These are the two juiciest paragraphs for SaaS geeks:

> We have a highly efficient go-to-market model, which consists of a self-service tier, a high velocity inside sales team, and an enterprise sales force. As of June 30, 2019, we had approximately 8,800 customers, increasing from approximately 7,700, 5,400 and 3,800 customers as of December 31, 2018, 2017 and 2016, respectively. Approximately 590 of our customers as of June 30, 2019 had annual run-rate revenue, or ARR, of $100,000 or more, increasing from approximately 450, 240 and 130 customers as of December 31, 2018, 2017 and 2016, respectively, accounting for approximately 72%, 68%, 60% and 48% of our ARR, respectively. Further, as of June 30, 2019, we had 42 customers with ARR of $1.0 million or more, up from 29, 12 and two customers as of December 31, 2018, 2017 and 2016, respectively. As of June 30, 2019, our 10 largest customers represented approximately 14% of our ARR and no single customer represented more than 5% of our ARR.

... and ...

> Our business has experienced rapid growth and is capital efficient. Since inception, we have raised $92.0 million of capital, net of share repurchases, and we had $63.6 million of cash, cash equivalents and restricted cash as of June 30, 2019. We generated revenue of $100.8 million and $198.1 million in 2017 and 2018, respectively, representing year-over-year growth of 97%. Our revenue was $85.4 million in the six months ended June 30, 2018 compared to $153.3 million in the six months ended June 30, 2019, representing period-over-period growth of 79%. Substantially all of our revenue is subscription software sales. Our net (loss) income was $(2.6) million, $(10.8) million, $0.5 million and $(13.4) million for the years ended December 31, 2017 and 2018 and the six months ended June 30, 2018 and 2019, respectively. We generated operating cash flow of $13.8 million, $10.8 million, $10.6 million and $3.0 million in 2017 and 2018 and the six months ended June 30, 2018 and 2019, respectively. Our free cash flow was $6.0 million, $(5.0) million, $1.5 million and $(6.4) million in 2017 and 2018 and the six months ended June 30, 2018 and 2019, respectively.

Very impressive SaaS business, especially in such a competitive space. And I'm a happy customer for several years. This chart of their quarterly revenue run rate going back to 2016 is truly amazing and will make every SaaS founder green with envy:

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1561550/000119312519...

Their financials on the surface and the growth look really good. Congrats to the whole DataDog team on this! I used it in my previous job and loved it. I love how quick they were to add support for new things and how easy it was to configure everything.

Since they are a SaaS startup which deals a lot with data and compute, I wanted to see their infra cost. I was looking through the consolidated financials[1] and I didn't find something that referred to infra explicitly. I am guessing "Research and Development" operating expense will cover employee compensation(stock and salary). So, would the infra costs be the one in "General and Administrative"?

[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1561550/000119312519...

Love their product, hate their shady billing.

I'm in the middle of a bad experience with Datadog's billing/sales team. My monthly Custom Metrics usage wasn't being billed for because they said they didn't have a way to track it. Naturally my usage gradually increased because without the monthly bill increasing. When renewing a while back they went over my usage on phone and quoted prices, same usage profile as this month. Now this month my bill increased almost 400% and they said "oh we just soft-launched billing for this feature without notifying you". No heads-up when communicating with them that I wasn't actually being billed for my usage.

Still trying to get a refund for this curveball bill. Their sales team keeps forever escalating to management, leadership, and they say it has to be approved by a C-level. It's been over 20 days and they say it might take 2-3 more weeks before C-level makes a decision on credit or not. I've never heard of this many layers involved in something like this before with other companies.

Their sales teams are ridiculously aggressive. I've received 9+ calls from them this month, have told them that my org isn't interested, and won't be revisiting the decision for a few years. It's soured me on them altogether.

Seems like more S-1 filings have been making it to the front page of HN. Is that because more people on HN are interested in them, or because there's been a recent uptick in S-1 filings? And if the latter, is there any reason?

Their sales/marketing teams are way too aggressive, IME. They cold called me on my private number, despite being on the do-not-call list. At several conferences they've the one booth one had to be careful to stay away from, lest one get into pretty aggressive sales talks (as in, "not interested" and starting to walk leading to booth folks walking with me for a bit, and talking to me).

Their product is great.

But the people I met there last year during a maybe-but-not-quite acquihire adventure we're also great. I wish them all the best with this IPO.

For those interested, I wrote a blog about what it's like for a solo founder to (almost) be picked up by company like Datadog.

https://blog.checklyhq.com/my-acquihire-adventure-with-a-lar...

This company has a shite hiring process. Ask you to submit pull request on github with answers to a challenge (and you can publicly view other people's answers as it is a public repo).

The answers were straight forward and I didn't pass. And I could see my answers were the same as other people submitting. Very odd company.

My service contract expired with them this Friday. Opted not to renew because of price change in synthetics product 100x initial release. The product is reliable, but billing is troubling.

I've been meaning to learn how to read and understand an S1. Does anybody have any recommendations?

Love the product through and through, my only annoyance is "live tail" and log lines in general show up from the top scrolling down, aka the opposite of how regular logs scroll.

I wrote an article summarizing the S-1 and contextualizing Datadog's metrics against its competitors (New Relic, Elastic, Splunk):

https://medium.com/@jonbma/datadog-s-1-teardown-35934690e76f

A beast of a business indeed

One of the top 10 metrics they choose to highlight is operating loss in the past 6 months. They just knew what everyone was going to look for anyway!

For those interested in the financials or model building, you can grab all the tables from the S1 in a single excel file here: https://get.sentieo.com/datadog-ipo/

This was already submitted at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20781524, not sure why it didn't get marked as a duplicate.

I got to briefly/tangentially Work with Ilan at Ooyala long time ago. Brilliant guy... very well deserved this outcome for the DD team.

Are there any hints on what will their market cap be on the first day of trading?

Congrats to the whole Datadog team! I have been an avid user of it at a previous job and loved the product. Not surprised to see them have a solid business. When the product is good, people buy it.

Just for curiosity, what's the legal process to go from being a French startup to a public US company? I guess there is some paperwork.

Well done Datadog! Couldn't be happier for them—great product, great company!

What do their margins look like? Is it worth investing?

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I interviewed with them and it was one of the worst experiences I've had interviewing. Really shabby company.