When Nicolas Dessaigne and Julien Lemoine agreed to start a company at the end of 2012, Dessaigne was 36 and Lemoine 31. Both had children and loans. Dessaigne later described that as a very risky situation, and the two gave themselves at least a year to find out whether it would work. Less than that, he argued, and you do not give yourself the chance to succeed.
They had met years earlier at Arisem, a company later bought by Thales, and worked side by side for a few years. Lemoine, an EPITA graduate, left for the search company Exalead. Dessaigne, an engineer with a doctorate in computer science, followed a few years later. They overlapped there for only a few months. Then they decided to build something themselves, with Lemoine taking the technical lead because, as Dessaigne put it, he was far stronger at it.
Y Combinator asked them to move to the United States, which opened the door to American investors and another 1.3 million dollars.
The first product was a technical success and a commercial flop. It was a search tool that worked offline inside mobile apps, and developers were not ready to pay for it. What nobody had planned for was what those developers asked next: could they have it online? A beta in March 2013 got a strong response. Around 1.5 million dollars from angels and funds, partly through one of the first beta testers, paid for the first two employees.
Then came a rejection. Their first application to Y Combinator in 2013 failed. After a trip to the United States to visit clients in mid-2013, they were advised to apply again, and they got in for the winter 2014 batch. Y Combinator asked them to move to the United States, which opened the door to American investors and another 1.3 million dollars. Paying customers rose from 17 at the end of 2013 to 400 a year later.
Funding followed: 18.3 million dollars in 2015 led by Accel, 53 million in 2017, and in July 2021 a 150 million dollar round valuing the company at 2.25 billion dollars. Algolia says it serves about 18,000 customers and handles more than 1.75 trillion searches a year. Dessaigne later became a general partner at Y Combinator.
For a founder, the lesson is in the order of events: the flop was the product, the rejection was the invitation, and the thing that worked came from listening to the people who said no.