DeepSummary
The transcript begins with Ethan Matroski, a partner at Venrock, introducing the episode's guest, Alex Rosenblatt, who was the former Chief Marketing Officer at Datadog. Rosenblatt explains what Datadog does and how he joined the company in 2013 as employee number 11, coming from a background working with VMware technology. He describes the early days at Datadog, sharing an office with architects, and sensing the groundswell of companies moving from VMware to AWS cloud computing.
Rosenblatt recounts his process of interviewing Datadog's early organic customers to identify the key problems the product solved for them, which centered around handling the dynamic nature of the cloud, easy dashboarding, and consolidating metrics across multiple systems. He focused Datadog's go-to-market strategy exclusively on those three use cases for the first several years. As large enterprises like banks began adopting AWS rapidly around 2017, Datadog had to build out an enterprise sales motion in addition to their original inbound, self-serve model.
Rosenblatt shares insights into what enabled Datadog's explosive growth from 2017 onward as the cloud computing market took off. He emphasizes investing heavily in high-touch, in-person marketing channels like trade shows and field events over digital advertising. Rosenblatt provides advice for marketing leaders on aligning around key metrics and instrumentation from the start. The episode concludes with a look at Rosenblatt's mentors, plans for the future, and a brief overview of his career journey.
Key Episodes Takeaways
- Focus marketing efforts exclusively on solving the key problems identified by your earliest customers.
- Invest heavily in high-touch, in-person marketing channels like events over digital advertising.
- Align upfront on KPIs and how marketing performance will be measured before planning tactics.
- Build operational rigor and discipline from the start as if you are already a large company.
- Be willing to make big investments in channels that demonstrate clear ROI, even at an early stage.
- Separate marketing motions and messaging may be required for enterprise vs. mid-market/SMB customer segments.
- Study mentors who complement your skillset in areas like large-scale operations and sales.
- Keep an eye on major market shifts that could spark exponential demand for your solution.
Top Episodes Quotes
- “We were always super disciplined and running as if we were a big company even when we were eleven people. And a lot of how to do that that came from Amit, and I had the benefit of taking all those lessons learned for over a decade from them.“ by Alex Rosenblatt
- “From a philosophical perspective, the best selling experience that you can have is in person. People to people.“ by Alex Rosenblatt
- “I would say the first thing to try to focus on is to forget about the campaigning, forget about the product marketing, forget about all that stuff. But think about KPI's and instrumentation. For those KPI's, you want to know what you're trying to aim for with all of your efforts and the budget that you're going to spend, and you want to make sure that you have alignment with all of the people that are going to grade you on that.“ by Alex Rosenblatt
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Episode Information
Running Through Walls
Venrock
6/26/24
Alex Rosemblat, former Chief Marketing Officer at Datadog, speaks with Venrock partner Ethan Batraski to discuss his 11-year run at the helm of Datadog’s Marketing Team and what’s next for his career. Rosemblat shares insights into leading Datadog’s go-to-market strategy, advice for other marketing leaders tackling this for a new product or company for the first time, his biggest learning from Datadog and more. During the conversation, Rosemblat recommended Digital CMO's Guide to Marketing Measurement by Bryan Semple.
Book mentioned: https://vnrk.co/3VuFvxg