PostHog began in Y Combinator's winter 2020 batch. James Hawkins and Tim Glaser launched an early version on Hacker News four weeks after starting to write code. The starting point was analytics, but the underlying belief was broader: engineers should have the information they need to make product decisions themselves.
That led PostHog to bring analytics, session replay, feature flags and a data warehouse into one platform. Its team describes consolidation as a way to remove the work of connecting separate tools, helping developers understand customers and act on what they learn without continually stitching data together.