YouSaid · the spoken record

Nicolas Dessaigne

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24
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2016-04-22
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2016-04-22
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1
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Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “Oh, so much. One is we want to change the way people search, like everywhere on the web. Kind of like, you know, we don't want people really to search for things. We want to guide them to their results with a very interactive experience, doing what Google did for the web, the public web, doing that, but for every B2B out there, like every business is out there. And then if I look more at the market perspective, 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. And we want to lead that market. This focus led us to decide not to provide any on-premise solution today.”

    2016-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fundraising Is Also Business Development with Nicolas Dessaigne, Co-Founder & CEO @ Algolia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Maybe Creativity Inc. I love how culture was transformative for Pixar and the way he described that. And then, of course, many other books like Harting about Hartings is just awesome and so on.”

    2016-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fundraising Is Also Business Development with Nicolas Dessaigne, Co-Founder & CEO @ Algolia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “So I think it depends on every person. I mean, you don't want to fake it. You want to stay authentic. And that's my challenge today is really to stay myself, to stay authentic. But then to get better at public speaking, better at really conveying the vision where we're going and so on. And so I think it's different for everyone. 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 into the, I'm not Steve's jobs or this kind of leaders kind of leader could I be. And I think everyone should ask themselves the question and not try to imitate someone, but really to play their strengths.”

    2016-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fundraising Is Also Business Development with Nicolas Dessaigne, Co-Founder & CEO @ Algolia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I'd love to be, and I'm working on that, I'd love to be a better leader in the sense of probably charisma. That's probably something I love to improve, to be able to convey even better the vision of the company to everyone”

    2016-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fundraising Is Also Business Development with Nicolas Dessaigne, Co-Founder & CEO @ Algolia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Probably slack, but I guess it's a common answer. I would even go to mention email. It's still most of my day is still spent into email. And thinking more about product in the sense of maybe APIs, we use Stripe. For us, it's a must use, helping us to solve a big chunk of the problem. We don't have to have to think about it, for example.”

    2016-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fundraising Is Also Business Development with Nicolas Dessaigne, Co-Founder & CEO @ Algolia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “But no, it's not just to please Jason. No, I actually love Saster. Very useful for me because I'm not like a sales marketing guy from my experience. And so that's exactly what Saster is doing for me. It's teaching me the important things in sales and marketing for SaaS businesses.”

    2016-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fundraising Is Also Business Development with Nicolas Dessaigne, Co-Founder & CEO @ Algolia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “But it also set the pace for the following months and years. Quinty sense of an acceleration program, it's really to accelerate, to go faster.”

    2016-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fundraising Is Also Business Development with Nicolas Dessaigne, Co-Founder & CEO @ Algolia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “It's difficult to choose only one. There are so many good things about YC. But focusing on maybe one thing that really helped us was the pace, the pace at which we grew the company. So when you join YC, it's for a sprint. It's like a three-month sprint. We did probably the best ever decision by moving every one of the company in the Silicon Valley at that time. So we were six people. We rented a house. And we were working like 24-7. And YC was in a way an excuse to work completely crazy on the company. And it was like the motivation, the inspiration that it would provide helped us so much drive a place. And every day we were releasing new things, trying new stuff. If it didn't work, we would try something else. If it did work, we would double down. And all of that helped us to reach great traction by end of the”

    2016-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fundraising Is Also Business Development with Nicolas Dessaigne, Co-Founder & CEO @ Algolia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Oh, I never thought about that this way. I think it was mostly a lack of experience about what we could expect back in five years, IPO, whatever. I mean, the situation would be so different because of our experience, but also our profile. Investors love second timers. It's much easier for them to raise. If I look back as a first timer, could I have done something better? Maybe getting into YC before would have helped a lot. It would have enabled us to learn so much useful skills for fundraising. But honestly, I don't regret anything because I think that given our experience at that time, given where we were, the risk people were taking into funding us, I think that was completely okay. We could have done better, but not hugely better anyway. It was an okay round. Today with the experience, we could probably do much better, but not like 10 times better.”

    2016-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fundraising Is Also Business Development with Nicolas Dessaigne, Co-Founder & CEO @ Algolia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “I think the last one you learn as you grow. So I think we didn't do such a great job in the first one. We didn't have any experience doing that. And the last one, we had like a couple of runs already down. And so we were, I think, better at fundraising, better at explaining the vision where we were going and so on. And the other thing that I loved into fundraising, so it's probably specific to our company. But 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 BizDev. It was also a way to reach out to new companies. And the best ever due diligence we could get was when an investor was asking one of their company, which was struggling with search to test us because then that would become a new customer. And then, of course,”

    2016-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fundraising Is Also Business Development with Nicolas Dessaigne, Co-Founder & CEO @ Algolia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “We did our third round last year, so that was our series After this couple of seed rounds. Well, I mean, the most important thing was the growth, like the matrix. We were out of an incredible 2014 on average at that time we did 30% gross months over months. So it was what triggered that series A.”

    2016-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fundraising Is Also Business Development with Nicolas Dessaigne, Co-Founder & CEO @ Algolia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “For us, it was really opportunistic. It was not an SCT. We still had so much, most of the first round money in the bank. So it was more like opportunistic. Let's do it. We can do it. Let's do it. It's going to help. I think in the end for us, it was more making the choice that would be the best for the company long term. And I think we did the right one at that time. For other companies doing a second seed round, I guess you're right. It's more like getting more time to achieve kind of market fit. In the end, it's just a letter on the round like seed round or series A or series B. Like 10 years ago what we call seed around was it was a series A at that time did that change so much? Probably a lot more investors money is also available for seed that was not available before like a lot of business angels investing and so on”

    2016-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fundraising Is Also Business Development with Nicolas Dessaigne, Co-Founder & CEO @ Algolia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Already delivering the product, selling the product. And so we did quite a good traction during Y Combinator. That generated interest. At that time, however, on the side, we didn't need any money yet because we already had some money from the first seed round. And on the other hand, the terms we could have gotten at that time would have not been so good because we were still very, very early into our growth. And so we finally decide not to raise any series A after weight combinator, but to take the risk, to just raise a very small grant, to onboard new investors that we thought could provide a lot of value. That's when Jason Lemkin joined us as an investor.”

    2016-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fundraising Is Also Business Development with Nicolas Dessaigne, Co-Founder & CEO @ Algolia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Yeah, it was different every time. So we actually did two seed runs and then our size A with Excel. The first time we had the beta, but we didn't really have any product in production yet. So at that time, it was mostly about the potential of the technology. I think because you don't have that many companies working on a very core deep technologies like that, like search, many investors simply saw a big potential and it was just like ready to take a small risk. It was still a seed just for the chance to be in the adventure. Later on, we actually joined Y Combinator after that first seed round, kind of like the wrong order, but well, no regret. It was now some adventure. And then after our combinator, we got a lot, like a lot of inbound interest from investors. When we joined Y Combinator, we were all”

    2016-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fundraising Is Also Business Development with Nicolas Dessaigne, Co-Founder & CEO @ Algolia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “I think that's difficult for them, but there are maybe a few ways to do that. 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. And so I guess that for investors, if they really believe in the importance of culture for scaling a company, then they need to make sure that the founders are considering that as a very important part of their activity, daily activity, like of their responsibility. And then if investors want to take the time meeting with other team members is always good so that they can actually see for themselves how the people are embodying that the culture that the forgers may have described.”

    2016-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fundraising Is Also Business Development with Nicolas Dessaigne, Co-Founder & CEO @ Algolia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Yeah, that's exactly we get that approach where we get one of the former employees being mentoring new ones. It's new employee has his or her body that he's helping with the onboarding”

    2016-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fundraising Is Also Business Development with Nicolas Dessaigne, Co-Founder & CEO @ Algolia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Yeah, the big challenge is when you scale fast, you will onboard many people at once that didn't have time really to understand the culture. Well, there is no perfect solution, but if you just assume that as they joined the company, they will learn as they go, it's not going to work. It's not going to work because every six months you get, it depends. Like sometimes we double the size of the company in six months. Of course, half the people being new, they cannot get all that experience with the others that would let them understand right away. So we need to, you need to formalize, you need to write it down, you need to make yourself accountable, you need to be consistent. We love all of that. There is no magic bullet, unfortunately. It's really repetition, repetition, repetition.”

    2016-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fundraising Is Also Business Development with Nicolas Dessaigne, Co-Founder & CEO @ Algolia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Yeah, it's tough. It's tough. It's very difficult to scale. I mean, people joining, of course we take care when we hire to look for people who would be compatible with that culture. We try as much as we can. But when they join, their conception of the culture is always different, which is normal. I mean, as long as you have not lived it, it's very difficult to really understand. And it can take months, maybe six months before to really understand it. And so quickly enough, we realized that instead of just speaking about culture, we had to formalize it. And we did that about two years ago, the first version. Then we continued to scale and we saw that it was failing again. And so we did that again actually a couple of months ago. Again, we clarified the culture, nailed some key values. For us, it's grit trust, care, candor, and humility. Then making ourselves accountable.”

    2016-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fundraising Is Also Business Development with Nicolas Dessaigne, Co-Founder & CEO @ Algolia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Me and told me that, oh, you know, I thought the other guys was the funder and he was referring to our VPB's devoton who came to Le Camping like a couple of months before to describe a partnership we had with them. It was so convincing. It was so engaged into what he was saying that the guy had”

    2016-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fundraising Is Also Business Development with Nicolas Dessaigne, Co-Founder & CEO @ Algolia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “It's not when I say that, actually, it's not at all thinking about like a development methodology. It's really more like a general concept of having a team that is empowered, that is feeling like owners of what they are doing so that they can actually take initiatives, try things. We want people who get out of their comfort zone who are always trying to learn. That worked pretty well. That helped us along the way to Pivot. We did Pivot. Also, many of our nice successes came from the team, from initiatives that were taken by individuals and having that empowerment really helped there. Let me give you a very quick anecdote. I remember maybe a year or two ago, like a year or a half ago, I was at an accelerator in Paris, Le Camping, describing the journey, answering questions. And after that event, one of the founders there came to see.”

    2016-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fundraising Is Also Business Development with Nicolas Dessaigne, Co-Founder & CEO @ Algolia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “That was interesting. At that time, we already knew we were kind of agreeing about what we were going to build. But we also knew that being startups, chances were we would pivot and have to change our mind many, many times. For us, it was more important to make sure the culture was the right one to be able to constantly revenge yourself, to adapt to events, well, to basically be agile and always adapt to circumstances. And also had spent a lot of time at big corporations. In a sense, we knew what we didn't like. We had that experience and we made sure together that the kind of culture, the kind of people we wanted to hire, the kind of team we wanted to create was the same.”

    2016-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fundraising Is Also Business Development with Nicolas Dessaigne, Co-Founder & CEO @ Algolia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “I'm not even saying you should follow that advice. Complementary is better, but make sure that you are aligned about the core things you want to build.”

    2016-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fundraising Is Also Business Development with Nicolas Dessaigne, Co-Founder & CEO @ Algolia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Yeah, that's a very good question. But actually, no, so it's not, I guess that the best way to find a partner is to find someone who is 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 were kind of critical and also critical in our later success. In the case of Julien, I've worked with him a couple of times in my career. And so in the beginning, that's when I actually had that thought about, okay, I want to work with him, to be the company with him one day, because I saw him, how he sought, how he was attacking problems and so on. And that was exactly the same approach I would want to take. Kind of like not the commanded.”

    2016-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fundraising Is Also Business Development with Nicolas Dessaigne, Co-Founder & CEO @ Algolia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Oh, yeah, I was always, I would say, passionate about entrepreneurship. And I had this huge, like awesome opportunity to work with Julian, my co-founder. And that was kind of like the guy I wanted to create a company with. So it was no brainer for me. 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 developer's forum. And we saw many questions, unanswered questions about app developers wanting to embed Lucine, which is a search engine, an open source library, wanting to embed Lucine inside their own apps and struggling with that. We had the experience, the previous experience to build that, and so we just did.”

    2016-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fundraising Is Also Business Development with Nicolas Dessaigne, Co-Founder & CEO @ Algolia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source