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Comment by pm90 | Hacker News Reader

I would love to be proved wrong on this, but most of the startups that are focused on:

- Observability

- Security / Compliance

Seem like they're plays by the founders to get acquired by bigger firms (either for acqui-hire or just to augment their own "observability and/or security" offering).

I would be very curious to see a company that really make it big and remain independent in this area. It seems to me like DataDog has been the only successful company in this area, with some other honorable mentions (e.g. honeycomb.io, sentry, sensu etc.)

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I once served as a PM for a startup in the observability space.

Monitoring is a brutal industry, as engineers love to build monitoring products. There is a long tail of hundreds of monitoring startups catering to every wim that are backed by only a small handful of engineers.

On the other hand, integrating a monitoring product into a company large enough to pay for the product is extraordinarily expensive. The DevOps team might want to have end-end visibility, but they can't add the library support required to make the deal work. Supporting one companies specific libraries is unlikely to pay off for other companies.

When it comes to distributed tracing, the value proposition depends on convincing every dev team in the company that this is the best solution for monitoring.

Larger companies have an easier time "cross-selling" these features, and can sometimes win deals by simply having the capability even if its never used.

I think you're right -- if only because it's probably the most viable path to growth.

If your value prop is 'we're stable and you can trust us', and your buyers are 'large enterprises that don't like to take risks', your biggest impediment if you have a great product is that you aren't part of a company like ServiceNow.

What's the saying? "The battle between every startup and incumbent comes down to whether the startup gets distribution before the incumbent gets innovation."

Even harder when you need enterprise proof-points...

I mean, few startups in any area make it big and remain independent. It's probably just that startups in this area are more visible to you because their products are ones you might use.

> I would be very curious to see a company that really make it big and remain independent in this area

Proofpoint (PFPT) is a big security / compliance company. Market cap is about half that of Datadog.

Crowdstrike (CRWD) is another big one. Twice the size of datadog.

This seems to me because after connectivity (“solved” with service mesh) getting proper insights at scale on observability is quite hard. Security is and will always remain har as one mistake can have large consequences.

Isn't Splunk a much better example than Datadog?

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