Spenser Skates has spent more than a decade building Amplitude from a YC startup into a public company, and in that time, he's had to reinvent himself just as much as the product.

Joining the Lightcone pod, he talks through the shift from founder to large-company CEO, the skepticism his team initially had toward AI, and the moment they realized the next wave of analytics would require a full reset. He walks through the hard reorgs, the bottom-up experiments, and the mindset changes that let Amplitude move fast again—and shares what it really takes for a big company to adapt when the ground under the industry moves.