Vijaye Raji to become CTO of Applications with acquisition of Statsig

It gives Statsig a lot more room to explore how our cursor movements and keystrokes can train LLMs to emulate humans browsing the web, you mean?

At peak amplitude's market cap was 10B

Really? I never heard of them.

Meanwhile Optimizely is a new partner in our agency portfolio.

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Maybe the industry you work in is relevant here. In e-commerce, A/B testing the position and color of "add to cart" button can yield legitimate revenue multipliers. People's opinions are irrelevant in that kind of A/B test, all that matters is the likelihood they continue down the funnel.

Statsig's core value is their experimentation platform— the automation of Data Science.

Big Tech teams want to ship features fast, but measuring impact is messy. It usually requires experiments and traditionally every experiment needed one Data Scientist (DS) to ensure statistical validity, i.e., "can we trust these numbers?". Ensuring validity means DS has to perform multiple repetitive but specialized tasks throughout the experiment process: debugging bad experiment setups, navigating legacy infra, generating & emailing graphs, compensating for errors and biases in post-analysis, etc. It's a slog for folks involved. Even then, cases still arise where Team A reports wonderful results & ships their feature while unknowingly tanking Team B's revenue— a situation discovered only months later when a DS is tasked to trace the cause.

Experimentation platforms like Statsig exist to lower the high cost of experimenting. To show a feature's potential impact before shipping, while reducing frustrations along the way. Most platforms will eliminate common statistical errors or issues at each stage of the experiment process, with appropriate controls for each user role. Engs setup experiments via SDK/UI with nudges and warnings for misconfigurations. DS can focus on higher-value work like metric design. PMs view shared dashboards and get automatic coordination emails with other teams if their feature is seen as breaking. People still fight but earlier on and in the same "room" with fewer questions about what's real versus what's noise.

Separating real results from random noise is the meaning of "statsig" / "statistically significant". I think it's similar to how companies define their own metrics (their sense of reality) while the platform manages the underlying statistical and data complexity. The ideal outcome is less DS needed, less crufty tooling to work around, less statistics learning, and crucially, more trust & shared oversight. But it comes at considerable, unsaid cost as well.

Is Statsig worth $1B to OpenAI? Maybe. There's an art & science to product development, and Facebook's experimentation platform was central to their science. But it could be premature. I personally think experimentation as an ideology best fits optimization spaces that previously achieved strong product-market fit ages ago. However, it's been years since I've worked in the "Experimentation" domain. I've glossed over a few key details in my answer and anyone is welcome to correct me.

A buzz word driven company with a product meant to track users, their mouse movement, keyboard usage across the internet. Of course to help make the world a better place .... for shoving advertisements.

I'm of the opinion that the marketing gimmicks that we see on some products but ends up either being acquired big or gets those big elusive contracts, is that they did those messaging on purpose to steer the general onlooker something else. However, their internals or when a customer talks to, say, the founders, they would narrate and then show such things that are 100x better than what we see in the open.

It seems a mix of analytics + session-replay (e.g MixPanel) and feature flags platform (e.g Growthbook)

1 comment - 13 points. Guess you should never feel bad if your own Show HN doesn't take off, it's not the end of the world!

Statsig is big enough that its acquisition is interesting in its own right. Or maybe I'm biased because I spent quite some time setting up a Statsig integration at $FORMER_EMPLOYER. But if I've done that, odds are that a lot of the other people here have too...

This seems like a big shift for OpenAI into an enterprise applications vendor to me.

Agreed. There are dozens of startups and established companies providing analytics-y software. The fact that this one is being acquired by OpenAI doesn't make it any more newsworthy to anyone other than the people who are getting some OpenAI equity...

Sounds to me like another phase in the growth of the "Unaccountability Machine"

https://www.amazon.com/Unaccountability-Machine-Systems-Terr...

Oh the CTO approved it so we should blame them. No not that CTO the other CTO. Oh so who decided on the final out come. The CTO! So who is on first again?

“CTO” makes sense as a signal that “the buck stops here” for technical issues. They are the highest-ranking authority on technical decisions for their silo, with no one above them (but two CEO’s above them for business decisions)

If Mira Murati (CTO of OpenAI) has authority over their technical decisions, then it’s an odd title. If I was talking with a CTO, I wouldn't expect another CTO to outrank or be able to overrule them.

It's signaling P&L responsibilities. It's not that weird, at least not unheard of at all, just that it's typically done through "EVP" - So EVP Applications, VP of Applications Engineering, etc. - I'm guessing that the line items those "C"s who are not Sam are responsible for, are bigger than most F500 executives, and they're using titles to reflect that reality.

This C level thing is happening for decades. There are many with CTO title who manage groups sometime as small as 5-10 people. And they are not startups but large corporates.

Just look at any media agency (OMG as an example). There are CEOs up the wazoo, one for North America, one for EU etc.

In practice, these are just internal P&Ls.

I'm just sitting here wondering what in the world "Applications" is, is that a subsidiary or what?

It was extremely effective while it was running. I was there.

Windsurf didn't not go through because of regulatory or MSFT issue – that was always a fig leaf. OAI walked.

Data/ML and Apps split seems pretty normal to me, even in a company of ~20. What makes a group of coworkers into "an org"? That they don't attend one-another's retros?

Also, best of luck to current statsig customers lol

StatSig is a reimplementation of Meta’s analytics and growth systems. The best in the world and how they’re able to enter and dominate markets and scale to billions in under a year.