It has its challenges, but it also has its benefits, too. I’ve spent equal time in each office and you can definitely get a feel for small differences between the two. The SF office was only started within the past year, so it’s much smaller than the Paris office. (We’re growing all the time so I don’t know the exact numbers, but it’s something like 35 in Paris and 10 in SF.) All of our devs are in Paris, while many of our business and marketing people, including our CEO and CFO, are based in SF. We use Slack and video conferencing liberally. We also use other tools for collaboration like Asana, Google Docs, Github, etc. One of our core values is transparency, so making sure we share information across all offices is really important. One of the big challenges is what we do in SF after Paris has signed off for the night. Since we currently have all of our devs in Paris, we request at least one dev cycle through SF at all times. That way we can answer support questions quickly at all hours. We have corporate apartments in SF and Paris a walking distance from the offices, so there is a lot of travel between the two. This gives the team a great opportunity to get to know each other in person and share the cultures between the two. That’s the challenges, but the benefits are great, too: we can draw on the cultures and the talents of France and Europe as well as the United States. It makes for a very refreshing company culture.

We are growing super fast and, as a result, we invest a lot in recruiting. It depends a lot on the position, of course, but our recruitment is a mix of outbound contact, referrals from friends/colleagues, and people who are excited about Algolia and want to work with us. Most of our team right now is in Paris, with the rest in SF. By the end of the year, we’re hoping for half and half in each city. The recruitment process was among the best that I’ve experienced before. The team was very thorough (I spoke with 6 people before flying to Paris for a day on-site) and made sure that we were good fits for each other, while at the same time eschewing the “trivia” that you see in a lot of tech interviews. Throughout the whole process, I really felt like the team was being supportive and almost cheering for me to do well, even as it was clear that they had a high bar to clear. It was a good insight into how the team works on the day to day. I can say confidently that for the right people, Algolia will help with the visa process because I’m going through it right now. ;)

That would explain the cute little car ( http://www.google.com/selfdrivingcar/images/home-where.jpg ) that’s always parked outside of our office. ;) More seriously, we see Algolia as complementary to Google. Sometimes you want to search for general information across multiple sites, and Google really is still the best at that. And sometimes you want to search just through a specific site, and that’s where we think we’re creating a much better experience--both for website/app owners and for their users.