

Mixpanel (YC S09) Raises $1.25 Million From Sequoia, Rabois, Levchin, And Birch - ssclafani
http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/27/data-tracking-startup-mixpanel-raises-1-25-million-from-sequoia-rabois-levchin-and-birch/

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jmtame
The announcement they make in a few weeks is going to be huge and disruptive.
Some interesting bits from the interview in _Startups Open Sourced_ :

 _Q: Tell me what your experience was like raising money. Was that positive or
negative?_

That experience sucked, and I'm still in that process. It's a lot better now
but it still sucks. It's still very taxing.

When we went to raise before, we were six months after the recession which
meant that it was very hard to raise from anybody because they were being
super cautious. Sequoia did this "RIP" slide thing. It was challenging, and so
it sucked because you just got a lot of "no's." We were two kids from ASU,
never done a company, had never worked anywhere really interesting. We had
nothing going for us other than that we were in YC. So raising sucked; we
almost died actually. We were probably a week from just dying, thinking "Oh
guess we're going to go back to school." I was like, "Tim, if you ever want to
build anything, build it now. We might not be alive in the next month, so just
build it now." And we actually ended up raising from Max Levchin and Michael
Birch at the last second, and that saved us. We were like, "Oh, we finally did
it, we raised." But raising was just taxing because you end up talking to VC's
who have a million reasons why your idea sucks, won't work, and then you talk
to angels who won't invest in you until some other angel invests in you. You
have this chicken and egg problem.

 _Q: Sequoia's leaked RIP slides happened October 2008, and we were in the
same YC class which was Summer 2009, so the summer right after. People may
forget but it was actually kind of a challenging economical environment._

Yeah. I think the companies that raised--you had to be pretty decent if you
raised. I think we were more lucky than decent.

 _Q: Any points where you thought Mixpanel would fail or where you really had
stressful moments?_

Yeah. It happened two weeks ago. It happens a lot. Basically when you're doing
real-time data analysis, the problem is that you have to pre-compute
everything. You have to do it all right when the data comes which means that
if you don't scale the rate at which the data is coming in you start to get
backlogged. You just have data that's piling up over time and so we definitely
had scenarios where we were not real time, we had 24 hour, 48 hour, 72 hour
delays for two weeks, and there are definitely points in times where the
scaling problems were so bad that I would just lay on the ground and think
"How am I going to scale this? How am I going to do this?" And the thing is,
if you can't, you die.

 _Q: I remember the delays in Mixpanel's early days._

Yeah, things like that still happen even today, but they're less severe. We
have a better handle on it obviously, but there were definitely days where
things just got really, really bad, and if you can't scale you just lose.

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rdl
I wish Startups Open Sourced had some way to do interactive content; I'd love
to be able to reformat it and see just one section (e.g. "how hard is raising
money") for EVERY company which answered that.

I've read about half of the dead-tree version at Sunfire while waiting for VM
stuff; it's a great book, but this is exactly the kind of data where being
able to treat it as structured data, instead of a static book, would be
awesome.

~~~
jmtame
You're not the first person to recommend this, I'm actually interested in
doing it that way too. I'll get this done at some point when I move it into an
HTML format that can be re-arranged and compiled on the fly.

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jamesteow
I met one of Mixpanel founders last year while I was in an interview process
at YC. Totally chill and down to earth.

Congrats on the funding and really happy to see their momentum keep going.

~~~
sunkan
Agreed. We did a small amount of Android work for them and they were great to
work with.

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sapper2
I wish they had a page titled "why we are better Google Analytics"

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old-gregg
Hm... we're happy users of both and they have almost nothing in common.
Mixpanel is more like a flexible _general purpose database_ which gives you
real time "views" of your data. You can chart it yourself or Mixpanel will do
it for you.

We (<http://mailgun.net>) built our email analytics on top if it in a very
short period of time and it's much nicer that anything we could have made in-
house (and keeps getting nicer).

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benologist
Congrats guys. Raising money and scaling, especially at the same time, is a
lot like I imagine prison would feel like. Glad you guys made it through.

~~~
rdin
Well said- congrats!

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ra
I've only recently discovered mixpanel, it is awesome.

I wish you guys every success.

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iamelgringo
Tim, Suhail. Congrats!

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suking
I don't know much about mixpanel, how is it better and/or different than
Google Analytics?

Congrats on the funding.

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jmtame
Google Analytics has a delay. Mixpanel is real-time and specifically aimed at
certain events that you specify. So when someone clicks your sign up button,
it fires an AJAX call and you see them do it in real-time, instantly.

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bentlegen
I like what MixPanel is doing, but I don't think it's fair to say that GA has
a 24 hour delay. It's nothing close to real-time, but you can get results from
the past few hours.

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jmtame
I'm looking at Google Analytics right now for my web site, but all I can see
is yesterday's data. Is there somewhere to see the data collected today?

Edit: I use both Analytics and Mixpanel, they're both great services. Google
has its strengths, but I don't think event tracking and immediate feedback is
one of them, which is where Mixpanel comes in.

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benologist
Click the date select stuff, you can _choose_ today and it'll give you
whatever data it's processed for today, but by default it only shows up to
yesterday.

