Hi, I'm Matt Turk. Welcome to the Matt podcast. Today, we have a very special episode with Olivier Pomel, the CEO of Datadog. Datadog is a monster of a company and also a great entrepreneurial story, the result of an unlikely journey as it was founded by two French immigrants in 2010 in New York City. At the time when starting an enterprise software company in New York, we're still very much considered a strange idea, this team to fail. Fast forward to today, Datadog has become one of the most exciting tech companies in public markets, who's very impressive stats, almost 29,000 customers around the world, 2.39 billion in revenue, and a 39 billion market cap at the time of recording.
In this conversation, we went deep with Olivier and talked about their product strategy. We don't do it like Apple, we don't disappear in a basement for three years and then ship a fully formed product that takes the world by storm. Instead, from the earliest days, we work with design partners, we work with customers, and we try to ship something to them as quickly as possible. And have they been able to add product after product to the platform over the years? Scaling a successful product and starting a new product are very different motions. People feel very differently about it. Why Datadog was initially careful about machine learning and AI, but this system's tend to be more force-negative than force-positive.
Basically, this system is not sure, it's probably not going to tell you anything, because if it tells you things are going wrong twice and you don't believe it, you're never going to look at it again. And their current AI strategy as they double down products like watchdog, bits AI, and the new Foundation model, Toto. Olivier is one of the most thoughtful founders out there, so please enjoy this terrific conversation with him.
Welcome, Olivier. Or should I say, Janv new, like I hope that people are ready for the sound of two French peoples with each other in English. Yes, the problem, usually when that happens, like the accent devolves into something that's very, very French. We will try not to get there. People have been warned. You've been in New York for 25 years, right? Or something you were writing in the late 90s?
Yeah, I moved here in 1999. Okay. Yeah, same general thing. Very comparable journey is obviously other than the fact that you build a $39 billion market cap company and I'm a VC with a podcast, but other than that, pretty close. What did you stay in New York? Well, first because it was fun. So I moved in 1999, I thought I was 10, six months. I had an internship at IBM in research, which was a very interesting place at the time. And then it was a tail end of the dot-com boom. So there was a lot going on at that time in New York. There was not much going on in France from a tech perspective.
So I thought it was a great time to start to stay and join startups. It was interesting. Of course, then there was dot-com crash, 9-11, all of that stuff. So that was less fun. But by that time, I was very attached to Siri. I liked the dynamism. I liked the cultural aspects of the Siri and it's decided to stay. And I stayed until it was until 2010 that I started that adog in New York. And what do you make of the current or recent explosion of the French tech ecosystem? Because I do remember saying the exact story. Like I came here and then there was basically not much to go back for in France and tech at the time.
Yeah, I think it's amazing. I think it when I left, there was not much going on. When I started that adog also in 2010, there was also not much going on. It was difficult to start companies. Few people wanted to work in startups in France. It was difficult to get funding and all of that stuff. And I think now it's changed a lot. Like there are many companies that are getting started, that are very dynamic, doing very well. I think we still have to see them scale to large companies in France, in Europe more broadly. It hasn't happened yet. So the ecosystem is still young and I would stay still fragile from that perspective. Especially, I mean, of course, compared to the Bay Area, but also compared to the New York ecosystem.
Yeah, and exit, right? Scale and exit. Yeah, exactly. Because France hasn't had that cycle of people making money and redistributing it into the ecosystem. Yeah, it has been, but typically earlier, like smaller exits. And I think they need to have more of the later ones. Cool. So maybe for context, so you and I did something sort of similar a few years ago in the context of data driven NYC, which is the monthly data I made up I've been running for 11 years now.
And in some ways, this podcast, the Mad Podcast, is a spinoff from it. But that was a really good conversation that stood the test of time as I was prepping for this. I listened to it again. And I would encourage people to go back to it, to hear sort of the basics, like the data doc story, the founding story, the initial vision, where the name comes from, all the things. And as real YouTubers say, we will put that in the show notes. So people should check that out.
But for today, we're going to try and do something a little different, more focused on product, more focused on all things data and AI at Data Doc. Maybe a great place to start will be the usual 101 on Data Dog, your elevator pitch that you've probably given about 10 million times at this point. Yeah, so we're Data Dog. We do observability and security. We do it for cloud environments. So we sell to engineers, basically, that run applications and infrastructure in cloud environments. And we do it for companies that are big and small.
So our smallest customers don't pass anything in their individuals or students. And our largest customers are the largest companies in the world, paying tens of millions a lot of a year. And you'll have pretty much everything in between. But very extremely technical product sold to a technical audience. And the core has been observability historically. What is happening in that space? It sort of feels like there was infrastructure monitoring, there were application monitoring, it sort of feels like things are starting to collide a little bit. Is that fair?
Yeah, I mean, it used to be different categories, used to be called monitoring. A lot of the use cases are fairly similar. And it used to be Balkanized. So it used to be the used to be monitoring, application performance monitoring, network monitoring, log management, user experience monitoring. All of these were different categories with different user bases and different types of instrumentation, different vendors.
I think what we've done that, to be honest, was kind of, I mean, it was actually the starting point of the company, but was a bit of a hard selling, surely, was bring together this category into one platform. The idea behind that adog was, well, those teams don't see it. I don't understand the world the same way.
I mean, for the story there, in the previous company, my co-founder and I used to run two different teams. I used to run the dev team and used to run the ops team. And even though we're very good friends, we have everyone on our teams in these companies because it was a fast growing startup. We did end up with ops that hated devs and devs who hated ops and fighting all the time and finger pointing.
So the starting point was, hey, let's get them in the same platform, showing you same language, the same view of the world and working together. So that, I mean, the first use case we brought up was really infrastructure monitoring for cloud. And then we added all of the other parts of that stack. So application, log management, user experience, network, all the other things that wouldn't make sense in there.
And very much for anybody that has been following the data doctrine a little bit, what's been amazing to watch is that evolution of a time from that start to a platform that keeps getting broader and more horizontal as you keep adding product after product every year. And in fact, it seems so you have this chart in your public document somewhere where actually the number of things that you add every year features new products seems to be increasing, which is amazing to watch.
But going back to the beginning of that, so the vision was always to be a platform. Because that's that kind of cliche in the adventure and startup circles that you need to be a tool before your platform. So how do you navigate that? Well, I mean, initially, not very well. So the idea was, yes, we were going to be this platform that was always on there, that was in the way we started the company. And we had this vision of multiple data sets, multiple teams, multiple sets of use cases, all meeting into this platform.
So we started the company, we were super excited, we applied to sorts of incubators, we got to a Y Combinator interview, and then we didn't get into Y Combinator. I have an email from a program that says, no platform is only as good as its first product, and you don't have a first product, la la la. So it was not like, you're right, like it actually was a tough sell. And to be fair, I mean, when we started raising our product, like the first beta of our product, we did call it a data platform, as opposed to calling it a very specific use case. And everybody loved the idea, like the users loved the idea. But people were not coming back to the platform, and also, but nobody was paying for it. So that was a bit difficult. At some point, we decided to name it monitoring, which was the name of the category before us, really, in fast-section monitoring. And without making too many changes to the product, we had a few small things to make sure it would be called that way.
Immediately, it got traction. Immediately, people understood, okay, this is why I need to bring it back, and this is how I convinced my boss I need to pay for it. And we were off on the races from now on. Because there was a known budget item. Yes, and that comes back, we can talk about it later, but in terms of understanding where you're going as a platform, but also who you bring that back to where your customer bases today, I think it's a key part. You actually have to take your customers where they are, and talk to them in terms of the understanding, in terms of their existing categories, their existing span, their existing solutions.
So maybe walk us through some examples of that evolution over the years. You started with metrics, trace, logs. What was the next few products over the years? We started with just metrics and infrastructure. We didn't have tracing, we didn't have logs. And for the first seven years of the company, we didn't do anything else. We had the great chance of having amazing interaction with that core product. So we were just too busy keeping up with the customer base, both in terms of scaling the systems, but also just adding all the functionality they needed for that, and supporting all these new customers. So for the first.
Metrics is just any number for performance of your infrastructure. Yeah, so metrics, we did that. We had a number of integrations, basically that would get the data from whatever systems our customer were using, whether that's their cloud provider, the database they're using, the operating system, the CDN. But also we would let them, we still do, submit custom metrics for their own applications. So if they want to track, for example, the number of times a certain function is called, then write terms in shop, write them in shopping cars, do a lot of amounts of adding pressures, they can do all that. And it did a lot of it. That's what made the product so successful, like that we could cover the gamut from the, would the, how much CPU you have, all the way to how much revenue you're making with the product. That was extremely appealing, especially to all of the digital native companies at the time that were moving into the cloud. So we started with that, I would say until from 2010 to 2016, we mostly did that. But our platform was still fairly open. You could add any sorts of data, manipulate the data in all sorts of interesting ways, build analysis and visualizations and things like that. And what we saw was that a number of our customers started building other products for themselves on top of our platform.
指标只是用于衡量您基础设施性能的任何数字。是的,我们确实做了有关指标的工作。我们与多个系统进行了集成,以获取客户正在使用的各种系统的数据,无论是他们的云服务提供商、使用的数据库、操作系统还是内容分发网络(CDN)。同时,我们还允许客户提交他们自己的应用程序的自定义指标。比如,他们想跟踪某个函数被调用的次数、购物车中的条款书写量或大量的添加压力等操作,他们都可以做到。正是这种功能,使我们的产品非常成功,因为我们能够从 CPU 的使用量到产品带来的收入等各个方面提供数据支持。这对那些正转向云服务的数字原生公司极具吸引力。从 2010 年到 2016 年,我们主要专注于这一领域。我们的平台依然很开放,用户可以在其中添加各种数据,以各种有趣的方式处理数据,进行分析和可视化等。此外,我们还观察到,一些客户在我们的平台上为自己构建了其他产品。
So we didn't do application performance monitoring, there were other products that were doing that, like a whole category of products. But we saw that a number of our customers were building a poor managed APM, like that's the shorthand for application performance monitoring into our platform. And that told us a few things that told us, well, does it need? And, but also our customers believe that we're part of the solution. So they want to see it there and they're willing to go if we do trouble of hacking together something on top of us. So that gave us great confidence that our initial vision was good and that we should keep developing that. And the next product should be application performance monitoring and we started building that. And when was that what year? 2016 I think is when we engaged with that. And this one actually took us a while to get right.
And we can also come back to that, but this was a part of it was going from product number one to product number two, which is hard. Part of it was also that it was, it's actually a category that has very high table stakes and it is a bit of a slow grind to get everything going with customers. So we took us several years actually to get that product to be truly successful. Yeah, and then there was a new relic of dynamics. Yeah, there were a number of other companies out there. And at about the same time, we also found that, blog management also is a category that belongs into what we're doing. It's another aspect of observability that is very important for users. And then, same thing, we saw customers trying to hook their log management to us in different ways and build hack solutions for doing that. We also found that the problems the customers have didn't stop at the barrier between application and infrastructure and a lot of the back. They actually cross everything. So it made complete sense to everything one goal. In this one, log management, so we started working on that too. This one we accelerated with M&A. So we actually bought a company in France. It's a small company that has an early product for that. And we accelerated the development. I think through the combination of this being accelerated by M&A, this being also an easier product to get to a critical mass compared to APM. We actually ended up with both the interaction at exactly the same time, even though we started with one, maybe two years after the other. What came after? There was synthetics. Yeah, we did. The rest of what's part of an observatory stack. So we did synthetic testing, which is automated testing for APIs or application, things like that. We did really awesome monitoring, which is measuring what end users are actually doing in the application, first for performance reasons, but then increasingly for business analytics reasons. So what are my users clicking on? What are they going from there? That kind of stuff.
We started expanding into security. So entering, doing security on top of logs, you know, there's a category that's called SIEM for that. We started doing security on cloud environments, so both on the infrastructure side and the application side. And we have a thesis that security, like five years from now, will be, or rather let me rephrase it, it will be a no brainer that you have to attach your security to your observability, because that is what is, get deployed everywhere in your application, in your infrastructure, and it would get used by all your engineers. And to solve your security issues, you cannot just rely on a team of, say, 10 security engineers, you need to rely on your 50 ops engineers and your 200 software engineers to make that happen. That's because a threat would manifest into logs, into activity, or. Yes, but also, like most of the security issues are introduced by your development team and your operations teams, and most of the fixes have to be made by your development team and your operations teams. Like mostly dealing with security is not, you know, monitoring North Korean hackers. I mean, there's a bit of that, but mostly it's about patching all of the various vulnerabilities you have, because maybe you had a mistake when you were coding, or maybe you use a library and that library now has a vulnerability and you need to upgrade your code and make sure everything works. Or you misconfigured something, or there's a vulnerability that exploits certain type of configuration. So you need to go and continuously go and close all of those vulnerabilities, and the people who do that are typically not the security team, they're the development and the operations teams.
So it's very interesting, right? The first two or three, so going into APM and other things, sounds like your customers basically dragged you into it, they started building the product that you didn't have and showed you the way. Is that true as well as security? Was that more of a strategic kind of decision? Because I totally get how a lot of this manifests in what you monitor, but equally it's a different industry, it's a different buyer. It's a big oleap, I think it's true in part, let me simply with customers build some versions of that themselves. And for some parts of what we do, it's a natural evolution, like in log management, for example, the companies that used to sell logs before us, then evolve into security companies as part of that. So it's understood that the two sort of leave together.
But for other parts, application security and cloud security, for example, these were very separate. So I think it's a bigger shift, so it's also a shift in terms of who to think about the security market in general. So I mentioned earlier that observability used to be very fragmented and now is one big category, really, that's what we're leading today. Security is still an extremely fragmented category. I mean, you're in VC, so you probably can spend the first three hours every month there, keeping up with all the new funded companies and cyber security. Yeah. And you can have an entire investing career just doing security, which some people do. Yes, there's so many of them.
And as a result, you end up having so many different sub-categories. And we think that it's too complex. Like it's impossible for the customers to actually understand how to piece that together and to integrate everything into a consistent hole that really protects them. And so we think that security is going to go through the same consolidation, basically, into platforms with some extra products here and there, but mostly relying on large platforms. I'm very fascinated by that topic of how you keep building products, because as you said, it's so hard to get a second product. Most companies never get the second product.
So one aspect is your customers point away, so that's super interesting. Sort of almost logistically, how long before you jump into an industry and do you start planning that? Like, how does that start? You do research efforts. You have a consulting team, or is that USU decides this? And then how long do you plan before you start building and then launching? Well, mostly we hear about it from customers. So we have this strong bias in the company that are windowing to the world is our customers. So for example, when we think about competitions, or competition in general, we don't spend a lot of time reading our competitors' possibilities or website. Instead, we talk to our customers and we hear what they have to say about it, whether it's registered with them or not, which seems to be valuable to them or not.
Basically, the world around us exists for the prison or our customers. So from that, we get a sense of what's actually a problem for them, what seems to be real. And then we decide what we might try to go and walk on. But the way we build it is so we don't do it like Apple. We don't disappear in a basement for three years, and then ship a fully-formed product that takes the world by storm. Instead, from the earliest days, we work with design partners, we work with customers, and we try to ship something to them as quickly as possible. So that's really the way we develop. And then we trade.
And then we trade. And you offered for free initially for those design partners? Well, there's a whole process. And actually, a key part of building a new product is understanding what's valuable and what's not. And it's difficult because when you start and your design partners are typically your existing customers because you have strong relationship with them. And typically, they love you. They love your product. So they're happy to spend time on working on new things. But they haven't necessarily thought through the whole value of what it is they're asking you to build. So the way we do it is we start by building with them. So we ask for what the problems are. We get a sense of what else they might use for it. Was their next best alternative or what they were using before? That's not good enough. So it helps ground everything. But then as soon as we have enough product, we basically say, OK, it's going to cost you this much to use this product.
And what typically happens at this stage is that when the product is ready, when it's great, about half of the design partners just disappear. The people who are showing up in the meeting every week or twice a week and were very happy to work with us, they start ghosting the product teams because they realize, actually, I'm not going. I'm not able to pay for it. I don't want to pay for this. It's not valuable enough. And so that's the first gate. The first gate is do you retain enough of the design partners? Is there enough value in what we're doing there? Or is it just good stuff?
After that, we start opening up the products more broadly. So we typically are going to have some form of a private or public beta for the product. And then we're going to go through another and initially for free. And then we're going to go through another phase of, OK, so now we're going to announce pricing. And we're going to start charging the most active of those customers. And same thing we see, do we have enough retention there? Do we clear the bar of that product being valuable enough that we can keep going? And then we do that one more time, which is when we completely open it.
And when we start charging automatically for usage, we see, OK, so do actually, when people start using it, do they keep using it after when we start charging for it or not? And then that tells you, OK, the value is there or the value is not there. And I think it's very important. We feel that the worst that can happen in software is that you build stuff, but nobody cares about it. And it's very easy to build stuff. Have you killed products that did not meet those bars?
We did not kill products. But the way we do it is we start small. And we've waited a long time to scale up teams or products. As they were still searching for basically the core value or we would be able to sell in the end. So some of these are still searching for the exit. Some of these are still. We have a small effort going forward exploring. And many of those have scaled as we went through all those gates. And we validate the value. And we understood better the packaging.
And we could then have a very clear roadmap in terms of what we need to build for those customers to keep scaling. Who does this? When you launch a new product, do you have an internal, I don't know, sure, part team? I know you're active on the M&A front. So like I assume in some cases it's whoever you buy. But do you take people from other products to reassign them? How does it work? Yes. And that's part why it's difficult to build multiple products.
Because what happens when you start thinking about product number two typically is you have product number one that is very successful. But if it is very successful, chances are everybody is super busy just keeping up. And everybody that is super good and you would want to trust with starting a new product is load bearing on your core product. So that's difficult. You need to pull people away. And that's painful. That's hard. The second part is that scaling a successful product and starting a new product are very different motions.
And I would say people feel very differently about it. Like in one situation, you mostly walk into situations where customers love you and you know exactly what you need to do next. And you can work with them. In the other situation, like you don't have traction yet, you're trying to understand why. And you have to understand, you have to read the decipher, the cryptic feedback you're getting from customers. Because again, these customers in general, everybody are people who are good people. They don't want to hurt your feelings. So when you talk to them, they'll say, oh, yeah, yeah. No, this product is great. It doesn't actually work. But it's great.
And the people who are used to scaling the products that work ignore the negative part, whereas it's the only part. That's worth listening to. And I assume that's true on the sales side as well. You can become super great at selling something that people want. And then you have to sell the new thing. So how does that work? That part I would say for us is a bit easier, because we get adopted bottom up. So we focus on getting usage first, so making the product discoverable, getting really short time to value inside the platform, in the product itself.
So then the sales side of things is a bit easier. I think as the products get more mature, and as the large enterprises start using them more, it does more of a sales job, basically, to work on consolidation. So basically, situations where customers were using 12 things before, and they're just going to use us after. So there's more of a sales job to do to be done there. That's more traditional. But otherwise, we mostly do it bottom up.
And one last thing to mention, by the way, on putting people into new projects is that people need to see through the angle of people caring for their career, too. You have to make sure it's safe to work on the product. It's not successful yet. Because otherwise, people just want to stay on the start of the show and not go into that thing, and they don't know if it's going to take off or not. Now, how do you measure the success of a new product? Do you have an internal metric? I don't know, around like a tax rate or whatever you call it? I mean, we tried to get very good signals. So I mentioned that we established value by starting to charge for products initially. So we try and not do too much bundling.
Of course, you do some of it, because it's an enterprise software. You can't just piece out everything, every single feature. But we try to get clear signals in terms of is it getting adopted, is it getting used more and more? So both on the revenue side, but also on the straight activity into the product. So how many users do they have? What's the footprint in terms of the data sets that are being sent? The impact on infrastructure, all those things. So we track all of those. We also optimize for very short feedback loops. So in particular, and that dates back from the early days of the company, we always start with very low commitments and very short timeframes.
So for new products and new companies, I would argue month to month is great. Because your customers can't try at any time, which means you'll get the hard reality to hit you in the face. And you can't ignore it, which is a problem when you have. So you say you sell one year, three year deals. You can, even though you might see concerning adoption or usage metrics, you can fool yourself into thinking that you'll be able to fix it. So when you have a very short cycle time on that, you really have to fix things very quickly.
And is that just an impression that you keep releasing one more product? Is that like on the slides that I was mentioning earlier, or is that you've just built a muscle and you're just cranking because you know how to do it and you keep doing it at the industrial scale? Well, it's more effective of demand. So I think we see that there's a lot more we need to do in observability. And there are other categories I mentioned. Security, there's a number of new things about AI, of course. We'll have to talk about it at some point. Yes. Right after this coming up. There are things that are getting closer to developer too, that are very interesting.
Yeah, it's a thought that came to mind as you were describing. The fact that security is a developer problem. It sort of feels like that's a world of like this, the set ups. You've been very focused on the on the metrics and what comes out of the machines, but it sort of feels like you need to go into the world of code. Is that maybe already doing that, but is that part of the idea? I mean, part of the idea is you have to tie it back to what the developers are doing. Yes. I think the act of coding itself historically hasn't been a narrative that's conducive to being solved with software products so much. I think it tends to be more the community side of the world as opposed to everything that relates to production systems. But we think it's a we definitely need to close the loop between what's happening with developers are doing on the type of line of code and what the impact is actually going to be on the application in production, on their end users, on their business, on the security posture of their business, like this is the hard part.
And you know, again, we think we're meeting, I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself there in terms of the, the, where AI is going to take us. But one way we like to think about it is the, the wave of the, the exponential increase of developer productivity. If you go back 40 years, 50 years, people were coding in a machine language on a credit card, like my dad started coding on. It was like rulers as well, right? Yes, rulers if I had, yeah. So fairly low productivity. Then you know, you went, you could on on keyboard and screen, but still on a machine. Then you had more advanced languages, then you have more advanced languages and libraries that other people wrote that you could use, but you still needed to pretty much write all the code yourself and, you know, buy books from the library to understand what to do.
Then you had the internet, then you had open source with all of the libraries you could use everywhere. Then you had SAS and pass and basically all of those things you can just plug into the API's that are going to do a lot of the work for you. So we've seen over the past 40, 50 years, orders of magnitude of productivity increases. And I think AI on top of that is going to give us maybe another order of magnitude or two in terms of what a human can produce functionally.
The flip side of that though is every time you add more complexity, or every time you add productivity, you add complexity, meaning that you have less and less of an understanding of what it is you're doing. Because I mean, you just, you did something super complicated in five seconds. You can't possibly know what's going to happen on the back of that. So a lot of the value shifts from just creating that thing to understanding how it's going to behave, how it's changing over time, what its failure modes are, what impact it has on its users, and basically how it can be abused from a security perspective. And that's where we see ourselves playing a role in the long term.
So as I think about it, there's different themes for data targeting AI. You touch on a couple of those. There's AI friend of foe for data targeting business. There's building AI into data dog products to make them better, faster, smarter. And then there's probably a lesser but interesting theme around how data dog employees use AI to maximize performance productivity, all those things. So maybe starting with the first one.
So I, it maybe playing it back does feel like the increase in complexity is your friend. So the fact that we may have all those machines that will do things for us that we may or may not understand is a good thing. Do you think there is a world just to play a little bit like a G.I. Duma where AI actually becomes a problem for data dog in, I don't know, automating or being able to do all the things in a way that where humans do not need to be involved? Oh, but I think you at some point someone is to control the AI in some form, right? So, or maybe not, maybe we just, you know, we'll be.
Yeah, we'll all that's in the end, you know, but I don't subscribe to that to that region of the future. But I do think that the idea of the day, I do see that as one more evolution in the history of innovation, which is we just do more. And because we can do more more easily, we do even more. And then we need to manage it and understand it. I think that's the overall arc of things. And that's where we have potentially a never big on role, a never big on role to play in the future as it happens.
And you know, when you think of the impact on our business, you know, there's a few ways to think about it. The most straightforward is, and the one happening right now is it just the emergence of AI just pushes more digitization and move to the cloud, you know, because, I mean, to capitalize on AI and your data. So it needs to be digital. And you probably are not going to build your data center for AI yourself. If you are a handful, maybe 10, 20 companies, yes, you are, because you are at such large scale, you're in the business of providing your services for others. But otherwise, you're not because you don't know what you need.
You, I mean, whole wheat companies even know today what to buy and what it looks like three years from now when they when they've realized those investments. That's impossible. This seems to be a little bit of trend around actually let's not move data to the computer to data to the AI, but bring AI to the data and therefore actually on prem or VPC to some extent is a good place to do AI, you know, and sometimes open source, hence, you know, a part of the NVIDIA rise, but also Dell and, you know, to be clear, the, what we call on prem at this level is the ground.
Yeah. Like it's on prem, but it behaves, it looks like and it behaves exactly like the public cloud switch is the same thing. And there's a dynamic also right now where the compute itself, the GPU's are way, way, way, way more expensive and don't need that much bandwidth compared to everything else. So it's actually okay if, you know, your data is in Australia and your GPU is in the US. That's not a big issue.
That's not necessarily how things are going to be in the long run. So I think it's more of a side effect of where we are right now, you know, in terms of the technical solutions, the evolution, this has the models and the press of the GPU and all those things. So I don't decide anything. This is long term trend. And from your perspective, all of this are just systems and machines that speed out machine data that needs to be monitored, right? So for example, I was, you know, reading somewhere that you integrate with whatever NVIDIA part of the NVIDIA platform that enables you to monitor the health of GPUs.
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, look, again, it's straightforward. That's more infrastructure. So we need to understand the GPUs. We need to understand there's new components in there, like there's models themselves from the outside of their components with latency and error rates and costs and things like that. We need to monitor the new databases and you vector databases and things like new. The whole new stack basically, around AI. But a vector database does not behave any differently than all app database from your perspective. No. And also the AI applications are typically the part that's a model in GPUs and you're a small part of that app, like the rest is, you know, it talks to a database and it talks to a web server and it talks to its source files and all that stuff.
So that part is I would say more of the same model. I mean, it's not exactly the same. Like there's many new technologies. We have many people working on things like GPU profiling that are very different from what you would do with the CPU. But I would say you can think of it as very similar, just another iteration of what we've been doing the whole time. There's a second thing which is a bit different, which is understanding the models themselves and how they behave. And that one is quite nice, completely open-ended. Mostly because the models are changing very fast. But also the applications around those models are still fairly early in their life cycle.
I think, you know, we, there's a few things that we understand well. So we understand what an image model looks like, you know, and we understand how to build a chatbot and those form factors are sort of there. But for the rest, we're still looking for the right form factors and the models themselves, as I said, keep changing underneath that. So I think it's going to take maybe a few years for that category of observing the models themselves to fully flesh out in terms of what the use cases are, the needs and where they go. And you just announced something right that Dash, which is a UN, your conference, an LLM observability product that does some of this? Yes, yes. We named it so it's easy to pronounce LLM observability, try to say it four times in a row. I had to practice hard for the keynote for that.
And from what I read about LLM observability, the, so you do indeed like a personal performance, but very much to the point that you were just making, you also evaluate functional quality. So the quality of the results, which is new territory for data dark, right? Yes. The functionally observing software was easier when everything was deterministic. Now that the software changes over time and it's, humans might actually disagree on whether it behaves properly or not. I think it's becomes a much harder task. But again, that means there's more value in understanding that and bridging the gap between the humans and the, what the application is actually doing. And we're still fairly early there.
Like we have a product that is out, we have real customers that use it with production applications, which is great. I mean, you know, you're a good, was not the case. Like everybody was talking about charge GPT, but other applications in the world were very few and far between. Now we start seeing that happen, but I expect that feel to change quite a bit in the near future. So, but it is out and you have customers in the, in the sort of evolution of a new product that you described, it says the design partner stage where people are sort of.
But I would say it's different from other products in that most other products go after categories that are fairly mature, where the use cases on the customer side are fairly clear. I would see this one is still in motion. Like it's very possible that two years from now, the applications look very different. The applications built on top of LAMS or models in general look very different. So that's one theme of like the impact on the business and the opportunities and it's a, yeah, so it's like one more way that I guess just like that's unbelievable business, which is that like anything that, any new thing that pops up fundamentally is just another thing to monitor.
Yeah. And look, the strength of the business is that it usually doesn't make sense to look at one aspect in isolation. You are not going to manage your AI separately from your databases separately, from your network separately, from your security separately, from everything makes more sense when it is managed together and when we can assemble the full picture for you. So that's what we focus on. The last aspect on the impact on the owner business is obviously there's a lot we can do with AI ourselves on the back of it, which is we have all these data, all these use cases.
What can we do to automate that for you? And I would say this is an area that was, for the longest time in the history of the company, we've been careful about using the word AI. We thought there were bullshit words, mostly people would say AI, but in practice, this was statistics or even less chartably just addition, sub-sarcasm, voltifications. I mean, obviously now it's different. We definitely can do a lot more with it. But the promise here is since we are of the cleanest data that you use today to get people up at night, so when it's not clean, it gets fixed pretty quickly. And we are in the middle of the use cases, like the transaction use cases of, hey, I need to fix something and verify that it works. We are in the ideal insertion point to automate a lot of that. I vividly remember that part of the conversation from a few years ago when we did that chat where you were precisely using the example of waking somebody up and false positive versus false negative. And yeah, you did seem careful about machine learning at the time. Having said that so fast forward to today, you were saying this shortly after launching watchdog, I believe, which is the AI product I'll let you describe it better than I can. But there was a little bit that you were doing. And so generally the AI has increased, not just the scope or you can do, but also the level of confidence you have in terms of not working people up at night. Yes, but I think most importantly, we don't have to lead too hard with it.
The problem with AI in general is if you start solely with the promise of automating with AI, you sort of on the hook to doing it all the time. And the general case for what we do is not something that you can solve with AI. I think right now we'd be lucky to solve 2%, 3%, 5% of the cases with AI. Maybe you know you're going to be 20%, maybe, but it's going to be gradual. I think if you try and insert yourself saying, I'm going to automate it for you, the incentive will be to try and do too much, break the confidence with a user, and then working out in the end, which has been the story of AI business, in systems management for the past 20 years, basically, that cycle has repeated again and again and again.
I think our strength comes from the fact that we can pick and choose. We can say, hey, for observability, we're here for security, we're here to make sure you can solve your issues, and little by little, we'll do more of it for you, up to the point where maybe you have only one person of the issues yourself. Maybe it makes sense to just double click on what AI means for the kind of data that you're dealing with, because we're not talking about creating avatars or voices or marketing copy, we're talking about detecting anomalies across mostly structured number, information everywhere, which to the point of having that watchdog product back in 2018 or 19 or whenever that was, that's very much what is now known incorrectly, but as machine learning versus generally AI.
So what is the mix of different models you use? Yeah, so the first generation of products we've built there, we're built on statistical methods and traditional machine learning, which means the best way to describe it is not transformers. And that's worked really well, like this fit for purpose works really, really well. I think with the new generation of models that we've seen come up, what's relevant to us is first of all the language models themselves are very relevant, because now we also can access not just the numerical data we have, but we can access the documentations or customers everything but their systems, what they're saying on Slack and email, what's going on in their incidents. And these together, like the semantic meanings of the various things they even put into the events, the logs and things like that. So that's very interesting and opens up more things there. There's more we can do maybe on the reasoning side, I would say even with the latest releases from OpenAI, it's still fairly early in terms of the quality of the models and what can be done there.
And then what we're seeing also is how we can apply these amazingly scaling transformers technology to what we used to do with traditional machine learning, which is time series, events and even before that like statistical modeling. And speaking of which another thing that you announced, which I believe is not in production yet, is you've just announced your own foundation model, which is called Toto. What is the idea behind doing a foundation model for time series data? Well, so the idea is now that this technology has been proven to work really, really well, what can we do with our own data? Can we actually improve forecasting for own time series, for observability time series, and maybe also for other kinds of time series? So Toto was our first attempt. And what's really interesting is that even though it's our first attempt, the first time we incorporate transformers in what we do. And it's also not a gigantic model. Like it's very far from like it's not billions of parameters, like it's much more than that.
This model from the one with state of the art, like it beats all the other models. Of course, on the observability data, we have special benchmarks from that, but also for other things like weather data, which was very surprising to us. The reason for that is that we've just got amazing data for it. Like we've got, of course, tons of time series data, but we also have really strong metadata to understand the quality of the data. So going back to what I was saying earlier, we know which time series are working people up at night. We know which time series are being looked at and hoof on which dashboard, which give us really strong signals in terms of quality. So the plan now is to double down on that. So there's more we can do to make that model bigger, so more data, larger model size. And there's more we can do also to incorporate more types of data into it. So, I mean, multimodal data, though, you know, it's not in the sense of images and sound. It's in the sense of mixing text data and time series data in the same models, basically.
All right. So we talked about LLM observability. We talked about Toto. We sort of touched on Watchdog, which again is a product from a few years ago that you've kept on improving. What does Watchdog do? So Watchdog does the anomaly detection. So basically, the idea is when you use us, you're going to generate millions or billions of time series and logs and things like that. And it's just impossible for humans to watch all of them and understand if something's going wrong. So the idea with Watchdog is it just watches them for you. And it tells you, okay, so that thing is deteriorating. You should pay attention. Or that thing is assigned that other issue is going to happen later on the world. Moving back to the conversation we had a few years ago, the most important when you do things like that is to not generate false positives.
These systems tend to generate more false negatives than false positives. Basically, the system is not sure. It's probably not going to tell you anything, because if it tells you things are going wrong twice and you don't believe it, you're never going to look at it again. So I think as the technology improves, as the quality of the models and the forecasting and the detection improves, we can go from having something very interesting to say, in 20% of the cases to maybe all the time, which would be amazing. And then maybe the last AI product to cover, at least in the context of this conversation, Bits AI, what is up? So Bits AI was the first time we incorporated the LMs into our product. We did the thing that was pretty much everyone's first attempt at incorporating Ginii, which was, hey, we have all these data and all these things in our product. In addition to our UIs, let's add a chatbot to it.
So we can ask for anything, mix data from a responsible product and interact with it in text. Which we find is, and I think we've been through the same path as the most other companies that have done that, which is, it works great for some use cases, but you need to hang and hold the users a lot more. Users don't necessarily know exactly what to ask for and hold to ask for it, or what to go next in a once to ask a question. And we've all been there like we all tried the various bots, whether it's the Google one, the Microsoft one, and you start to try them, you force yourself to try them, and then you run out of ideas, so you don't come back. I think it's a very ironic considering it's also supposed to be easier, but in fact, it's harder. Yes, yes.
So, but the next step for that really is, so that's great. I mean, there's still some advanced use cases where it's fantastic. People want to mix data and do things and that works great. However, in most cases with the models and the AI actually let us do is get ahead of the issues and the head of where the customer is arguing and help them get their faster. And so that's the next generation of that. We announced that at Dash. I'm going to fill your AI bingo card, but you know, you see the the the agentic workflows, you know, but the idea there being is the the machines that he is in its own loop and it's going to figure out what to do next and tell you about it. You don't have to ask. And so there's interesting ways for us to do that. Is that experimental? Is that working? Well, we have we actually it's experimental and working, you know, it's not something we've rolled out widely. But the idea there is say you get a page because something broke on your application. And by the time you get on on Slack, the body's there already and told you and he's telling you, this is what I looked into. I looked at check this piece of data, this piece of data. This is a notebook where I put my investigations. You can you can follow what I did there. I think this is probably that. My recommendation is to restart the service. You want to click here and restart it. Turn it off, sir. Oh, man. Yes, exactly. This is this is not this is really exciting.
Like, you know, it really changes the interaction. Also, what she is what people do on Slack, you know, so when you when you when we ask a question about something, you can say, actually, I found the data for that. And this is what it is. Again, I think there we still we need to make sure it works well enough in enough of the cases because the models themselves are still imperfect enough that sometimes, you know, don't get exactly what you want. And also we need to make sure we find the right form factor for the interaction with the user, like what's not enough? What's too much? You know, you don't want to end up with Clippy. And the the risk right now is that a lot of the assistance we're seeing from the big companies are too close to Clippy. But for the young people who listen, Clippy was the the Microsoft word. Yes. Maybe to make sure that we at least touch upon it.
The foundation for all of this, the reason why all this data in our able to leverage the data to fit it into the AI is because you have this unified real-time data platform, which, you know, sounds like a complete monster in terms of what does it do? Like trillions of data points per hour. How is it architected? Like, how does one build a platform that's able to do that kind of, you know, have that kind of performance? So first there's the way that is organized for that.
You know, from day one, we have decided it would be a broad platform and it would load data from many different sources, more sources we didn't know at the time with different sizes, different velocities, different shapes. So we organize everything so that we could have we could hook together many different data stores under one one fairly flexible data mall. So that was the, I would say the the good idea in the beginning that helped us do that, even though it stood in the way of us getting into white community.
The after that, I think the secret has been we just keep rebuilding all of those modules all the time. Obviously we're not around the same data stores right now, you know, we which are getting billions of data points every second. Then you know, the things we had on week one, you know, what you were only going to just one database and there was extremely naive in terms of the, the Indian infrastructure.
And that's a you're right that it's a extremely high constraint word, especially since we have to keep that going, you know, 24 seven. And anytime we have a delay of a few seconds, it actually impacts our customers. So it's a the bar is fairly high in terms of we can do there. And the repercussions on the on the AI side is that the bar is fairly high also in terms of what we can incorporate on the AI side, what the cost of it can be to operate at this very large scale.
And also the latency of it can be in layman's terms that I get just like a gigantic cluster in the cloud that is like process cranks this whole thing and you have like connectors and feed data into it and API is to push data out of it is that that roughly the I mean, well, I mean, there's a there's a number of cues and data stores basically. And some of it is completely homegrown after generations of iterations.
And some of it is still like open source on the shelf that works very well for us like we use a lot of Kafka, for example, of that works well, and we still use a lot of Kafka database wise, you know, we mostly built on and we still use in some areas like some standard databases like post-glasses and things like that. But we we obviously show them and scale them a lot.
But a lot of the the core that I store like the time series, the log data, the even data, all of that is on completely custom data stores that we've built over time. We published actually a few series of articles on our on your event store, which we use for logs and traces, which is called Husky, you know, another dog name. And people can go on our blog and read about it like we share some of the technical details behind it. And you store all of this right? Like I think I read that there were some improvements around, you know, storing log data and that kind of stuff. But that's that you just store massive amount of historical data as well and be out of your customers.
Yeah. And we did some things there. I mean, look, the biggest challenge is observability is that any application can generate any any arbitrary large amount of logs. And so the data volumes grow much faster than our customers revenue, which is a problem. And so for to solve that, the few things to do, one is you create the right feedback loop. So people understand what they would they need and what they don't need in terms of data produced by the application. And when they send too much, you can fix it.
But the other one is also you just to be need to be more and more efficient in terms of how you can send more data and store more data. And and it costs less. One thing we've done over the past few years is we decoupled the storage from the compute. So it allows us to store storage was much cheaper. They are at different, different basically, differently from the the compute, which is a lot more expensive. And you have about half of the team that works on that platform.
So yes, the breakdown is roughly half of our engineering team is on the platform and half is on the is assigned to specific products. And for the AI stuff, did you have to build like a mini lab with some AI PhDs type? We so we don't have a lab in general. We're a little bit careful with with labs. I think it's a system expectation. But we so we and we've been through the same iterations as most companies, which is you centralized a little bit too much, then you decentralized a little bit too much, then you recent for a little bit.
So you sort of going between those two to make sure you you get the right amount of financial, common stuff. And at the same time, the right amount of work is directly applicable to the real problems of real products and real customers. But we've been building that. I think the main difference in terms of the way we invest in we build the products for compared to the others is that because that part of the market is moving so fast, it's a little bit more speculative often, like you have to start building and experiment before you know exactly what it is you need. Just because one customer doesn't know yet. But two, you also need to learn as you go. So I think we place the dial a little bit differently there than we might in some other parts of the company.
Incredible. Well, look, this has been a wonderful conversation, maybe too close and going in a completely different direction, but since you mentioned, you know, PG. And by the way, it's it's it's wonderful to hear that even YC makes terrible mistakes and terrible passes from from time to time that they just don't have like, you know, mega hits. But since you mentioned PG a couple of times and I heard you say either in our conversations or in other things I listened to that you at some point, you were a little bit of a control freak. What's your take on founder mode? Look, I think one it's a most of the would say in there is a value of your slack. You mean you you don't just, you know, tell people hire people and let them go and do whatever they want. Like you actually actually have to care about the details. Yes, you do. Like I think that parts value of use.
My worry about the founder mode and everything that gets pulled down to a very short piece like that is that I think it's going to be using that using all sorts of different ways because there's so much context that goes into every single world in there. Like when you say manage someone, what does it mean? Like it's going to mean very different things for the very, very different people or details when you mean very different things for very different people. So I think it's a as is that my worry is that it's going to do more harm than good in terms of the impact on the on the ecosystem. I've already been on the receiving end of a few people quoting quoting founder mode to disagree with things that we're doing. I was doing so.
We'll see where it goes. But look, I point short of it is yes, of course you have to care about the details. I think that's where you build a company and I think that's a there's no way to to remain relevant unless you do that. OK, amazing. Thank you so much for doing this. Thank you.