Lago

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!

BIGGEST misconception about open-source? "Just build in the "open" and engineers will naturally come to you! Nice "hack!" " Our view is you need to have much more solid reasons to build in open-source... Our conviction at Lago stemmed from our experience: - Billing looks like a solved problem: there's a lot of vendors out there in the market... - ...however... a lot of companies continue building billing themselves... -... and engineers *HATE* it... Engineers take turn to stop maintaining billing systems, and would even leave companies when staffed on that type of projects. We lived it first hand at our previous company, a $5B Fintech, where we did build and maintain billing It's "cool" to be an AI engineer, not a "billing engineer", right? So, how can we solve this underlooked (but critical) challenge? A little bit more than 2 years ago, we mapped the reasons why home-grown billing was still "a thing"... and how open-source solved for it. This has not changed since we started, and it's only the beginning! 💪

Back from Austin! We missed out on the 🇫🇷 Olympics but it was all worth it! Beyond the incredible weather ☀️ and fantastic Fintech Devcon conference flawlessly hosted by the Moov team (honored to have such a team as customers Lago), the most impactful slides we presented were around "how to get paid" Especially in the AI era, metering usage and issuing an invoice is not trivial (Lago solves for that) but the *MAIN* pain is: - How do you deal with users who consume but then leave - Sign up with a different email and do it all over again ---> Prepaid credits right? But don't they add potential friction in the user experience? What are the other options? One of the many options we're building at Lago (for leading AI companies like Mistral, Groq, Together, for instance) is the concept of "threshold billing": i.e., not waiting for the end of a billing cycle (month/year) to collect revenue, if the user spends more than $X These logics can be cumbersome to implement, and they come out of the box at Lago, ping Raffi Sarkissian, Mathieu Déjean or anyone within the team for a personalized demo!

Community love is our fuel Lago! It gives us so much energy to read these messages ☀️ 2 years ago we were told: "Billing isn't an engineering problem" "Open-source makes no sense" We had a strong conviction though and kept building anyway and Lago is now the largest and fastest community for billing engineers - 1.5k+ engineers in our Slack - 6K+ stars on Github With no marketing, sales, or 'business' team. We've recently started hiring for these roles though, to double down!

Can't say how excited I am for the Groq team, and their mission: "Open-Source AI" is definitely the path forward 🙌!!! Also we're both humbled and proud to serve Groq at Lago: beyond their bold vision, we've met incredibly smart (and super kind!) team members, so this huge series D definitely doesn't come up as a surprise! 👏👏👏 Sunny Madra Jordan Wu Shivranjani (Surbhi) Vaidya (CPA) Cole McCracken William Nusser, CSCP Open-source FTW!