Prediction Not checkable as stated
Pomel: Paul Graham's 'Founder Mode' essay will do more harm than good
“My worry about the founder mode, and everything that gets pulled down to a very short piece like that, is that I think it's going to be used and abused in all sorts of different ways, because there's so much context that goes into every single word in there, l…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Pomel: Within five years, security will inevitably attach to observability
“We have a thesis that security, like, five years from now will be will be, or rather, let me rephrase it will be a no-brainer that you have to attach your security to your observability, because that is what gets deployed everywhere in your application, in you…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Pomel: Cybersecurity software will consolidate into large platforms
“We think that it's too complex. Like, it's impossible for the customers to actually understand how to piece that together, and to integrate everything into a consistent whole that really protects them, and so we think that security is going to go through the s…”
Insight
Pomel: Month-to-month contracts beat multi-year deals for validating new products
“So for new products and new companies, I would argue, month to month is great. Because your customers can try at any time which means you'll get the hard reality to hit you in the face and you can't ignore it, you know, which is a problem when you have, so you…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Pomel: AI will boost developer productivity by 10x to 100x
“And I think AI on top of that is going to give us maybe another order of magnitude or two in terms of, you know, what a human can produce functionally.”
Disclosure
Pomel: Datadog historically avoided 'AI' terminology, viewing it as 'bullshit words'
“For the longest time in the history of the company, we've been careful about using the words AI. We thought they were, you know, bullshit words mostly.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Pomel: AI solves only 2% to 5% of systems management cases
“Right now we'd be lucky to solve, you know, two percent, three percent, five percent of the cases with AI.”
Assertion Supported
Pomel: Datadog's Toto model beats other models on observability and weather benchmarks
“This model from day one was state of the art, like, it's it beats all the other models, of course, on the, on observability data, we have special benchmarks from that, but also for other things like weather data which was very surprising to us.”
Insight
Pomel: Product AI chatbots require handholding as users struggle with prompts
“It works great for some use cases, but you need to handhold the users a lot more. Like, users don't necessarily know exactly what to ask for and how to ask for it, or what to go next, you know, once they've asked a question.”
Opinion
Pomel: Many big tech AI assistants risk being too much like Clippy
“The risk right now is that a lot of the assistants we're seeing from the big companies are too close to Clippy.”
Insight
Pomel: Leading with AI in IT monitoring will inevitably disappoint
“It's very hard for what we do to lead with, you know, AI because you, you're bound to disappoint, because the generic case is very, very hard to solve”
Insight
Pomel: Customers say they want false positives but hate noisy software
“When you ask, when we first visited customers to figure out what they wanted from our product. When you ask them to pick between a false positive and a false negative they'll say, oh, give me the false positive, I'll decide if it's right, but I want to know. I…”
Opinion
Pomel: European tech ecosystem remains fragile without large-scale companies
“I think we still have to see them scale to large companies in, in France, in Europe more broadly. It hasn't happened yet. So the ecosystem is still young, and I would say still fragile from that perspective.”
Disclosure
Olivier Pomel: Y Combinator rejected Datadog over lack of initial product
“We applied to all sorts of incubators, we got to a Y Combinator interview, and then we didn't get into Y Combinator. I have an email from Paul Graham that says You know, a platform is only as good as its first product, and you don't have a first product, blah,…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Half of Datadog design partners drop off after pricing is introduced
“When the product is ready, when it's great, about half of the design partners just disappear.”
Disclosure
Datadog keeps struggling product teams small rather than killing products
“We did not kill products, but we, the way we do it is we start small, and we've waited a long time to scale up.”
Insight
Pomel: Negative customer feedback is the only feedback worth listening to
“The people who are used to scaling the products that work ignore the negative part, whereas it's the only part that's worth listening to.”
Insight
Pomel: AI shifts software value from writing code to understanding behavior
“Every time you add productivity, you add complexity, meaning that you have less and less of an understanding of what it is you're doing... So a lot of the value shifts from just creating that thing to understanding how it's going to behave, how it's changing o…”
Opinion
Pomel: OpenAI's latest models remain early stage for reasoning capabilities
“There's more we can do maybe on the reasoning side, though I would say even with the latest releases from OpenAI, it's still fairly early in terms of the quality of the models and what can be done there.”
Insight
Pomel: Anomaly detection systems must prioritize avoiding false positives over false negatives
“The most important, when you do things like that, is to not generate false positives. So 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 …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Pomel: West Coast VCs dismissed NYC-based infrastructure startups
“Whenever we pitched West Coast investors, like, it was sort of seen as a form of mental deficiency to be to be based in New York and, you know, doing it, doing infrastructure.”
Insight
Pomel: Effective technical content requires hiring engineers reporting to engineering
“In the end we ended up hiring full-time engineers who are also interested in journalism, and those people exist and have them basically focus on research and writing and we have a team basically that's built that way. It reports into engineering, it doesn't re…”
Insight
Pomel: Resisting acquisition offers is key to building a large company
“To grow to a large independent company, you, one of the hardest thing to do is to not sell on the way.”
Insight
Olivier Pomel: Startups must frame products within existing categories and spend
“You actually have to take your customers where they are and talk to them in terms that they understand in terms of their existing categories, their existing spend, existing solutions.”
Olivier Pomel