Raffi Sarkissian

Raffi Sarkissian is co-founder and chief product officer of Lago, a Paris, France, company that makes an open-source billing platform for usage-based and hybrid pricing. He started it with Anh-Tho Chuong, his former colleague at Qonto.

An Armenian Family of Entrepreneurs

Sarkissian grew up in an Armenian family of entrepreneurs and shopkeepers, where work, high standards and success were not negotiable, according to the Itinéraires podcast (translated from French). He played youth football for Olympique Lyonnais, in Lyon, France, which taught him the discipline of a team, though the path did not lead to a professional career. The podcast describes an aversion to failure, formed in his youth, that became a driver for him.

Starting PayWithYourPhone

After a fairly conventional education, he discovered technology almost by chance. His first venture, PayWithYourPhone, was intense and formative but full of complications. He went on to other projects and learned to code along the way, before joining Qonto in Paris, France, where he held key roles in the company's growth for several years.

Growth Engineering at Qonto

At Qonto, the business bank, Sarkissian led the Data Intelligence and Growth Engineering teams, Chuong writes on Lago's blog. The team also carried painful memories of building and maintaining Qonto's internal billing system as the bank added plans and pay-as-you-go charges. After the two left, Chuong's proposal rekindled his interest in starting a company, and they founded Lago together.

A Blog Post That Changed Lago

Lago got into Y Combinator's Summer 2021 batch without a product. It first built tools for marketing and growth teams, then moved away from that space when it struggled to find enough teams like the one they had built at Qonto. In a bid to reach an audience, Sarkissian wrote a post for Hacker News about the problems billing causes developers, TechCrunch reported. "When you start building your internal billing system, it's hard to think of all the complexity that will pop up down the road, unless you've experienced it before," he wrote in Why billing systems are a nightmare for engineers. The response showed the founders that billing was even more broken, and Lago pivoted to open-source billing.

Lago officially launched in March 2024 with $22 million raised across two rounds, and Mistral.ai, Together.ai and Juni were among its early customers. The episode of Itinéraires about him carries a line from the conversation as its title: "An entrepreneur needs to love his product, his customers" (translated from French).