35-year-old CEO built a $1.4 billion business—after completely scrapping his ‘pretty good' startup

  • 📰 NBCPhiladelphia
  • ⏱ Reading Time:
  • 34 sec. here
  • 2 min. at publisher
  • 📊 Quality Score:
  • News: 17%
  • Publisher: 51%

Business News News

Business Business Latest News,Business Business Headlines

Just when Spenser Skates and Curtis Liu’s first startup was on the rise, they shut it down — and replaced it with an analytics business now worth $1.35 billion.

Here, Skates discusses the risks of ditching Sonalight, how to build great ideas rather than good ones and why software engineers don't always make the best startup founders.

But we'd been working on it for almost a year, and it was starting to become clear to us that the technology wasn't good enough, in terms of creating a great user experience and getting people to engage and come back. It wasn't useful enough as a product to be really sticky. We had built our own analytics in-house. What was interesting was a lot of the insights we were getting about [Sonalight's] customer journey, so many other companies wanted those exact same insights. We were like,"OK, this is fantastic."Why did you feel the need to chase"breakout, massive" success? Was there something wrong with good enough?

 

Thank you for your comment. Your comment will be published after being reviewed.
Please try again later.
We have summarized this news so that you can read it quickly. If you are interested in the news, you can read the full text here. Read more:

 /  🏆 569. in BUSİNESS

Business Business Latest News, Business Business Headlines

Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.

35-year-old CEO dumped his ‘pretty good’ startup—and built a $1.4 billion business insteadJust when Spenser Skates and Curtis Liu's first startup was on the rise, they shut it down — and replaced it with an analytics business now worth $1.35 billion.
Source: CNBC - 🏆 12. / 72 Read more »