Why I joined Mixpanel
Six years at a startup is a lot of time to put in. So it was after six years at mParticle, a NY-based tech company where I started as a founding member of their best-in-class Customer Success team, I felt the itch to check out the job market.
The bar for my next company would be high since I knew I wanted to keep a lot of the same great things I’d come to love about mParticle: smart, committed colleagues with a culture of excellence and partnership, paired with the huge opportunity of product-market fit and an incredible customer base.
At the start of my job search, I spoke with recruiters, partners, and random connections. I spoke with some great people about great opportunities, but nothing felt like a home run. A functional lead I was speaking with at a martech company was super helpful, that is until a Covid case interrupted the company’s strict return-to-the-office rollout — and their communication with me about the open role I was interested in. I spoke with a SaaS company whose recruiter couldn’t articulate why they were better-positioned in the market than their primary competitor. Then, I got in touch with the recruiting team at Mixpanel.
I was familiar with Mixpanel since they’re a partner of mParticle and a top choice for product analytics in the market. I also knew they had been making recent steady gains to increase their competitiveness, culminating in the announcement of a $200M Series C at a $1.05B valuation last November.
From my first correspondence with the recruiting team at Mixpanel, it became clear that this is a company whose employees pride themselves on not just professionalism, but sincere warmth. I spoke with five people across three days during my interview process (a land speed record!), and every person was prepared, had thoughtful questions to ask, and had considerations to share. Most surprisingly — and this was a big one in startup tech where people are often wearing several hats and grumble about being brought into interview cycles — they were completely undistracted and focused on getting to know me.
In addition to the positive reflections on Mixpanel’s culture during my process, the other thing that became obvious was the opportunity to join a mature company that still has some gains to make. Somewhat surprisingly (given the industry and the size of the recent fundraise), Mixpanel operates very lean and has very strong business fundamentals that come from a primarily inbound business. The recent fundraise has made it possible, they weren’t afraid to tell me, for the company to focus on growth under minimal pressure, enabling teams across Mixpanel to make the right decisions at the right time for the long-term.
Product-wise, Mixpanel’s position in the market could not be better. Since retiring its Messaging and Experiments functionality, Mixpanel has doubled down on best-in-class product analytics. This has allowed the Mixpanel product team to create an exceptional and leading UX that can continue to innovate around its core functionality. Mixpanel has also deepened integrations with other best-of-breed partner tools like Iterable, Hightouch, and Braze to help customers create tech stacks tailored to excellence and purpose-built to propel them forward. In parallel, competitors in the product analytics space are diversifying their offerings so rapidly and under so much financial pressure that they face major challenges in educating the market as well as their internal teams (not to mention the difficulty of maintaining and iterating on that new functionality both with respect to tech and cost).
In short, Mixpanel perfectly pairs my priorities of culture and opportunity, and that’s why I’m so excited about my role here as Enterprise Customer Account Executive. Embedded values of openness, leadership, customer focus, results, and teamwork have been reflected in every person across every team I’ve met in my short tenure so far. As I begin the real fun of getting familiar with my book of business, meeting customers, and learning the product, it is unequivocally clear that the opportunity ahead is massive. Mixpanel’s success to date is a testament to exceptional leadership that earnestly demonstrates company values, making that conduct infectious and pervasive throughout the organization. That has created the bedrock for a team that works unquestionably together toward something really incredible. It is my privilege to have joined this team, and I can’t wait to see what the rest of 2022 and beyond will bring!
