Julian Lemoine: Challenge engineers on maintenance costs instead of arguing
Julian Lemoine · Founder's Guide to Scaling Applications: When to Build, When to Buy and What Breaks · Oct 16, 2019 · at 23:26
Algolia co-founder Julian Lemoine shares management lessons from engineering debates over building versus buying infrastructure monitoring tools.
0:00 / 0:32exact quote · 32.8s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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 the market, challenge them on every single decision, but do not try to convince them. It will never work, I think. My personal feedback is that you will never convince them But you can challenge them, and they will look at the problem differently.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Julian Lemoine
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…”
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…”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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, …”