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OCS 2020 Breakout: James Hawkins

James Hawkins is the Co-Founder and CEO of PostHog.

Relevant Links
LinkedIn - Twitter

How PostHog went from zero to $12M+ in funding, thousands of stars and a dozen employees within 2020.

You started PostHog just over a year ago, after going through YC and raising a seed round. How did you get into entrepreneurship, what motivated you to start a company, and what motivated you to start the open-source project PostHog? - 0:20

Talk about the pivot from your original project at YC to PostHog and exploring that new problem space. Was the open-source decision related to growing the overall pie, or a different reason? - 4:51

So the idea “get something on the Internet as fast as you can” led to open-sourcing it? Can you reflect on the initial few days/few weeks of open sourcing PostHog at the beginning? - 7:23

How did you think through engaging your open-source users at the beginning? Can you talk about that process? - 9:50

When you reflect on your 70ish meetings that you had with people, what was the ratio of people you contacted to people who actually met with you and gave you feedback? - 12:33

Product analytics is an area you’re focusing on. Open source is really hard to engage/track as well, and there’s a lot of missing information around adoption. Is PostHog potentially also useful for open-source projects, just in terms of better understanding how your technology can be implemented and the metrics? - 13:51

You’ve talked about metrics in a few subtle ways. What are the most important KPIs/metrics that product teams care about, which is driving your roadmap at PostHog? And what are some new ones you’re potentially innovating around? - 18:31

Talk about your fundraising journey and your seed round, and how you’re thinking about partnering with investors over time. - 21:16

Talk about your own product platform. Do you use PostHog for your own analytics on the enterprise side? What does your commercial product look like and who are you customers there? - 2614

Are you focused on growing the cloud service as the primary commercialization approach? Or are you also focused on serving customers with an on-premise instance? - 28:57


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