Lago

I love the Bay Area but Paris will always be the best kept secret and underrated place for tech IMHO 🇫🇷🙌 Met so many impressive founders and operators yesterday for our Open-Source meet-up at the Lago office: while Paris is obviously less visible than the Bay Area, this crowd is heads down *quietly* building impactful companies! Many many thanks to our co-hosts Ugo VOLLMER, Hexa (building their Open-Source studio!) & Maxime Corbani, Runa Capital (It was a "no VC" event but Max was *tolerated* as an ex YC founder 🤣) And thanks Arthur Bonnecarrere for bringing this very *special guest* with him!!! 🔥🔥

We love Developers x Open-Source at Lago! That's why we're beyond excited to support SurrealDB Cloud launch. We've followed SurrealDB's team for a while and admired their journey: - Big commitment to Open-Source - Loved by developers: 26K+ stars on Github - Loved by Enterprises too (!): Nvidia, Amazon, HSBC SurrealDB is a multi-model database, in other words, they help developers consolidate their database. It IS a huge problem, especially at scale, ping Pratim Bhosale, Tobie Morgan Hitchcock or Jaime Morgan Hitchcock if you need proof! 😊

"We struggle to get paid." This is the most common challenge revealed by the research we conducted among major AI companies. 1️⃣ Why is that? Users consume their products and then disappear at the end of the month, when they need to pay. They might re-open an account later, and do it all over again. This wasn't ok for B2B SaaS, this is even *more alarming *for AI companies that need to pay for the compute costs, whether they manage to get paid or not. 2️⃣ What can they do about that? They can: - Eat up the cost as they need to "win at (literally) all costs" (not sustainable) - Rely on prepaid credits (this can add a lot of friction to your user journey, as the user needs to (i) provision their account, (ii) understand and adhere to a credit system) OR - Use "Progressive billing": our new feature. Also known as "threshold billing", it is simple yet powerful. Instead of waiting until the end of a billing period, Lago automatically triggers an invoice the moment a customer’s cumulative usage hits predefined thresholds. We don’t simply warn you (the merchant) or your customers. We also make sure to invoice them at different steps of their usage. This *proactive* approach ensures that no one can overuse your services without paying for them, drastically reducing the risk of unpaid services or fraud. I'm genuinely beyond excited of the impact of this new release! It's rare to ship something that *for sure* will not only save, but grow $$$ for users, on top of freeing up their bandwidth and brainspace! And super proud of the all-star team at Lago who can't stop shipping 👏👏👏 Raffi Sarkissian Jérémy Denquin Vincent Pochet Michael Ponrajah Toon Willems Lovro Colic Kelly Phan

✨ Welcome Ancor Cruz! We 2x the Engineering team at Lago over the past months, and it's so thrilling (and humbling) to build such a talented team, with Raffi Sarkissian. Meet Ancor Cruz, currently based in Spain, in Tenerife 🏝️🇪🇸. (I'm personally trying to find an excuse to travel there: do you need to meet in-person Ancor?! I heard the 🏄♀️ is fantastic 😊!!!) Ancor is joining us as a Backend Engineer here at Lago. He has close to 20 years (!!!) of experience building with Ruby on Rails (we love RoR) and the last 4 in the fintech industry (Qonto and SeQura). 3 fun facts about Ancor: 1️⃣ Ancor has been a founder (we love ex-founders at Lago!), and worked for companies across the globe: Manchester in the UK, Memphis in Tennessee, as well as more “mainstream” tech hubs such as New York, London, Barcelona! 2️⃣He loves dancing to Latin rhythms like salsa and merengue—his favorite way to unwind and have fun! 3️⃣ He  lives by the seaside in the Canary Islands, in Tenerife, where he enjoys experimenting with new recipes and cooking up delicious meals with fresh, local ingredients. Maybe (litterally) food for thought for our next offsite Raffi Sarkissian? Welcome Ancor, can't wait to build together!

Our 🇺🇸 team is growing fast! Meet Brian Vu, Bay Area native, who joins us as a Solutions Engineer. Brian makes sure the engineers using Lago have the support they need and acts as a Liaison between our Product and GTM teams. His journey is quite unique. Some people start their career as engineers, and then transition to the "business side of things", Brian did the opposite. How is that possible? He started in Customer Success at Freshworks and Mighty Networks, where, among other things, he dealt with "billing nightmares". Indeed, billing is still the #1 source of Customer Success questions today (upgrades/downgrades, proration, VAT, anyone? :) ). During the pandemic, he learned to code by himself ("I didn't need to commute anymore, I've put this extra time to good use!"), and enrolled Circle CI tech team for 2.5 years after that. I loved this fact during our interviews (among other things): I personally spent a lot of time reading and baking during the pandemic 😆 🥖. 3 fun facts about Brian: - He loves restoring classic Japanese sports cars - He is currently obsessed with composting - He is raising 4 baby hens, and makes his own yoghurts Welcome Brian! PS: we're still hiring, check out our careers page, and/or ping the one and only Alison Eastaway!

Best pricing communication I've seen, super impressed by how ElevenLabs handled it! Pricing strategy is always intensely debated, but the implementation is often neglected. This includes billing implementation (we see it on a daily basis at Lago!), but also communication to existing and new customers. A few observations as the ElevenLabs is probably setting a trend here: 1️⃣ Eleven cut their prices by 50% as they managed to reduce cost as well They probably could have refrained from doing this proactively, but I guess the rationale was that it's just a matter of time until the competition also reduces time, so building trust/user goodwill was prioritized. 👏 2️⃣ They introduced a new package, the "business plan" As much as we talk about "usage based billing" a lot, the reality is that users want to have visibility on how much they are spending, so packages that *include* usage are gonna be the norm. 3️⃣ Usage credits that roll-over To add flexibility to the pricing and "grow with their users", credits can be purchased. We've all already bought credits, that we let expire because they were not used in time, and that's never been a pleasant user experience. So, once again ElevenLabs chose the friendliest option, which is to rollover unused credits. 👏 So if you need text to speech, do check them out! Piotr Dabkowski - Ben Budde - Maciej Mylik - Luke Harries

A company I invested in just pivoted and they seem "lost", how should I react? 😱 -- I've made around 20 investments before I got way too focused on Lago to be able to do anything else. Received quite a few investors' updates announcing pivots recently! And two years ago we pivoted at Lago and had to break the news to our own investors as well, so we've been on both sides! I don't have the absolute answer but here are "DON'TS": 1️⃣ Emit any kind of opinion on the new direction By the time the founder sends the update, they've spent quite a few countless sleepless nights so... respect it. 2️⃣ Ask for a timeline Finding a new idea requires a mix of market analysis, chemistry, timing, a little bit of luck and a lot of grit, harder than falling in love in my opinion, but the thing is you can't time it. If you want a clear timeline, you probably shouldn't invest in pre-seed/seed! 3️⃣ Ignore the email If it doesn't come naturally to you to support them, just know that when/if the founder IPOs with this company or the next one...believe me, they will always remember who showed up/ghosted during these "moments of truth" Last but not least, some of the best teams I've met are the ones who pivoted, and made sure they enjoyed working together "no matter what"! cc Hugging Face Mattermost PostHog Warmly, and the list is very long!!! So if you're pivoting, you're just one step closer to PMF, and congrats on taking this hard decision 👏 We also wrote about - The "angel code" with Jean de La Rochebrochard recently - Our pivot journey Lago with Raffi Sarkissian Will share the links in the comments, if you're interested!

New series! -- Highlighting the brilliant teams we're working with at Lago (genuinely impressed and honored, on a daily basis!). 🙌 Starting with Mistral AI - why are they so special? (Most people would start by stating their massive funding rounds (Techcrunch recently reported their $640M series B) or their notoriously famous large language models.) - We fundamentally prefer to mention their mission, which is to “externalize what [they] build for science to the developer community”, through, among other things, their commmitment to Open-Source! - They released open-weight models for everyone to customize and deploy where they want it. For instance Mistral Nemo is availabler under Apache 2.0, while Mistral Large 2 is available through both a free non-commercial license, and a commercial license. In other words 👉 Open-Source (AI) for the win! 🙌 - You could also use Le Chat, their conversational AI assistant (for free), or their AI agents, in Alpha Release. They are a very lean team at the moment (small team but massive impact!), and are hiring in Europe and in the US (careers page in the comments). Congrats on the success Mistral AI and thank you for your trust!

The #1 question we ALWAYS get about Generative AI deployments: "But what will using Generative AI cost our firm when we unleash it on hundreds of thousands of our internal documents?" 🤝 We've partnered with Anh-Tho Chuong from Lago ,who just raised $22 million to tackle this specific challenge head-on! 🚀 What we can now offer: * Real-time tracking of millions of transactions per second! * Instant usage data for all our Generative AI solutions! 💡 Result: Unprecedented transparency and control over your AI expenses in real time! Should we tempt you to re-locate from the US to Europe? You're always welcome in 🇳🇴 Anh-Tho Chuong Reach out to Newcode.ai if you want to learn more! #GenerativeAI #CostManagement #AIInnovation

NEW HIRE THURSDAY! 🔥 Lago is scaling fast, and we are starting a new series to introduce our new team members! Meet Heber Martinez, located in the South Bay Area! He joined as a Founding Account Executive here at Lago. Heber brings with him more than 10 years of experience in selling technical, and API-first products, and was an early hire at companies such as Looker (acquired by Google) and Clearbit (acquired by Hubspot).We are so excited to have Heber be a part of our team. 3 fun facts about Heber: 1. He is a Father to a 3-year old toddler 2. He grew up in Santa Cruz, and his perfect day consists of beach, sun, friends/family and food 3. He is a big dog person. He had 5 dogs throughout his life and currently owns a 2-year old GoldenDoodle named ‘Kenny’ Also his first days at Lago happened in Biarritz, in the South West of France (a world class surf town, just like Santa Cruz) as he joined just in time for our offsite there! We’re glad to have you Heber!