213. Datadog Founder Olivier Pomel

Olivier Pomel’s journey into tech began with early exposure to computers in France, starting with a Thomson T07T and later falling in love with programming on his Commodore Amiga. His interest in graphics and graphical programming led him to contribute to open source projects like VLC. Growing up in France and transitioning from Menetel to the web, he emphasized the difference in excitement and graphical nature of the early internet versus text-based services. His educational background in France was complemented by his move to the US for research at IBM, where he spent over 25 years, witnessing the evolution from the dot-com era to the rise of startups.

Olivier co-founded DataDog after a long career in startups and research, inspired by the dev-ops divide he experienced at Amplify. The idea was to unify disparate monitoring and logging tools into one platform, addressing the friction between development and operation teams. The company was founded in a modest co-working space in DUMBO during the aftermath of the 2010 financial crisis. Early on, raising capital was challenging due to limited understanding of the product and the ecosystem in New York compared to the Bay Area. Despite these hurdles, early angels and Funds in New York supported DataDog’s vision.

DataDog’s success is attributed to responsible growth and operational efficiency. Olivier emphasizes the importance of solving real customer problems, especially targeting developers and operations who control budgets and decision-making. The company maintained a disciplined approach to spending and focused on product-market fit, using metrics like revenue retention and quick customer feedback loops. The strategy included grounding new products in existing categories to ease adoption and understanding. Their frugality and focus on retention helped them grow to a $40 billion valuation while staying capital efficient.

DataDog’s product strategy involved simplifying complexity for customers by providing a single source of truth for data across various teams. They aimed to address the dev-ops divide by unifying data sources and later extended this approach to security teams. Olivier shared that their focus was on making the system more autonomous with AI, automating issues and reducing night-time firefighting. The importance of real-time feedback, customer retention, and the disciplined launching of products grounded in familiar categories was reinforced as key to their market strategy.

DataDog considered multiple acquisition offers but decided to go public in 2019, believing the company had enough growth potential for a 5-10X increase. The founders valued maintaining independence over being acquired, as they still enjoyed their work and believed in the company’s long-term vision. Post-IPO, Olivier mentions that habits around discipline and focus remained largely unchanged, though the quarterly reporting rhythm added some structural demands. Their commitment to staying independent was driven by confidence in the company’s trajectory and market position.

Olivier highlighted that the frontier for DataDog involves automating infrastructure and problem resolution through AI, reducing manual firefighting. They see a significant transformation in programming with AI—models that self-generate code or operate agents—changing developer roles and downstream systems. Observability remains critical in this evolving landscape, with a focus on making systems more intelligent and autonomous, minimizing human intervention, and improving reliability.

Olivier emphasized New York’s unique advantages: its density of diverse, real-world customers; easier access to talent; and the development of a resilient ecosystem with large infrastructure companies and startups alike. Compared to Silicon Valley, NYC offers closer proximity to actual business problems, which accelerates product development and customer feedback. For European startups, he advises that once they find product-market fit, they should heavily invest in the US market—particularly New York—to grow faster, as the US offers a larger, more dynamic customer base and more funding opportunities.