Olivier Pomel is the co-founder and CEO of Datadog. He reflects on early organizational hiring mistakes during Datadog's scaling process.
0:00 / 0:06exact quote · 6.8s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading:
filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard
(the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Olivier Pomel
Insight
Pomel: Infrastructure management software cannot rely on a narrow product wedge
“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.”
Olivier PomelApr 5, 2021▶ 6:1720VC: 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
AssertionNot checkable as stated
Pomel: Long-term investors often flip IPO shares immediately on 40% gains
“Many of them actually, even the long, the good long-term investors, like, they buy into your IPO, and they flip it right away because they've made, you know, 40% in one day, and that's good enough for them, and then they'll come back later.”
Olivier PomelApr 5, 2021▶ 29:2820VC: 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
Insight
Pomel: Enterprise product feedback must be counterbalanced by SMB input
“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.”
Olivier PomelApr 5, 2021▶ 12:0120VC: 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
Insight
Pomel: Quadrupling team size in one year paralyzes company operations
“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 ex…”
Olivier PomelApr 5, 2021▶ 23:5520VC: 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
Insight
Pomel: Co-founders balance each other during emotional low points
“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.”
Olivier PomelApr 5, 2021▶ 4:4820VC: 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
Insight
Pomel: Product simplicity is driven by customer base, not design
“To a large extent, the simplicity of the products is driven by the user base you have for those products.”
Olivier PomelApr 5, 2021▶ 8:3120VC: 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
Made with StarZero
Turn any episode into a week of clips.
This entire site, over 1,200 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable,
runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the
moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.
We use essential cookies to make the site work. With your permission we
also use analytics cookies (Google Analytics and Mixpanel) to understand
usage and improve StarZero. See our Cookie Policy.