Spenser Skates on AI Leadership Grit | Generated by AI
I’ll search for Spenser Skates’ recent interview on the “No Life” podcast or show.I found it! Spenser Skates did a recent interview on the “Grit” podcast (not “No Life”) that was released in April 2025. Let me get more details about this interview.Perfect! Here’s a breakdown of Spenser Skates’ recent Grit podcast interview from April 2025:
“No Reset Button: Reinventing Amplitude in a Post-AI World” - Grit Podcast
This 77-minute episode (released April 21, 2025) is hosted by Joubin Mirzadegan from Kleiner Perkins and covers some really interesting territory about leading a mature tech company through the AI transition.
Key Themes Discussed:
AI Strategy & Technical Challenges
- How Skates is rethinking AI within the constraints of a 13-year-old codebase
- Why he believes AI is still in its early stages
- The urgency of potentially building from the ground up versus iterating on legacy systems
- Being an incumbent in the AI era and dealing with slow innovation pressures
Leadership & Personal Growth The episode gets quite personal, exploring:
- “The ultimate founder” concept
- “Becoming the person you hate” - an honest discussion about founder evolution
- Balancing family and work (46:41 mark)
- “Being the person I want to be”
- The challenges of being a “tired founder”
- His roles as “chief general, chief justice, chief priest” in the organization
Going Public & Business Strategy
- Why taking the company public early was a risk worth taking
- His views on higher valuations and market timing
- Who’s leading whom in company leadership dynamics
- Markets being open and closed
Team Building
- Bringing in new executive talent (“new blood”)
- Things he’s willing to relinquish as CEO versus what he maintains control over
- What Amplitude is currently hiring for
The interview seems particularly notable for its candor about the personal costs of building and leading a public company over 13+ years, along with the strategic challenges of evolving an established analytics platform in an AI-first world.