Julian Lemoine, co-founder and CTO of Algolia, reflects on why building non-core infrastructure in-house fails over the long term compared to purchasing third-party SaaS.
“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 will have 50, while you will stay with, like, a limited effort, and only two, three engineers working on it.”
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More from Julian Lemoine
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…”
Julian LemoineOct 16, 2019▶ 33:39Founder's Guide to Scaling Applications: When to Build, When to Buy and What Breaks
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.”
Julian LemoineOct 16, 2019▶ 2:14Founder's Guide to Scaling Applications: When to Build, When to Buy and What Breaks
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.”
Julian LemoineOct 16, 2019▶ 15:39Founder's Guide to Scaling Applications: When to Build, When to Buy and What Breaks
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.”
Julian LemoineOct 16, 2019▶ 31:52Founder's Guide to Scaling Applications: When to Build, When to Buy and What Breaks
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, …”
Julian LemoineOct 16, 2019▶ 4:14Founder's Guide to Scaling Applications: When to Build, When to Buy and What Breaks
AssertionPartly 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…”
Julian LemoineOct 16, 2019▶ 5:35Founder's Guide to Scaling Applications: When to Build, When to Buy and What Breaks
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