How They Hire: Olivier Pomel, Co-founder & CEO of Datadog
Every week, we highlight a top founder's hiring playbook.
At RTP Global’s 2023 Founder Summit in New York, Datadog CEO and co-founder Olivier Pomel spoke about Datadog’s journey from a scrappy startup to one of cloud infrastructure’s most respected companies. Pomel also explained how Datadog’s intentional, product-led, and frugal mindset directly shaped its approach to hiring and talent development.
Talent was harder to find here [New York] than in the Bay Area, but retention in New York was better. Engineers stay longer versus in the Bay Area, where churn every 18 months is normal. It's hard to build a strong culture with that... We didn't hire our first actual salesperson until we had a modest amount of ARR. And even then, we built the team bottom-up: individual reps first, then structure later.
Olivier Pomel, Co-founder & CEO of Datadog
Initially focusing on hiring engineers in New York rather than the Bay Area, he discovered an advantage in higher talent retention, which he believes is crucial for building a strong, coherent team.
Pomel champions a bottom-up approach to building teams, especially in sales, hiring individual contributors first before adding layers of management.
That's why he's searching for talent who genuinely understand the product and its value at every level of the organization, rather than talent who simply come with big titles.