The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 21 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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.”
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.”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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.”
Pomel: In 2013, only startups operated at scale in cloud
“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.”
Datadog rejects executive playbooks in favor of leaders willing to learn
“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 m…”
Pomel: A CEO's role is being 'equalizer in chief' during highs and lows
“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. Wh…”
Pomel: Leaders must constantly engage in details or employees stop communicating
“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 k…”
Infrastructure monitoring is an ideal landing wedge due to wall-to-wall deployment
“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…”
Pomel: Datadog decided to IPO only after APM and logs succeeded
“When we started seeing APM and logs 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…”
Pomel: Multi-product scaling requires a culture willing to fail on new products
“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 goi…”
Pomel: Datadog never more than doubled engineering headcount in a year
“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.”
Pomel: Tech companies must scale recruiting capacity like sales teams
“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 ne…”
Pomel: Datadog waited too long by hiring Head of People past 50 headcount
“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.”
Pomel: Startup ground truth comes from internal operational data, not general advice
“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 of hundreds of customer emails, what's happening in your CRM, what's happening in your support cas…”
Pomel: NYC startups must pitch constantly due to intense competition
“Well, in 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 make…”
Pomel: Datadog struggled to raise capital when founded in 2010
“It was actually very hard to raise money for Datadog initially, back in 2010 when we started it”
Datadog employees donated $1 million to communities from company pandemic grants
“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 thei…”
Pomel: Customer DIY hacks signal valid opportunities for new products
“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 t…”