Klaviyo's 2023 IPO letter from its co-founders

About this letter

Andrew Bialecki and Ed Hallen, Klaviyo's co-founders, wrote this letter for the registration statement on form S-1 that Klaviyo filed with the SEC on 25 August 2023 for its initial public offering. It is signed 'Andrew & Ed' and placed before the business section.

The founders open with the belief they started on: find a customer problem, build software that solves it for enough people who will pay, and a sustainable business can follow. They describe Klaviyo as self-funded in its early years. Before founding it, they had spent years building business intelligence software for the world's largest companies, where they kept finding data in silos. They explain how one of their earliest product experiments, a cloud-based central consumer system of record, became the first version of Klaviyo, and close by setting out the company's seven values.

What to notice

1. 1

   The product emerged from talking to prospects: the founders realised their data store would be most powerful if linked to a way to take action and drive measurable outcomes, so they layered analytics and email on top.

“Values alone are just words, what matters is how intensely we live them.”