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 25 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 2 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
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…”
Lemkin: $200M ARR SaaS startups converge at 700 headcount and breakeven
“Turns out in 20, 24, they're all, these three and a half companies, 200, they're all exactly the same. They're all breakeven, and they'll have 700 employees. Break even and set all of them.”
Lemkin: Algolia crossed $200M in revenue and will IPO next year
“Second one, Algolia, worth three billion, doing over two hundred million, we'll IPO next year.”
Lemkin: Algolia, Talkdesk, Greenhouse, or SalesLoft will likely IPO in 2024
“We had a panel of Algolia, Talkdisk, Greenhouse, and I think SalesLoft, they're all at two hundred million and at least three of them, I think, will IPO next year.”
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: 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.”
Lemkin: Talkdesk was the only SaaS unicorn he knew would hit $1B
“I had no idea that any of my cash unicorns, right, the ones that were exited for billions, I didn't, Think any of them would except for talk desk. I did. I, and it's not that I didn't love the founders. It's just so hard, right? It's just so hard to build thes…”
Lemkin: Algolia generates hundreds of millions and will IPO post-downturn
“The second one was Algolia, which is doing hundreds of millions and is worth three billion today, which will go IPO when we come out of this search as a service API.”
Nixon: CRO differs from VP Sales through whole-company allegiance
“What makes the CRO role different than the VP of sales is the fact that this allegiance to growing the overall company and an understanding that there's gotta be a marketing strategy that's in lockstep with the product strategy that then when it rubber hits th…”
Nixon: Startups should raise capital when they do not need money
“You want to raise the money when you don't need the money, because then you can act financially independent because you don't need the deal.”
Nixon: A company's second product must target its existing buyer persona
“As you're thinking about introducing that second product, make sure it's a product that is applicable To your main persona or the decision-making unit to which your sellers, your go-to-market strategy is already aimed because otherwise they will have a hard ti…”
Nixon: Startups must screen candidates for stage-specific experience to avoid mismatch
“You also need to blend that with people that have stage-specific experience, so you're screening for values, you're screening for skills, Also, screening for stage-specific experience can be really, really important, because again, you get that impedance misma…”
Lemkin: Algolia crossed $100M in revenue with growth accelerating at 60%
“And they just crossed a hundred million accelerating, okay, at about 60% growth.”
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 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.”
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.”
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…”
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…”
Algolia acquired Australian vector search startup Search.io in late 2022
“We made an announcement yesterday that we acquired A company called search.io. So we have been the leading API first keyword search platform on the market, and search.io cool startup, about 30 people, mostly out of Australia, and they are, and they have a sema…”
Algolia CRO: Company Has Over 13,000 Customers and 30B Weekly Searches
“We have over 13,000 customers, and doing about thirty billion search requests a week.”
Algolia CRO: 10-quarter forecasting algorithms broke down in Q2 2022
“I'll tell you, Q two, the data failed me. The algorithms we've built over the past 10 quarters from the tops down and bottoms up, it started to fail.”
Lemkin: All four panelists from a 2015 SaaStr session became SaaS unicorns
“You did a panel you did it with three entrepreneurs on, that were at a million in ARR, and all four of you are unicorns and decacorns. So it's interesting. It was you, Tiago from TalkDesk, Nicholas from Algolia, and Daniel from Greenhouse, and all were growing…”