Pomel: Inquiring on random support messages forces managers to stop managing up
Olivier Pomel · How Two French Engineers In New York Built The Company That Monitors The Entire Cloud · Y Combinator · Jul 24, 2026 · at 13:26
Datadog co-founder and CEO Olivier Pomel discusses management dynamics and how leadership behavior shapes organizational culture.
0:00 / 0:36exact quote · 36.8s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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 things that happen. The first one is the person who's receiving that is wondering, oh, why, why, why is he looking at that? And then after that, the positive effect is that the whole management chain, instead of looking up and trying to figure out who they're going to manage up, they start looking down and starting to figure out, okay, so what's actually happening, I better know because if I get asked, I need to understand, you know.”
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: 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…”
Pomel: European startups must enter the US market immediately after PMF
“On the other hand, I think it's absolutely critical
to go after the US market as soon as you can.
So as soon as you have a product with some form of market fit go after the US market.”
Pomel: Founders should always move faster on hiring and firing
“The one thing, the one lesson I keep learning all the time, so, is that you should always move faster, especially when it comes to hiring and firing.”
Pomel: Established companies initially dismissed Amazon's cloud as an unusable toy
“The premise for the company, which was let's bring Dev and Ops together into one platform was actually completely central to the explosion of the cloud. And we also completely underestimated the explosion of the cloud with, oh, that's interesting. There's this…”