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 18 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: 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…”
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…”
Pomel: Scaling founders must sample raw customer feedback over executive summaries
“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 s…”
Pomel: Major Datadog Investor Dumped All Shares When COVID Lockdowns Began
“Our lockup expired the day of the COVID lockdowns. So I don't know if you remember, there was a big market crash that day. It was also a lockup expiring. One of our biggest investors got scared and he dumped everything that day. So I think, I don't know, we're…”
Pomel: Datadog counts the top 10 AI companies globally as customers
“We have the top 10 AI companies in the world as customers.”
Pomel: Framing products in established categories makes enterprise purchasing easier
“People love the idea of a new thing, but they have no idea what they should pay for it, and their boss has no idea what they should pay for it, whereas you say, oh, this is financial monitoring and then everybody, everybody and their boss understands, yes, act…”
Pomel: Companies must build ahead of AI demand and will fail more often
“With AI in particular, things are changing so fast that you just can't wait to see the demand materialize from the customer base. So you need to get ahead of it, which I think us and many others I think are going to get wrong more often, and we need to be at e…”
Pomel: Public Stock Crashes Harm Tech Companies via RSUs, Not Operations
“Does it impact the company in the short term? No, but it creates a comp issue because people are paid in RSUs. So the main things you have to worry about is, okay, so what does it change to comp and how can we manage that?”
Pomel: VCs Spend Far More Time Understanding Companies Than Public Investors
“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 nam…”
Pomel: Software engineering is inverting from mostly writing code to mostly automating
“The point here is it's an inversion. Like, you used to mostly write, sometimes automate, and now you're going to mostly automate
Sometimes, right.”
Pomel: Startups expanding to the US must relocate at least one founder
“I think the, you know, typically if there are two founders one of the founders moves to the U.S., and you cannot start in the U.S. Without, without having a founder there and you should absolutely go to the U.S. But I don't think you need to move the whole com…”
Pomel: Datadog Interviewed for Y Combinator and Was Rejected by Paul Graham
“Yes, we applied. We got an interview. I've got I've got a rejection email from Paul Graham still, you know.”
Pomel: Legacy monitoring was siloed for Ops, leaving developers blind to production
“It was not called observability. It was called monitoring. And it was very job specific and very reactive. So, you know, for network monitoring, you'd have a product for, you know you'd have something that the ops team would use, but the developers would never…”