Meet the Team: Yana Welinder, AI Maven

If you want to do more with AI than parlour tricks, Yana Welinder is the person to talk to. She’s spent her career understanding the deep magic of AI and using it to solve true customer pain points—as an academic, product leader, and even founder and CEO of AI startup Kraftful. As part of Amplitude’s acquisition of Kraftful, Yana joins the team as Principal Product Manager on AI initiatives.

Read on for her takes about what the tech industry is getting right with AI, what it’s getting wrong, and the unique perspective that motherhood gives on being a founder.

In addition to being an AI founder, you’ve led product at fast-growing unicorns and later-stage tech companies, but also been a professor and worked in law and policy. What do you see as a throughline or core passion in your career so far?

Two passions consistently shaped my path: design and AI. I’m obsessed with well-crafted products and can’t help but want to fix every broken experience I come across. Used right, AI can strip away clutter and show just what users need to understand what the AI’s doing and to stay in control.

As a product leader, I gravitated toward design-forward products powered by AI, either simplifying previously painful workflows or unlocking entirely new kinds of designs, like we did at Carbon with Adidas’s iconic 4D lattice shoes and other products that previously were impossible to design and manufacture.

My academic research also tackled this intersection: exploring how intuitive UX could replace complex tech policy frameworks. I published a seminal piece in the Harvard Journal of Law and Tech, highlighting UX as the best response to emerging challenges around computer vision, long before AI disrupted everything.

Given all that, it’s no surprise I went on to start Kraftful, empowering product teams to leverage AI to ship products people love.

You’ve been working with AI since before it was a buzzword. What do you think people are getting right with AI? What excites you about AI right now?

I think folks are finally starting to get that the magic of AI isn’t just throwing around buzzwords. It’s actually about using AI in very specific, tangible ways to solve real customer pain points. At Kraftful, we served 60,000 product teams who all started using LLMs to take huge messy piles of feedback—think chaotic app reviews, angry support tickets, and noisy Slack channels—and turn that noise into clear, actionable product insights. That’s exactly what AI is great at: cutting through chaos to tell you what your customers need, so you can build what actually matters.

What really excites me right now is the shift from novelty to necessity. We’re past the stage where everyone’s just slapping AI on their product deck for funding or hype. It’s super motivating to see companies integrate AI into their workflows not as a shiny toy, but as a foundational tool that makes teams smarter, faster, and frankly, happier at work.

What are they getting wrong about AI?

The biggest mistake I still see companies making is treating AI like some magic wand: Just sprinkle a little GPT on your product and voilà, problem solved! It’s not that simple. AI isn’t set-it-and-forget-it tech. If you use it without thinking, you’re going to get weird output and disappointed users. The right way to build with AI involves tons of thoughtful iteration, great prompt engineering, and rigorous quality control.

Aside from AI, you also co-founded a community for venture-backed moms. How did you come to do that?

I started the community with a couple of founder friends at the peak of COVID, when we were all navigating the chaos of building startups with zero childcare and massive uncertainty. It quickly grew to hundreds of founders because there are so many unique challenges to building a startup as a mom, like fundraising while pregnant, or designing support systems for minimal parental leave (I took exactly one day myself).

Our members range from early-stage to late-stage founders. They’re some of the strongest founders around because they’ve overcome far greater hurdles: female founders receive less than 2% of VC funding and have fewer opportunities to build venture-scale businesses.

Many members tackle problems that only women deeply understand (like women’s health), but we also bring a uniquely valuable perspective to running startups. A mother naturally operates in founder mode because she’s already done it before: created something from scratch, navigated ambiguity, and made intuitive decisions that hired help or outside observers simply can’t replicate.

The reality is that foundership isn’t something you just squeeze into a particular life stage. True founders build companies through pregnancy, child-rearing, and maybe even as grandparents. Sure, you might be playing on hard mode during certain phases, but it doesn’t mean you’ll be less effective as a founder. At Kraftful, I closed our strongest quarter (growing ARR by 87%) while raising an infant, before selling the company to Amplitude. Katrina Lake took Stitch Fix public with a small kid. So did Jennifer Hyman (Rent the Runway) and Whitney Wolfe (Bumble). We built this community to prove it can be done and done well.

What sealed the deal for you about joining up with Amplitude? What are you looking forward to here?

At Kraftful, we were lucky to have multiple tech companies approach us about a potential acquisition. My bias for Amplitude, though, goes way back. When we first launched Kraftful, we piped our early data into every analytics platform we could find, hunting for the best insights. Amplitude stood out.

Long before the IPO and long before Amplitude emerged as the clear market leader, it was obvious from the product alone. Amplitude was built with the same care and taste that defined our own product journey at Kraftful.

Talking with Spenser Skates, founder to founder, I could tell he’s driven by the same customer obsession and a drive to build delightful products. I’m super excited to be partnering with him and the rest of the Amplitude team.