Yana Welinder on AI-Driven Product Development and Acquisition

In this supersized episode of the CEO Series, Lenny Murphy sits down with Yana Welinder—Head of AI at Amplitude and former CEO & Founder of Craftful—for a wide-ranging conversation about the explosive rise of AI-powered product development. Yana shares Craftful’s rocket-ship journey from 0 to 60,000 product teams, the behind-the-scenes chaos of hyper-scale, and the strategic decisions that shaped the company’s acquisition by Amplitude.

They dive into the real future of AI (short-term, long-term, and the unpredictable “middle”), how product teams can actually use LLMs to deliver impact, why qualitative + quantitative integration unlocks “1 + 1 = 11,” and what today’s builders need to understand about creativity, adaptability, and experimentation in the AI era—plus, a few parental insights about Gen Alpha as the first true AI natives.

Whether you’re a founder, product leader, or insight professional navigating rapid transformation, this conversation offers clarity, candor, and inspiration for what’s here—and what’s coming.

 

Transcript

Leonard Murphy: Hello everybody. It's Lenny Murphy with another edition of the CEO series of interviews. Thanks for taking time out of your day to listen to myself and my guest talk about cool and interesting stuff and I promise you it is going to be cool and interesting. So, with that promise out of the way and setting our expectations very high for the rest of the interview, want to introduce you to Jana Wellander, the head of AI at Amplitude and formerly CEO and co-founder of Craftful. So, Jana, welcome. …

Yana Welinder: Thank you. Thanks so much for having me. Super excited to be here.

Leonard Murphy: Let's see if you think that when we're done, but it's good to have you as well.

Yana Welinder: Love it.

Leonard Murphy: I missed your talk at IX North America last year. but I heard nothing but good stuff and I think you've had quite a ride since then with that presentation and then the acquisition with Amplitude. Looking forward to kind of diving in, but why don't you tell us your origin story?

Yana Welinder: Yeah, absolutely. So, before starting Craftful and maybe just to kind of set the Craftful was essentially an AI solution for product teams. it took everything from taking in all the customer feedback from every possible source.  So support tickets, call transcripts, survey data, user interviews, we had our own AI interview process kind of AI moderated process in pulling that through the entire product development process. So getting insights then using AI to turn those insights into user stories and with acceptance criteria that went to Jira and…

Leonard Murphy: Yeah.

Yana Welinder: Linear there was sort of rule AI road mapping in between and really took that whole kind of end toend product development journey powered that with large language models. so that's kind of what we built.  We grew zero to 60,000 product teams in two years which is sort of like a w wild ride or beyond 60,000 when we ultimately sold to amplitude. so definitely had a fast scaling problems ourselves where we had to use our product just to be able to listen to all of our users and customers giving us feedback on the product. My kind of how I came into that space is I've been a product manager and ultimately product product leader at various tech companies everything from being PM number two at a fast growing unicorn to ultimately leading product teams with where we had millions of users use our multiple products and so the challenge of listening to users that's eel has been there throughout my product journey so ultimately when I got my hands on large language models That's the very first problem I tried to solve and that's what I ended up doing at CLA.

Leonard Murphy: That's very cool that I love the stories of I guess it's core to every entrepreneur story to an extent right here's a problem that I am intimately familiar with or have identified and how do I fix that problem right what can I do I think especially in the world of AI that allows us that focus you have to tackle a big vertical right like we're going to fix healthcare …

Yana Welinder: Yeah. Mhm.

Leonard Murphy: but a fundamental important component within any business which is product development and how to optimize the product so it actually launches and sells and does those things that's very cool the Okay.

Yana Welinder: And I think that the fundamental piece of talking to users and customers is the most fundamental piece yet it gets so forgotten in the development process. And that always struck me working in product was just how critical it is and how under utilized it is in the process despite the fact there's oftentimes you have just so many customers giving you feedback and that all gets lost in the process. Just blowing to me.

Leonard Murphy: Yeah. Yeah. And the efficiency of the kind of process and throughput right from early stage ideation through all the way through concept testing and it is convoluted, complex, expensive. let's be frank,…

Yana Welinder: Mhm. Yeah. Yeah.

Leonard Murphy: A pain in the ass, as you're testing, various combinations of,…

Yana Welinder: Yeah. Yeah.

Leonard Murphy: Features and benefits so to leverage the existing information to help, I assume this is part of it is you're shortcutting that, right?

Yana Welinder: Yes. Yeah. It's like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Leonard Murphy: Still doesn't certainly remove the need that you need to test and validate at some point, but from a process workflow standpoint, you integrated that into a seamless process.

Yana Welinder: Yeah. Exactly.

Leonard Murphy: Yeah, sure.

Yana Welinder: And that was such a brainer to use AI in that way because I think particularly early on there was kind of just a lot of concern around all the AI solution. there's so many AI solutions like which ones are actually useful and which ones are kind of just books trying to think about how do I this AI wave is coming I need to do something with it and this was just one where it was so clearly immediately beneficial to every team using it they had a sea of information and then being able to make sense of that sea was just so immediately powerful. Yes. Yeah.

Leonard Murphy: Yeah, obviously since you went into hypers scale mode, so you call it the crap scenario, right? The …

Yana Welinder: Yeah. Yeah.

Leonard Murphy: Crap, is it going to go or Do you ever see the commercial? I think it was a FedEx commercial where somebody launched their business and they see the orders start coming in and then all of a sudden it's thousands and they're all like, " what do we do?" so it …

Yana Welinder: Our moment that was actually interestingly I mean we had a few of those.

Leonard Murphy: It'll share challenges.

Yana Welinder: Early on we launched and then our product broke under the volume of requests and so the way it broke was all the API read limits and so I had to kind of reach out to all these different companies some of which I literally was just trying to figure out how do I get to the founders and the founder CEOs to do this fast I need this to happen in an hour it cannot be like days that was the first one and then the second piece shortly then we fixed that shortly after that was that we went globally immediately because you can do that with large language models right they can analyze feedback in any language and so suddenly we were analyzing feedback in Japanese in Korean in German and we were getting all of these very local requests from those folks suddenly where we hadn't like normally you launch and then maybe you're in the US and maybe in Canada and then you kind of start entering countries and think about …

Leonard Murphy: Yeah yeah they got it now was that so we found you to speak via product hunt.

Yana Welinder: What's all the things that come with that and tax filings and all that. We kind of just went there overnight everywhere that was our big second oh s*** moment yeah definitely I think we had two main distribution channels one was product hunt and…

Leonard Murphy: So, was that part of that s*** moment when you went global was being picked up in product hunt. Yeah.

Yana Welinder: The other was Twitter and I would say most of our growth came from Twitter X and some amount came from Product Hunt. and there that was sort of just it snowballed from TwitterX which is where we saw that actually we didn't need to talk about our product. We just needed to talk about things that is interesting to product builders generally and…

Leonard Murphy: Mhm. Okay.

Yana Welinder: Then they would click through because the value prop was so clear they would sign up. that was most of our growth and that and interestingly as a result I ended up getting a lot of our initial customer feedback in my Twitter DMs. So then I had to kind of figure out wasn't connected to craftable. So, how do I integrate user feedback into our development process? its own can of worms.

Leonard Murphy: That. I guess that point would have been Elon, but since you were trying to get hold of CEO, so I was thinking about that. I'm like, hey, just we did a Jack Elon. Hey, help me. Yeah. Yeah.

Yana Welinder: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, that there we ended up with a completely different solution. But yes, yeah, that would have been sort of trying to ping Elon and try to get them to set up some special API for me.

Leonard Murphy: He seems responsive. the…

Yana Welinder: Yes. Love it.

Leonard Murphy: Total aside, it just was just funny since you mentioned it, I saw a thing last week, somebody posted, "My mom says I need to get in touch with Elon." And then he popped in. He's like, "What can I do for your mom?" and this is cool the wonderful world of accessibility.

Yana Welinder: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, IPO.

Leonard Murphy: So you launched success you're going wow this is awesome. Did you build the business from the get-go thinking that you would be acquired or were you thinking, no, we're going to go alone?

Yana Welinder: Yeah, we're gonna go all the way.

Leonard Murphy: Yeah. Yeah.

Yana Welinder: Yeah, definitely. Yeah…

Leonard Murphy: Okay. All right.

Yana Welinder: Definitely definitely not looking to get at some point fairly early on we started getting acquisition inbound interest and…

Leonard Murphy: Right.

Yana Welinder: Started exploring that and sort of just had to make a decision do I do that right because I'm a solo founder I have very limited bandwidth how much time do I have to explore this yes yeah I raised three rounds so similarly I guess similar to going out and…

Leonard Murphy: Did you raise capital? Yeah.

Yana Welinder: Raising capital. that's another moment where you kind of have to in some sense step away from product and I could not do that that was always a big challenge. It was a similar in acquisition conversations was sort of like how do I do this? So very early on got multiple inbound interests ended up exploring that in a very time boxed so I was sort of like if we can get to start to finish in 30 days, we'll do it with the right partner. And I should say back then we were exploring a very different solution…

Leonard Murphy: No.

Yana Welinder: Which is to have craftable be a standalone company with another company kind of helping us primarily with enterprise sales and go to market because we're very productled and so having someone else do the sales motion was quite appealing while we could kind of stay productled and just focus on the product. so I ran that and I realized okay 30 days is not enough to run a full acquisition process not going to go and then went back and was okay back to IPO as the end goal and let's keep going and then we started getting more inbound interest and then I explored it a second time and in that process ended up structuring it slightly differently instead of time boxing it to 30 days. I time boxed it in terms of how much of my time because in the first round I ended up speaking to 25 companies had 10 interested players at one point.

Leonard Murphy: Yeah. Yep.

Yana Welinder: So it was very very time conuming. So the second time around just thinking through how can I make this be less time consuming so that I can do both things right like run my company and run the acquisition process.  And I think conceptually was always kind of mostly thinking about if I can find the right bit that can scale us and take us to the next level in ways that we skip a few steps then it would make sense and if I'm not skipping a few steps we will keep going so kind of to answer your question no absolutely not it was very opportunistic and ended up being a great great opportunity great partnership great partnering with a great company that is leaprogging us in scaling our product to a place that we couldn't have done alone this quickly.

Leonard Murphy: Yeah. And…

Yana Welinder: But definitely not the plan in the beginning.

Leonard Murphy: As part if I understand, correctly, the shift within Amplitude, is that you're now part of an ecosystem rather than a standalone, it's a broader category. It's not just obviously larger companies, sales resources, arbitrage, profitability, all those great things, right, that come in.

Yana Welinder: Mhm. Yeah. Yeah. Mhm.

Leonard Murphy: But the enhancement of where craftable as a product line fits the broader suite of solutions and addresses even more business issues. Is that right? Yeah.

Yana Welinder: Yes, that's absolutely So our ability to analyze qualitative data in a very unique way. We developed this proprietary hallucination detection process and just a way to analyze data in a way that isn't available in we were the only player on the market that did that in a very unique but. Perfect. But then being able to plug that in with Amplitude's quant data analysis and go from what are users telling us to what are users doing in the product? What are those users doing in the product? in a native way that's be and being able to answer questions deeply from that perspective because sometimes people say one thing and they do something else and sometimes p when you're just looking at…

Leonard Murphy: Yep. That's great.

Yana Welinder: What people are doing you don't know anything about their intent, so being able to p to paint that full picture is very powerful. And so that's why it was just such a great partnership.

Leonard Murphy: Before we hit record I had used the analogy of the 1 plus 1 equals 3 but you offered a better analogy that you have within amplitude. which makes total sense for a company named Amplitude…

Yana Welinder: So in a we say 1 plus 1 equals 11. and so I think this is definitely 11 in terms of what we can bring our joint customers.

Leonard Murphy: With the Spinal Tap analogy, the amp turning to 11. Anyway, the silly movie but that was fun. All right. So, hell of a ride. I mean, traditionally, the rocket ship, right? and now you're, part of a larger company. it's, growth mode. what were some lessons that you learned, through that process? particularly as you became the bell of the ball, right? People were chasing you and, here we want to give you money. anything that you could share with other early stage CEOs other than what you already shared of this is timeconuming this this is not something that you enter into lightly and…

Yana Welinder: Mhm. Yeah.

Leonard Murphy: Matter what it's not on your terms so what other things did you learn of wow I never thought I'd have to deal with

Yana Welinder: Yeah. Yeah.

Leonard Murphy: That's Heat.

Yana Welinder: Yeah. I mean I learned so much. I feel like that was just looking at my founder journey.  there's been pivotal moments where I had just condensed learning moments and the M&A process was certainly that I learned that inbound interest is huge. there's this saying that you don't sell a company. companies are bought not sold I guess is the saying. and that's so true. If you have inbound interest you can end up in a much better position than you could if you proactively try to sell even then of course it's going to depend on all the other factors like how well is the business doing what is the M&A market right now all those that's one piece then I learned a lot around just finding the right partner I talked about some of that in terms of just how strategic fit with the product  But then another piece is this like an experienced acquirer? An experienced acquirer turnouts turn out is a huge factor for how fast you're able to sell…

Leonard Murphy: Yep.

Yana Welinder: Which in turn is really important for whether you're able to sell at all because speed is so critical in M&A and if you can't get to speed most deals fail and so you really just want to move fast and then you need someone who's done this before and know what they're doing. multiple of the companies I was talking to were not that and it was so clear in the process and that if I would have bet on those it probably would have gone poorly.

Leonard Murphy: Mhm. Yep.

Yana Welinder: I would say then finding the company with leaders at the very top that you culturally align with is really really important.  And that's so hard to do because oftentimes you have very little interaction with the founder CEO particularly for the big companies when you're being sold there's usually someone else underneath that you're doing most of your talking with and if it's a big company there's probably the layers are big company type layers and you're not going to have cultural alignment with those folks as a start like an early stage company you're just completely different worlds and completely different universes, And so being able to when you have those touch points with the founders to get a sense for is it a good cultural fit or that's so important and I think I learned that more now being on the inside of the company. if you found the right fit, which I think we did with Amplitude, it's so much better than if you were kind of just pushing against something that doesn't align well.

Leonard Murphy: Yep. Yeah.

Yana Welinder: Yeah, I mean I could go on and on. Many learnings.

Leonard Murphy: And those are big ones, right? I mean, I do a fair amount of M&A work as well in the kind of a matchmaking. And what I have learned over the years is one you want to get to the no as fast as you can. so nobody wastes any time.

Yana Welinder: Yes. Yeah.

Leonard Murphy: And regardless of anything else, if that cultural alignment is not there, and being fully transparent on that upfront, then the odds of successful integration. so you may get the deal done. But…

Yana Welinder: Mhm. Yeah.

Leonard Murphy: Then everything falls apart on the back end. and I've just seen that happen so many times postacquisition that people realize yeah it's like dating, right? it's,…

Yana Welinder: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yes.

Leonard Murphy: I really like this person, but this kind of annoys me. So, you're not going to get married to somebody necessarily with when the annoyance factor outweighs.

Yana Welinder: Yeah. Exactly. that is such a great analogy and it is like there in and by definition everyone else in the big or are going to annoy you coming from a startup just and…

Leonard Murphy: Yes.

Yana Welinder: So you have to kind of tell apart from like that and but do you have alignment with the top with the leadership that's sort of interesting

Leonard Murphy: Yes, agree. Yeah, is that soul connection right for values considerations and…

Yana Welinder: Mhm.

Leonard Murphy: For anybody who listening right and I'm sure that maybe you've encountered this as well there are some transactions that are purely financial transactions they just make sense from a financial standpoint private equities involved and…

Yana Welinder: Mhm.

Leonard Murphy: It's a pure consolidation play and everybody you come in and you're going to do an earn out in six months and you make your money and you leave and That's totally okay. That is a different type of transaction than a growth transaction which I would classify…

Yana Welinder: Yeah. Yes.

Leonard Murphy: Where you guys are …

Yana Welinder: Yeah. Yes.

Leonard Murphy: Where you need to feel good about these folks that you're marrying right …

Yana Welinder: Yeah. Yeah. That's right.

Leonard Murphy: Because there's not a good divorce option in all right so that's congratulations right on all of That's fantastic.

Yana Welinder: That's right. That's right. Thank you.

Leonard Murphy: Obviously you've been part of this AI transformation early recognizing the tools and I agree anything qualitative unstructured data that was the lowhanging fruit the course why would you not do that?

Yana Welinder: Yes. Yes.

Leonard Murphy: So you probably live this more every day more than I do being in the weeds. I continue to be amazed by the step changes of capability and the implications of those capabilities on all thing.  I mean the ripple effect is it's the tsunami right it's a global tsunami it's like an asteroid and I don't think we even comprehend yet the full potential effect of how these technologies transform business processes certainly how they transform insights and analytics but yeah I mean procurement I mean

Yana Welinder: Yes. Mhm. Yeah.

Leonard Murphy: Everything what's your take on what I think I can't predict what's going to happen in the next few months. I can maybe see we're going to see more change

Yana Welinder: Everything. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. …

Leonard Murphy: But robots are coming. but that's what's your take? where do you you know you're in there.

Yana Welinder: I think yeah, I'm in there. and as you point out, I've really been on this journey,  I think the first time I built tried building the first version of what craft ultimately beca be became with the first GPT model in early 2020 and then we ultimately launched our first LLM powered product in 2021 and then we pivoted to a full-on solution in late 2022. So really and I say this in that I've just seen how these models were evolving and then just started evolving faster and started evolving faster, and also seeing the process of building with them, what did that entail? and I think that as a result I have this intuitive sense of where things are going in the next few months.

Leonard Murphy: Okay, I get that, right?

Yana Welinder: I can fairly clearly see that and I can fairly clearly see where it's going to be in the long term. But the things that I find really hard to predict is really in between short term and very long term. what is that going to look like?  And so in the very short term there's just more AI adoption and the AI capabilities are going to improve and the state we're at right now in terms of model improvements is that they can just solve all of going from GPT 4.1 to GPT5 it's that you can give the model the really really really hard problems and then they will do better. When you give the model the simple problems, it's not noticeable is there any better actually maybe sometimes be worse just because you've sort of adjusted for the previous versions of the models as one example right there's other model development going on too…

Leonard Murphy: Okay.

Yana Welinder: But just as one example but if you give the GPT5 model a really really hard problem then suddenly it can solve it so much better so that's going to be what we will be seeing is that every single business will be finding their  hard problems and giving it to the latest models and suddenly being able to solve those hard problems and being like wow that unlocked so much in my business and we'll be seeing that for the next few months and then the much longer term is ADI right where AI is doing a whole lot of the work in many industries and in our space a lot of the product development I think will be end to end done by AI. And I think that the human addition that there will still be both a human drive to and I know that was actually the talk that you missed.

Leonard Murphy: Yep. Mhm.

Yana Welinder: This is what I talked about. but be this the human drive to build products is just so important to us as humans. that's sort of what sets us apart from other species is that we love creating things and seeing others use the things we created. that humans will continue doing that because they love to do it and other humans will continue value humans having created that and kind of having these potentially artisanal products that will be like these hyper-efficient AI products that are end to end just built by AI will be great. Kind of like you can think of that as maybe the fast food of products but not the bad connotation of fast food. but…

Leonard Murphy: I totally get that.

Yana Welinder: Then there will also be these artisanal products and there will be value for that and there's reasons that will exist. I think that that's the long term and then how do we get from the few months out to that? I think that that's the more ambiguous. I can have theories about that, but I don't see that as clearly as those two kind of points in time.

Leonard Murphy: I mean, I guess yours as well, right, part of my job is to try and see the future and, look at current data and implications and say, here's how I think this is going to go from a business strategy, standpoint. And I same I can see the kind of the incremental changes where are now based primarily just on adoption and expansion of use cases and that's pretty straightforward and I see the sci-fi future right which I'm also kind of scared of right so it's like this could go away right I mean …

Yana Welinder: Mhm. Yeah. I mean what I described was that's the optimistic view, There's the definitely very pessimistic news too that…

Leonard Murphy: I have stopped watching Black Mirror.

Yana Welinder: if everything goes really well, I think we will be in that land. But yeah,…

Leonard Murphy: Because I just don't it's no I can't Yes.

Yana Welinder: Real. It's getting too real.

Leonard Murphy: We're not in science fiction land anymore. this is next week. they're laying out. But in between the adjustment of that in between, right? And I think that's the ch and there's and it's going to be rocky. It is rocky, right? The impact on human capital the roles I …

Yana Welinder: Yes. Mhm.

Leonard Murphy: If you're familiar with the grit report that we put out it's grit time and…

Yana Welinder: Mhm.

Leonard Murphy: I'm going doing the analysis and I wrote a whole section and just out of curiosity so I put in perplexity which is personally my favorite right now I really like perplexity so it does what it does really well and for my use cases I just like perplexity So I just to edit,…

Yana Welinder: Mhm.

Leonard Murphy: Did I miss anything misspelling whatever? and it made you did all that and I thought I'm going to ask is there anything that I missed right from this data? You have this massive data that is any key insights that I just didn't address? And I wish I had never asked that. because it was like, holy crap, really? and not fluff, right? I mean it was indepth analysis.

Yana Welinder: Good stuff. Yeah. Yeah.

Leonard Murphy: It was contextually accurate and it was primarily pulling from verbatims. So right within this data set and I have mixed feelings about that wow that's really cool and my god but what about me? And I think that's just where we're grappling at right now across the board is that…

Yana Welinder: Yes. Yeah. Mhm.

Leonard Murphy: What that human machine interface, yeah, the singularity approaches, and we're in the middle of or I'm not the middle but certainly on the outer bands of what does that look like and finding the balance in increasing quality of life for humans with knowing that maybe I mean buggy makers aren't in business anymore right unless you live in Amish territory right it's car manufacturers that evolution always has some things left on the side of the road

Yana Welinder: Mhm. Yes. Yeah.

Leonard Murphy: Yeah. Yes.

Yana Welinder: And I think that that's absolutely but at the same time there is just so much opportunity with AI for technically speaking for and so someone being left on the side of the road in the past because they didn't have the right training or something. suddenly you can leverage AI if you don't have the right training to do certain things that you in the past couldn't. so now it's more about creativity and…

Leonard Murphy: Yeah, it is.

Yana Welinder: adaptability, if you have those two, you're not going to be left on the side of the road. and so that's interesting and that is just a very different problem set.

Leonard Murphy: So, yeah. And also just to put perspective, it's not just business. I mean even socially. So I have five kids aged 30 to almost 13. and three of them are clustered as teenagers and it's my 30-year-old. She got a master's degree etc etc. I went down in my younger ones it's a legitimate conversation now of there really is kind of two paths for you. One is highly creative and luckily they are highly creative. The other is highly specialized from a trade standpoint, but a job like mine probably don't want a job like mine because I don't know it's going to exist. so there's just this long tail.

Yana Welinder: Mhm. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's really interesting.

Leonard Murphy: Go ahead.

Yana Welinder: My kids are much younger. So I have a eight-year-old and a six-month-old.

Leonard Murphy: Congratulations on a

Yana Welinder: And thank and my 8-year-old was really interesting. I sort of obviously he's had a lot of AI exposure from his parents. but one interesting thing I introduced to Lovable probably months ago maybe up to a year ago. and initially I did it and I tried to kind of teach him how to prompt. but that didn't go anywhere.

Leonard Murphy: So legs.

Yana Welinder: He was sort of like the moment he learned that you could do this, you could use this to build, he was all in. But then in terms of learning how to prompt, he was like, "No, don't need that. I can just do it." Okay. I'm like, " okay. You just go." and then I realized that actually my attempts at teaching him how to prompt was completely irrelevant because he is prompting in a native way that's just completely different right so the way and he builds games is as his thing and so he will use lovable with a flow dictation app And so he walked around with his laptop. He got a laptop to build these games, but he's using it in ways that I didn't necessarily predict. And so he walks around with it at home and he presses one button which is the dictation button and then he talks with his laptop. " hey. So, I was thinking how about if we build it and it's like him talking with a friend and that's him prompting lovable and then he's sort of like, hey, there's a bunch of bugs in this part. why don't you fix that?" and it's fascinating to see that process. Because That is probably how we're going to be interacting with in a much more fluid way. It's not going to be so structured. models are getting better and…

Leonard Murphy: Yeah, it is.

Yana Welinder: And yeah, it was just sort of really eye opening to me in terms of just seeing his interaction was just really fascinating.

Leonard Murphy: Do you ever and for our listeners, this is a longer than normal interview, but we're going to go with it because this is, fascinating. you can remember you can pause and come back. I don't know how I feel about that. And part of this generationally I'm 54 blah blah blah, the Gen X, I'm cynical about everything. Right. that's it. so we Right.

Yana Welinder: But this is an alpha. They're one step further.

Leonard Murphy: They're the natives. Yeah, I get it. So I get exactly what you're saying and I'm in my own mind as we're talking this I'm thinking about the idea of being goal oriented leveraging obviously creativity intuition those human characteristics that magical thing that we do of processing data together and…

Yana Welinder: Mhm.

Leonard Murphy: Thinking okay we want to get to this output the I worry about the discipline for myself of be able to think through process and kind of that critical step thinking while owning that that's a bias right of my own so I have been reluctant to let my kids utilize AI out of the concern of kind of that cognitive laziness or what I would judge just cognitive laziness. But what I'm hear from you is that's not…

Yana Welinder: Mhm. Yes. Yeah.

Leonard Murphy: What you're experiencing, Your son he is fully visualizing these outcomes and just not worried about the grunt work, so to speak, right? Sure.

Yana Welinder: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, it's the way I think about it is some of the analogies is sort of like using a calculator using a math app versus using an actual map, in some sense you lose the capabil you absolutely right.

Leonard Murphy: Yep.

Yana Welinder: You lose the ability to do things manually, but that then unlocks the ability to do something else potentially, with a calculator, certainly with a map. Questionable. That's probably a bad analogy, but the fact that an eight-year-old can build really complex computer games.

Leonard Murphy: Yeah, that's amazing.

Yana Welinder: Right. So yes, maybe he cannot, do a waterfall planning process. but instead he can just make it happen and then what…

Leonard Murphy: Yeah. Yeah.

Yana Welinder: What the next thing that he will be able to build when he's a nineyear-old will probably be something like a 20-year-old couldn't imagine before right so I think that that unlock in my view is worth it to see…

Leonard Murphy: Yeah. Yeah.

Yana Welinder: What else is Okay.

Leonard Murphy: And just to be clear, I'm not judging in any way, shape, or form. there's a fascinating kind of macro conversation of that mid,…

Yana Welinder: No. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Leonard Murphy: That's what even got us here is think that what is this mid?

Yana Welinder: Yeah. Yeah.

Leonard Murphy: These are the types of things that we as a species and as a culture are trying to adapt to the u and there is no avoiding them, This isn't something you duck.

Yana Welinder: Yeah. Yeah.

Leonard Murphy: The old William Gibson quote of the future's already here. It's just not widely distributed yet. but it is getting widely distributed much faster than any other technological change we have ever experienced in my view.

Yana Welinder: Yeah. Yeah.

Leonard Murphy: So we have to deal with these things and sometimes the answer is we don't know.

Yana Welinder: Yeah. Yeah.

Leonard Murphy: We're going to have to just kind of see how it plays out. So the movie Wall-E you have small kids I'm sure that you've seen Wall-E right so there's that fear of do we really want to be just kind of the floating blobs on the and…

Yana Welinder: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We don't want to do that.

Leonard Murphy: And Yeah.

Yana Welinder: And I think to me the big piece is around consumption versus creation. I want to be in the creation camp now. I want to be creating with AI. I want to leverage all the tools. I want to be as amplified as I can be. element amplitude. but I think that that's important not to never get sucked into consumption and…

Leonard Murphy: Yeah. Yep.

Yana Welinder: That's like that when my view of Wally was that right all the humans who had lost the ability to create and were just sucked into consumption. I think that's important.

Leonard Murphy: Yep. Yep. That's a lovely way to kind of encapsulate this. So, for the audience, Yan and I have never spoken before. I said beforehand it was going to be two friends, even though maybe not friends yet. we're friends now. we're friends now.

Yana Welinder: We're friends now.

Leonard Murphy: Really enjoyed this conversation. hope that we have many more in the future. but I want to be conscious of your time as well as the listeners. Cool stuff. I love people that just think, and you've got both. So, yeah, just really appreciate that.

Yana Welinder: Thank you. Thank you.

Leonard Murphy: Anything that you wanted to touch on that I know you had mentioned that there's a kind of a launch coming up that may coincide with when this goes live. You want to touch on that real quick?

Yana Welinder: So we're sprinting fast to this joint quant world of mirroring craftful inside of amplitude. So it will be available in November for folks to try out. Particularly if you're an amplitude customer but even if you're not you can try it out. it's on the PLG model. so we can kind of experience the world that I just described.

Leonard Murphy: Okay, very cool. I encourage everybody to check it out. anything else you want to just mention more?

Yana Welinder: I think that we've talked so much about this piece, but I do think that just experimentation with AI is the most important thing right now is the not being afraid to just try all the new things. personally I'm playing a lot with video models and image gen models and obviously building with large language models. but I think that the more you can get your hands on these things, the better the more you feel prepared for what's I was about to say what's coming, but what's going on is probably the better. What's here?

Leonard Murphy: What's here. Yes. Yeah.

Yana Welinder: Yeah. Exactly.

Leonard Murphy: The water's rising,…

Yana Welinder: Yeah. Yes.

Leonard Murphy: Right? Whatever analogy you want to use,…

Yana Welinder: Yeah. Yeah.

Leonard Murphy: It's yeah.

Yana Welinder: Yeah. Yeah.

Leonard Murphy: Thank you. That is really a wonderful conversation. really appreciate it. congrats on all the success and can't wait to connect again as you keep pioneering all of these things. for our listeners, thank you for taking the time. This is kind of a super sized episode, but I think it was worthwhile. We covered some interesting stuff that's I think valuable perspective. Thanks to our producers and to our sponsors and any final words before we sign off?

Yana Welinder: Have fun.

Leonard Murphy: All right.

Yana Welinder: Do it. Yeah…

Leonard Murphy: There we go. Just do it and have fun doing it.

Yana Welinder: Just do it and…

Leonard Murphy: Right.

Yana Welinder: Have fun doing it.

Leonard Murphy: And turn it up to 11. Right. So,…

Yana Welinder: Yes. And turn it up to 11. That's right. Thanks,

Leonard Murphy: All That's it for this edition of the CEO series. Thanks a lot, everybody. Take care. Bye-bye.