Today we’re talking to Sean Mullaney, CTO at Algolia. We discuss Sean’s entrepreneurial journey that brought him to leadership, why internet search is largely outdated, and how AI is transforming search and bringing us into the future.

All of this right here, right now, on the Modern CTO Podcast! 

For more about Algolia, check out their website: https://www.algolia.com/

Have feedback about the show? Let us know here

Produced by ProSeries Media.

About Sean Mullaney:

Sean Mullaney is Algolia Chief Technology Officer (CTO). He is responsible for scaling Algolia’s best-in-class engineering organizations, developing Algolia’s AI powered Search and Discovery technologies, and growing our API-first solutions globally.

He  joined Algolia from Stripe, where he most recently acted as the Chief Information Officer in Europe and led a global engineering organization overseeing the development and operations of 40+ local payment methods across Europe, Asia, and the Americas that processed hundreds of billions of dollars. 

Prior to his time at Stripe, Mullaney oversaw the development of AI powered discovery experiences, including search, recommendations, personalisation and browse as the VP of Engineering at Zalando, the largest eCommerce fashion retailer in Europe with nearly 50M active customers.  Mullaney also spent more than seven years at Google heading various innovation teams, including three years at the Google research labs in Silicon Valley.   

In addition to serving as CTO of Algolia, Mullaney serves as a Board Member for Manna Drone Delivery, a Venture Advisory Board Member for Elkstone Ventures, is a member of the Market Advisory Group at the European Central Bank advising on the design of the Digital Euro and an active startup advisor and a Sequoia Scout angel investor.   

Mullaney earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Cambridge.

About Algolia:

Algolia is the world’s only end-to-end AI search and discovery platform. The company delivers a combination of market-leading keyword and natural language processing via vector search – all uniquely packaged on a single API and supported by hyperscale indexing. The company’s vision, mission and purpose is ‘Powering Discovery. Algolia achieves its vision by enabling more than 17,000 customers including Under Armour, Stripe, Petsmart, Walgreens, Proctor & Gamble, Sony, NBC (Universal), British Telecom and Citibank, to build blazing fast and relevant search and discovery experiences for their in-app users and/or online visitors (using any web, mobile or voice device) – by surfacing the desired content instantly and at scale. Algolia powers 1.75 Trillion search requests a year or more than 30 Billion a week – that’s four times more than the combined volume of Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, Baidu and Yandex). Algolia is used by one in six online users and more than 5 million developers a month.

At the core of Algolia’s platform is hyper-scalability. During the 2022 Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend, Algolia handled more than 100,000 search interactions a second without a single failure. One customer, Gymshark, experienced 15,000 queries per second with zero interruption to service. According to a Forrester Consulting study, customers gain a 382% Return on Investment with less than a 6 month payback period when deploying the Algolia Search and Discovery platform.  Founded in 2012 in Paris, the company grew and subsequently moved its headquarters to San Francisco to expand its operations and penetrate the North American market.