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Spotlight on Engineering Team Building: Lessons learned from Algolia

Cracking the Code

Recruiting and retaining top talent is even more challenging for software engineers. To get an insight into how successful start-ups approach team building, we spoke to Sylvain Utard, employee number 1 and VP of Engineering at Algolia, an Accel portfolio company. That is a very powerful statement.

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Lessons Learned: The hacker's lament

Startup Lessons Learned

Its common to find a hacker at the heart of almost any successful technology company. And we cant hire new engineers any faster, because you cant be interviewing and debugging and fixing all at the same time! Even with the highest standards imaginable, theres no way to hire just genius hackers. Just change it.

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Lessons Learned: What does a startup CTO actually do?

Startup Lessons Learned

So I initially gravitated to the CTO title, and not VP of Engineering. Instead, they find options and can communicate them to everyone in the company. Find the 80/20 - this was my favorite part of the job. I mean, have you seen other people? They might do anything ! But along the way, something strange happened.

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