YouSaid · the spoken record

Olivier Pomel

lines on the record: 42
first: 2021-04-05
most recent: 2021-04-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“What I'm hoping for is first a lot of fun because otherwise you shouldn't do it. Second, a ton of building. I'm excited about building, building products, building companies, building processes for the companies, and then obviously for employees and investors alike like mountains of growth. Like we think we're so early, it's a very large market and a shift, really the shift to digital economy and to the cloud that's only happening once or twice a century. So we are really excited about that.”
2021-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on The Scaling Journey to a $26Bn Market Cap, The Challenges in Moving From Single To Multi-Product Company & How To Scale Efficiently into $M+ Enterprise Deals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I don't have any specific special mentor. I think the people that I appreciate the most are the ones who have really fine, great understanding of the business to give me a really pointed feedback based on what they see as opposed to no generalities again.”
2021-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on The Scaling Journey to a $26Bn Market Cap, The Challenges in Moving From Single To Multi-Product Company & How To Scale Efficiently into $M+ Enterprise Deals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We touched on that briefly before, but curiosity, empathy, I think these are the keys to happiness. If you have all of that, I think you will set. And by the way, not to be paternalistic, but when we look at employees, these are also fantastic qualities that mean people are going to grow a lot if they're curious. They show empathy with their customers and fellow datadogs and they have the drive and the grid to keep going.”
2021-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on The Scaling Journey to a $26Bn Market Cap, The Challenges in Moving From Single To Multi-Product Company & How To Scale Efficiently into $M+ Enterprise Deals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“While New York, you're competing with so many other things. Like, you're competing for talent, you're competing for space, at least you're used to, you know, for office space. You're competing for attention with a million other things. That's also what makes the city attractive. But that means you have to be out there and you have to pitch all the time.”
2021-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on The Scaling Journey to a $26Bn Market Cap, The Challenges in Moving From Single To Multi-Product Company & How To Scale Efficiently into $M+ Enterprise Deals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Try to take a deep breath. Actually, it's a great point. Like, you know, when you're really stressed out, taking a run is a really good thing that actually takes a lot of the stress out and it helps you think more clearly.”
2021-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on The Scaling Journey to a $26Bn Market Cap, The Challenges in Moving From Single To Multi-Product Company & How To Scale Efficiently into $M+ Enterprise Deals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't have a favorite book, but I would appreciate anything by Code Vongut, and that's because it's very whimsical, and I really enjoy whimsical writ”
2021-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on The Scaling Journey to a $26Bn Market Cap, The Challenges in Moving From Single To Multi-Product Company & How To Scale Efficiently into $M+ Enterprise Deals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The one thing it does change is you have to be even more disciplined about time management because when you get young children, your time is not yours anymore. So I had to have even more rigor with that. You can't just, if you don't manage your time well during the day, you can't just make up for it in the evening or on the weekend like you actually have to be very good at managing your time. Aside from that, I mean, look, it's a joy to have young children. So maybe I'm in a better mood now. I don't know. We have to ask the rest of people at Dedadog.”
2021-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on The Scaling Journey to a $26Bn Market Cap, The Challenges in Moving From Single To Multi-Product Company & How To Scale Efficiently into $M+ Enterprise Deals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but that's obviously a concern for everyone, right? I think you want to give your children the good things you've had when you are growing up. And I think curiosity and drive, these are good things you want them to have that and empathy and you don't want them to lose that because of their situation.”
2021-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on The Scaling Journey to a $26Bn Market Cap, The Challenges in Moving From Single To Multi-Product Company & How To Scale Efficiently into $M+ Enterprise Deals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I'll say is as a starter, money is not the big driver for me. And if in 2010 you're starting a monitoring company, that's not really a get rich quick kind of scheme. And that hasn't changed. That's still very much the case. One thing, though, that I found to be...”
2021-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on The Scaling Journey to a $26Bn Market Cap, The Challenges in Moving From Single To Multi-Product Company & How To Scale Efficiently into $M+ Enterprise Deals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, you can say whatever you want about it, it just happens. So you have to be at peace with it. I think that's why you see now some of the new mechanism for going public, you know, that maybe alleviate some of that. But I think the space is going a little bit crazy right now. So we'll wait a few years to see exactly what the new webgoing public is.”
2021-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on The Scaling Journey to a $26Bn Market Cap, The Challenges in Moving From Single To Multi-Product Company & How To Scale Efficiently into $M+ Enterprise Deals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The process might be changing quite a bit right now, actually. There's new ways to go public, and you don't have to do Rocho anymore and all that stuff. But the thing that I realized throughout the process was that it's not really about the day of the IPO. Actually, nobody cares about what happens the day of the IPO. I mean, it's a very moving moment. I would remember all my life, obviously, and it's great to see we had 100 of our earliest employees on stage at Nasdaq for that. It was very moving. But it doesn't really matter all that much in the end. What matters is the relationship you started building with all these public investors, and those relationships will play out in the years that follow, not on that day. And many of them actually, even the good long-term investors, like they buy into your IPO and they flip it right away because they've made 40% in one day and that's good enough for them and then they come back later. So you have to see it as the beginning of a long relationship with those investors.”
2021-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on The Scaling Journey to a $26Bn Market Cap, The Challenges in Moving From Single To Multi-Product Company & How To Scale Efficiently into $M+ Enterprise Deals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so you balance between the two by really focusing on the long term and making sure that you have the right investors on board. I mean, you can't control all the inverses you're going to have. You can't control what happens to your stock after a given quarter. And as a high-growth company, there's going to be a lot of volatility in your stock anyway. So my take on it is you just give up on that part because it's not within your control. You focus on the long term and everything else will follow. You know, there's this famous quote about the stock market. You know that in the short term the voting mechanism and in the long term they're weighing mechanism and you just have to remember that if you do your job if you grow the company long term the right way everything else will follow”
2021-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on The Scaling Journey to a $26Bn Market Cap, The Challenges in Moving From Single To Multi-Product Company & How To Scale Efficiently into $M+ Enterprise Deals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Simono in many ways, I would say, interestingly enough, I do spend a bit less time talking to investors now because it's more choreographed, so it's bundled over a specific period of time, and there's a whole team that's assisting me in doing that, as opposed to being somewhat always there. Other than that, I think there's a new constituency for a company, which is the public investors. Part of my job is to make sure we have the right of those public investors and that they understand our story very well and that they have the right expectations when it comes to us. That's the main difference. Everything is the same.”
2021-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on The Scaling Journey to a $26Bn Market Cap, The Challenges in Moving From Single To Multi-Product Company & How To Scale Efficiently into $M+ Enterprise Deals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, I mean, it's not a finish line, it's a starting line. Basically, when you tell the company public, you're committing to a long time of a certain amount of growth, and that's the expectation you set with your investors. So what tells you you should go public and it's the right time is that you have a good line of sight on that growth and that future and you are fully committed to show up and deliver it. So it's very much a starting line.”
2021-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on The Scaling Journey to a $26Bn Market Cap, The Challenges in Moving From Single To Multi-Product Company & How To Scale Efficiently into $M+ Enterprise Deals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's one of my pet peeves. The problem with business books and a lot of the startup self-help you find out there is it's really hard to understand what a plasma doesn't apply to you and you can read a very convincing case for everything and it's opposite. And so what I like to do is I actually look at the various business books and all that literature for ideas, but to understand what you should do and not do, the truth is usually in the details of your business. So it's not on the five-liners you get from somebody at the cocktail party. Instead, it's looking at dozens or hundreds of customer emails, what's happening in your CRM, what's happening in your support cases, what's happening in the guts of your business, basically. That gives you the ground truth that should inform what you should try and do next.”
2021-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on The Scaling Journey to a $26Bn Market Cap, The Challenges in Moving From Single To Multi-Product Company & How To Scale Efficiently into $M+ Enterprise Deals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The wrong person to say because we waited too long, like we were past 50 people when we had our first head of people, I think. We should have hired that person earlier. I would say earlier than that is my answer.”
2021-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on The Scaling Journey to a $26Bn Market Cap, The Challenges in Moving From Single To Multi-Product Company & How To Scale Efficiently into $M+ Enterprise Deals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not the case. When you think of sales, nobody is having magical thinking about sales anymore. People understand there's a capacity model on a ramp model for that. It's the same for building and scaling teams.”
2021-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on The Scaling Journey to a $26Bn Market Cap, The Challenges in Moving From Single To Multi-Product Company & How To Scale Efficiently into $M+ Enterprise Deals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, first, we've been a little bit more measured early on. We've never done more than double the size of the engineering team in one year, for example. We had to have a little bit of restraint on that, and that was precisely to break the team. Other choices we've made are to really invest in the infrastructure for building the teams, meaning invest in the recruiting team, invest in the people team. I know that's in the back end of that, invest in the processes, you know, in between the, I would say, the upside of each individual team, whether that's on the engineering side or on the sales side. And that's the recipe for growing an organization. You need to have another organization that's focused on scaling the organization. And you know, when you think of things like recruiting, for example, you really should think about it like you do of a sales team. Like it scales the same way. Like a recruiter is going to have a given productivity. And if you want to go to a team in a certain way, you need to have all of your recruiting capacity online ahead of time. Otherwise, it's not going to work. What I see sometimes from some companies is a little bit of magical thinking there. I'm thinking, hey, if we just decide we'll do it, it will just happen.”
2021-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on The Scaling Journey to a $26Bn Market Cap, The Challenges in Moving From Single To Multi-Product Company & How To Scale Efficiently into $M+ Enterprise Deals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so one thing that is important to us is that we understand what's load bearing in our business. So we don't throw money unless we understand what purpose it serves, which means we probably won't change everything at once or throw everything at the kitchen sink is a problem. But at the same time, we want to invest as much as we can without breaking the business. And what I mean by that is find the right balance between short-term and long-term. If you try to do things like quadrupling the size of the team in one year, chances are maybe it's going to be great a few years from now, but for the next year, two years, you're going to be completely out of commission. Like your team will not do anything except hiring and then passing the community go too fast and collapsed. So we don't want that. So we're trying to grow as fast as we can to still deliver for our customers in the short term while building as much as we can for the long term.”
2021-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on The Scaling Journey to a $26Bn Market Cap, The Challenges in Moving From Single To Multi-Product Company & How To Scale Efficiently into $M+ Enterprise Deals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's hard because on one hand, you have to be easier on yourself a little bit. And if it's not working, you should figure out what your options are. And while we're not a good fit to acquire these kinds of companies, there's many, many other avenues for these companies to exit. On the other hand, I've seen many examples of companies that got very successful after two, three, four, five years of difficult beginnings. So I think it goes back to how much of a conviction do you have about the problem you're solving? And can you actually build more conviction by talking to”
2021-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on The Scaling Journey to a $26Bn Market Cap, The Challenges in Moving From Single To Multi-Product Company & How To Scale Efficiently into $M+ Enterprise Deals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we think we can expand in a number of different directions. We have a pretty good idea of those at this point, and that goes back to the surface of contact we have. We typically plan to build everything ourselves, but we find that we can accelerate in some areas with M&A if we're being opportunistic and find the right fits. Now the question is, how do you find the right fits and what makes a company a fit for us? Overall, the most important thing is what happens after you actually sign an acquisition, so how you integrate or you get people to work together. For that, the key factor is culture, obviously, but also having a company that wants to build. There's many, many situations in M&A where a company tried to shoot for the moon didn't quite get there, they've been at it for a while, and the funding team is tired and they want someone to take it off their hands. That's not really what we're looking for. We're looking for companies that actually want to build and want to spend another three or four years rebuilding and taking the company to its full potential. And that's what we're looking for.”
2021-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on The Scaling Journey to a $26Bn Market Cap, The Challenges in Moving From Single To Multi-Product Company & How To Scale Efficiently into $M+ Enterprise Deals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the thing that's the hardest is that when you're successful with one product, you're used to being successful and you're used to being right and to having a good product that's fully fledged and everything else. When you start new products, you're going to be wrong. So it means, one, you have to know how to deal with it when you're wrong. And two, you have to actually want to be wrong. And it's hard. In a culture where you're successful, it's hard for people to put themselves in a situation where they're going to be wrong. They're going to take more risks and they're going to have to fail and then fix it. And we certainly had some products that came out fully formed out of the gate and they were fantastic and we had some products where it took us a while to actually get the basics right and then scale from there. So it's a hard shift from the teams.”
2021-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on The Scaling Journey to a $26Bn Market Cap, The Challenges in Moving From Single To Multi-Product Company & How To Scale Efficiently into $M+ Enterprise Deals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are real and two, that customers see us as being part of the solution. So that's a great data point for us to get started.”
2021-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on The Scaling Journey to a $26Bn Market Cap, The Challenges in Moving From Single To Multi-Product Company & How To Scale Efficiently into $M+ Enterprise Deals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you start with the customer always. There has to be a real problem from the customer. You have to be in the right spot to fix it. And then that problem has to be valuable. So all of that comes from understanding the customer and the problem really well and the solution typically comes next. And when I say going back to the customer, it's important not to invert the roles. Many companies have a backwards approach to it, which is the problem they solve is their own problem, which is, hey, I need my sales reps to sell you more stuff. That's not the customer's problem. Nobody wishes for that. Instead, you have to go back to your customer and see what other problems do you have. In our case, one thing that helps us is that our product is a fairly open-ended platform. Our customers already build their own specific use cases on it. So before we started with our API and product, we saw customers build Poor man's APM on Data Dog. Before we started launching our security products, we saw customers also sell their own security use cases with Datadog. So seeing customers solve the problems with us tells us that one product”
2021-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on The Scaling Journey to a $26Bn Market Cap, The Challenges in Moving From Single To Multi-Product Company & How To Scale Efficiently into $M+ Enterprise Deals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Product, log management product, and rapid succession. We have nine products today. I should say when we started seeing APM unlogs really take off, that's when we decided to take the company public because that's when we saw the proof that the company's ultimate vision was right and we gained confidence that we could see or deliver a lot of growth for many, many years basically with those new products.”
2021-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on The Scaling Journey to a $26Bn Market Cap, The Challenges in Moving From Single To Multi-Product Company & How To Scale Efficiently into $M+ Enterprise Deals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so you know when we started, we always saw the company as a platform that would integrate many sources of data and present it to many different teams. That was a core mission. That was why we built it. We didn't build it to be a monitoring product initially. That's what we wanted. To get success initially, we focused on monitoring. That was the first use case. It took off and we spent really the first five or six years scaling to keep up, adding functionality and making sure we scaled the team and the company around it. We were in a great position to expand though because we didn't realize it at the time. But that first product that in fascination monitoring is the perfect place to land because it gives you a very large surface of contact with your customer's environment. An infrastructure monitoring product needs to see all the infrastructure so it's deployed everywhere. Wall to wall to have surface of contact with everything and we build our platform to be used by every single engineer across all the teams and so we're also used by all these different people so used by everyone deployed everywhere at our motto and that's what gives us the room to expand a few years ago we added an ape”
2021-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on The Scaling Journey to a $26Bn Market Cap, The Challenges in Moving From Single To Multi-Product Company & How To Scale Efficiently into $M+ Enterprise Deals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, there's a couple aspects. First one is you actually have to show real interest and you have to engage with the details. Because otherwise people stop telling you things. Like if they realize you don't even know what they're talking about or you're just waiting for them to leave your office, you know, which you want to show that interest and curiosity and you want to engage with the details. And that's not something you do just when people come to you. You have to do it all the time so you know exactly what people talk about. That's number one. Number two is you have to listen first so that people feel that they can talk. And you should not try to pass judgment right away. I mean, of course it's tempting to pass judgment like anytime somebody tells you something. In the back of your mind, you're trying to figure out what this means. Do I agree? Do I not agree? You probably have a few things you want to retort. And it's important not to do that right away.”
2021-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on The Scaling Journey to a $26Bn Market Cap, The Challenges in Moving From Single To Multi-Product Company & How To Scale Efficiently into $M+ Enterprise Deals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, I mean, I do lose my shit. And by the way, when you run a starter on a high growth company, there's many highs and many lows. There's always something that goes wrong at any point in time. I think the one thing you want in those cases is the word uses equanimity. You know, you want to make sure that you level things. You make sure people don't too scared when there's a big issue. And everybody can focus on solving it and what comes next. And by the way, as a CEO in general, you have to be the equalizer in chief. You know, so when things look great, you have to temper people's enthusiasm a little bit and say, hey, this looks great, but all these other things are still broken. We need to fix them. Whereas when things are pretty dire, you need to remind people that these two shall pass and our goal is to improve it and fix it, and it will get better next week.”
2021-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on The Scaling Journey to a $26Bn Market Cap, The Challenges in Moving From Single To Multi-Product Company & How To Scale Efficiently into $M+ Enterprise Deals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The most important for us is the desire and the ability to learn. We don't think we've got, so to speak, our shit figured out in general. We think we still have to learn pretty much everything. And that goes back to the early days of humility and trying to make sure we solve the right problem. And we want that from monitors too. So we're not hiring somebody typically to tell us, hey, this is how I've done it and I've scaled to 1 billion.”
2021-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on The Scaling Journey to a $26Bn Market Cap, The Challenges in Moving From Single To Multi-Product Company & How To Scale Efficiently into $M+ Enterprise Deals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, there are some things we needed to do completely differently, right? For example, we used to run a lot of physical events with customers like trade shows and things like that, and we were very good at it. So it was a very good source of business for us. Almost overnight, we had to pivot that to being completely remote. Also works, but in very, very different ways. You're going to talk to 10,000 people that are basically a captive audience to 200,000, but they'll only be there for a few minutes and have a little bit of their attention and they will be from all over the world. So the running of the events is very, very different. So that's one example. Paradoxically, it hasn't made talking to our customers harder. It's actually a little bit easier. And that's because it's easier to schedule time with customers when everybody's just at home all the time.”
2021-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on The Scaling Journey to a $26Bn Market Cap, The Challenges in Moving From Single To Multi-Product Company & How To Scale Efficiently into $M+ Enterprise Deals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the family and whatnot. And so we invested a lot in the people themselves. We actually gave grants to our employees to help them solve their own problems. We also decided to donate some of these grants because some people were feeling bad. They're feeling okay themselves, but they're really feeling really depressed and bad about their communities and the state of the world around them. So we also empowered them to donate and help their communities. And that's been a really good experience because we saw everybody's situation is different, right? Some people need the money, some others don't. But we saw in the end our employees decided to give about a million dollars to their communities. And that was a fairly heartwarming for us.”
2021-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on The Scaling Journey to a $26Bn Market Cap, The Challenges in Moving From Single To Multi-Product Company & How To Scale Efficiently into $M+ Enterprise Deals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, first of all, the thing that surprised me the most was that humans are really adaptable. We went from something that was combertly unthinkable in the matter of a couple of days or weeks, and then it very quickly became a new normal. And that makes me really optimistic into what comes next, you know, because right now we don't quite know what the world's going to look like next year, but I'm sure that we might also go from someplace to a place that's unthinkable in a matter of weeks or months as we go back to some new normal again. So I'm very optimistic about that. The thing I learned about running the company was that in times like this, you have to take care of the humans first and then everything else follows. In general, as a company, we like to treat people as adults, and in normal times people can take care of themselves and you need to make sure they're productive and motivated, but people can take care of their own lives. With the pandemic, many, many, many of the people on the teams were in some form of distress. It could be mental distress, it could be economical distress in some cases. In some cases, it's hard for them to focus because they live in small apartments and have Vumex and keys.”
2021-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on The Scaling Journey to a $26Bn Market Cap, The Challenges in Moving From Single To Multi-Product Company & How To Scale Efficiently into $M+ Enterprise Deals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's a great thing if you're being pulled into it. That's great. It means there's a need and somebody wants it. It's much better than we're trying to push into the enterprise. Maybe you're hoping there's something, but you're not completely sure. So in general, I think it's a good thing when that happens. Beyond that, the most important choices you make as a product surgeon and a sales organization is where you spend your time. So if you're going to spend more and more time with enterprise customers and give them more and more of a voice in your product, you need to make sure you counterbalance that with voices from the SMB and the low end as well. Going back to Makomart initially on keeping things simple, otherwise you end up with a product that can be used by large enterprises, but none of your initial customers can still use it anymore.”
2021-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on The Scaling Journey to a $26Bn Market Cap, The Challenges in Moving From Single To Multi-Product Company & How To Scale Efficiently into $M+ Enterprise Deals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, the various parts of it came at various times. We have a slightly differentiated go-to-market depending on. We have different teams that sell to you depending on the kind of customer you are. If you're a smaller company, larger company, it all grew, I would say, organically. Like when we started, most of our customers were in SMB. And the reason for that was that eight years ago, the only companies that were at scale in the cloud were new companies and smaller companies. The larger prices were not there yet. But then over time, the large enterprises started coming in and we started selling to them initially from the same sales teams and with the same sales motions. And then as more and more enterprises came in, we decided to specialize the sales team and have different enterprise level teams that understand better who to deal with the requirements of large enterprises. While the developers behave in a similar way, the companies tend to buy in slightly different ways, like they would say more participant to a decision in large enterprise, more boxes to check, you know, things like that.”
2021-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on The Scaling Journey to a $26Bn Market Cap, The Challenges in Moving From Single To Multi-Product Company & How To Scale Efficiently into $M+ Enterprise Deals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, to have these very large customer base to sell to individuals and small companies as well as big ones, we needed something that was very low friction and that could be adopted bottom up. And when you think of go-to-market, go-to-market always goes hand-to-hand with product. You can't just say, hey, my product is this, but I'm going to sell to that other completely different way. That doesn't work. The two actually have a very intricate relationship. So we built the go-to market to be very low friction, all bottom-up. We found that there's actually a real continuum from individuals to SMB to enterprise. And I think that sort of makes sense because developers tend to be the same in small companies and in large companies. And they use the same tools. Used to be these were completely different universes, but today when you go by our infrastructure from Amazon, for example, it's the same menu for everyone. If you're a two person startup or a 1450, like you end up using the same components. And so the landscape is very much the same and developers think the same way and are going to end up adopting the same kinds of products on top of their”
2021-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on The Scaling Journey to a $26Bn Market Cap, The Challenges in Moving From Single To Multi-Product Company & How To Scale Efficiently into $M+ Enterprise Deals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, so when you think about building a simple product, many people think of UX and who is it going to look. Maybe I should hire some people who've done UX for great consumer products and then they're going to do the same thing for me and my product will be simple. It's not as simple actually. If it was as easy as hired a designer and asked them to make things simple, everybody would have simple products. I think to a large extent the simplicity of the product is driven by the user base you have for those products. So in our case, we made a choice to have a very broad user base and customer base. You know, we serve with that dog anybody from on the low end, individuals and students to on the high end, the largest companies in the world and everything in between pretty much. What this means is that whenever we pull towards complexity by our largest customers, we have the counterpool of all these small customers and individuals that still have to be able to interact with our product on their own as mere mortals and pull us towards simplicity. So this choice to have a very broad customer base is then what actually informs”
2021-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on The Scaling Journey to a $26Bn Market Cap, The Challenges in Moving From Single To Multi-Product Company & How To Scale Efficiently into $M+ Enterprise Deals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They've solved the problem and they have the right solution. And usually it's not true at that stage. And I think it's a problem. Like, I think it's a recipe for having a troublesome first few years and a really hurtful realization at the end of that you're in the wrong spot. Can I ask you, I've just had, I just met with the founder, obviously I'm in VC by day. I just met with the founder that's just getting around at a 300 million post. Their pre-revenue and they've got five design partners. For me, I'm just like, oh my God, I am so worried. Do you share my perspective when you see things like that? Yes, totally, totally. And I think, again, this is because it's showing all the signs of success before there is actual success. Like you only have actual success when you product solve the right problem for the customers and they're using it and they're buying it. Before that, you have ideas that maybe you'll get there, but they're still a number of things that you need to do and you need to get right. And I think humility in the face of the problem and humility in the face of the customer, especially for B2B businesses, is absolutely critical. So this doubt, these constraints initially, I think.”
2021-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on The Scaling Journey to a $26Bn Market Cap, The Challenges in Moving From Single To Multi-Product Company & How To Scale Efficiently into $M+ Enterprise Deals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Extent, you get hearing that to enter a big market, you need a wedge, you need something really sharp and really specific, and then you expand from there. Turns out for some classes of problems such as infrastructure management, which is what we do, the wedge doesn't work. Like there's a large amount of stuff you need to do from day one if you want your product to be useful. And our initial product was positioned as a very broad platform to bring multiple teams together actually didn't have that wedge aspect and disconcerted some of the investors. I would say, you know, in terms of doing things differently, I wouldn't change anything. I mean, failure to raise initially was what made us all those constraints are how we build the culture of the company, how we found certainty about what it is we're building and for whom we owe our success to that in a large amount. By comparison, I would say today I see many new companies that are extremely hot from the seed stage or Series A and that better than I, but VCs trample over each other to invest in the companies. And as a result, it's tempting for the funding teams of those companies to believe that they're already successful.”
2021-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on The Scaling Journey to a $26Bn Market Cap, The Challenges in Moving From Single To Multi-Product Company & How To Scale Efficiently into $M+ Enterprise Deals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Done differently with hindsight. Yeah, so when you go back to that time, when you looked at the market we're entering, which was broadly speaking, monitoring, it was seen as being a very crowded market, like there were tons of old companies doing it, a number of new companies doing it. My co-founder and I didn't have any direct experience in the market, who were on the customer user side of it, but we hadn't worked in the industry before. And so it was not very clear to the investment community that we were going to be the people to solve that, basically. They thought it's really hard to actually break out from the pack and we don't think these are the people who are going to do that. I think what they missed is that precisely because we were not part of the existing industry, we are not just building a better mousetrap, but we were having a very different approach that ended up being significantly better and led us to where we are today. Like the focus not on, hey, let's build a better monitoring product, but on rather on, hey, let's bring Dev and Alps together was completely new. The other thing that I think a lot of the investors missed at the time was that at least back then, I think still today was some”
2021-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on The Scaling Journey to a $26Bn Market Cap, The Challenges in Moving From Single To Multi-Product Company & How To Scale Efficiently into $M+ Enterprise Deals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What you always doubt you're serving those moments, I think that's one of the reasons why it's good to have a co founder because your laws are not completely aligned, so there's always someone to pull the other up in those times. But, you know, the way we dealt with that doubt was to go back to first principle, go back to the customer, go back to making sure there was a real problem and we're latching onto the right thing. I explained to Sinlamplify there and he told me about the challenges raising in the series A”
2021-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on The Scaling Journey to a $26Bn Market Cap, The Challenges in Moving From Single To Multi-Product Company & How To Scale Efficiently into $M+ Enterprise Deals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so the idea is that it was actually very hard to raise money for Datadog initially back in 2010 when we started it. And it was difficult, right? You know, when you start a company, first you're super excited because you say, I'm going to solve this great new problem, I'm going to be my own boss, going to be fantastic. And then three months in, you know, we had no customer, we had no money, we had no product, nobody thought it was going to work. It was also the winter in New York, so it was cold and dark. And so we were in the middle of that valley of darkness, so to speak. And what this forced us to do was really to focus on the problem we were trying to solve, like focus on making sure it was a real problem. And I think that ended up being the roots of our customer centricity at Detadog. So everything we became in great part was because of that. We had to focus on the basics. The other thing it forced us to focus on was having a business that was lean and efficient because we didn't have the money for it initially. And so if you play that back and see where it led us today, like we have a business that is fairly profitable for businesses, it's growing very fast. And we can trade.”
2021-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on The Scaling Journey to a $26Bn Market Cap, The Challenges in Moving From Single To Multi-Product Company & How To Scale Efficiently into $M+ Enterprise Deals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My co-founder used to work together in different companies. In the last company we worked at, he ran the ops team and I run the dev team. And those two teams were actually fighting all the time. And so our starting point was there's got to be a better way. Like we've got to find a way to get DevOnovs to talk to each other, work together, see the world the same way. And that was a starting point for Data Dog.”
2021-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on The Scaling Journey to a $26Bn Market Cap, The Challenges in Moving From Single To Multi-Product Company & How To Scale Efficiently into $M+ Enterprise Deals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source