Insight
Julian Lemoine: Internal engineering teams can never compete with SaaS vendors
“And I think that the big learning with SAS, your internal team will never be able to compete with the SAS product. Never. It's hopeless. Like, if the solution is successful, the team will scale, and maybe today they have two engineers, but in two years they wi…”
Insight
Julian Lemoine: Only build in-house if it delivers 10x competitive differentiation
“I think there is only one for me, which is a factor 10. Like, if you have this factor 10 on one specific area which is important for your business, it can be the UX, it can be the performance, it can be the relevance, it can be anything. If you have this facto…”
Insight
Julian Lemoine: Strong engineering teams struggle more with build-vs-buy decisions
“The better your team is, the more difficult it is to take the good build versus by solution.”
Insight
Julian Lemoine: Engineers overconfidently propose building tools outside their core expertise
“I think a good engineering team will always find this, and they will come to you and give you a big list of things you could do way better than anyone else, even if they have no strong expertise on this market.”
Insight
Julian Lemoine: 99% of startups should not build their own infrastructure
“I think 99% of the company, or 99%, should not build the infrastructure. I think you need to have a big bet, and it needs to be a huge difference in your product, in your company, in your business, to have a good reason to build it.”
Disclosure
Algolia founders chose bare-metal hardware over cloud VMs at inception
“First big decision we took, it was in the very early days of the company, we were only two, we have not even fundraise, we have no salaries, so very, very early days of the company, we decided to use bare metal infrastructure and not use cloud infrastructure, …”
Assertion Partly supported
Cloud infrastructure in 2012 lacked the hardware required for search engines
“Like search engines are very intensive in terms of CPU, SSD, memory, so we had to pretty much select a very specific machine, very specific hardware, to make sure we have the best performance of the market. None of that was available on cloud infrastructure at…”
Insight
Julian Lemoine: Challenge engineers on maintenance costs instead of arguing
“So what I did learn in this story is never try to convince them, but challenge them on the cost of developing their prototype, challenge them on the fact we cannot use our existing monitoring solution for six months to a year while we find a good solution on t…”
Insight
Julian Lemoine: Startups prematurely cut tooling costs instead of buying engineer time
“So that's another mistake, like looking at the cost, maybe too early, and spending some money for a limited period of time would basically buy us some time, and the time of one of our best engineers, which is a big thing, like we never have too many engineers.”
Insight
Julian Lemoine: Design replaceable components instead of permanent internal systems
“One of the best ways to deal with it is to accept we can replace components easily over time, and don't think about building something for the long term.”
Insight
Julian Lemoine: Evaluate SaaS vendors by their roadmap, not current features
“I never want my team to think in terms of features. I think you have the product with the feature set as it is today, but if you use and you buy a solution, you need to project your decision on the long term. So looking at the roadmap, discussing the roadmap w…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Algolia ran 3,000 bare-metal servers handling 300B API calls in 2019
“We are today around 350 people in six different offices. We have mainly a bare metal infrastructure with close to 3000 servers distributed in more than 70 data centers, and we handle between 203 hundred billions API columns.”
Assertion Supported
AWS Route 53 supported only 7 of Algolia's 12 regions in 2014
“Like we had at the moment of the launch, 12 regions. Amazon was covering only seven of them. So we were not able to do the geo routing for all our customers, all our region.”
