The Exchanges

Q In terms of product, you know, another area where you've done so well is moving from kind of single to multi-product company. How have you found that transition first?

A 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. Like, 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, you know, scaling to keep up, you know, adding functionality and making sure we scaled the team and the company around it. We were in a great position to expand, though, you know, because we didn't realize it at the time, but that first product, that infrastructure monitoring, is the perfect place to land, you know, 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. So we have surface of contact with everything, and we built 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, that's our motto, and that's what gives us the room to expand. A few years ago, we added an APM product, log management product in rapid succession. We have nine products today. I should say the, when we started …

AI assessment note: “we were in a great position to expand, though... A few years ago, we added an APM”

Q Can I ask, in terms of, like, the decision-making framework for new products, how do you decide what to do versus what not to do? There's always a platter of options. What's the decision-making framework for yes versus no on priorities?

A 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 the problem has to be valuable. So all of that comes from understanding the customer and the problem really well, and the solution, you know, typically comes next. And when I say going back to the customer, it's important not to invert the rules. Many companies have a backwards approach to it, you know, 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 seeing 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. You know, so before we started with our APM product, we saw customers build poor man's APM on Datadog. Before we started launching our security products, we saw customers also solve their own security use cases with Datadog. So seeing customers solve the problems with us tells us that one, the problems 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.

AI assessment note: “Well, you start with the customer always. There has to be a real problem.”

Q Ollie, I think just spending time with you, I'm becoming a karma influence. So it's a good influence on me. Final question before we move into the quickfire. Obviously with IPOs and with liquidity events, Personal wealth changes. One that I think about intensely for myself is, like, you know, relationship to money. How do you think about your relationship to money, and has it changed over time?

A What I'll say is, as a starter, like, 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. Like, that's still very much the case. One thing, though, that I found to be extremely satisfying is to see a number of Datadog employees, like early employees and important employees who became very successful financially throughout the growth of the company and the IPO, and that's super gratifying. I mean, give you an example of one employee who's an immigrant whose parents lived in a seventh floor workup, something like that, and you know, at IPO time, he bought an apartment for their parents in the building with an elevator. So that's the kind of things that make me super proud, and today, I feel that my mission is actually to make sure that the newer employees, people who have joined us last year and who join us now, find the same level of success as we keep basically delivering on the same growth.

AI assessment note: “money is not the big driver for me... and that hasn't changed.”

Q Got you. I love that. But before we probably dive in, you said to me before, and I love this, you said short-term failure as a source of long-term success. Can I ask, what did you mean by this, and how do you think it, like, actually shapes who you are today?

A Yeah, so the story there 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, it's 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, 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're 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 Datadog. 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 is growing very fast. And we can trace that back to those days.

AI assessment note: “what this forced us to do was really to focus on the problem”

Q In terms of, like, the leaders that run these different orgs, from sales to marketing to customer success, you name it, another one that Dav asked was, what do you look for specifically when you're hiring true, like, exact leaders into your business?

A The most important for us is the desire and the ability to learn. We don't think we've got So to speak, or should figure it 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 all leaders too. So we're not hiring somebody typically to tell us, hey, this is how I've done it, and I've scaled to one billion at Company X before, and let's do the same thing again. We're looking for people who can say, hey, let's go and look at what's actually happening on the field, talk to the customer, look at the details of the processes and what's working and not working, and let's Design the next version of it, and solve it, and measure it, and see if it's going to work better, and improve it over time. And it's not for everyone. Some people have a playbook, and like to stick to it. Some others are really motivated, and really interested in their hiring, and are also willing to be proven wrong from time to time. I think that's what we're looking for.

AI assessment note: “The most important for us is the desire and the ability to learn.”

Q Can I ask, in terms of, like, the decision-making framework for new products, how do you decide what to do versus what not to do? There's always a platter of options. What's the decision-making framework for yes versus no on priorities?

A 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 the problem has to be valuable. So all of that comes from understanding the customer and the problem really well, and the solution, you know, typically comes next. And when I say going back to the customer, it's important not to invert the rules. Many companies have a backwards approach to it, you know, 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 seeing 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. You know, so before we started with our APM product, we saw customers build poor man's APM on Datadog. Before we started launching our security products, we saw customers also solve their own security use cases with Datadog. So seeing customers solve the problems with us tells us that one, the problems 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.

AI assessment note: “seeing customers solve the problems with us tells us that one, the problems are real”

Q That's really incredible to see, and I didn't actually know that on the grant program. Can I ask, you know, in terms of, like, how adaptable humans are, I'm with you and we adapted brilliantly well, there are also areas where it was just hard. When you look across the org, were there certain functions, processes, which broke in terms of the transition to COVID?

A I mean, there's some things we need 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, you know, they'll only be there for a few minutes, and you'll have a little bit of their attention, and they will be from all over the world. So the running of the events, you know, it's 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.

AI assessment note: “For example, we used to run a lot of physical events with customers”

Q Can I ask, Oli, you seem so calm, composed, unflappable. Do you ever lose your shit, and how do you deal with the shit hit the fan moments when things are really tough?

A Yeah, well, I mean, I do lose my shit, and By the way, when you run a startup and 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 I use is equanimity. You know, you want to make sure that you level things, you know, you make sure people aren't too scared, you know, 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, you know, 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.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, well, I mean, I do lose my shit”

Q How have you learned about scaling teams as fast as you have done, as efficiently as you have done? As you said, you haven't scaled headcount ridiculously fast here, but it's been pretty fast. What does it take to scale a team as fast as you have done and maintain it in such a fashion?

A So first, we've been a little bit more measured early on, like 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 so we didn't break the team. Other choices we've made are to really invest Invest in the infrastructure for building the teams, meaning invest in the recruiting team, invest in the people team, you 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. Like, 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. It's not the case. When you think of sales, nobody is having magical thinking about sales anymore. People u…

AI assessment note: “invest in the infrastructure for building the teams, meaning invest in the recruiting team”

Q I'm very close to Jason Lemkin at Sastra, and he says, if there's one thing that will make me not invest, it's a founding team that's burnt out, that's just super tired. How do you think about and advise founders who are maybe in that situation and are maybe feeling the burn after three years and not that much momentum and trajectory? How do you advise them?

A Well, it's hard because on one hand, you know, 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, you know, while we're not a good fit to acquire these kinds of companies, there's many, many other avenues for these companies to exit, right? On the other hand, I've seen many examples of companies that got very successful after two, three, four, five years of, you know, 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 more customers and things like that? I think that's what gives you the basis for deciding, you know, am I crazy for pursuing, or is this good grit or bad grit, basically?

AI assessment note: “how much of a conviction do you have about the problem you're solving”

Q The thing that I always think about and feel for public market CEOs on is like, how do you balance between hitting next quarter's numbers as Wall Street expects, and also having long-term thinking, strategic planning, and investing for the long term, whilst also hitting the short term? How do you balance between the two?

A 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 investors 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, there are voting mechanism, and in the long term, there are 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.

AI assessment note: “you balance between the two by really focusing on the long term”

Q Totally. Also amazing for retention and prevention of churn, so that's always a nice thing to see. Can I ask, final thing on like the multi-product, is there anything that's really freaking hard about going from single product to multi-product? What do you think people don't see, don't understand misconceptions?

A 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 suddenly, you know, we 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, you know, for the teams.

AI assessment note: “I think the thing that's the hardest is that when you're successful with one product”

Q I suppose the team at Meritech in particular, who said when it comes to the go-to-market, they were so impressed, specifically with how you went from self-serve to smashing, in their words, smashing multi-million dollar enterprise deals. So how do you think the go-to-market's evolved? And I guess when you look at the success, what have you done that made you the success that you have become in the go-to-market?

A So to have this very large customer base, like to sell to individuals and small companies as well as big ones, when you did something that was very low friction and that could be adopted And when you think of go-to-market, go-to-market always goes hand-to-hand with product. Like, you can't just say, hey, my product is this, but I'm going to sell it that other completely different way. That doesn't work. Like, 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, you know, 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 infrastructure from Amazon, for example, like, it's the same menu for everyone. If you're a two-person startup or, you know, a Fortune-Fifty, 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 infrastructure.

AI assessment note: “we built the go-to-market to be very low friction, all bottom-up.”

Q we're serving individual contributors, but we're getting pulled into enterprise. Should we go? And it's often a challenging one because you have to build out an extreme amount of functionality, security to cater for that enterprise customer. How do you advise founders generally, and I know it's a tough one to be general, but who are being pulled in and are questioning whether it's right to scale up to enterprise?

A 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, you know. 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 organization 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 my comment initially on keeping things simple. Now, otherwise, you end up with a product that can be used by the largest enterprises, but none of your initial customers can still use it anymore.

AI assessment note: “If you're being pulled into it, that's great. It means there's a need”

Q That's really incredible to see, and I didn't actually know that on the grant program. Can I ask, you know, in terms of, like, how adaptable humans are, I'm with you and we adapted brilliantly well, there are also areas where it was just hard. When you look across the org, were there certain functions, processes, which broke in terms of the transition to COVID?

A I mean, there's some things we need 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, you know, they'll only be there for a few minutes, and you'll have a little bit of their attention, and they will be from all over the world. So the running of the events, you know, it's 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.

AI assessment note: “For example, we used to run a lot of physical events with customers”

Q Can I ask, Oli, you seem so calm, composed, unflappable. Do you ever lose your shit, and how do you deal with the shit hit the fan moments when things are really tough?

A Yeah, well, I mean, I do lose my shit, and By the way, when you run a startup and 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 I use is equanimity. You know, you want to make sure that you level things, you know, you make sure people aren't too scared, you know, 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, you know, 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.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, well, I mean, I do lose my shit, and”

Q Totally. Also amazing for retention and prevention of churn, so that's always a nice thing to see. Can I ask, final thing on like the multi-product, is there anything that's really freaking hard about going from single product to multi-product? What do you think people don't see, don't understand misconceptions?

A 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 suddenly, you know, we 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, you know, for the teams.

AI assessment note: “I think the thing that's the hardest is that when you're successful with one product”

Q I'm very close to Jason Lemkin at Sastra, and he says, if there's one thing that will make me not invest, it's a founding team that's burnt out, that's just super tired. How do you think about and advise founders who are maybe in that situation and are maybe feeling the burn after three years and not that much momentum and trajectory? How do you advise them?

A Well, it's hard because on one hand, you know, 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, you know, while we're not a good fit to acquire these kinds of companies, there's many, many other avenues for these companies to exit, right? On the other hand, I've seen many examples of companies that got very successful after two, three, four, five years of, you know, 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 more customers and things like that? I think that's what gives you the basis for deciding, you know, am I crazy for pursuing, or is this good grit or bad grit, basically?

AI assessment note: “I think it goes back to how much of a conviction do you have”

Q How have you learned about scaling teams as fast as you have done, as efficiently as you have done? As you said, you haven't scaled headcount ridiculously fast here, but it's been pretty fast. What does it take to scale a team as fast as you have done and maintain it in such a fashion?

A So first, we've been a little bit more measured early on, like 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 so we didn't break the team. Other choices we've made are to really invest Invest in the infrastructure for building the teams, meaning invest in the recruiting team, invest in the people team, you 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. Like, 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. It's not the case. When you think of sales, nobody is having magical thinking about sales anymore. People u…

AI assessment note: “Invest in the infrastructure for building the teams, meaning invest in the recruiting team”

Q The thing that I always think about and feel for public market CEOs on is like, how do you balance between hitting next quarter's numbers as Wall Street expects, and also having long-term thinking, strategic planning, and investing for the long term, whilst also hitting the short term? How do you balance between the two?

A 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 investors 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, there are voting mechanism, and in the long term, there are 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.

AI assessment note: “you balance between the two by really focusing on the long term”

Q Got you. I love that. But before we probably dive in, you said to me before, and I love this, you said short-term failure as a source of long-term success. Can I ask, what did you mean by this, and how do you think it, like, actually shapes who you are today?

A Yeah, so the story there 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, it's 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, 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're 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 Datadog. 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 is growing very fast. And we can trace that back to those days.

AI assessment note: “what this forced us to do was really to focus on the problem”

Q Can I ask, how do you structure your go-to-market teams, do you think? And, like, what do you think you've done well in terms of the structuring of go-to-markets?

A Well, I mean, we, the various parts of it came at various times. Like, you know, we have a slightly differentiated go-to-market depending on, like, we have different teams that sell to you depending on the kind of customer you are, you know, 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 enterprises were not there yet. But then, you know, 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, I would say more participant to a decision in large enterprise, more boxes to check, you know, things like that.

AI assessment note: “we have different teams that sell to you depending on the kind of customer you are”

Q In terms of, like, the leaders that run these different orgs, from sales to marketing to customer success, you name it, another one that Dav asked was, what do you look for specifically when you're hiring true, like, exact leaders into your business?

A The most important for us is the desire and the ability to learn. We don't think we've got So to speak, or should figure it 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 all leaders too. So we're not hiring somebody typically to tell us, hey, this is how I've done it, and I've scaled to one billion at Company X before, and let's do the same thing again. We're looking for people who can say, hey, let's go and look at what's actually happening on the field, talk to the customer, look at the details of the processes and what's working and not working, and let's Design the next version of it, and solve it, and measure it, and see if it's going to work better, and improve it over time. And it's not for everyone. Some people have a playbook, and like to stick to it. Some others are really motivated, and really interested in their hiring, and are also willing to be proven wrong from time to time. I think that's what we're looking for.

AI assessment note: “The most important for us is the desire and the ability to learn.”

Q efficiency is always helpful in all respects. And we mentioned earlier where you've been incredibly capital efficient. How do you think about the balance between growth versus profitability? Because with the capital efficiency and the profitability that you have, you could pour a ton in of marketing, and you could pour a ton into CS and be much less capital efficient. How do you think about that growth versus profitability?

A Yeah. So one thing that is important to us is that we understand our, what's load bearing in our business, you know, so we don't throw money unless we understand what purpose it serves, which means we probably won't change everything at once or, you know, throw everything at the kitchen sink as 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 part of the company will 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.

AI assessment note: “we want to invest as much as we can without breaking the business.”

Q In terms of product, you know, another area where you've done so well is moving from kind of single to multi-product company. How have you found that transition first?

A 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. Like, 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, you know, scaling to keep up, you know, adding functionality and making sure we scaled the team and the company around it. We were in a great position to expand, though, you know, because we didn't realize it at the time, but that first product, that infrastructure monitoring, is the perfect place to land, you know, 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. So we have surface of contact with everything, and we built 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, that's our motto, and that's what gives us the room to expand. A few years ago, we added an APM product, log management product in rapid succession. We have nine products today. I should say the, when we started …

AI assessment note: “we added an APM product, log management product in rapid succession. We have nine products”

Q we're serving individual contributors, but we're getting pulled into enterprise. Should we go? And it's often a challenging one because you have to build out an extreme amount of functionality, security to cater for that enterprise customer. How do you advise founders generally, and I know it's a tough one to be general, but who are being pulled in and are questioning whether it's right to scale up to enterprise?

A 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, you know. 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 organization 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 my comment initially on keeping things simple. Now, otherwise, you end up with a product that can be used by the largest enterprises, but none of your initial customers can still use it anymore.

AI assessment note: “you need to make sure you counterbalance that with voices from the SMB”

Q Yeah, I spoke to Sunil on Amplify, though, and he told me about the challenges raising the Series A. Can I ask, and he asks the same, what did investors not see? And I guess, what would you have done differently with hindsight?

A Yeah, so when you go back to that time, when you looked at the market we're entering, which was, you know, 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. We were on the customer and 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 back and we don't think there's other people who are going to do that. I think what they missed is that precisely because we are 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 rather on, hey, let's bring dev and ops 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 to some extent, you kept 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, s…

AI assessment note: “I think what they missed is that precisely because we are not part”

Q Yeah, I spoke to Sunil on Amplify, though, and he told me about the challenges raising the Series A. Can I ask, and he asks the same, what did investors not see? And I guess, what would you have done differently with hindsight?

A Yeah, so when you go back to that time, when you looked at the market we're entering, which was, you know, 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. We were on the customer and 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 back and we don't think there's other people who are going to do that. I think what they missed is that precisely because we are 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 rather on, hey, let's bring dev and ops 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 to some extent, you kept 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, s…

AI assessment note: “I think what they missed is that precisely because we are not part of”

Q Ollie, I think just spending time with you, I'm becoming a karma influence. So it's a good influence on me. Final question before we move into the quickfire. Obviously with IPOs and with liquidity events, Personal wealth changes. One that I think about intensely for myself is, like, you know, relationship to money. How do you think about your relationship to money, and has it changed over time?

A What I'll say is, as a starter, like, 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. Like, that's still very much the case. One thing, though, that I found to be extremely satisfying is to see a number of Datadog employees, like early employees and important employees who became very successful financially throughout the growth of the company and the IPO, and that's super gratifying. I mean, give you an example of one employee who's an immigrant whose parents lived in a seventh floor workup, something like that, and you know, at IPO time, he bought an apartment for their parents in the building with an elevator. So that's the kind of things that make me super proud, and today, I feel that my mission is actually to make sure that the newer employees, people who have joined us last year and who join us now, find the same level of success as we keep basically delivering on the same growth.

AI assessment note: “money is not the big driver for me”

Q efficiency is always helpful in all respects. And we mentioned earlier where you've been incredibly capital efficient. How do you think about the balance between growth versus profitability? Because with the capital efficiency and the profitability that you have, you could pour a ton in of marketing, and you could pour a ton into CS and be much less capital efficient. How do you think about that growth versus profitability?

A Yeah. So one thing that is important to us is that we understand our, what's load bearing in our business, you know, so we don't throw money unless we understand what purpose it serves, which means we probably won't change everything at once or, you know, throw everything at the kitchen sink as 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 part of the company will 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.

AI assessment note: “we want to invest as much as we can without breaking the business”