave Schneider, and Mike Scarpelli all called me about an opportunity over at a company they had funded through Sutter called Lacework. Yeah. Lacework had been one of the fastest, hottest, cybersecurity companies and raised $1.3 billion on their raise, but then hit some hard times and were, you know, just had some difficulties managing. They wanted an operational CFO to come in and help them get ready. They brought in Jai Parikh, who's now. Oh, yeah. ... over at Microsoft. Yeah. We got the business in good shape. You know, it took a little while. Believe it or not, we lost $350 million the year before I joined. Lost. They burned $350 million? Burned $350 million. Wow. We cut that in half. How do you burn that much money? We were gonna cut it in half again. How do you burn $350 million in a year? I know. I know. It's like, you don't care about- Just really, how do you do it? What do you spend it on? You know, a lot of it was Snowflake. Oh, really? ... hosting. Oh. You know. When companies say gross margin doesn't matter, I went, "Well..." You know, it can. It'll catch up with you. Yeah. In the December timeframe of 2023, there was a major strategic came forward and made an offer. Mm-hmm. Jay and I took it to the board, and we recommended that we do not do it because we were seeing progress against Wiz and others. Oh, really? The board decided against us because a lot of the investors who made that, contributed to that big raise wanted to reallocate capital. Yeah. We started a process, and by August of 2024 we had sold to Fortinet. The funny thing, story I tell people is on August 1st, 2024, I was CFO of Lacework, and by 12:00 P.M. I was assigning the definitive agreement to sell to Fortinet. By 2:00 P.M. I was announced as the CFO of Amplitude. Oh, really? How did that happen? Well, it was a very public process- Yeah ... for that way of selling. I had a lot of. Yeah, everyone knew. Everyone knew. People were calling. That's when. I'm sure a lot of people called. What was it about Tell? Okay, now. How long did that take? Too long, but that's all right. Sorry. That's all right. It was enjoyable. That's right. You won't get that level of detail at any other conference. Who called initially? What did they say, and why did you take this one? The then President and Leader of go-to-market, Thomas Hansen, and I have known each other for a while. Okay. he said, "Look, we've been trying to go drive a change in our go-to-market to focus more on enterprises. We have aspirations to become a platform in this space, and I need a CFO who's operational who can help me in this process. Mm-hmm. The one we have isn't capable, and we're gonna make a change." He said, "I want you to go talk to Spencer, our CEO and founder. Yeah ... and see if this is maybe an option. Yeah. Tell people what Spencer's story, and then how was your meeting with Spencer? The first part of the story was that Spencer just wanted to meet and understand, like, how to improve finance processes. Yeah. I think, "Okay." We met at one of my favorite restaurants in Palo Alto. Spencer's kind of your typical. Very much. Well, and. ...... Silicon Valley founder. Yeah. Yeah ... and, but, very bright and. Yeah What he doesn't have, which I think a lot of founders have, which, frankly you had asked me in the process if I was gonna go to another founder-led company, I would've said no. Yeah. He's surprisingly humble. Hmm. We were going through this process and talking eventually he said, "Look, I'm ready to make you an offer. I'm totally convinced you're the right CFO for Amplitude." I'd met with the board and other people. I said, "You know what, Spencer? I'm not convinced." He goes, "Why not?" I said, "Well, you know, I just don't know how you're gonna treat this CEO/CFO relationship. I have high expectations that this has gotta be one where, you know, we're very much like a married couple. Mm-hmm. You know, you've got to be able to tell me everything, I will tell you directly back on how we're gonna manage this. I'm not gonna be just the person who's doing the reporting and the accounting. I'm gonna be in the operations." He said, "I agree with you. That's what I want." I said, "Well, why do you want me?" He goes, "Well, I think I can learn from you." I just had never heard that before from a founder, that they're actually open to that. Yeah. To his credit, there have been plenty of times that we have disagreed on things and gotten to the point where we come to the right end. I also tell a funny story is I'm a... You know, we were talking, you were asking me if I was a tennis player. Yeah. He'll probably kill me for this, for telling people. I'm sure he will. He knows I'm a golfer. When I have my chances to, that's how I decompress. You know, that's how. Yeah. Shortly after I started, he said, "Hey, what are you gonna do this Saturday?" I said, "Well, I don't know. I'm probably gonna go play some golf or something." He said, "Cool. Can I join you?" I said, "Well, sure. Yeah, of course. Why not?" He comes and joins me. Oh, yeah. I can't wait. He's, you know, warming up and stuff, I'm like, "Okay." I'm doing my thing. We get out on the first tee, and I tee up and hit. You know, it was a good shot. I'm a good golfer, so. He gets up, he starts swinging, and looks at me and says, "Wow, this is actually the first time I've ever been on a real course." I said, "What?" The rest of the time he was a really good sport. I kept telling him, "We don't have to keep playing. You wanna keep playing?" He had, like, blisters on his hand, and I said, "Hey, we don't have to keep playing." He said, "No. Were there four of us or was it just the two of you? It was just us. Okay, good. All right. He says, "No, you know what? Frankly, I just wanna hang out. What you're doing and what you... I wanna learn more about what you enjoy. I wanna get to know you better." I'm like, "Wow, what founder would ever do that? That's cool. So- Does he play golf now? No. No. Okay. I think if you asked him, he'd probably say, "I'd love to go out and play golf with Andy again. I'm gonna play again." Yeah. All right. What does Amplitude do? Keep it simple for our audience. All right. Basically, if you think about any digital engagement that a business has with its customers, they need an instrumentation layer to basically understand how those customers are demanding the services, the products, the technology. Think about any mobile application you have, Pat. You know, Chick-fil-A, Starbucks, you know, anything. Joe & The Juice. McDonald's. McDonald's. All of those have an underlying instrumentation layer that they're trying to understand what patterns you're exhibiting through that application, what your preferences are. Chicken McNuggets with honey mustard sauce. Yeah, yeah. frankly, they should be giving. With a pup cup for the dog, yeah. ... they should give you the discounts based upon exactly that all the time. It's that, it's that catering what we call Product Analytics that basically says, "Hey, what is the thing that customers really enjoy about that application? Mm. How can you build loyalty programs and better sourcing funnels and conversion rates and promotional programs? I mean, that's the underpinnings of how the businesses are being run. companies like The Economist that went from pure print to pure digital. Yeah ... use Amplitude to understand what content that they wanna curate, and how that content is being demanded by users so that they then can drive their advertising programs. Amplitude is kind of like the instruction layer to understand behavioral heuristics about humans interacting with technology, and that has applications in every business. Well, give me some other example. Okay, The Economist is a good one. What are other real customer examples? How about First American Title. They're automating their whole process around the mortgage title process. Yeah. They're using Amplitude to do that. There is NTT Docomo, which is completely changing the way in which they're doing their promotional end campaigns for advertising. There's just a host of them across lots of different industries. That's the great thing. Yeah Amplitude is not resident only to software companies that are building applications. It's really to any company that is trying to build a digital interaction with a client. We started with a lot of the software and digital native, like the DoorDashes of the world. Mm. That expanded into all these different industries that are increasingly building applications for their clients. Okay. How's business? It's good. We had a really good Q4, one of the best quarters we've ever had. You grew 17%. We did. is that right? Yeah. Yeah. When I first joined, we were growing 6% and we were wildly unprofitable and had a lot of problems with churn. I would tell you that, every quarter since then, knock on something, we've been showing accelerating growth with greater leverage, and we hit profitability for the first quarter. You had accelerating growth six quarters in a row? Yep. Wow. Yep. obviously we did- Is it gonna keep accelerating? We did, yes. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think there's. Amplitude had accelerating growth six quarters, yeah. tons of opportunity for us to go after. I mean, if you read anything around Spencer, you'll see that he is very, very active about transforming our company to what everybody would consider AI native, like everything that we do. Uh-huh. That started in product where we're increasingly driving more and more innovation, lots of new products over the last year building out our platform. That's increasingly going through the rest of the company as well. We've acquired. Okay. ... a number of companies that are in- Let's not get to that yet. Okay. Okay. I said will it keep accelerating, and you said yeah. Yeah. What are the drivers that would cause this business to keep accelerating? A couple things. One, there's 2 primary monetizations in our business. One is the amount of data that's ingested into the platform. Like, we don't build based on seats. We build based upon- Mm ... how much data that customers are putting into the platform. The more applications they use, the better, more data they have. Yeah. There are lots of other vectors on that. The other one is cross-sell. We charge for additional modules around our application. We have modules around Experiment, Session Replay, Guides and Surveys. Take on WalkMe and Pendo in the marketplace. The postulate was from a platform that will bring all these applications together because if you go into an enterprise and they have all five different areas, they're moving data around, they're constantly dealing with different UIs, and it's very inefficient. Bringing them all together in one platform made a lot of sense. That cross-sell mechanism is what's really driving our growth this last year because one of the things that Amplitude didn't do so well historically, they were overselling capacity. Mm. You know, the, what, in the run up post IPO and then, you know, kind of the crash after, there was a lot of churn related to customers buying more than they actually could use. Was actually churn or just, down sells? Well, there were both. There were both. There were both. Yeah. Because you had a lot of those companies too that were digitally native that started up then. Yeah, yeah. ... and it just died, right? You had both. Part of the go to market re-engineering was building a more value-oriented sales process, and one that was starting customers with the right level of data ingestion, and then helping them get value, and as they add value, adding more capability. That, that cross-sell, and upsell mechanism is starting to actually get both vectors. Before, we didn't have really any upsell. You had some customers increasing their data, but it'd be offset by the, by the downsizing, the churn. Yeah. The cross-sell's been great as we added more capabilities. Awesome. As we move into like Marketing Analytics. We only got two minutes, so I wanna open it up to our audience. Okay, yeah. Sorry. ... and see if they have any question, or if we have a question from our audience. In the back. Go ahead. Yeah. Yeah. Have you done anything in the healthcare sector as far as mining-? We have to repeat the question. Sure ... public guys. The question was, have we done anything in the healthcare sector, and the answer is yes. We have a number of healthcare clients that are actually using our capability. There was a couple of them just patient onboarding. There's one that's using it for emergency room kiosks, so they're actually seeing how that interaction is working. There's a number of, I think it's Sutter who's doing nursing floor optimizations on how they're interacting with the various systems itself and monitoring patients. Anything that is digitally interactive with customers is an opportunity for us, and healthcare is a, is an area that's looking to figure out how they drive greater and greater efficiencies. All right. Quick one. Go ahead, yeah. Are your customers the end users themselves or integrators? They're users themselves mostly. I mean, we do have a, we do have a burgeoning opportunity to go with partners and build out, you know, a more partner-led model. I would tell you if you looked at our long-term business plan, I would tell you that we should get to a point where 40% of our business is coming from partners. We're just at the point now where the platform is enabling greater and greater development upon it, which allows value add resellers and global systems integrators to go create business extensions to our platform. We didn't have that before, you have to kind of open that up and then start building that as we go. Awesome. All right, Andrew. It was great to have you here. We could do another 25 minutes easily on the transforming to an AI native. Well, I'll, you know. We'll do that as a follow-up. I'm here all week. Yeah. I can come back. All right. Thank you, Pat.