Olivier Pomel

Olivier Pomel is a skilled French software engineer and visionary technology entrepreneur who previously worked alongside his future co-founder at Wireless Generation, where they famously experienced the extreme, everyday friction that existed between siloed software development and IT operations teams. This painful firsthand experience directly inspired him to co-found Datadog to break down these destructive corporate silos.

Datadog possesses a pragmatic, technical founding story, born out of frustration and intense, daily arguments between software developers and systems operations teams. The company was founded in 2010 by Olivier Pomel and Alexis Lê-Quôc, two brilliant French engineers who were working at Wireless Generation (an educational technology company in New York that was later acquired by News Corp). At Wireless Generation, Pomel managed the development team (the engineers writing the code), while Lê-Quôc managed the operations team (the engineers responsible for keeping the servers running). They experienced a foundational realization: their teams hated each other. The developers constantly pushed new, buggy code, and the operations team constantly blamed the developers when the servers crashed. The root cause of this friction was that they lacked a single source of truth; they were using entirely different, siloed monitoring tools that did not communicate. Recognizing this as an universal problem across the rapidly expanding cloud industry, Pomel and Lê-Quôc quit their jobs to found Datadog. Their foundational vision was not simply to build a better monitoring tool, but to alter corporate culture by forcing Dev and Ops teams to look at the exact same data on the exact same dashboard. They initially built the platform in New York (far away from the echo chamber of Silicon Valley). Their immediate success was driven by a brilliant, intuitive user interface and an easy deployment process, allowing grassroots engineers to adopt Datadog without requiring top-down enterprise procurement, establishing the foundational architecture of the modern 'DevOps' movement.