At my previous job I had to open 15 different tools to figure out why the site was down at 3 AM. I thought — this is insane. What if all of this was in one place? That became Datadog.
We built Datadog in New York, not San Francisco. Everyone told us that DevOps companies had to be in the Bay Area. Turns out infrastructure does not care where you write the code.
Our average enterprise customer uses 4 or more of our products. They start with monitoring and then realize they need APM, then logs, then security. We designed it that way — one platform that keeps expanding.
The cloud providers all have their own monitoring tools. But nobody uses just one cloud anymore. We see across AWS, GCP, Azure, and your on-prem servers simultaneously. That is something CloudWatch will never do.
We release 2-3 major new products every year. Most companies our size release one every 2 years. Speed is our competitive advantage — by the time competitors copy our last product, we have shipped the next two.
Usage-based pricing means our revenue grows automatically when our customers grow. We do not have to renegotiate contracts. They add more servers, we send a bigger bill. It is the most beautiful business model in SaaS.