How Two French Engineers In New York Built The Company That Monitors The Entire Cloud

Name: How Two French Engineers In New York Built The Company That Monitors The Entire Cloud
Uploaded: 2026-07-24T20:00:38.000Z
Duration: 30 min 29 s
Channel: Y Combinator

Y CombinatorJuly 24, 202630m

Topics16

Introduction and YC Rejection Story0:00 Background and Path to Founding DataDog2:00 The Problem That Led to DataDog5:00 Founding Vision and Market Timing6:00 Fundraising Challenges7:30 Culture Philosophy9:00 Staying Connected to Product and Ground Truth10:30 Multi-Product Strategy14:00 Going Public and Market Volatility16:00 AI Revolution and Market Perception19:30 Current AI Bets21:30 AI Usage and Internal Development23:32 Organizational Impact of AI24:32 Long-term Co-founder Partnership26:01 European vs US Market Strategy27:01 Key Lessons on Speed29:01

In a Nutshell

Olivier Pomel and Alexis founded DataDog in 2010 after experiencing the Dev-Ops divide at their previous company, building a unified observability platform that rode the cloud and DevOps wave they initially underestimated. The company succeeded despite YC rejection, painful fundraising, and New York location stigma by staying deeply connected to customer feedback and product decisions rather than delegating to strategy. Now public with 20-25 products and heavy AI investment, they're betting on agents using their platform directly while fundamentally restructuring teams around AI productivity gains that let 2-3 people accomplish what previously took 6 over months.

AI-Generated Notes

These notes were generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.

Olivier Pomel and Alexis shared their experience of being rejected by Y Combinator. DataDog did not get into Y Combinator despite applying and getting an interview. Olivier still has the rejection email from Paul Graham. When Olivier agreed to do a session, he received an invite to a YC dinner in Paris, but was told he wasn't invited anymore because they weren't part of YC, resulting in being rejected twice.

Olivier graduated in 1999 and did an end-of-study internship at IBM Research in upstate New York, which at the time was a legitimate research place. Alexis, his co-founder who was a couple of years ahead in school, had already been to that internship and was still working at IBM. They met there and spent time at IBM together. Olivier thought he would stay in New York for 6 months but is still there 26-27 years later.

During the dotcom boom, startups were everywhere in New York. Olivier started working for startups and worked together with Alexis. After the dotcom bust, things got worse with September 11th. Olivier decided to stay for personal reasons and started working again with Alexis in an educational software startup. At the time, after the bust, nobody thought technology would be worth anything again. The company was successful, growing to around 800 people when they left. Olivier was building the dev team while Alexis was building the ops team.

At the educational software company, they lived through developers hating operations and operations hating developers, with people pointing fingers at each other. There were already observability companies out there, though it wasn't called observability - it was called monitoring. The existing monitoring was very job-specific and very reactive. For network monitoring, there would be a product for the ops team, but developers would never touch it. Developers were essentially blind to anything that happened in production.

They started DataDog in 2010 with the premise of bringing Dev and Ops together into one platform. What they didn't realize at the time was that this premise was completely central to the explosion of the cloud. They also completely underestimated the cloud explosion - they thought Amazon was interesting but when talking to real companies, they all said it was a toy they would never use. It turns out they all did.

The bet was DevOps together, and the first infrastructure they supported was cloud infrastructure because they talked to smaller, more modern companies that were built on the cloud. This became the tailwind of everything as the cloud market exploded and DevOps were brought together.

Their product was called infrastructure monitoring initially - the term observability didn't exist yet. It didn't look like infrastructure monitoring that came before. Initially they had called it something different, like a data platform for DevOps to collaborate, because they thought monitoring was a thing from the 90s that was boring and old. However, people love the idea of a new thing but have no idea what they should pay for it, whereas when you say it's infrastructure monitoring, everybody understands it's a real category they need.

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How Two French Engineers In New York Built The Company That Monitors The Entire Cloud

Introduction and YC Rejection Story00:00

Background and Path to Founding DataDog02:00

The Problem That Led to DataDog05:00

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