Long before there was Amplitude, there was Musync. During their undergrad at MIT, our co-founders Spenser and Curtis, along with a couple of their friends, hatched the idea of Musync, a music streaming service that was a bit before its time (people didn’t have LTE in their pockets back then).
Spenser and Curtis entered Musync into MIT’s $100k Business Plan Contest during their senior year. Despite the quality Microsoft WordArt logo, they didn’t quite make it:
Spenser gave a talk at MIT’s Startup Bootcamp last month, which you can view in the video below . He starts with a brief overview of the mobile analytics space, but much of the talk focuses on the path that’s brought him to where he is now. This path starts with Musync and continues with a string of different side-project startup ideas while Spenser was an algorithmic trader in Chicago, and Curtis was an engineer at Google:
Their journey included rejections from Techstars and Y Combinator, before finally making it into Y Combinator in 2012 with Sonalight, an Android text-by-voice app. Sonalight did reasonably well, but the the pair soon realized that there was limited room for growth, and that they had noticed a much bigger and more interesting problem: the lack of powerful, scalable analytics for mobile apps. And thus…Amplitude was born.
Spenser and Curtis in 2010. Adorbs.
Watch the video (~3o min) to get the stories behind all of those logos and to hear how Spenser quit his algorithmic trading job and lived on Curtis’ floor for 3 months.
You can also check out the full lineup of Startup Bootcamp speakers here.
