The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 20 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Algolia closed its $53M Series B before finishing its pitch deck
“In the case of the build run, I mean, it went super fast. I mean, we actually closed the run before having, even having finished our funding deck, so it indeed went much faster than anticipated.”
San Francisco offers a superior talent pool for senior sales executives
“For a company, like a tech company like ours, definitely the talent pool for sales and marketing talents is San Francisco, especially for the highest positions. If you are looking for VP marketing, VP sales, The talent pool is much better here.”
Hiring top engineering talent is easier in Europe than San Francisco
“The concentration of, like, good tech people is probably better In Europe compared to, like, the competition you have here in SF. I mean, you have, like, crazy good people here, but the local industry is startup, so you are going to compete with so many other …”
Pitching Investors Doubles as Customer Acquisition for B2B Startups
“Many of the portfolio companies of investors, of potential investors, actually potential customers for us. It was kind of like, you know, fundraising for us was also business. It was also a way to reach out to new companies. And the best ever due diligence we …”
Pitching VCs doubles as business development for SaaS startups
“At least in the context of a SaaS company like ours that could work with any of these investors' portfolio companies, it's actually a very good business development approach as you are Working with these new, like, investors, winning this relationship, it's al…”
Growth startups should target two years of runway over 18 months
“In our case, I would look more at two years than 18 months, and when you're looking at that, you are like, Working with the assumptions that you are going to be very aggressive on the market, on investment and growth, so that there is no bad surprise.”
Search will shift from keywords to conversational interfaces
“The way really we see things evolving is that tomorrow we are not going to search as we do today with keywords type enter and wait for an answer. It's going to become more and more interactive and then conversational. And so I believe that in the, in a few yea…”
Co-Founder Alignment on Core Values Matters More Than Skill Complementarity
“Complementary is better, but make sure that you are aligned about like the core things you want to build.”
New Hires Will Not Learn Startup Culture Passively During Rapid Growth
“If you just assume that as they join the company, they will learn as they go, it's not going to work.”
Algolia Delayed Post-YC Series A to Take Small Investment From Jason Lemkin
“And so we finally decided not to raise any series A after weight combinator, but to take the risk to just raise a very small round to onboard new investors that we thought could provide a lot of value. That's when Jason Lemkin joined, joined us as an investor.”
Algolia Averaged 30% Month-Over-Month Growth Leading to Its Series A
“On average at that time we did 30% growth month over month, so it was what triggered that series A.”
Moving Algolia's Entire Team to Silicon Valley Was Their Best Decision
“We did the, probably the best ever decision by moving every one of the company in in the Silicon Valley at that time.”
Founders Must Lean Into Authentic Strengths Rather Than Imitating Steve Jobs
“If you have someone who is very good at, very charismatic, but is not believable, It's not going to work either. You need to play your strengths, and my strengths are not like into the I'm not Steve Jobs or these kind of leaders, kind of leader could I be? And…”
SaaS Search Will Overtake On-Premise Search by 2021
“Search Is moving from on-premise to SaaS, and it's going to accelerate in the next five years. And so I believe that in five years SaaS will be actually much stronger than on-premise.”
Algolia Sacrifices Short-Term Revenue by Refusing On-Premise Deployments
“This focus led us to decide not to provide any on-premise solution today. While it could help us to get much more revenue at short term, we believe that because we want to be the Best player tomorrow for the SaaS market. We need to keep our focus on the produc…”
Algolia had more U.S. customers than anywhere else from day one
“From day one, We had more customers in the U.S. Than anywhere else.”
Algolia's Co-Founders Were Both Technical Rather Than Complementary
“I wouldn't say we were such complementary partners in our case, because we were both technical, like the way we wanted to build the team, the important things for a company, all of that things were like the core things we agreed upon.”
Algolia Doubled Its Company Headcount in Six Months
“I sometimes would double the size of the company in six months.”
A Company Inherits Its Founders' Culture If They Prioritize It
“I mean, the culture in the end, it's embodied by the founders. I mean the company has the culture of the founders as long as the founders consider the culture important.”
Algolia Was Inspired by Stack Overflow Questions About Lucene
“Algolia in itself, Came to being because of questions on Stack Overflow. If you don't know Stack Overflow, it's a very, very famous developers forum, and we saw many questions and answered questions about app developers wanting to embed Lucene, which is a sear…”