Algolia: Lessons Learned Selling to 10,000 Customers Small, Medium and Large

Okay, well, welcome everyone in the SaaStr community. I'm super excited to have Bernadette Nixon, the CEO of Algolia, here. We're gonna have a fun conversation on a bunch of levels. Algolia has been part of SaaStr since the very beginning. I was lucky enough to lead their first seed round when I think it was 6 people, 1 in the US, and we've had someone from Algolia participate in every SaaStr event for, for years. And then it's exciting to have Bernadette here come as the CEO as the company pushes through $100 million and then $1 billion in revenue. And even more interesting, she joined— we're all distributed, we're all running distributed teams today, but Bernadette's super interesting because she agreed to join just before COVID hit and probably was getting her boxes packed and ready to move into her office, and then all of a sudden COVID hit and you've met, you've met like 4 people in the company when you joined, is that right?

I have met 2 Algolians so far.

Is that really only 2, huh?

Yeah.

Oh, wow.

We are very distributed right now.

You're 200 days in this, but what did you have to change? What did you have to change that was different than when you took the jobs?

Well, I guess the good thing is that I've been remote for 10 years. So I guess that was a good background going into this, quite honestly. So I didn't have to change a huge amount, but I did have to edit some of the some of the approach. So, you know, frankly, COVID or all of us being remote as we were when I joined, it was a bit of a leveling of the playing field, which was interesting because ordinarily I'd have joined, I'd have been in San Francisco in person. And, you know, we've got a large population, as you know, overseas in France and the UK, you know, and they would have, you know, felt a little bit like kind of left out of the fun and the excitement. So it was actually being, you know, I was in my office here at home as I am today. And it was a great sort of— it leveled the playing field. Everybody felt that they were on the, you know, the same level in terms of getting to know me and vice versa. So I've always done listening tours when I've started a new position. Normally in person, but I do one or two usually that are virtual. Obviously I had to make it all virtual this time. So made it smaller groups and did more of them for longer. So for the first 6 weeks, I was probably doing 3 listening— part of the 3 meetings on the listening tour, 3 times a week for probably my first 6 weeks. And then also started layering in skip levels to get to know people, you know, half an hour here and there. And 20 minutes of that could be nothing to do with Algolia because I was trying to simulate, you know, I'd have these conversations if I was bumping into people, bumping into them in the kitchen making a coffee. You know, how do you simulate that? You have to be, I think, more intentional about that sort of stuff.

The listening tour is interesting. One of the many things I didn't get at first and now I realize is so important, right? How much time do you give yourself as a new CEO? How long— how much can you do that and how long do you get to be the new person?

You know, years ago, I remember my manager saying to me at the end of my second week, "OK, now the honeymoon's over, so what you gonna do?" Two weeks.

2 weeks and it's yours.

Yeah, so it's not quite 2 weeks, but I think different things work at a different pace. And part of what I say to even new execs that I bring on board— and I've just brought 3 on board, you know, because they want to learn, they want to listen, they don't want to make any decisions too soon based upon, you know, first impressions or not a complete picture. And I say to them, when you know, you know, and therefore move. And the things that you're not quite sure about, then you need to wait till you are sure about about them. So I don't think there's one speed, or it's not the same across all aspects of the business. I think some things you can move pretty quickly on, and I think others you've got to really, really understand before you make your move.

Have you— and I want to talk about some business stuff next, but that how different it was is interesting. Have you found that because it's flatter in the distributed world that certain— some folks have risen up in the leadership that might not have when they weren't in headquarters?

Yes, actually. So there was an individual that was part of the pre-sales team that is now running a solutions group for us. And, you know, she's young in her career, but she's doing fabulous stuff. And yeah, would she have gotten that exposure otherwise? I don't know. But she's doing an amazing job. So it's great to see things like that, for sure.

Yeah, I found that everyone— there used to be someone that was at the bottom corner of the Zoom, but now it's level and one of those folks just becomes a star, right? And they just, they couldn't have in the prior environment, right? Are you guys gonna, I mean, Algolia has a fabulous office in Paris, or it did, and it has roots in SF. Will you guys go back to the office? Have you figured this out? What's the world gonna look like in 2022?

Sure, well, I mean, you know, you've got, you know, leases, depends how long your leases are, so you—

There are leases, yeah.

So you've typically got that for a fixed period of time, but I think the office, we will definitely still keep office locations but they will look very different. I mean, my vision for that is they will look like— they'll look more like cafes than they will, you know, rows and rows of cubes. So I think they'll look very different. And for us, I think they'll look a little bit— I want to try and get a little funky with some of the offices because we need to collaborate not just in that location, but we'll need to, you know, if you're in Paris, you'll need to dial somebody in from San Francisco and vice versa. And how do you do that in a collaborative space without having to be locked in a conference room? You know, all day. So we're gonna, we're gonna get creative with, uh, with some of the office space.

Yeah. Um, and then just one curious question as I've talked, because you're— you've been a pretty, pretty, pretty experienced manager. A lot of folks have said in the distributed world, you know, the seasoned folks benefit from it, right? We can work from home, it's quiet. The engineers that have been at Algolia for several years are the folks with maybe 5 or 10 years of experience, but training new folks is harder. And many folks that don't have the roots. Have you changed anything? Have you learned anything about how to onboard folks in these times? Because I'm guessing 20% of Algolia has never been to the office either at this point, right?

Yeah, that's right, yeah, because we've been hiring pretty aggressively. I think it requires— we've got a pretty good onboarding process where it's got to be lots of different touchpoints and you've got to be very— it can't all be on the hiring manager. There's got to be a team that supports them really from HR and different parts of the organization. And you can do it still and be pretty lean, but I think you have to get fairly creative.

Got it. So let's talk about— you just announced you brought on a whole bunch of seasoned executives, some of whom you worked before, CRO, a CCO, and I guess I get there's so many C's, a Chief Business Development Officer. We can make up any acronyms we want, right? It's the next phase, right? Crossing $100 million to a billion. What did you look for in executives at this phase? Like, because we were chatting before we went live, Algolia has a brand, but not everyone that's going to listen to this has heard of Algolia. But especially if you're developer-focused or have built software for a while and deployed search, there's a decent chance you've heard of Algolia at this point, but it's no—

it's—

we're not at the Microsoft or Adobe level of brand. Not even at Twilio or someone like that, right? So who do you need at this next phase to like to get to 9 figures and beyond revenue? What does the makeup look like? How agile versus how senior? What were you looking for for these hires?

Yeah, it's interesting. So for the CRO role, I was looking for somebody who was pretty seasoned, but I didn't want, you know, a typical enterprise. We do sell into the enterprise, but I didn't want a typical enterprise sales leader. I needed somebody that was really good at pattern matching, really good at getting to repeatability, a high velocity sale, and then also could span up into the enterprise as well. So I was looking for definitely somebody who had more of a science than an art approach to the role and somebody who was, you know, pretty maniacal about understanding our ideal customer profile, really living and working collaboratively with the CMO on the pipeline and really making sure that we had focus because we're a platform and there's probably many companies out there that are platform companies. I've done nothing but platforms for the last 10 years. And what I can tell you is it's extremely hard ramping salespeople to sell a platform because it can be many things to many people. Therefore, you have a use case-based approach where you can kind of get it to be cookie cutter and you can train people on, you know, specific plays that you can launch into market. So I was looking for somebody who had that experience, understood that, and was and had a track record of delivering in a high-velocity model and that could flex into the enterprise for me.

Now let's just dig in a little bit. Your CRO, she last came from Dropbox for Business, is that right? Or Dropbox Enterprise, do I have that right?

Yep.

Yeah, so Dropbox is interesting, although different, in that it has a long tail like Algolia, longer than Algolia, right? Everyone's used Dropbox. How many customers does Algolia have?

9,700 right now.

Okay, so 10,000 and how many— so that we know. I don't know how many folks have used Algolia or how many that have the longest tail including free and folks. It's probably 10x that or something, isn't it?

Oh, um, yes, it's close to that. If you look at developers on the platform, you know, eyeballs on open source docs, probably close to that.

Yes. So, but high velocity to me says, um, high velocity gets me from 10,000 to 20,000 to 50,000 to 100,000, right? But sometimes there's a trade-off in that you don't— you're not able to spend as much time on closing that, that great 7-figure deal, right? What is the trade-off there? Because you have— your CRO can do everything, but she or he can't be perfect at everything, right? Everyone has a— has a— has their top insertion point. So why did you pick— how do you know when you have 10,000 customers which piece of the pie to make your number one criterion?

I think you've got to analyze your customer base. So I mean, we analyzed that 10,000 customers, we understood how many of those were field managed We understood how many were SMB, mid-market, and enterprise. And then we made an assessment as to, you know, where are in the short and medium term, where was our biggest opportunity, and then longer term. And that made me want to go for somebody who most recently had got the high velocity, but I didn't want to go for exclusively somebody who had that skill set. I wanted somebody who had the enterprise too, because I didn't want to have to switch them out in 12 months' time.

Yeah, that gets hard, right? Or you have to segment it, right? You have to have 2 CROs or 2 Senior Vice Presidents of Sales, and that's tough to manage 2 fiefdoms at the same time, isn't it? Exactly.

Yeah.

Yeah. And, um, uh, cool. And then you hired a Chief Customer Officer. Do it when you— so now you're getting a chance to do it again, right? You've been a leader, you've been a sales leader, you've been a CEO. Now it's 2021, so are you thinking any differently about how customer success and sales, CRO and CCO, should work together? In these days and with new learnings? Is there any fresh learnings or new insights you want to deploy here?

Yeah, I mean, for many years, as you know, because you're right, I came up through the ranks on the go-to-market side, and for many years I did that dual role of CRO and CCO. I chose to break it out, and that's how Algolia had it as well when I came. But I chose to break it out because for a SaaS company, the customer success function is just so critical. And I wanted to have somebody that represented that's all they did. They eat, slept, and breathed our customer experience and customer journey. I wanted them to have a seat at the table so that when we're having those discussions about where we take the company and what we do next, that that voice came out loud and clear and wasn't subjugated under anybody else.

Yep, and now, and when, you know, I don't know the exact numbers today, and maybe AlgoLi is getting too big to disclose it, but as a company that has a lot of developer-centric roots, accounts do flex and they grow a lot over time, right? And some, some accounts you'll drop in and it'll be a massive website with massive search needs and you'll close a big deal. But there's plenty of accounts that could start at a few hundred dollars a month, $1,000 a month, and grow into big accounts. Um, when it— when the growth is a lot, like a Twilio or Algolia for accounts, do you think about the line between sales and success differently? Do you think about the handoff? Do you think about compensation plans differently? Like, how do you handle this when there's a lot of growth A lot of it which could be automated, right? A lot of which could be automated and not require sales.

Yeah. So we have a self-service business as well. And that's something that we're starting to look at and see how we fine-tune. So over time, one of the questions that I have is when you start to look at our SMB sector, could that SMB sector actually be served by the self-service engine?

Yeah, that's a— That's it. So that's an interesting, like it's an interesting question of when you have an asset, could you, there's obviously an appeal to have it self-service, right? Require less people, forces you to do more work on onboarding and automation than you might otherwise would, right? Looks good on an org chart, but sometimes I worry that maybe the idea is to put more people into it, because maybe they get ignored when what if you put 50 people on it, let's say, I don't know, maybe we don't want to say, but let's say self-service today is 10% of Algolia's revenue, maybe it was 30% before, usually it declines with companies like Algolia, right? Because the big accounts, you know, Box is 1% today, it used to be 30%, right? So there's a, but what if that 10% could be 15% if you put 30 people on it? It's an interesting different way to think about it. But anyhow, automation is what you're thinking about. It does make the product better, right?

It does. And we just hired a VP of growth as well. So, you know, we're looking to, we're looking to just, you know, do some experimentation and get some learnings in that space.

So let's do one more on sales and then I want to talk about some other things at Algolia, but maybe this is true of a lot of products, but certainly in the early days when I watched Algolia, a challenge is that search, search is a core part of basically every web product, right? And we'll talk, I want to talk a little bit about e-commerce and SaaS and media because certain segments search is more important, right? In e-commerce, if you can find something faster or better, the ROI is there. Other categories are less ROI focused, but We can't find a single website where search is not only important but usually at the top, right? You go into the nav, what's at the top? So, but it's not something that is always thought about every week because the decision might be made every few years, every 4 to 5 years you might build a product, refresh a product, right? So how do you, and a lot of us are that way, right? How do you get more top of mind? How do you get customers and prospects to accelerate a buying decision or a deployment decision or a switching decision? How do you, have you thought more about how to get more velocity in decision-making in search?

Yeah, I mean, so you're right. If somebody is doing a redesign or a replatforming, it's an obvious time to think about search. But there are, I would say, not all search on every website is created equal. Insofar as search on an e-commerce site or a media site that is selling subscriptions is, there's such an intrinsic value between the search and the conversion that those types of organizations are not just looking at it when they replatform. Platform because they're looking at it as how do I optimize my search by presenting the right kind of personalized results to the people that come to my, to my site and are searching for stuff. So they are thinking about it on a more continuous basis. So we try to provide tools to be top of mind as they're going through that journey. For example, you can go to algolia.com today and you can on scroll down on the homepage, you can find the Search Grader, and that is nothing to do with Algolia. It is a tool that anybody with a website, be it an e-commerce or a regular experience website, you can check out. You can go through an assessment, and it will assess what your search capability is like on your existing site. So you have to try and get creative, I think, to find ways to become relevant in between those obvious milestones where they're going to look at it.

—Now, and now, and you might have to get me up to speed on where Algolia is in 2020, but Algolia is an API that is deployed by developers, and its number one segment is e-commerce. And in e-commerce, you have marketers that want ROI lift, right? They want increased conversions. So you're marketing and selling to both marketers and developers, which are pretty far apart on the continuum and spectrum. How do you do both, and how does that change at the next phase, right, as your customer mix and buyers change?

Yeah, and I think we've gone through some of that change already. So in the earlier days, we only focused on developers. Hyper-developer.

Every developer event, Algolia was there, right? Yeah, exactly. Very developer-focused, right? Then I think we pivoted.

I think we pivoted to the line of business persona, and perhaps a little too much. Too much, yeah. So to me, the bread and butter is focusing on your core persona, which for us is definitely the developer persona. Persona. But then you've got to understand who your other personas are and really target them directly. So for us, it's actually category managers in e-commerce or even media. And it would be product managers in a SaaS company or even in a media company when they're producing a product and they want search to be embedded in it. It's often the product manager or the category manager. So you've got to get specific. You can't be all things to all people.

You've got to get specific. So who in— it was interesting to me meeting the team in the very beginning days because the company was focused on inbound and outbound, right, targeting buyers. So when you have those personas, who are you from an outbound perspective in sales? Who do you target today? Who are you trying to get into— get exposure to, get into the hands of?

It really is those category owners. If it's a brand, it's a brand owner, or it's a product manager in a SaaS company. So that might be someone mid-level on an organization.

Chart, right? It might not be the CMO, right, or this, or the chief product mid-level, and then you're trying to get them to go, to go knock on the Zoom— it used to be knock on the cube or the door— you're trying to get them to knock on the Zoom of the developer and getting them to, to deploy it into, uh, next week and check out the product, or how does that flow go today?

Yeah, it can go either way in actual fact. So, you know, there's a developer relations component making sure that we're engaging with the developer community, and that's an area that we're investing in at the moment. So we often get the pull, frankly, from the developer that then introduces introduces us to the business person.

Still today, still at scale, you're getting developer to knock on the door. But the developer isn't thinking about ROI in e-commerce, or are they thinking about conversions and ROI?

They, I think they are in e-commerce companies, yes, they are.

But they're all you talk about, right?

Well, they're also thinking about their time. I mean, if COVID has taught us nothing, it's that you have to be agile, you have to be nimble. If you don't, you know, it's got catastrophic consequences for the business. So therefore, you know, they're looking at it and they're looking at how do they differentiate. They can't just do that with using standard UI layers out there from a DXP or an e-commerce engine. They've got to take control of that personalization, that UX level. And so then looking for the right tools to plug in. And so they're pretty, you know, they're almost two in a pod, you know, with the business person these days.

Yeah, it's true. Let's chat a little bit about segments because when you and I caught up earlier, it was interesting, at least somewhat interesting. Algolia is a search as a service product. It has been, it's horizontal, it can be used anywhere, but e-commerce since the early days took off because the ROI was there, right? Increase conversions through search that is 10 times faster and 5 times more accurate. Even if you increase conversions modestly, the outcome could be huge, right, for e-commerce. So that became number one, even within an early team that was not e-commerce. Experts, right? And then I was always interested in the SaaS side, but media was number 2, and then COVID changed things, right? So e-commerce still got a boost. So e-commerce number 1, but SaaS became your largest, second largest category of customers, right? How did that, how many SaaS companies are there? And what does that mean? And how can they be your second largest category today?

You know, I think some of that wave started prior to COVID, but I think it certainly did accelerate as well. I mean, we've got, you know, companies like Weight Watchers. If you're logging your food in the Weight Watchers app, That's Algolia powering it because of the speed and the accuracy and the relevance of what we expose to you. So I think it comes back to being nimble. A lot of companies are looking at putting new products out in the market. They're looking at competing and they don't want to— they want differentiation, but they don't want to build it all from scratch. So therefore they look to us, for example, to give them that boost in terms of how long does it take them from starting with us to being in production and in market. And that's part of the value that we offer to the developer. We shrink that window.

Yep. And when, and just when you have two segments of customers like e-commerce and SaaS that are very different. So one is focused on maximizing ROI and conversions, right? And the other, on an average SaaS company, you want to get to data quickly and you want to have a sort of a Stripe-like elegance of deployment, but the ROI is different, right? The ROI is different and it's critical to find data in SaaS. We want to find our data, right? We want to structure or really semi-structured, unstructured data. That's what search does, right? I've got terabytes of unstructured data, but how do you market two different ROIs? Is it as simple as landing page? Do you have two different sales teams? Do you specialize your sales teams in the different verticals? Or because it's a different ROI and different approach, how do you do that in two different verticals like this?

Yeah, you've got some choices to make, some of which have financial implications, but at a bare minimum, you've got to approach them as two different plays that you're launching. And you have to have, you know, separate, you know, ideal customer profiles. You've got to have separate ways that you train your salespeople on how to be successful. How do you qualify? How, what's the value they're going to be interested in? What is the, what's the pitch deck? It will be very different for both of those segments. The demos will be very different for both of those segments.

They are. So how long, how can you have the sales, same sales team do this forever? How early do you want to specialize?

So we have had up until this point the same sales team do everything, and we'll actually launch an experiment next year where we have a small OEM, for example, sales team specifically focused on those app, the SaaS companies. Got it. So starting now, right?

You'll see. So we'll find out if it was late or early when we check in next year, right? Okay, two other things I want to make sure we touch on before we run out of time. We can hit anything else you want, but one that I'm really bad at but learning about more is culture, because I still always wonder what culture is. But Algolia is interesting because it's really— we're all distributed now, but it's a company with roots on very different continents and a very French piece. What have you learned? Are our cultures different? How do we blend cultures? Are people different? I like to think of everyone as the same and it's a meritocracy and be neutral, but it's not true, right? There are differences. So what have you— how do you blend companies on different continents and different cultures?

Yeah, and I guess I've been lucky because in my last 3 roles, they've been with companies that are very similar to Algolia and they've had two big centers of presence on different continents here in Western Europe. You know, I used to live in Switzerland and France, so I speak French, and I've lived in, you know, lived in continental Europe. So I do think that helps me sort of bridge a little. But I think it comes down to two things for me. You know, you said, what is culture? Culture, I think, can be nebulous, but you can impact culture, and it's You can impact it every single day, and every single person in the company can impact it by the decisions and the actions that they take. And all the conglomeration of all of that really makes up the culture. So I like to get it out of the stratosphere and down into the sort of practical for me, because I struggled with it for many years too. But when I look at it here at Algolia, I think there's two things that are important. One, I think you have to educate people on the fact that not everybody has the same perspective, and here's why. So I think there's a sharing that you've got to take the time to do, which in the moment can sometimes be challenging because you want to get to the end of that task, but you have to take a step back sometimes and understand. And I think the second thing is that, you know, there's been a lot of focus in the press and the media all around differences right now, and, you know, diversity, inclusion, and belonging is at the at the top of everybody's minds at the moment. To me, I like to see the differences as making us stronger. It doesn't mean to say we'll always all agree. It doesn't mean to say that, you know, anybody or any one perspective is better than another. But I like to think about how do we harness our differences to make us better. You know, some could say that, you know, it's inconvenient having a 9-hour difference between San Francisco office and Paris. And occasionally it is, trust me. But the other side of that is how do you get that time difference to work where you don't have a single point of failure and where it's effectively you are getting, you know, almost 24 hours coverage. Now I wouldn't say we're there today, but that's the journey that we're on. And I think it's recognizing that people have different perspectives. That's okay. But the one mission is the same. Yeah.

Is there anything now that you've joined, like, you know, to put those different perspectives, to surface more of them at the company? Do you have any tips or learnings how to get those out? I mean, how many folks work at Algolia today? 400, 500 folks? Approaching 400. 400. So how do you surface— have you tried to surface more of them, or how do you do that?

We have, actually. Well, I mean, you know, 2 weeks into my role here, George Floyd was killed, and we started talking about that. We had different listening circles. It was interesting because as we saw the social unrest that followed all of those events, as we saw those sort of traverse the world, we saw some of the perspectives of our colleagues in other countries change as, you know, that's really an American problem. Oh, actually, no, hold on. Those riots are happening here on my doorstep now. That's not just an American problem. So, you know, nobody wants any of that to happen, but it does enable you to have the dialogue. Yep. It's a good insight.

Okay, two last things I want to hit. One's very tactical, but it's always interesting to folks, is pricing. So you've recently revamped pricing, right? Pricing's always, generally I think we obsess about it sometimes too much. But Algolia's always been interesting because over time they've always struggled with the breaks, right? The breakpoints between, you know, a very, a low usage free version, a cheap version for developers to get started, more enterprise in the middle, and the breaks have always been challenging for the company for whatever reasons, right? They've always been challenging to not overprice, not underprice. It's not obvious, right? It's not obvious. And so what have you changed, and maybe even more importantly, what have you learned about the different ways to price?

Sure. So I think one of the learnings is it's really hard when you go all the way from self-service all the way up to the enterprise to have one model that fits all. So one of the things that we changed back in July was we actually went to a usage model so that we didn't have these artificial breaks. We have just two plans and it's usage-based. Now you can do pay-as-you-go, just sign up on the website, you know, swipe your credit card, or you can commit. And at higher volumes, that involves a sales conversation. But we found that what it did was it removed those artificial sort of jump points. There's a much smoother curve now. So that customers feel much more comfortable that they're buying into a certain level of usage that is tied to their business outcome, as opposed to having to have artificial tiers or to even, you know, in the old days, we used to have infrastructure-based pricing, which, you know, they liked even less. Yeah, so going for usage, smoothing out that curve has definitely been a big boon for us, and it has boosted the self-service business tremendously. I still think it's tricky to get it right all the way from there up to the enterprise with one model. So will we tweak it still? We probably will.

But now, now that I get— and I want to ask a little bit about that, but in my limited experience as a SaaS CEO, but also my limited experience as an SVP in a bigger company, Certainty does matter too, right? So there's a certain point where it's not fun, I don't care about the benefits of that when I'm a big, when I, I don't know what the amount of revenue a company has, I want to, I have a budget, I have a budget Bernadette, and just tell me what it's gonna like, and so that's the artificial breaks, it sounds like they stressed out sales, right? Oh, that's too much, you know, $1,000, $2,000, $5,000 is too much, but certainty does matter too, right? So where does that, where does that change and how do you educate the sales team to get that right.

Yes, so we have a certain volume that you can buy via self-service, and then after that, we believe that a conversation is better. And that's why we— even though it's usage-based, you sign up for an amount of usage over a 12-month period so that you do get that budget certainty. Have you studied, like—

I mean, obviously, who's figured this out pretty good is AWS. Everyone complains. I mean, AWS used to be cheap. If we've been doing this for a long time, we remember when it was cheap. Now it's very expensive, but it's worth it, right? I don't think we're going to argue it's not worth it. I mean, Algolia is multi-cloud, which we could chat about for last minutes if you wanted to, and what you've learned. But they've learned to start off variable and then have multi-year contracts, right, as you go bigger, right? Have you studied anything you've learned from other folks here that you've brought into Algolia? Are there other folks that you look at their pricing strategies and want to bring them in?

Yeah, we do. We look at Azure, we look at AWS, we look at those two in particular, as well as a whole host of other SaaS companies when we were doing the pricing analysis. And yes, we have, you know, I always used to say, you know, AWS, they have, you know, the pay-as-you-go, then they have reserved instances, and then they have their EDPs, which, you know, could be $20 million. So we basically have the same thing. We have the, you know, swipe your credit card, pay-as-you-go, but then we have what they would call the reserved instance. It's not an instance, it's a reserved number of searches, if you like, you would do with us. That would be our comparable for a certain period of time. And yes, if you want to buy it for 1 year or 2 years or 3 years, we'd never go beyond 3 years, but we would go up to 3 years and we have programs for all of that.

All right, and one last follow-up on that. We could spend a whole session on pricing, but I still hear a lot of advice from folks, cloud investors, SaaS investors in particular, VCs, that want the most revenue recurring, like, and under fixed contracts. And when Twilio IPO'd, a lot of folks were skeptical. Well, Twilio's gonna take a hit. Twilio's gonna take a hit because they're concentrated. Well, they were, they lost Uber. And Twilio's gonna take a hit because they have a lot of variable revenue, right? Well, what's Twilio today? $40 billion. So, and I don't think their multiple has, but does that matter? Do you think about that as CEO? Do you want, do you still want as much committed revenue versus variable? Does this not even matter as long as you hit your number.

I do think about it, and in fact, I've spoken to a number of the— number of bankers recently that— yes, several of the well-known IPOs took those software companies public just recently, and, you know, they have an interesting take on it. And the usage, provided it's consistent and growing and it's not lumpy, they value the usage the same way as they would just a regular subscription. So that's the insight, right?

As long as you see the same retention numbers, right? Twilio's like $145 percent net revenue retention, right, growth, you don't have to have the perfect, uh, e-signed contracts for every month for the same amount, right?

That's the learning. Yep, exactly. Consistency, and consistency up into the right is, is, you know, is the key learning.

Well, ideally, if you have 10,000 customers and high NPS, the consistency should work itself out over time, right? Yeah, for sure. Yeah. All right, that's a good insight. Okay, last one. They're related. Um, I just You've been in enterprise software and business software and cloud software most of your career, right? These are the best of times, aren't they?

Oh my God, absolutely.

So is it too good? How long will it last? And related to that, why did you pick Algolia in the best of times? You had a lot of options, so this is as good as it gets. Why Algolia? And in general, how long do we have another 5 years? Do we have 20 years? Is this all going to crash on us when we come out of COVID Like, how long will the best of times last?

Oh Lord, I wish I had the crystal ball for that one. I think we all do. So why did I choose Algolia? It was really because of 3 main things. I mean, I looked at the market, the target addressable market, and it's huge. And I have experience in search previously from both ends of our competitive spectrum, all the way from open source down to purpose built SaaS packages. And I firmly believe that Algolia's approach to the market being an API search-as-a-service solution is 100% the right way to go. So those were the primary reasons. The other reason was I loved the fact that there was a self-service business because I believed it would make our product better. I wanted to get more exposure in that part, that end of the market. And then finally, I saw that, you know, every company has its growing pains, and I felt that I'd seen a good chunk of this movie before and that I could help.

Yeah, that's it. Let's finish on the best one, but the last one's interesting. You know, when a company goes through phase transitions or growing pains, a great one like Algolia, sometimes you think you can't recruit somebody great, right, if you hit a bump. But the great people know those bumps, right, and actually they'll jump on those opportunities because they know how to fix them. They've done it before. So if you hit a bump, don't think you can't hire a great VP of Sales or VP of Marketing or CEO. Because they know when that's an opportunity, don't they? Oh, 100%.

Absolutely. Those are the, you know, yeah, it's a great opportunity. And like you said, I mean, you look at the backdrop of the market that we're in right now and, you know, gosh, I don't know how long this is going to last, but what I would say is you've got to run with it and you've got to be agile yourself to be able to take a hold of things. And I would say If there are companies out there that are looking at how to harness this, I would say really get serious about your ICP, your ideal customer profile, and go figure out— you know, one of the things that I did at Alfresco was we figured out what were the 4 questions we could ask. We got marketing to automate them. And based upon that, we segmented the target customers we wanted to go after into 3 buckets. Digital innovators, fast followers, and digital dinosaurs. We put the dinosaurs in a drawer and we figured out the other two. So anything that you can do to streamline, and as I was saying before, get to that repeatable process to really maximize the opportunity that is there, I think that's what everybody should be focusing on. And now's the carpe diem, right?

Now's the time. Yeah, 100%. All right, Bernadette, this was amazing. Thank you so much for your time. Anything, anything, last thing we didn't hit that you wanted to hit or get out there?

No, I think it's just, you know, I'm loving being at Algolia, just the approach that we've got to helping our customers, and you layer that on top of fantastic technology and a great approach to the market, and it's a great time to be at Algolia. We're recruiting heavily, and so I would encourage people to ping us. Ping us.

Go join up. Go join a pre-IPO winner today. That's great. Yes, exactly.