Pomel: Scaling founders must sample raw customer feedback over executive summaries
Olivier Pomel · How Two French Engineers In New York Built The Company That Monitors The Entire Cloud · Y Combinator · Jul 24, 2026 · at 12:19
Datadog co-founder and CEO Olivier Pomel explains how leadership can stay grounded in reality as the company scales.
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“Another thing I think I encourage everyone to do as soon as you start scaling a little bit in your company is to keep in touch with what's actually happening on the ground. And by that I mean the actual support requests, the actual sales transcripts from the sales conversations, the actual customer feedback, the actual Employee comments that you get in the you know, employee surveys and things like that. Of course, you can't read everything. I mean, except for, I still read all of the employee survey comments, but for the rest, I don't read everything. You sample. But when you do that you get a good sense for what the fabric of the universe actually is in the company, and you don't just get the beautiful summaries that, you know, find their way up to you know, where, you know, everything's beautiful.”
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