calvin french-owen

There are many successful entrepreneurs who are the geniuses with big degrees. But there are also many of the ones who just got off the college and started working on their dream projects, and ultimately, became an inspiration for all. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are some of the names that have proved that skills are always above a degree. The story of Peter Reinhardt is similar to the two, as he also, along with his friends, Calvin French-Owen, and Ilya Volodarsky, dropped out of MIT, and founded one of the most successful startups, Segment.

Peter Reinhardt was born in Seattle City in Washington. He was always curious about the space and loved doing Mathematics. He met Calvin at a summer math class at the University of Washington when he was in 7th grade. Soon after meeting each other, the two shared a friendly vibe.

After completing high school, Reinhardt went to MIT to gain a bachelor’s degree in Aerospace Engineering. MIT was the place where he again united with French-Owen. The two then met Ilya Volodarsky in 2008, during the campus preview weekend at MIT.

Being into space and maths, Reinhardt took both the subjects as majors at the university. But his two friends were thinking of working on a startup. All the three first thought of building a classroom tool that would help the kids in the class to show the level of confusion they face during a lecture and tell the lecture about their doubts, without interrupting him. The three worked on the project and started the testing for the tool. But for their surprise, most of the students in the class were more engaged to Facebook than the lecture.

The three co-founders had raised a sum of $600K for the project. But they got soon aware of the fact that this idea is not going to work practically. So they tried to pay back the investors. But the investors wanted a better product instead of their money.

The three friends again started thinking of a new project. This time, they thought of products like Google Tag Manager and Mixpanel. It took a year and a half for them to even start the project. By this time, they had spent all the money and to earn some more investment, they went to Y-Combinator in 2011. But on seeing the wastage of time and money, the company refused to help.

This incident made Reinhardt and his friends realise that they were rushing the things, and their idea does not have the strength to sustain. So they took a step back and started more research work. At the same time, to devote most of their time to their dream project, they dropped out of college.

To work on their new project idea, they had to choose between Google Tag Manager and Mixpanel, and after being confused for some time, they realised that people need a tool that would help them figure out which among the various tools is better for their work.

This way, they had a new project idea, and they started working on an analytic tool that would integrate various other tools and provide the users with the right solution. The tool was Segment. Before launching the product, they made it open-source for developers. The platform started evolving and provided the engineers with the facility to integrate various tools at one place and organise their customer’s data in a cleaner way.

The idea became a huge success, as most of the people were facing a problem with what tool to choose for what data situation. The users were able to handle all the tasks from analytics to marketing automation through Segment. Reinhardt and his team used to test every new tool and integrated all the effective ones to Segment. Today, Segment helps over 19,000 companies in 70 countries to refine their toolkit, including Product Hunt, Atlassian and Instacart.

For the success of the company and its product, the company owners relied on content marketing. The company had started with four employees, and by 2017, the company had employed about 130 employees. Segment did not raise any money in its starting years. In fact, the three founders were spending $30K every year on the process of product development. Till 2019, the company has raised more than $280 million in total.

Peter Reinhardt is still very much interested in things related to space. He continuously follows the footprints of companies like SpaceX and Rocket Lab. According to Reinhardt Segment still has to go a long way.