81–90 of 227 posts
The internet is mostly machines talking other machines or monitoring what other machines are monitoring. But then you can also pay for machines to watch the machines that watch the machines.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
very few other crypto companies capable of paying that much. god knows ftx wasnt investing in observability
Not on purpose, but I could imagine someone at FTX signing up for datadog, configuring it to ingest their logs without doing any estimation or setting up any guardrails and then not checking on it because things were probably crazy over there.
Since 2022 Q1, the allowance for doubtful accounts has remained under $6 million. Bankruptcy generally triggers a writedown of any associated receivables, so Datadog appears to not have had any material exposure to FTX or any other bankrupt customer.
Damn. Why not self-host something on that scale?!
Datadog prices are out of this world. I assumed their front facing prices were for the lone dev, so when I reached out as a company looking to integrate multiple of their products I expected a deal, and got very little compromise. I told them up front they were going to have to cut prices by 90% for us to consider them -- no budge. And they are pretty belligerent salesman, not wanting to leave me alone. After a while…
Their sales team is a nightmare, I had to block them on personal and company email.
OpenTelemetry is going to be an existential threat to DataDog and other companies that effectively rely on vendor lock-in to exploit customers. Not sure how companies rationalize these types of services at scale when there are so many open source options to run for a fraction of the cost. You could hire 100+ engineers and still save money compared to a 65M bill https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34540419
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could be salespeople that are paid by contracts closed, with zero regards for the consequences to the company's reputation.
How can you secure an opportunistic and resourceful sales team that's encouraged by commission, but not corrupted by it? What are some of the best ways to ensure the folks developing business leads don't sell out your future for their present? What are the best incentive structues you can provide so they don't want or need to?
The idea behind this are a few-fold but essentially:
As an engineer (now CEO/CTO), I've hated having to wait the full year for my bonus. It's just a way to lock me in for the year when my incentive to stay should be to love the work & team. I don't want to create a place to work where you're forced to stay because of some guaranteed bonus - if you want to leave, leave & then let's hire someone who finds the work engaging + we all know performance slips as you wait for the bonus.
For the sales team, it means they're incentivized to work with the engineering & product teams to make sure they get the engineers the proper feedback in order to build a better product that they can sell more easily.
We've found this has generally built a better more team-oriented & results-oriented culture. Happy to expand but overall I think a quarterly revshare for everyone is a much better end-result (other than the fact I'm now forced to care more about making sure engineers are happy but that should be a huge focus regardless...).
Edit - also worth noting that we give everyone equity so there's still a long-term focus of building a company, not just cashing out quickly.
Having never heard of datadog, Wikipedia’s summary is: > Datadog is an observability service for cloud-scale applications, providing monitoring of servers, databases, tools, and services, through a SaaS-based data analytics platform. So it checks if your servers have crashed or slowed down with a nice dashboard? Any better summaries or descriptions of what it does and how coinbase would have used it?
OpenTelemetry is going to be an existential threat to DataDog and other companies that effectively rely on vendor lock-in to exploit customers. Not sure how companies rationalize these types of services at scale when there are so many open source options to run for a fraction of the cost. You could hire 100+ engineers and still save money compared to a 65M bill https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34540419
I see cloud costs like this a lot and it really puzzles me. It seems like people would rather pay 10X+ more to just not have to think about it than even to hire other people to think about it, because then you have to think about hiring and HR.
"Here's a blank check. Just make it go away."
Of course corporate consultants run on that, so I guess it's not without abundant precedent elsewhere. I guess if you work for a big company with budget and it's not your money you really have little incentive not to take the easy path.
They paid upfront for 3 years of usage, and yes they were burning > $20m/year on datadog