Pomel: VCs Spend Far More Time Understanding Companies Than Public Investors
Olivier Pomel · How Two French Engineers In New York Built The Company That Monitors The Entire Cloud · Y Combinator · Jul 24, 2026 · at 20:07
Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel contrasts managing private venture capital investors with managing public market equity investors.
0:00 / 0:19exact quote · 19.3s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“The VCs you have as a private company, they spend so much more time on your company There's so much more concentrated than the public investors. Like public investors have, they're looking at, you know, 20, 30 different names. They come in and out of these names and a couple of times a year, as opposed to a VC that's going to be in like seven, eight companies and, you know, stick around for five to 10 years.”
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
Pomel: Culture flows from leadership actions, not written value lists
“What we said instead is culture flows from the top. So we exemplify the culture, we hire, we promote, we hire based on the culture, and today, that still works.”
Pomel: Inquiring on random support messages forces managers to stop managing up
“Well, what I do is I just pick up those random emails or, you know, Slack or whatever, and I just reply with a question, you know. I was like, I don't understand what's going on. And then, you know, and then, you know, the, what happens is that, there's two th…”
Pomel: A manager's job is knowing their domain, not pleasing their boss
“Your job is not to understand what I want, As a boss, your job is to understand what's happening within your span of control, and understand it very, very precisely. What's, what's working and not working?”
Pomel: Solo engineers using AI do six months of work in days
“We saw like literally, I mean, absolutely excellent developers, like not beginners, but people rebuild whole systems in a couple of days alone that were absolutely amazing. Things that would have been possible, but, you know, done by a team of six, over six mo…”