Few tech leaders have scaled a company from a two-person startup to a $36 billion public powerhouse while staying true to their original vision. Olivier Pomel, CEO and Co-Founder of Datadog, has done just that. Since launching the cloud-based observability and security platform in 2010, Pomel has led Datadog through a successful IPO in 2019 and sustained rapid growth well into the AI era.
Pomel’s path to the top began in Paris, where he earned a master’s degree in computer science from École Centrale Paris. He started his career as a software engineer at IBM Research and several startups before taking a pivotal role at Wireless Generation. There, he built and led a top-tier engineering team of nearly 100 developers, delivering educational data tools used by millions of students. It was during this time that he met his future Datadog co-founder, Alexis Lê-Quôc, and encountered the very cross-team collaboration issues they would later solve with Datadog.
At Datadog, Pomel promotes a low-ego, high-discipline culture where data-driven decisions and customer needs guide innovation. From the start, Pomel and his team focused on bridging operational gaps, building strong customer relationships, and tackling cloud transformation head-on. “Cloud transformation turned out to be bigger than we thought," he reflected. Today, Datadog reinvests heavily in new products, aiming to spend 30% of revenue on innovation. Pomel’s emphasis on continuous learning ensures the team never plateaus. As Datadog scales deeper into AI and observability, Pomel remains focused on building with intent, prioritizing long-term impact over short-term hype.