 Hello everybody. I'm really happy to be here on stage again this year. I'm Oskari, CEO of Ivan, Cloud Software Company. Really happy to welcome Olivier on stage with me. Olivier, as you heard, is the CEO and founder of Datadog. Hi. Good to be here. So I had the honor to invite Olivier to Helsinki to speak at Slosh and I'm happy to have him here. A little-known fact about Olivier, I think, in addition to being a founder and CEO of Datadog, is that he actually has a soft spot in his heart for this location, you know, the site of the assembly event. I just heard this was where the assembly was held and when I was growing up I was watching these demos on my Amiga and it looked like everybody was from Finland and finally I'm here today so I'm leaving to dream. Yeah. So I also was part of that community for some time and my background is also in engineering, software development and that is something that ultimately led me to start building Ivan, turning opens or technologies into cloud services. Olivier, you want to talk a little bit about your background. Like, how did you get started with? Yeah, so I'm an engineer. I mean, as I said earlier, I grew up watching demos, then I wanted to program in 3D, then I started programming video. I actually worked on the first version of VLC before some more capable people turn it into something real. And then, you know, fast forward a few years, I was in New York with a very good friend of mine and we decided to start Datadog. I think it was in 2010. Excellent. So we were asked to talk about product-led growth and PLG and what that means. So, you know, I think Datadog has been labeled as a PLG company for a long time, but like, what does PLG actually mean to you? Do you use that term? Yeah, so we don't actually use the word. I hate the word. I discourage people from using the word. And the reason for that is that half of your organization is not product. So if you run product-led growth, then what does your sales team do? It gives people an idea that they don't contribute, whereas they're actually a very big part of it. So, and by the way, this is one of the main misconceptions. Product-led growth still needs sales. You still need absolutely everything else. You just use it differently and you structure the company differently. So for us, product-led growth is just growth. You know, that's how we do things. And if I were to characterize it, really what it's rooted in is it's putting the customer in control, putting the user in control. So we don't control what they do. We don't push to them. They pull from us. So we they control how much they come in, how much they buy, what the terms are of what they buy, how much they use. And then the whole company is articulated around delivering value to them and driving their usage of the product and therefore revenue up. Yeah, that makes sense. Like we started building Ivan as engineers to build a product and a platform that we would have loved to use, something that just allowed me, you know, myself, other people like me to get started building something, using technologies that were familiar to us. We also hadn't heard of the PLG term until, I think actually I first heard about it at this event here in Slush some years ago when we were between I think our A and B rounds. And I thought like, well, I guess that's what we're doing. That's how we got to more than $10 million in ARR before we heard of the term or figured out a different model for the company. So... Yeah. I mean, in our case, so we started very early. When we got the company started it was difficult to get it funded. So we didn't have any money. We didn't have any customers. Everybody thought that what we were doing was a little bit stupid. So we were very scared of not getting the problem right and doing something that was useless. And as a result, we made ourselves feel better by spending more time with the customer and making sure we really understood their problem and making sure we really solved the problem for them. And I think that's what rooted all of our journey through product like growth. We started by having the funding team spend a ton of time with customers. Then we met the first deals ourselves with customers. Then because we didn't have the money or the prestige to attract great salespeople, we didn't hire any salespeople. So we did some more of the sales ourselves. And that's where I would say the whole motion got in place with the company. Then we scale that. Then of course we added the sales motion behind it. Then we got through all of the other steps. But we didn't do it by choice. We didn't read the blog post about PLG and said that's what we need to do. We did it because we didn't have any choice. I think that's very, very relatable to me as founding Ivan. I was going to ask you when you mentioned like, this is what you did. So just like specifically, who did you mean in the company? Who was working with the customers? So, well, the whole funding team was, you know, but very importantly, what we had very early on is a product team and a product leadership that wanted to spend time with customers and that was not afraid of discussing value and money with customers. So basically the first deals were made by our product team and still today for newer products, a lot of the deals are made by the product team and what this gives us is a product team that intrinsically understands the value, understands what parts of the product are good enough or not good enough because they understand what customers are going to pay for or they're not going to pay for. By the way, this is a mistake I see many new entrepreneurs make, which is that they raise money. It looks like they're going to be successful. They get experienced investors on board and the first thing the experienced investors help them do is hire an experienced sales leader and then what they do is the experienced sales leader is that they start building a sales force right away and they don't get the occasion to develop that strong culture of having their product team interact with their customers and very often the founders are like doing that because they don't actually know how to or like to have conversations with their customers about value. They love talking about product but they don't love talking about value. So my advice to anybody who wants to go that route is to make sure that very early on on the team you have some people in the product organization who are not first who enjoy spending most of their time with customers because that's where the value is but also who are not afraid to discuss what's valuable what's not and to make deals with the very first few customers. Is there a concrete example of a case where you know you've failed at identifying like is something you're building actually valuable to the customers early on? It happens very often actually it's something that happens more often now because we're so we were for the first half of the company the first six years we had one product and we found great product market fit early on and then we spent our time adding to that and scaling the company around it you know up to I think after those six years we're around 100 million in AR or something like that. After that though we started building more product building out our platform adding more to what we're selling to our customers and as we did that we needed to pivot from having one thing that works really really well to having a lot more things some of them are not going to work really well from day one and so we had all the issues that companies have where they go from a position of safety you know which is I know what I'm doing I have validation of it my customers love it to a position where we come up with things that may be great you know right out of the gate or maybe not and oftentimes they're not fantastic right out of the gate I mean oftentimes there are just good parts about them and there's not so good parts and it's a bit of a shift or pivot in culture at that time to get your product team to want to see the bad news actually want to go talk to the customers hear what's not working hear what's missing listen to it you know because usually we were discussing that right before but your customers love you and they are typically good human beings so they don't want to upset your feelings so when you go to them with a new product they'll say yes I'll use it they tell you great things and when they give you feedback about what they really don't like about it or what's missing they try to you know wrap it into compliments like that just the proverbial shit sandwich and most people don't want to look at the bad part like they just listen to the good parts and say yes they love it whereas the only part that matters the only part people really meant was the part that's broken or missing and not today for all of the new products we typically see that when we go from the first phase of every product is working with design partners and then after that we start asking those design partners for money we start charging for the product when we do that is when the bad news comes that's when we figure out what's missing and it's very important for us as a part of our process and culture to to make sure people everybody out of the product side is comfortable with that so you know scale the company from you know two or three founders maybe you know that's another another interesting topic on like how did you get you know scale the company early on but especially with scale you're you know bringing in new people and they have to be educated on on what actually is value creating for your you know your end users your customers so how do you find the right types of people who get what you're doing or do you train them to do so first of all we train most of the people on the sales team most people are I mean some people are familiar with our space but not completely and most especially most experienced sales people are not used to selling you know I hit the word but product-led environment which means that they're going to have customers in charge customers are going to acquire usage over time and they're not going to sell very large commits of fraud and customers are not going to start from day one spending millions of dollars and committing for five years which is a whole a lot of the software sales were made historically so one of the big things we do is when people join we return train them so that they expect to to do smaller transactions faster transactions and then grow their business with customers by driving their usage up by making sure basically customers know where the value is we know where to find it and and get that that usage themselves I think it's great because I think it again it keeps the customer in charge and by the way you have to be willing to live with the consequences of that know which is you push customers to do month-to-month deals and to commit at their level and grow as they see fit which means you're not protected like if something goes wrong if they're not happy if you don't deliver the value you'll have the bad news right away but I think it's it's good because it forces you to get all the news good or bad very quickly and it also forces the the whole sales organization to think long-term they think not in terms of what deal can I close that with this customer but rather what is that customer going to look like for me a year or two years from now and how do I make them successful which I think aligns everyone yeah so over the years you've shown the success of this model scaling to you know where you are today with more than a billion in revenue but early on was it easy for you to also explain the model that you're operating under to your investors that maybe you know where more use is on some more traditional enterprise sales well I think initially the the biggest challenge was not with the investors who were fairly comfortable with the model I think the model was the problem was more with the the employee pool or the tenant pool for sales because it's fairly new I think today is becoming more common but you know five six years ago it was more difficult to find people who were open to the idea and who didn't see that as a you know as a step down you know in their career like it's very important part of it is how people understand their own success and how what the expectation is is of what they're going to be successful when your whole experience has been closing million dollar deals and when on your first day you asked to close a $50,000 deal it's a big shift yeah and and I think it today is easier but it took some time initially to make sure people understood that they were going to be even more successful just just in a different way yeah so we've definitely seen that at Ivan understanding how we can also scale up our sales teams and educate them on the model that we are using as you say it's now more and more common but I think still today the consumption models that we're operating under are not really the standard in most businesses so when it comes to you know being you know running a public company and you have tons of customers that are on this kind of a model like what does that mean to you like well I think as a public company it's fine I think because the what we do which is like what you do like you know you sell databases as a service yeah we sell you know observability and security for infrastructure all of that is inherently recurring like the workloads out there they're not disappearing it's not transactional so from a business perspective it's a it's still a subscription model that is fairly safe I think the one thing that you you do lose in the equation though is you cannot really fully predict growth in the very short term like because it's all depending depending on the customer usage and I think it again I think in the end it's good it makes us stronger because we get the the bad news earlier or the good news often I mean when when customers scale up they don't have to talk to us if they find more value and they use more product they don't have to talk to us it's a very efficient model but I think you do lose a little bit of short term predictability there yeah I think that's definitely what we see as well we're just looking at our top customers and and in aggregate we got our forecast pretty well right but individually customer by customer it was a completely different picture for for all of them so I guess with enough data you you start to see the big picture and the trends trends there yes well it's especially interesting like in the we've had an interesting period through COVID and another one now is you know what look like maybe some economic disturbances it's very interesting to see you know what happens through the usage pattern of customers and you know it's also something that we communicate to our to our investors a lot like to make sure they understand what we see and what the what the validity of the business is so going back a little bit to the product topic so you know you started basically with one product and then you evolved it to bring in more capabilities some you know you grew organically and others you brought into acquisitions can you describe a little bit you know you're thinking about expanding from one product yeah so for us what we built it was always meant to be a platform that brought together different teams and different use cases so and the the infrastructure monitoring was the first use case we didn't even want to call the product infrastructure monitoring initially we just did it because you know a data platform to bring dev and us together you know everybody loved the idea but nobody understood what that was so it was much easier to find product market fit this way but we always intended to build more on that platform and bring more use cases and unify we used to be different parts of a larger observability category we also specifically we thought that if we wanted to grow the company for a very long time we needed to be able to have more than one product and so for us really getting from one to multiple products was the the threshold to cross so we'd feel comfortable taking the company public and basically making a commitment to investors to grow it for a very long time we so we started on that in 2016 2017 and we got to the proof points we wanted by 2019 which is when we took the company public the the biggest challenge is there where to to operate the cold transfer transformations I talked about before which were how do we how do we turn our team that is mostly succeeding into a team that is going to start by filling before they succeed how do we make it attractive for the members of the team you know how do we convince someone who's working on a team that knows exactly what they're doing that has all these customers putting for more to actually go into a place that's unknown where they might fail initially like it actually takes a little bit of transformation initially for that but we also didn't lose the coordinates of the company we kept for all of our new products we kept everything customer driven in terms of usage so basically none of the new products we shipped had to be big commitments upfront everything was consumed as it went and as it delivered value to customers and we made sure the customers had all the levers to control that yeah so when you add more capabilities you add more products I suppose it can be a bit discouraging at first because you don't see the great take up of the new products that you saw with the existing popular ones but yeah yeah I mean initially you see everything that's broken everything that's missing yeah you're picking up new competitors and your competitors make it clear to your to your customers that you're still missing some features you know so it's a it's a race yes but you know the good news is once you've done it a few times you you grow confidence that you know you can actually catch up you can exceed the competition you need to understand how do you deliver value to some customers first like you know products typically start by being super useful to a narrow band of customers and then as you as the products mature they can be useful to a much broader and broader band of customers until they reach the full market and we we've practiced at playbook now did you have to make a lot of changes to your team as you went from you know one product to more products and like how you're talking about datadog and what does datadog mean to to end customers we we did so we you know we had to invest quite a bit on the on the go-to-market side in enablement making sure everybody understood everything fit together we also had to really defend the way we run products so that the product management team wouldn't get isolated from the customer and would still keep that culture of spending their half of their time you know with customers in the customer's shoes and really understood the value of their business so I would say you know it took a few trials and errors to do that I mean from the outside it looks like a beautiful you know exponential growth you know from the inside we broke a lot of things very often and we fixed them even at the organizational level so I think it's a it's a learning process yes yeah so kind of talking about like scaling up the and changing the go-to-market team a big part of your go-to-market team was always as opposed reporting to your chief product officer of the of the company how did that come about so the well actually it's rooted in the what we did by leading with customer growth or customer usage the one year into the life of the company we hired the head of product who is really like the third co-founder of the company and he was the one who was spending most of his time trying to make deal with customers and ended up running the early iterations of the of the sales team before we we hired professional sales leadership to do that and by the way that's another piece of advice again if you have the occasion if you are running a product-led growth company even though you shouldn't call it this way I really encourage you to start by running sales from product and only try to hire specialized sales after that one reason as I mentioned earlier is that you build a better culture in product and you understand your customer problem better another reason is that at least for us when you're a small startup it's hard to attract the very best sales leaders it's kind of the opposite of engineers like when you start from scratch you get the best engineers because they want to shape everything build everything from zero and make it their thing for sales is the opposite for sales you tend to recruit and attract the very best people when you have some scale and something that can be accelerated something that has a high likelihood of being very very very successful if it's made it right yeah that makes makes sense and that's definitely something we've seen seen at Ivan and Candidl we tried to scale up sales too early and it didn't really work out so we ended up scaling the company just by creating better products and talking to our customers and and that's how we got to got to the scale of like 10 million as I as I mentioned before and so by the way I'm an investor in Ivan it's been it's been fun to see you to see it grow yeah really happy to have have you on the I hope you're going back to work after that by the way yes yeah good yeah so you know talking about the company so you know we both started building products for people that you know like ourselves people that we thought you know we would appreciate what we're building but now another I think important important part about building company companies and products is like so what you know what's the identity like who are you and what do you look like and and all that so yeah and I see you have a you have a crab by the way the first time I saw that that was wondering what it was about you know I was wondering if it was a finished thing you know but yeah it's I mean so Ivan's identified by a crab and some people have asked me if it's a seafood business that's not not quite the case but we appreciate seafood and we do have you know company traditions of crayfish parties which is a great Nordic tradition but the identity has is really a big part of the company and we figured out what we want to do much earlier than we figured out how do we actually want to look like we wanted to have a kind of a fresh look look for Ivan we have four founders at Ivan and and we had some debate around should we look like a letter a or should we look like a crab and you know we had some different opinions between the founders so I asked my my then three-year-old daughter to to tell us what we should should be and she selected the crab and that's that's how we've always been being you know working with crabs but like so what about the you know the dog the data dog like the dog so at least you know you don't get the quick and always get the question do you like dogs or do you have a pet dog and you probably don't get that with the crab but the and the sad answer I'm going to break all the all the myth here but I don't have a dog my co-founder doesn't have a dog we call the company data dog initially it was a code name because in our previous company the biggest driver of 10 operation was a very large Oracle database and we called the production machine machines dogs and data dogs were the portion databases and data dog 17 was a database we lived in fear of you know if it went down everything went down so it was the name of pain for us it turns out everybody loved the name like the people remember data dog so we we dropped the 17 so it wouldn't look like a myspace handle and then we we look for a logo for it and we had the one of the first employees was a designer yeah who also followed us from our previous company and he produced a whole list of dogs and most of them were you know attack dogs alpha dogs dogs with sharp teeth and no small eyes and like things that that spell like performance technology you know the future etc and then there was a puppy and everybody said I want the puppy so and I think in the end that it ended up being maybe the smallest choice we've done at a time which was something that can be identified and that also represents the fact that we're here to make life easier not to be you know another problem something scary for our customers yeah well I think you've succeeded very well and on that end you know everybody I think you know loves the dog so thank you for sharing your story it's great thank you all right excellent