How a train ride helped Mixpanel get into YC

I'm so proud of Suhail, Tim, and the team at Mixpanel -- they just announced their $10 million Series A funding with #1 VC firm Andreessen Horowitz

Back in 2009, I had just moved back to San Francisco and we had just raised our angel round for Posterous. We worked out of our bedrooms in SOMA in San Francisco. A friend of mine, Dan Haubert of Ticketstumbler (R.I.P. Dan) had introduced me to a pair of young hackers out of Arizona State, Suhail Doshi and Tim Trefen. 

They were in town for their YC interview. We met up at the Creamery across from the SF Caltrain for coffee, and I tried to impart whatever wisdom we had about how to get through the process. Good ole' Creamery...

What was supposed to be just an hour meeting turned into a couple of hours, as we talked at length about their vision for analytics done right. Suhail had worked with Max Levchin and the Slide team, and that's where he realized how data-driven decisions could make or break a product. 

I ended up having to jet out of there, since I was headed down to Mountain View by Caltrain. We decided to head over together, since that would give us more time to go over the pitch. They were headed to Mountain View for their interview at YC Headquarters.

On the train, I had the idea of implementing Mixpanel analytics for tracking what people did on the homepage. It was as simple as it is today -- drop one line of javascript on the page. I'd like to say it took just a minute, but it actually took about ten. Embarrasingly, I forgot a semicolon someplace in the Javascript function call! 

When Suhail and Tim walked into the YC offices for their interview with the partners, they were able to say Mixpanel was so easy to implement it happened on the trainride down from San Francisco -- and that you could see realtime data from the Posterous homepage right that moment, just minutes after implementing it. 

Proud to be one of the early datapoints in the now 7 billion Mixpanel has tracked. And many more to come.