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

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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?

 

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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 »