Descriptions:
Olivier Pomel, co-founder and CEO of Datadog, speaks at a Y Combinator event about building one of the most successful cloud monitoring companies — and the AI-driven transformation now reshaping how its engineering teams work. Pomel and co-founder Alexy Lau met at École Centrale in Paris before landing at IBM Research in New York, where they eventually spent decades before founding Datadog. The company was famously rejected by YC early on, a fact Pomel recounts with evident relish.
The conversation ranges across Datadog’s evolution into a 20–25 product platform, touching on how the company identifies new products by observing customer workflows and usage patterns. Pomel shares his management philosophy around staying connected to ground-level signals — reading employee surveys, sampling support tickets, and replying directly to internal messages to keep the management chain focused downward rather than upward.
A striking thread throughout is AI’s accelerating impact on software development. Pomel describes his co-founder announcing to the entire engineering team that within two quarters they would likely stop writing code entirely — a shift already visible in individual engineers rebuilding systems in days that previously would have required teams of six working for months. For practitioners tracking how large-scale engineering organizations are actually absorbing AI tooling, this first-hand account from a major infrastructure vendor offers a grounded, non-hype perspective.
📺 Source: Y Combinator · Published July 24, 2026
🏷️ Format: Interview
