Amplitude Series-A

This is the Amplitude pitch deck to raise a $9m series-a round in 2015.

About

Amplitude is the product intelligence platform that helps companies use their customer data to build great product experiences for systematic business growth. Headquartered in San Francisco with offices in New York, London, Paris, Amsterdam, and Singapore, Amplitude is the cross-platform intelligence solution of choice for modern product and growth teams. Amplitude serves over 30,000 teams at companies like Microsoft, Twitter, Adidas, CapitalOne, NBC, Hubspot, and Procter & Gamble.

Analytics startup Amplitude announced in July that it has confidentially filed to go public in a direct listing, just one month after it had raised a $150 million Series F at a $4 billion valuation led by Sequoia Capital.

Amplitude publicly released its S-1 paperwork ahead of that listing, showing growing revenues: It posted over $72 million in revenue for the first six months of 2021, up 57% from the same period of 2020. It also shows that while the company isn’t profitable, its losses are narrowing, posting a loss of $0.57 per share over that same period, down from $0.68 in the same period of 2020.

The filing also shows that venture capital firm Benchmark Capital owns 15% of the company, making it the single largest outside investor, followed by Battery Ventures, Institutional Venture Partners, and Sequoia Capital.

The direct listing means that Skates will be the youngest CEO to take a software company public since Box’s Aaron Levie in 2015 — with the document also showing that the 33-year old CEO has a compensation package of over $6 million.

The startup has experienced tremendous growth in the past year as companies increasingly want to use data to better engage their customers online. But the firm’s journey hasn’t always been smooth.

Amplitude CEO and cofounder Spenser Skates told Insider that he initially struggled to get venture capitalists to understand what his startup was trying to do. While he believed the aim of his company was clear — to help businesses understand how customers are using their products — the VCs just couldn’t seem to get it.

He pitched over 70 firms for his seed round back in 2012 and was met with a lot of skepticism. He felt incredibly frustrated and remembers blowing off steam to a friend by saying he “hates” the investors. It took two years before Amplitude was able to raise a $2 million seed round from SV Angel, Quest Venture Partners, and Data Collective.

Skates eventually realized that his pitch was the problem: He was spending too much time trying to explain the company itself, and not enough time showing how the product would be good for users.

“I realized when I look back in the seed decks and in terms of pitching, I didn’t do a good job talking about customers and the pain they had,” Skates said. He revamped his deck, and managed to raise a $9 million Series A round led by Benchmark Capital in 2015, followed by a $15.9 million Series B led by Battery Ventures in 2017.

You can read Amplitude’s seed deck, as well as the Series A pitch deck that actually got VCs to open their wallets, below, to see how the company’s messaging to investors changed over time.

But Skates really had a pitching epiphany when he met with Sequoia Capital’s Pat Grady, who, after the presentation, pitched the company back to Skates even better than he could explain it himself.

Grady honed in on how Amplitude’s tool helps companies understand their digital products — not just with how mobile apps are being used, but how digital services like apps or websites serve as a “distribution channel” that can drive attention to specific goods, services, or deals.

For example, one of Amplitude’s clients is Burger King and it helps the fast food chain measure what features on its app users use the most: which promotions are most attractive to customers, for example, or which menu items they linger over.

“When Grady made this big point about the product being its own distribution channel, I thought ‘whoa, this guy finally gets it,’ he is able to see the company’s potential,” Skates said.

Funding rounds

Announced Date	Transaction Name	Number of Investors	Money Raised	Lead Investors
June 9, 2021	Series F – Amplitude	4	$150M	Sequoia Capital
May 21, 2020	Series E – Amplitude	7	$50M	GIC
Dec 5, 2018	Series D – Amplitude	6	$80M	Sequoia Capital
Aug 10, 2017	Series C – Amplitude	6	$30M	IVP (Institutional Venture Partners)
Jun 8, 2016	Series B – Amplitude	6	$15.9M	Battery Ventures
August 5, 2015	Series A – Amplitude	6	$9M	Benchmark
Jan 16, 2015	Series A – Amplitude	2	—	—
Jul 11, 2014	Seed Round – Amplitude	8	$2M	—
Sep 10, 2013	Seed Round – Amplitude	2	—	Quest Venture Partners
Jan 1, 2013	Seed Round – Amplitude	1	—	—

Pitch deck review summary

 

Structured summary review

Words

Generally, there aren’t a lot of words per slide and not enough to explain points well. Maybe an adtech specialist would be able to glance at this all and think everything is interesting, but not me.

Slide length

At 23 slides the deck is fair length but fine.

Headers

The headers are better than the seed deck that they wrote, but they are still far from what they should be like.

Appearance

Never use 4:3 for a PowerPoint slide. Always select the widescreen option of 16:9. You get a lot more space on your slide.

Capitalize the first word in a sentence.

The design is fairly ghetto, but if you have content you don’t need to be fancy. In fact, I feel designers create new issues.

Narrative

There is no real narrative to speak of but the slides seem to be in the correct order.

Structure

The slides are a little disorganized, but it’s not a deal killer.

Slides

The cover pretty much everything that you need to cover in a deck, but they don’t do it terribly well. This isn’t the worst deck that has been shared publicly, but it’s still not something to write home to Mother about.

Slide by slide review

Don’t put the page number on the cover. Small thing, but why is P in powerful not capitalised?

This is an ugly slide. It’s not hard to format your team slide. The green box shoved in with an arrow is messy.

They seem to have a grat team so they should have put in the effort to highlight this better,

Don’t write a header such as “you make what you measure”, that is the sort of thing people do in presentations. In a deck you want to make the point in the header so investors don’t have to figure it out.

I see they are trying to explain things by analogy here, but my ADHD is playing up and I can’t be bothered to read it.

Don’t write the header as a question. Again, make the point you want to make.

The body copy is ok, but there are better ways to structure up information. Also, if you are going to make a point such as “it’s what devs say is important” support it with data. Also is analytics really the most important piece? Compared to what?

When I see a slide like this I think the founders have left placeholder text as a reminder of what they plan on making.

Why is event-based analytics important?

They are making a lot of claims of what is important without any evidence. The implication is ‘trust us we know what matters’.

The 7 friends in 10 days is a fairly famous example of a growth hack. That’s interesting but I wonder if this slide could be presented in a more interesting manner?

The content on the slide is interesting but it is very wordy. I would probably just make three examples with some screenshots.

This is just a bizarre slide. Why did they think sticking an orange box with we equal awesome was a good idea? I don’t think it is.

This was in 2015. Was the architecture particularly interesting then? It doesn’t seem particularly novel or interesting to me, but then I can only do basic Python.

If you are going to make comparative claims to competitors actually show a competitor. It would be a lot more convincing.

I don’t know why but slide 11 is missing. It could have been an error or the founders just didn’t want to share.

It should be obvious that the font size for the header is far too large.

I’m not sure what is going on. ‘Behavioral cohorts’ is what, a header, a bullet point?

Don’t paste in screenshots. Format charts natively.

This is sort of a rubbish market sizing slide. It’s a hodgepodge of random things that they found.

WTF is this slide about?

Amplitude are the only people in the whole world that do bus intel?

How do they define willingness to pay?

If you are sticking in logos, get the PNG version so there is no white background.

Do they really need more than one competition slide? I’m not sure that they do.

Ok, they have also omitted slides 17 and 18. They released their deck after their IPO so I’m not sure why they would feel the need to not share the whole deck, but there you go.

They have good points to be made on the slide, but the slide isn’t great.

This is not a go to market slide nor is it about distribution. This is sort of like a revenue model slide?

In academic literature, competitive advantages are not long-term, core competencies are.

It always cracks me up when people write their team is a competitive advantage. It’s not like Google who makes 90% of their revenue from ads couldn’t do this?

When you make a slide, make it consistent. Three is good. Make a header and then describe it.

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