EP 108: Olivier Pomel (CEO, Datadog) Shares Every Lesson From Scaling to $40B

**Logan Bartlett** (0:05)
Welcome to The Logan Bartlett Show. On this episode, what you're gonna hear is a conversation I have with co-founder and CEO of Datadog, Olivier Pomel. Datadog is a $40 billion business doing over $2.5 billion in revenue, and they got there while only burning $25 million in capital. Olivier and I talk about that incredible journey, including the early days of Datadog and their decision to build a platform architecture that enabled modular applications to be built on top of their existing infrastructure.
We also talk about a number of the different product-related considerations they make in building additional modules, how they think about scaling them in the early days, what the success metrics look like, how they empower the team, among a number of other considerations. We also talk about how Olivier learned to acquiesce as a self-described control freak and give autonomy to his different leaders, including his belief that you should hire executives that are more peers than they are subordinates. A really fun conversation that you'll hear with Olivier here now.
Olivier, thanks for doing this.

**Olivier Pomel** (1:07)
Thank you for having me.

**Logan Bartlett** (1:08)
So maybe for people that don't know, can you describe what Datadog does?

**Olivier Pomel** (1:11)
Oh, yes. So we do observability and security for companies that are into cloud or in the mix of cloud and on-premise. So we sell to engineering teams and we sell to companies that are big and small. So anything from one-person shops or students are all the way up to the largest companies in the world.
And started a company in 2010 in New York, went public in 2019 So it's been almost five years now.

**Logan Bartlett** (1:38)
And you all struggled to raise money in the early days. I'm curious, how did that inform the business that Datadog ultimately became?

**Olivier Pomel** (1:47)
Yeah, so that was kind of horrible in the beginning. So it was very hard to raise a seed round and it was a seed round in 2010, 2011, which was a very far cry from what you'd call even a pre-seed round today.
The... So in the end, I think, in looking back, anything that is a constraint or a hardship actually is good for the future. If you survive it, you're more likely to make it later.
On our end, I think two things that we got from that was one, a real focus on solving a real problem. So we never felt like we were winning earlier on. So we had to get constant reinforcement. They were doing the right thing. So we focused on that and till today, it's a core tenet of the company, make sure we solve real problems. And the second one is we're always super scared that we would not actually manage to raise more money. So we wanted to build a business from day one that was very efficient and that would be profitable in the end. And again, to this day, and every single step on the way, even when it was a lot easier for us to raise capital, we've been very disciplined, very efficient. So I think those two things, I really trace them back to the early days and the hardships we had.

**Logan Bartlett** (2:58)
Do you think that's a universal truth that anything that is a struggle ultimately proves to be a benefit if you get through it?

**Olivier Pomel** (3:08)
Well, I think so, but on the other hand, you know, there's heavy survivorship bias.
But yes, look, whenever you get asked if you could look back and change anything, would you change anything? Probably not. All the mistakes we've made actually got us there, even before starting Datadog. So before starting Datadog, I was at an educational software company for eight years.
I think like four or five years into it, I really wanted to start my own company. I could not at the time because I was waiting for a green card and I had to step out for a few years. I found that upsetting. I really wanted to do other things. At the same time, all that time I spent there getting my team, growing with that company, making mistakes, learning from my mistakes, actually led me to be a better founder and a better manager. And in the end, I think we probably were more successful because of it. So again, everything that came out of cost actually paid back later.

**Logan Bartlett** (4:06)
It's interesting. It's hard to know the counterfactual, but I assume starting in 2007, I don't know if you actually had the same insight at that point in time, but the market would have been, you probably would have been too early to what ultimately became Datadog or would have been a different business in some way, shape or form.