Letter #252: Olivier Pomel and Alexis Lê-Quôc (2019)
Datadog Cofounders (CEO and CTO) | S-1 Shareholder Letter
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Olivier Pomel is the Cofounder and CEO of Datadog. Prior to cofounding Datadog, Olivier was Vice President of Technology at Wireless Generation (acq. by News Corp). Before Wireless Generation, Olivier was a software engineer at Silicongo, Neomeo, and IBM Research. He is also an original author of the VLC media player.
Alexis Lê-Quôc is the Cofounder, President, and CTO of Datadog. Prior to cofounding Datadog, Alexis was the Director of Live Operations at Wireless Generation. Prior to joining Wireless Generation, Alexis spent several years as a software engineer at IBM Research, France Télécom S.A, Neomeo, and Orange.
Today’s letter is Datadog’s S-1 shareholder letter. In this letter, Olivier and Alexis share the genesis of Datadog, starting by highlighting their complementary skillset and lack of industry experience. They then share the two critical design choices they made when the company first started to be deployed everywhere and used by everyone, discuss building a single platform to fight complexity, their focus on solving valuable customer problems, and highlight the opportunity ahead of them.
I hope you enjoy this letter as much as I do! This was a fun letter not only because of Datadog’s success, but because it was an important milestone for Olivier and Alexis, who had initially met while undergraduates in France, then worked at the same companies (IBM Research, Neomeo, Wireless Generation), before finally starting Datadog together.
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Datadog Investors
Letter
Datadog was born from a problem we experienced first-hand through our careers in software engineering. In a previous life, we, Alexis and Olivier, stood on opposite sides of the dev and ops divide and witnessed how hard it was to get those two teams to understand their systems the same way and solve problems together. We started Datadog to fix this by breaking down silos across systems, teams and functions.
Deployed Everywhere, Used by everyone
Neither of us came from the ITOM industry; we didn’t aim at building a better mousetrap. We instead set out in 2010 to build a real-time data integration platform to turn chaos from disparate sources into digestible and actionable insights. Our first transactional use case was born from observing early users of our platform, and the immediate and acute pain they experienced when setting up cloud infrastructures. In 2012, we launched our Infrastructure Monitoring product, purpose-built to handle increasingly ephemeral cloud-native architectures. This made Datadog our customers’ first call after their public or private cloud provider and a critical part of their cloud journey. Our infrastructure-first approach also allowed us to be deployed on our customers’ entire cloud IT environment, and our focus on appeal and usability across functions gave our product broad usage across Dev, Ops and Business teams. These two design choices — to be deployed everywhere and used by everyone — along with the common data platform underlying our products, form the basis of our current and future platform expansion.
A single platform to fight complexity
Our mission to break down silos didn’t end at cloud infrastructure monitoring. From the very early days, we saw our customers integrate additional data sources into their Datadog accounts. We saw them bring data in from their logs, networks, end-users, applications and many other sources, and build their own tooling on top of our platform. This made the broader set of problems we could solve for them very clear, and in 2017 we launched our APM product, designed to be broadly deployed in very distributed, microservices architectures. In 2018, we were the first to combine the “three pillars of observability” with the introduction of our log management product. And in 2019 we announced user experience and network performance products to offer end-to-end monitoring and analytics, powered by a common data model that is extensible for new use cases.
The problem we solve for our customers is, at its core, the explosion of complexity faced by their teams as they become software companies, and as the cloud technology innovation cycles keep accelerating. Our long term vision for addressing this problem is the same as when we started: it doesn’t make sense for data and teams to live in silos when technical and business issues rarely stop at the boundaries between tools. So the most important characteristics of a platform to solve this new complexity are that it be broadly deployed and broadly used.
Even though our product lines today mimic the historical ITOM categories—split between infrastructure, applications, logs, etc.—there is no clear boundary between them in our platform, and there is no doubt in our minds that these splits will lose relevance over time. The future according to Datadog is a broad, unified category, bringing together all data relevant to Ops, Dev and Business users. Deployed Everywhere. Used by Everyone. To fight complexity.
Our focus on solving valuable customer problems
A lot of our strengths as a company were born out of necessity. Datadog was not an obvious winner in 2010: Our market had large incumbents. Neither of us had direct experience building or selling monitoring. And we were based in New York, which wasn’t where most of the other infrastructure players were. All of this made fundraising difficult. In retrospect, this forced us to focus on two really important things: First, on making sure we solved a real, valuable, hard problem for our customers. Second, on understanding our unit economics and constantly finding a path to providing more value to our customers.
Today, as a company, we are relentlessly seeking to understand the problems we need to solve for our customers and how we can bring value to them, however gnarly these problems might turn out to be. This focus on customer problems is our true north, and we pride ourselves on having built a highly functional environment, where employees are engaged for the long term and we can innovate at scale. Datadog-the-product can only ever be as good as Datadog-the-company.
A momentous opportunity
As exciting as our business may be today, we are convinced that we are barely scratching the surface. We would love you to join us as an investor on our journey to break down silos and fight complexity for our customers.
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Wrap-up
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