AI at Datadog: Monitoring machines in the age of LLMs | Olivier Pomel, CEO of Datadog
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How did Olivier Pomel and his co‑founder start Datadog in New York?
Hi, I'm Matt Turk. Welcome to the Mad Podcast. Today we have a very special episode with Olivier Pommel, the CEO of Datadog. Datadog is a monster of a company and also a great entrepreneurial story, the result of an unlikely journey, as it was founded by two French immigrants in 2010 in New York City, at a time when starting an enterprise software company in New York was still very much considered a strange idea, destined to fail. Today, Datadog has become one of the most exciting tech companies in public markets with very impressive stats. Almost 29,000 customers around the world, 2.39 billion in revenue, and a 39 billion market cap at the time of recording. In this conversation, we went deep with Olivier and talked about their product strategy.
We don't do it like Apple. We don't disappear in a basement for three years and then ship a fully formed product that takes the world by storm. Instead, from the earliest days, we work with design partners, we work with customers, and we try to ship something to them as quickly as possible.
And have they been able to add product out?
The product to the platform over the years. Scaling a successful product and starting a new product are very different emotions. People feel diff very differently about it. Why Dadadog was initially careful about machine learning and AI. But these systems tend to generate more false negatives than false positives. Basically, if the system is not sure, it's probably not going to tell you anything. Because if it tells you things are going wrong twice and you don't believe it, you're never going to look at it ever again.
And their current AI strategy as they double down on products like Watchdog, Bits AI, and the new foundation model, Toto. Olivier is one of the most thoughtful founders out there, so please enjoy this terrific conversation with him. Welcome, Olivier. Uh or should I say uh Bienvenue. Like I hope that people are ready for the sound of two French people speaking with with each other in English.
Yes.
People
have been warned. Um You've been you've been in New York for twenty five years, right? Or something? You arrived in the late nineties?
Yeah. Okay. Yeah.
Same. Some general thing. Very uh very comparable journeys, uh obviously other than the fact that you build a thirty nine billion dollar uh market cap company and uh I'm a VC with a podcast, but like other than that, like pretty uh pretty close. What
did you stay in New York? Oh first because it was fun. So I moved in uh in nineteen ninety nine, thought I would stay six months. Uh had an internship at IBM in research, which was a very interesting place at the time. And uh and then the uh it was a tail end of the dot com boom. Um so there was a lot going on at that time in New York. There was not much going on in France from a tech perspective. So I thought it was a great time to start to stay and and you know, join startups. You know, it was interesting. Of course, you know, then there was the dot com crash. Um Nine eleven, all of that stuff. So that was less fun. Uh but I was by that time I was very attached to city. I liked the dynamism, I like the uh cultural aspects of the city and it's I decided to stay.
And I stayed until you know, it was until two thousand ten that I started Datadog in New York.
And what what do you make of the uh current or recent explosion of the French tech ecosystem. Because like indeed like I I do remember saying the exact um story. Like I I I I came here and then there was basically not much to go back for in France in tech at the time.
Yeah, I think it's uh it's amazing. I think it Um When I left there was not much going on. When I started Datadog also in two thousand ten, there was also not much going on. Um it was difficult to start companies. Few people wanted to work in startups in France. It was difficult to get funding, you know, all of that stuff. Uh and I think now it's changed a lot. Like there are many companies that are getting started that are uh very dynamic, doing very well. I think we still have to see them scale to large companies in in France, in Europe more broadly.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
How did Olivier Pomel and his co‑founder start Datadog in New York?
0:00–6:52
2
Why does Datadog avoid the “Apple‑style” secret‑lab product launch?
6:52–14:59
3
What was Datadog’s first product and how did it evolve into a full observability platform?
14:59–22:58
4
How did customer‑driven design partners shape Datadog’s product roadmap?
22:58–29:45
5
What is Datadog’s AI strategy and how did generative AI change its approach?
29:45–38:10
6
How does the Watchdog AI service detect anomalies and reduce false positives?
38:10–47:04
7
What is the Toto foundation model and why is it built for time‑series forecasting?
47:04–54:28
8
What does Olivier think about “founder mode” and its impact on company culture?
54:28–1:01:29
Speakers
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