co-founder @PostHog
San Francisco, California
Joined April 2009
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I moved to SF from london 9 months ago. hot take: it's only about 20% better living here than just visiting 3-4 times a year
- before I moved here I'd come to SF once every 4 months on average, usually planned around 1-2 big events. i'd be extremely efficient with my time, planning a bunch of back to back meetings (people often thought I already lived here as I saw them as much as they saw anyone else here)
- this required real discipline, it's a long flight and often the events on their own weren't enough reason to make the trip
- now that i live here, i don't go out of my way to try to meet new people, more of it is organic but lower volume
- the whole group think thing is real and you can get as much of that as you want from X
- just attending events is probably not worth your time
pros:
- damn this city is so beautiful. having some of the most stunning nature a 20 min drive away never gets old. coming from london, the weather here is perfect (never too hot but _way_ more sunlight)
- there are definitely friends i wouldn't have made if i didn't live here
Making everything public has made PostHog easier to copy, meant we haven’t closed every hire we wanted to, and companies we’re selling to know our every move. Long-term, we still think it’s worth it.
- externally, this builds trust. we write about what we’re working on so others can take advantage of it too and know how to work with us better.
- the more context that lives in public, the less time is spent asking or looking for it. just as important now, it lets agents handle more things.
- write about your strategy, share real numbers, publicize post-mortems. our post-mortem of the Shai-Hulud attack was one of our most-read blogs last year.
- internally, we go further. managers tell you to share feedback directly, financials and board slides are shared, and team changes happen in public. if i think a team should be split up, i’ll literally post in their channel: “i think this team should be split into team A and team B, because you’re working on too many things together.”
- it’s more efficient, and builds trust too. you get more feedback, the team aligns on direction, and there’s less resentment and politics.
- ask (dumb) questions, share sales updates, and have disagreements in public channels. we trust people to spend in the company’s best interest, but have an expense-defense channel to back it up. i’ve called people out for using AI to write RFCs.
- practically, putting things in public is uncomfortable. do it anyways. literally just ask yourself "if i was dutch, how would i handle this".
- for example, i recently closed our private exec channel, which was reasonably active. nearly all exec discussions are now public, even significant positioning changes and their criticisms.
Part of being as transparent as possible is sharing info about potentially awkward moments, like when people leave PostHog.
Just had a team member share their exit feedback, so I shared it with all employees (with permission!).
My main takeaways:
- we need to invest more in product design
- there's a missing layer of product thinking below James and me
- we need to start facilitating 360 feedback from people on different teams (right now it's all from immediate teammates)
The cost of coordination is often way larger than the cost of some duplicative work across an org.
This came up last week in our slack when someone cross checked our teams' Q4 goals.
- it costs a lot in overhead to silo tasks
- in most cases different teams' work will be better if it bleeds over anyways
- it's dumb to spend too much time directing people
how the best products will be built
Introducing PostHog Code, the product editor that:
- Understands your product
- Identifies usage patterns
- Triages bugs and errors for you
- Creates PRs to fix them
- Continuously monitors and improves your product
Join the waitlist: posthog.com/code
Here's our secret master plan, available to read for free on your favourite ~short~ medium form text based social media platform
I'm chatting with Junan from Fin.ai on Thursday in SF. Come join!
luma.com/finxposthog?utm_sou…
Had a fun chat with David today on Fondo live (10:00 onwards)
Talked about early days of PostHog, pivoting and moving to SF
nitter.cf/davj/status/2022417084…
Happy Friday! We’re streaming @thestartpod the weekly show for AI founders
Here’s today’s line-up:
– @timgl on growing PostHog from a Hacker News MVP into an open-source product and data toolkit used by 190k teams (Co-CEO & Founder, @PostHog)
– @olivieropinotti on building AI Employees for Enterprise (Co-Founder, @Tensol_ai YC W26)
– @priyak_9 on doing things that don’t scale, at scale (CEO & Founder, @withnixo)
– @PamirEhsas on building AI-led legal services for tech companies (CEO & Founder, @arclinelegal YC W26)
– Jad Bousselham on building the AI Scheduling Assistant built to handle the ambiguity that breaks scheduling (Co-Founder, Verdex)
– @gwitchel on making infrastructure for advanced human testing and simulation (CEO and founder, @mantisbiotech YC W26)
Big thank you @Fondocom, @rhobusiness, @posthog, @TheCorgiCompany, @numeral, @mastra, @EragonAI, @compai, Napa, and viewers like you
Let’s go!!
nitter.cf/i/broadcasts/1LyGBXXzk…
tim glaser retweeted
🚨 There are more cool things in PostHog:
- Max AI has evolved into PostHog AI. It can now navigate the app, create feature flags, and is automatically aware of the active tab.
- PostHog AI's updated chat UI now shows its reasoning, planning, and tool calling all in real-time.
- You can now schedule changes to *existing* feature flags, making it even easier to manage release conditions.
- Export up to 15 second session replay clips to MP4 or GIFs. Memes not guaranteed.
- Our new beta SDK Doctor will alert you when you're running an out-of-date SDK
- Android and Flutter SDKs now support error tracking (beta)
- Long session replays now take less time to buffer by only loading 15 mins at a time
- New tab UI that shows you most recently visited pages at the top
- You can now pin tabs, so you can now have pinned tabs inside your pinned tabs. We call this Tabception
- Sort error tracking issues by revenue impact (if you've setup revenue analytics, so you should probably do that!)
- TikTok Ads as a data source
we raised some money
warning: actually non-meme content...
@timgl and I jumped on some quick calls and ended up raising a $70 million series D led by Stripe.
and of course we decided to announce this with the help of our newly created irl hedgehog Max.
see reply for a link to a post on how we’re going to use the $$$, but here’s the tl;dr version:
- we'll build even more products, like messaging, support, CRM, a lot more
- all the tools + your data + Max AI = shareholder value
tim glaser retweeted
I can mostly take for granted that startups in YC use @posthog
tim glaser retweeted
As a former Google Analytics PM, I am shocked by how much easier it is to get the insights I want from @posthog.
I’m still struggling to figure out how to filter for event values in GA. Figured it out in PostHog in 1 minute. 👏
tim glaser retweeted
Founder Mode: paulgraham.com/foundermode.h…
Me and the team in a Waymo on our way to look at The PostHog CRT
used a raspberry pi to set up our @posthog graph + main kpi on the old crt tv everyone sees when they walk into the office.