You became a $40 billion company while only burning like $25 million in capital. If people are out there listening, was there something unique for how you were able to do that without brute forcing it like you're saying?
I don't think I'm very good at brute forcing in general. Maybe others can do it. I think in our case, one is we try to grow responsibly. Maybe we could have grown faster. There's another world where instead of being a $40 billion company, we're an $80 billion company because we spent more. It's possible, who knows? In our case though, we were very careful about building a company that was efficient. We were efficient in how we built the product, efficient in how we went to market, and tried not to overbuild the sales organization, for example. Some of that were lessons we learned through the dot-com boom and bust. When we saw companies spending lavishly on things that didn't matter, those things stayed with us. And maybe we see some of that again today. It's a little bit bubbly right now with AI.
Olivier, thanks for coming on to talk to us today. Hey, I want to go all the way back, but I want to do it in a nerdy way where I ask you about the first computer that was yours. Either the first computer you had access to or the first computer where this is my computer and I'm going to start doing stuff on it. I want make and model stuff. Do you remember that?
Yeah. So, I grew up in France and there used to be this category of computers that were bought by schools in France, and my mom was a teacher, so we got one at home. It was a Thomson TO770 with 70K of memory, and I remember it very distinctly. That was the first computer I had at home and I could actually use as much as I wanted. It was in my bedroom. But the real computer that made me completely fall in love with programming was a Commodore Amiga at the time.
Mentioning growing up in France, were you on Minitel? I'm assuming.
Of course we had a Minitel. For those of you who are listening who are not familiar with the Minitel, it was the internet before the internet in France. Basically every single household had a VT100 terminal that they could connect to a remote system, and it was used as a phone book replacement initially, and then all sorts of services and anything you can imagine would actually happen over the Minitel. It was in the 80s.
Right. As late as the late 90s, I was in France and there were still advertisements for mostly adult stuff, but Minitel advertisements for numbers to call up. Do you remember the transition in France from when the web comes up and how people in France were like, 'How is this different than Minitel?' Do you remember that transition at all?
Yeah, I think the web was always exciting in ways the Minitel was not because Minitel was text mode. Even the adult stuff on Minitel was text mode, which required quite a bit of imagination. Whereas the web from the very beginning was very graphical. So I think it took off independently of the Minitel at the time, even though everyone had a Minitel at home.
So you went to college for computer science, correct?
And you were involved in the late '90s in a lot of open-source stuff, like VLC player I think you're an author on. What turned you on to open source as a movement or something to participate in?
What turned me on to computing in general was graphics and programming graphics. I saw that with my Amiga. In Europe there was this thing called the demo scene. People mostly from Northern Europe would program incredible graphics on fairly low-powered computers at the time, and I was so impressed by that that I started programming and seeing what I could do to do 3D rendering and things like that. That's how I came to work on VLC, or VideoLAN as it was called at the time, which was a project at my university to stream video on a campus. I wrote the very first version of VLC, but I can't take any credit for all of the amazing success that followed. It was generations of students and programmers after me that open-sourced it and made it so good and so successful since then.
Well, what lesson did contributing to that, as you're saying it lives on beyond your initial contributions, is there anything from that that has stuck with you as your career has evolved?
I think the lesson is always that it's all about getting others to do the work and show up and build things that you can't build yourself. It's been true at the time, and it's even more true today at Datadog. We have more than 6,000 people contributing, and I don't write any code anymore.
So, what brought you to the States and your first work at startups?
I came to New York in 1999. What brought me to the States was an end-of-study co-op at IBM Research. There used to be a pretty sizable research center in upstate New York from IBM. At the time, it was by far the best research center in the US. I think now you could argue that goes to Meta or Google or AI labs like OpenAI. But at the time it was a really exciting place to be. I came for what I thought would be six months, and I'm still here more than 25 years later.
So you're coming to New York City at the tail end of the dot-com bubble sort of bursting.
Yes, exactly. I didn't stay that long at IBM. I stayed a year and a half, and then I enjoyed the tail end of the dot-com boom and then the full extent of the dot-com bust after that. I lived through it all.
Explain that to me. You come here and there's all this excitement happening in tech, and then all of a sudden the air goes out of the bubble. Do you remember thinking, 'Maybe I've made a mistake'? What was the feeling like in New York City around the bubble ending?
Well, I should say first that the feeling in New York City in 1999, 2000 was amazing. Things were booming. The cultural scene was exploding. The expression 'party like it's 1999' was exactly like that.
Did you happen to go to any of those Pseudo parties? I remember Pseudo.com, I don't know if you remember.
No, not Pseudo parties. But it was very exciting times. The startups I worked at were extremely cool. I learned a lot of lessons there about what to do and also what not to do when you build a company. After that, we did see the market crash, and like everything else, when it starts crashing it doesn't look like it. Initially people were questioning whether we were just slowing down a little bit or the economy needed time to breathe. You had all these rationalizations at the time, and then it became very clear that things were going down pretty fast.
Was it difficult? Did you see people leave tech as an industry because they thought it was a fad that had ended? Was it difficult to keep working on projects, or was there an undercurrent of true believers?
I was very much into startups. I worked for one startup that was amazing but didn't go so well when the economy started turning, and then I started working for a few other startups. Where it became quite dark was shortly after that, September 11th. A month after September 11th, there was a plane that crashed in Queens also. Those were dark times. Nobody thought technology would be worth anything ever again. The whole employment market contracted for people like me who were on a work visa. You had to find a new job pretty quickly if you wanted to stay in the US. All of that was pretty stressful. I did decide to stay because I found New York City as a city and as an ecosystem so exciting, and I foolishly at the time believed that startups would still be around and there would still be a lot to build in technology. I stayed, joined another startup in education of all spaces, and it ended up being a very successful one. After that, in 2010, I started Datadog.
That's what ended up becoming Amplify, the education startup?
Exactly. Yes. It was an education company selling to schools, initially K-12 and now K-12. It was very exciting in many ways, also very difficult in other ways. Building a successful business in public education is really difficult.
Can I ask why not go to Silicon Valley? Why stay in New York? You just said you love New York and the ecosystem, but can you go into detail on that? The obvious thing to do if you need a job is to go out to where the tech jobs are more prevalent. Why stay in New York? What's the difference for you?
First of all, I'm a bit of a city person. I grew up in the Paris suburbs, spent time in Paris as a student, then moved to New York after that. New York was a dream destination for me. I sort of need a city with all of its diversity to thrive, and New York has plenty of that. It was obvious when we started Datadog that it would be way easier to get the company funded in the Bay Area. But my co-founder and I, who is also French and also came to New York in the late 90s, we enjoyed living in the city quite a bit. Also, through that other company, Amplify Education, we had a great network of engineers and product people that would work with us and for us at Datadog. For that reason, that's the place we chose to get started. In the end, it probably made things more difficult at the very beginning but way easier after that, and I do not regret making that choice.
So let's talk about the founding story of Datadog. You met your co-founder at Amplify, correct?
Yeah, we actually met way before that.
You were friends first, right?
Yes, we actually worked at different startups together. Before that, we worked at IBM Research together, and before that, we met briefly in college in France. I was part of the team that ran the campus network, and my co-founder was code hacking into the campus network. He was basically court-martialed by the student body and sentenced to disconnection, and I carried out the sentence. I went to the basement and disconnected his internet.
You exiled him from the network.
Yes, exactly. That was the whole extent of our relationship in college. Then we found each other again at IBM Research, sharing the same office, and that's when we really became friends.
But then who ended up at Amplify first? Who got the job at Amplify and brought the other?
After IBM, he went to a startup first and then brought me in. Then I went to Amplify first and then brought him in. That was the deal. The full story is that I was at Amplify for about eight years, from 2001 or 2002 until 2010 when I left to start Datadog. During that period, the company grew from a handful of employees to maybe 500 or 600. My co-founder Alexis and I built all of the technical teams there. I used to run development, and Alexis used to run operations, technical operations. We sat on both sides of what was known then as the DevOps divide. We ended up in a situation where, even though we were very good friends and we hired everybody on our teams with a no-jerks policy, the development organization hated the operations organization and vice versa. We spent our whole time dealing with finger-pointing and people trying to escalate issues. The starting point for Datadog was, let's bring everybody on the same page, get everyone into the same platform, speak the same language, and solve problems together. It turned out that it was actually a critical part of cloud adoption, and we started Datadog right at the time when the cloud was starting to explode. That's what really made us successful.
You're saying you were on the side of the two sides of the DevOps divide. Your teams were sort of at cross purposes, rolling their eyes at each other, not liking each other, and putting out fires for one or the other. Would you say those scars were the inspiration for Datadog?
Exactly. That's what drove us to get started with Datadog. There are good reasons why those teams disagree. They are put in different situations, different roles, different goals, and you end up with these considerations of developers thinking that ops are too slow and ops thinking that developers don't know what they're doing and just throw stuff over the wall. Getting everybody to speak the same language and bringing them in one place went a long way toward getting rid of that. Today, we've done that for maybe 10 years. The emergence of DevOps between 2010 and 2020 helped, but then we found a lot of the same issues between development teams and security teams. There's a lack of empathy between development and security, people don't respect each other's qualifications, and the teams can work at cross purposes. So we also started bridging that gap by releasing a series of security products in Datadog to help bring everybody on the same page.
Was there anything you remember specifically, either a direct disagreement between you and Alexis or between your teams, that led to early product decisions around what Datadog should be?
The early decisions were always that the teams were looking at separate data. They had completely separate windows into the world. Our pitch for Datadog was, we'll bring everything under one roof. You don't have to use different tools, and you don't have to have two completely different perspectives. We can give you the same perspective.
A single source of truth. Right.
Exactly. I've read that I just want to touch on the name real quick. Where does the name Datadog come from? The story of the servers, if you want to recount that again for us.
