Speaker 1 (00:03):
From the library of the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad streets in New York City, you're inside the ICE House, our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange on markets, leadership and vision and global business. The dream drivers that have made the NYSE an indispensable institution of global growth for over for 225 years. Each week we feature stories of those who hatch plans, create jobs and harness the engine of capitalism, right here, right now at the NYSE and at ICE's 12 exchanges and six clearing houses around the world. And now welcome, inside the ICE House. Here is your host, Josh King of Intercontinental Exchange.
Josh King (00:46):
I'll be on call tonight. It's a phrase uttered by many of us and one of the reasons why we're constantly checking our smartphones or refreshing our email inbox when the kids go to bed. Perhaps company news is about to break. Maybe you're a journalist waiting for a source to call with a scoop or a surgeon waiting to find out if you'll be called in to operate in the morning. I can't help but think back to 1999, the premiere of the pilot episode of The West Wing, where the show opens on a similar scene. We see the cast, CJ, Toby, Josh, Sam, and Leo, as their pagers go off simultaneously. We soon learn the source of the alert, President of the United States, Jed Bartlet has crashed his bike into a tree and all hell breaks loose at the white house. 10 years later, it's 2009. Software engineer, Alex Solomon is working for Amazon in Toronto.
Josh King (01:35):
He'd written code for the website, tested it, deployed it and was managing his systems in production. Work was ending for the day but he was stuck on PagerDuty, aka, carrying a pager for the rest of the night to alert him if any issues arose that needed his immediate attention. We arrive at the present day, 2019. Remember Alex? He, along with two other Amazon engineers, Andrew Miklas, and Baskar Puvanathasan, turned PagerDuty into a product, a tech platform that manages on-call scheduling and alerts employees to any problems that might be unfolding. Today PagerDuty is used by over 11,200 organizations and including 82% of tech companies in the Fortune 500. An article in Forbes described PagerDuty as a business most customers hope they will seldom need to use. It seems that PagerDuty was born out of Murphy's law. Whatever can go wrong will go wrong often at the worst possible time.
Josh King (02:36):
The company initially began as an application for instant management and has grown rapidly. Now over 500 employees strong, not only working to alert clients of potential disruptions or fire drills, but also to put them on offense, offering analytics on which operations are most effective and setting alerts of traffic spikes so the client can capitalize on the opportunity. It's one of those great days at the NYSE. The image of a CEO on the bell podium ringing the bell, surrounded by senior management and looking out over hundreds of employees who made it possible, including Pagey, the company's mascot who looks more like it should be on the sideline of the Super Bowl.
Josh King (03:15):
Well, this morning was the NYSE's version of the Super Bowl as PagerDuty went public on the New York Stock Exchange. Last night shares priced at $24 and today they opened at 36.75 and at last check it's hovering around $38 up 60%. joining us in the library today of the New York Stock Exchange is the CEO who was brought in in 2016 to scale up the company's growth and prepare PagerDuty for what just happened on the floor and continue that trajectory now as a public company. We'll uncover the future of digital operations management with Jennifer Tejada, the CEO of PagerDuty, right after this.
Speaker 3 (03:55):
Tencent Music Entertainment Group is the largest online music entertainment group in China. We operate the four largest online music apps, including the social entertainment park. We are serving more than 800 million users. The user experience on TMD platform is extremely great. I look forward to have a long term partnership with New York Stock Exchange. Tencent Music Entertainment Group is now listed on New York Stock Exchange.
Josh King (04:24):
Joining me today is Jennifer Tejada, Chief Executive Officer of PagerDuty. Jennifer joined PagerDuty as CEO in 2016, a move that VC legend Marc Andreessen called adding octane to jet fuel. Prior to leading PagerDuty she was CEO of Keynote Systems before its acquisition by Dynatrace in 2015, where she led the company to double digit profit growth. She got her start in marketing at Procter & Gamble, that's NYSE ticker symbol PG, and her career has led her literally around the world making stops in Sydney and now San Francisco. Jennifer, welcome inside the ICE House.
Jennifer Tejada (05:00):
Thank You for having me.
Josh King (05:02):
It's been a momentous stay for PagerDuty, Jennifer, from standing at top the bell podium to the frenzy of media interviews, has it all sunk in yet as we sit at the end of this day?
Jennifer Tejada (05:11):
No, I feel like I'm watching someone else's life from a distance. It has been just an absolutely exhilarating, incredible day.
Josh King (05:20):
Around $38 a share up 60%, quite a pop. You have some explaining to do about why there was such a gap on the opening day?
Jennifer Tejada (05:30):
We're really thrilled with the support that we've seen from the market today. And while we know it's only one day, we're big believers in the long term opportunity for PagerDuty, largely because every business is trying to become a sophomore business. And as that happens, developers are increasing in their influence in decisions that get made in the business and consumers are increasingly demanding as well. You want your app to run perfectly. You want your coffee at the push of a button on your remote or lap. And PagerDuty helps developers and IT teams, support teams and security teams make sure that everything runs smoothly in the three seconds that you want it to be perfect.
Josh King (06:08):
So describe how this day went for our listeners. Was it everything you envisioned?
Jennifer Tejada (06:14):
It started very early. I talked to different people in the team that were getting ready. We arrived at the New York Stock Exchange and just seeing your brand up in a banner in the front of the building of such an historic place is an epic thing. We had group pictures out front and then we walked into to the exchange and you could literally feel the excitement. And getting out on the floor, I think the best thing about today was being able to look out at employees and our three co-founders. People who have been at this for 10, 12 years who have taken on a lot of personal risk to create opportunities for others and just see the sheer happiness and the pride on their faces. That makes every day of my job well worth it.
Josh King (06:59):
I'm looking at a tweet you sent at 8:43 AM this morning. My dad always said you're only as good as the people you surround yourself with. I'm surrounded by a brilliant, bighearted, committed and crazy team of Dutonians. Is your mom and dad proud today?
Jennifer Tejada (07:15):
I think my mom is proud. My dad is no longer with us but I suspect he's pretty happy too.
Josh King (07:20):
What kind of lessons did your mom and dad instill in you early on to get to this point today?
Jennifer Tejada (07:26):
I come from a big family and we were all expected to carry our own load. We all had jobs by the time we were 10, whether it was paper routes or babysitting. And so, we come from a clan of a strong work ethic. It was expected that we would take on leadership roles as part of service to our community and so, running a company while not something I imagined I would do is something that does sort of feel natural to me now. And the lessons I was taught was to really focus on outcomes, that actions shout and words whisper. And for us the outcomes all come down to our customers and our users seeing value every day, having PagerDuty make their lives a little less stressful and help them run their businesses a little better. And I think today, at least the market seems to understand that's what we're doing.
Josh King (08:15):
Actions shout, words whisper. I'm looking at another tweet from maybe a couple days ago. I think you're on the middle of the roadshow. On the road with some early morning wisdom from our friend Ben Franklin, who said, "Well done is better than well said. Focus on the outcomes." How did the road show go for you?
Jennifer Tejada (08:31):
I was really expecting the road show to be this grueling kind of terrible thing. And we had a blast and I think that's partially because it's a great story to tell. I had terrific partners on the road and our CFO, Howard Wilson, and our chief of staff, Katherine Almeida. And we met just a lot of really interesting people that are smart and ask great questions. And they challenge you sometimes. But like I said, it's a fun story to tell. The numbers are good and it's a very early market. I think a lot of companies are just trying to become software companies. So we see a long runway.
Josh King (09:04):
Where did you grow up?
Jennifer Tejada (09:05):
I grew up in the Midwest. I was born in Minnesota. We moved around a lot and I ended up at the University of Michigan before I moved out west.
Josh King (09:12):
With all of the world traveling you've done, your roadshow actually brought you back home almost.
Jennifer Tejada (09:16):
That's right. It was kind of fun being in Chicago where the accent sounded very natural and familiar.
Josh King (09:22):
So the first question that NYSE President Stacy Cunningham asked me to ask you is, why did you decide to move to San Francisco?
Jennifer Tejada (09:30):
San Francisco is the center of the tech industry, and I really wanted to get back into high growth. And I also wanted to raise my daughter in a place where she would have exposure to math and science and see a culture of innovation. So those were the driving reasons to be there. Increasingly I feel like I'm a citizen of the globe because I don't get to spend that much time in San Francisco. And I love the industry and at the same time, I think there's a lot we can learn from the rest of the world.
Josh King (09:59):
So you've just finished the roadshow and you're probably looking forward to getting back to your own bed in Northern California and seeing your kids again, but if I can ask you one more time to repeat the elevator pitch you made on that roadshow, maybe for investors who weren't as familiar with PagerDuty, what did you tell investors they'd be buying into?
Jennifer Tejada (10:18):
So PagerDuty is a company that provides a digital operations management platform for modern businesses. We serve both the smallest most disruptive digital innovators and the largest captains of industry across the Fortune 500. In fact, a third of the Fortune 500 are PagerDuty customers. We take complex signals coming from any software enabled environment in the very technical ecosystem that supports the backend of just about every company and brand experience. And we help users understand what's happening before a customer or an employee feels the impact of a problem. We then orchestrate teams. We get the right problem to the right person at the right time, which enables companies to protect revenue, to improve the efficiency and the productivities of their team. It gets people back to the innovative work that matters to them. And increasingly it delivers a better brand experience for the end customer.
Jennifer Tejada (11:13):
And since every company is going through some form of digital transformation and developers are becoming increasingly influential in how businesses work, our platform is often used outside of the dev teams in IT and security and customer support increasingly in sales and marketing and finance. It's a horizontal, ubiquitous platform. It's very easy to use. It's like a consumer grade app sitting on top of one of the most resilient and secure enterprise platforms in the world. And we believe in a world that's always on. It's our job to keep it that way.
Josh King (11:46):
So smoothly said in the room, Jennifer, as you're giving your elevator pitch to potential investors, but they weren't necessarily buying that company. They were buying the leadership behind that company. I want to go back to that high praise that Marc Andreessen gave you. Bringing Tejada on was like adding octane to jet fuel. I listened to Andreessen on Brian Koppelman's podcast a few weeks ago, the bets he makes on companies and Andreessen Horowitz are aren't necessarily on ideas they're on people. Let's hear a listen from Marc at a talk that he gave recently at Stanford Business School.
Marc (12:19):
Yes, Definitely. And in fact in the abstract, there's kind of two models that are both actually working quite well. The kind of reference model now is the Mark Zuckerberg Sheryl Sandberg model. And I work with Sheryl at Facebook and I tease her all the time. She's lost control over her own name. It's now become a proper noun. Every 24 year old technical founder is like, "I need a Sheryl." And I'm like, "So do 400 other people. Unfortunately, human cloning is not quite at the stage yet where we can fulfill everybody's need."
Josh King (12:45):
So, that's Andreessen talking at Stanford Business School. You worked with a bunch of technical founders. Were you there with Sheryl? What did Andreessen see in you?
Jennifer Tejada (12:54):
I don't know so much that I was there Cheryl because in the case of PagerDuty, Alex stepped down and I replaced him as CEO. But I do think that one of the things we have in common is the ability to recognize that different people bring different qualities to a team and that when you bring them together in the right way, they produce better than the sum of the parts. And in my case, Alex had the foresight and the humility to recognize a need to bring in a more experienced leader to help scale the business. He's probably super unique in how much freedom and autonomy he gave me to build out the business, to drive the strategy, to sort of change the trajectory of the company. And he's been a terrific partner in that regard. Equally, I have a huge respect for founders.
Jennifer Tejada (13:41):
I'm not somebody who starts something in the garage. I think I add more value as the company is scaling and growing. And I have an incredible amount of respect for Andrew and Baskar and Alex and what they were able to do, particularly as the rest of the world was saying, "Is this really that important? Is this a feature or a product or is it really a company?" And they were rejected many times until they proved it through the numbers. And so I'm very proud of the three of them and I'm very excited for their success.
Josh King (14:13):
I think you called yourself a great adoptive parent in relation to that relationship.
Jennifer Tejada (14:15):
I love this company like it's my own baby. I wasn't there in the delivery room, but I feel like it's a part of... It's an extension of me and I am an extension of it. And this is a very special culture. These are people who are easy to love.
Josh King (14:29):
I think I saw you tweet out at some point in the roadshow your appreciation and affection for University of Michigan, particularly in the liberal arts education that it gave you. The ability for a person schooled in marketing to translate technology into plain English. I've heard enough podcasts with tech founders to know it's a rare talent you go there and listen to Kara Swisher and mark Zuckerberg and you just... Your head will spin. How do you approach the task of going from technology into English that any of us can understand?
Jennifer Tejada (14:58):
Well, I think I have probably I over index in intellectual curiosity and I like to understand how things work and in my process of learning and sort of pulling the pieces apart to understand them, I'm able to simplify and distill sort of what's important. And then I've surrounded myself with people who are great communicators and also deeply technical to help pull all the pieces back together. I do think it's important to focus on how value gets created and who is the person that you're targeting. What are their challenge? Where are the problems that live that are currently not solved and how do you find solutions for them in a unique way? And that's one of the reasons PagerDuty has been successful. We solve a problem for our users and in doing so ultimately benefit the companies that they work for.
Josh King (15:49):
In September, Jennifer PagerDuty raised 90 million in its Series D round led by T. Rowe Price in Wellington bringing total funding, if I'm correct, to 173 million in evaluation of 1.3 billion, joining you in, along with the cavalcade of unicorns. That's the list of startup companies with evaluations greater than a billion. You could have hung out for a while as a private company, not have the burden next month of giving your quarterly numbers, getting on a conference call with analysts and having everything, all your numbers exposed every 90 days. Why was this the right time to go public for you?
Jennifer Tejada (16:24):
You know, it's the right time for PagerDuty because we want to bring the power of our platform to the whole world. And creating the brand reach and the awareness to do that, getting our enterprise customers and our future enterprise customers comfortable with the viability and the long term opportunity for the company is helped by being a public company. And I also think that it's a great way to attract fantastic talent in a talent war that's worse than anything I've ever seen in my career. So, the timing is right. We've done all the right stuff from an operational perspective to get prepared and the growth is there and leadership is there. So, I couldn't see a different way forward.
Josh King (17:04):
How did the culture of PagerDuty evolve, if at all, over the past two years while the anticipation of this day began to creep into the hundreds of folks that work for you?
Jennifer Tejada (17:13):
We haven't spent a lot of time talking about the IPO internally. We always focused on our near and midterm goals in terms of company performance, the objectives in terms of product that we're trying to deliver for our customers. And we always talked about it in terms of maximizing our optionality, driving consistent, sustainable growth in an efficient way and delivering products and innovations to the market that our customers love and see value from. And in doing so, it kept people pretty focused on the end game. Fast forward a few months later when we told the company we were filing and flipping to public, there were a lot of excited people in the room, but at the same time, what I've said to the team is, this is like just getting to the start line of the next leg of the race that we're in. And we're going to compete with bigger boats. And we can't control the weather and the conditions, but we're well equipped. We have a great team and we're a pretty resilient bunch. So, I'm looking forward to it.
Josh King (18:14):
You look at what today offered and I've watched you guys on the podium. I watched Pagey and all his, her friends assembled on the floor and then I saw your CNBC interview, surrounded by screens and blazen with a PagerDuty logo. Certainly the benefits of the exposure that this building, New York Stock Exchange gives you is one big advantage. But, as you were thinking about where to list your shares, what were you and your CFO and your executive team thinking about the opportunities that were ahead?
Jennifer Tejada (18:42):
Well we thought about the market that we serve and how either exchange might benefit us in getting to know that community better. And you can't beat the companies on the New York Stock Exchange. We thought about the day and what that opportunity might look like for our teams and our investors and our board and importantly, our employees who couldn't all be here in New York today. But most of all came down to the people and the partnership. And I met Stacy, I don't know about a year ago in passing at a conference. And there was very quickly an alignment of values and interests. And she and her team have been a terrific partner to PagerDuty, to me personally. And when it came down to really understanding what the New York Stock Exchange could offer us as a company, it just felt like a no-brainer and I'm thrilled with our decision.
Jennifer Tejada (19:35):
It was really exciting to have Stacy join us on the podium today but, we've got to know John and Betty and others over the course of the last year, the marketing team has been phenomenal. I mean, even just the team that has handled me all day, getting me from one interview to the next and making sure I'm standing in the right place. It took a long time for trading to open and partnership is what makes the world turn. And I don't think this is a short term relationship. I think we're in it for the long haul with you all. So thank you very much.
Josh King (20:03):
Well, thank you very much. One of the cornerstones, Jennifer of PagerDuty, is to alert clients the platform errors before seemingly small issues turn into massive headaches. Looking back to Black Friday sales this past November, let's hear from CNB's Squawk box.
Speaker 6 (20:20):
We have some new numbers on holiday shopping on this cyber Monday. Adobe says that last Friday alone pulled in a record $6.2 billion in online sales that's up 24% from just a year ago. More than a third of those purchases were made on smartphones or other mobile devices. And the fastest growing day for e-commerce is, Thanksgiving. Thursday online sales total $3.7 billion of 28% from a year ago.
Speaker 7 (20:46):
You see the numbers in terms of traffic, just how many people were actually showing up in stores, the foot traffic.
Speaker 6 (20:51):
Was it good?
Speaker 7 (20:51):
It was down. No, it was down by every measure. [crosstalk 00:20:54]. It's a lot easier. You don't have to, you can avoid the crowd. [crosstalk 00:21:01]
Speaker 6 (21:01):
I'm down 25%.
Speaker 7 (21:03):
And on usage.
Speaker 8 (21:04):
On usage. No, but this goes back to the whole idea of Danny Chelsea, for example, and all of these other analysts running around the malls, trying to figure out what's going on as if that's a way to indicate anything anymore. It may very well be that that's not really what measures.
Speaker 7 (21:18):
By one measure it showed the foot traffic was down five to 9%. And on one tracking company that actually uses cameras to track things from a year ago.
Josh King (21:25):
So these guys who are on CNBC on Squawk Box were so enthusiastic about the online sales, but it wasn't all good news though. Many popular online retailers, experienced website crashes as a result, perhaps the hardest hit was J.Crew, whose website was down for nearly the entire holiday weekend, potentially costing them over a three quarters of a million dollars in sales and impacting over 300,000 customers. Seems like a use case for PagerDuty to alert the developers that the website couldn't sustain the heavy traffic.
Jennifer Tejada (21:55):
It's one of the most common use cases for PagerDuty. And retail e-commerce is a really important industry for us. And at the time I don't believe J.Crew was a customer. That probably could have been avoided. What I would tell you is of our customers tell us they can lose up to a half a million dollars a minute. Think about that every two minutes, a million dollars going down the drain because you're not leveraging the opportunity that's there. And a consumer is waiting and they're going to go somewhere else if it doesn't work out. So, using machine signals and machine learning to identify symptoms before they become diseases or storms before they become disasters, is what we're very good at. But our core competency is really in orchestrating teams, in automating the process of determining who needs to do what work when, to compress the time it takes to understand these issues, address these issues and get back to business.
Josh King (22:46):
Consumers are also more impatient than ever. Jennifer, I read that the average user will leave after three seconds if a site isn't loading. How is the demand for instant gratification factoring into PagerDuty's purpose for providing real time action?
Jennifer Tejada (23:02):
Instant gratification and consumer demand is a huge tailwind for PagerDuty. And unfortunately, it takes the average company about four hour to solve an incident. So there's this huge orchestration gap between what the consumer needs and what the business can deliver upon. And we're trying to help them close that gap.
Josh King (23:19):
Your focus is to pinpoint issues such as outages or in slow downs or as what they say, I think triage, notify, fix, learn. How has machine learning and AI made it easier for users to get an issue alert or better yet, be aware of a growing issue before the real trouble starts?
Jennifer Tejada (23:37):
Well, we leverage machine learning based on human behavior events and signals that we capture from software enabled environments, workflows, business metrics and incidents themselves. And one of the ways we can use machine learning is by recognizing certain relationships between events. We can tell that certain signals storming together will likely become an incident that we've seen occur before. We can tell people who are trying to manage a current incident that it looks exactly like an incident they've experienced 335 times in the last quarter. In doing that, we then can serve them with recommendations on how to resolve the incident based on a play or a set of steps that they've run in the past. And we automate that process with the click of a button. We can also bring the person who resolved the incident the last time and... So, the human doesn't have to make a lot of those decisions. They don't have to go searching through a directory to figure out who does what. They don't have to stare at a computer to try and figure out how certain events are related to one another. The machine does that for you.
Josh King (24:37):
Alleviating the burden on the human, letting the machine do the work gives you an abundant supply this thing we call data. And PagerDuty uses a vast data set from, I think over 10 or more years of experience with 300 tech integrations, which you combine with machine learning and AI, what data is most important for companies to grow?
Jennifer Tejada (24:59):
I mean, I think it's different for every different business. I think in our case, we sit at the intersection of human behavior and machine data and bringing those two things together is very unique. We get an understanding of why certain people respond more effectively to others from certain signals, why certain teams are more productive and why certain applications and technology is more expensive to run or runs more smoothly for the company. And that can help you make better forward looking decisions as opposed to just solving incidents better. And so, the way we see the platform evolving is we've gone from helping teams respond more effectively to being more proactive and predictive and increasingly preventative. And that ultimately benefits all of us, trying to order coffees or do our workouts online or whatever the case may be.
Josh King (25:45):
With data come is responsibility. The big op-ed this morning in the New York Times, Kara Swisher, "We're not going to take it anymore." A reference to the great movie and now play network. She begins two decades ago at the dawn of the internet age. In an era before smartphones, before apps, before all manner devices that monitor everything from your car healing practices to your dating preferences, the Sun Microsystems co-founder Scott McNealy made a startling claim, "You have zero privacy anyway," he said, "Get over it." You sit on a pile of data and privacy issues are of paramount importance, not only your customers but to every consumer. How do you take this responsibility to manage it?
Jennifer Tejada (26:26):
We take this responsibility very seriously and we're transparent about how we use data. It's made publicly available in our data policy. And we really want feedback from our customers in terms of how they want their data leverage. We don't collect much PII data. We know people's mobile phone number and often their email address, but that's about it. We're thoughtful about how we leverage that data and how much information we give customers in terms of how we're using that information. When we use data in an aggregate way, it's encrypted and anonymized. So it's also safe. We take security very seriously.
Josh King (27:00):
Data is important but only if there's a capable workforce to leverage it and since coming on board, you've doubled the company's head count, including an executive leadership team that is 50% female. 40% of all PagerDuty management roles are also held by women. Was bringing more women into the company a deliberate move to take advantage of inefficiencies in the labor market?
Jennifer Tejada (27:21):
I was deliberate about building an organization that reflects the complexion of the community we serve. And the world is a pretty diverse place. So it started with ensuring we had balance at the leadership level and that's what we are. We're a gender balanced team. Half of our team was born outside the US. So we have a global purview. And the tech industry is not well known for its gender diversity much less it's diversity in general. And so we've set out to make operational changes to demonstrate by example, that it is possible to have a high performing tech company that is diverse and inclusive in nature. And in fact, for us we believe it's a business imperative and a competitive advantage. It means that we can not only attract people from different backgrounds, different lifestyle choices, different genders, different ethnic backgrounds, but we also can create access for people who otherwise might not see an opportunity in the tech industry.
Josh King (28:17):
Last year you also achieved gender pay equity within one to 2% job for job. What message do you have for other companies and CEOs who are trying to increase the number of women on their teams?
Jennifer Tejada (28:28):
Well, I think you should be trying to increase the diversity across all of your teams. And the earlier you start, the easier it is. It's easier to change the complexion of your organization or your equitable pay when your head count is growing. Soon as that head count growth slows, it gets harder and harder. So, start now, start early and then stay on top of it. And keep a very open dialogue with your employees and your partners. I mean, every every time we recruit, the final candidates laid needs to be half underrepresented people. And we push those demands back on onto our recruiting partners. And that drives change in the system, not just within PagerDuty. And so we continue to look for ways to lead the industry or share our learnings with the industry and even sometimes share our failures with the industry, to help move them forward faster.
Josh King (29:20):
As we wrap up, Jennifer, I read a piece where you told PagerDuty's founders, "We aren't disrupting ourselves fast enough." Here is a report about a story brand based in Rochester, New York, which learned that lesson the hard way.
David Gillon (29:33):
It's a Kodak moment, but it's not a happy one. Eastman Kodak, a pioneer in photography for more than a century has declared bankruptcy. I'm David Gillon reporting for the New York Times. Late last night, Kodak, which brought the world the brownie, the Instamatic and of course, Paul Simon's Kodachrome, filed for bankruptcy protection. Kodak was long synonymous with camera, but in recent years it seemed like a company almost stuck in time. Almost everyone carries a camera nowadays, but almost all of those cameras are digital and almost none are made by Kodak. Simply put, the world changed, but Kodak didn't, or at least not fast enough.
Josh King (30:11):
Jennifer, how close did PagerDuty come to being like Kodak? And now that you're beginning your journey as a public company, how do you prevent that from happen?
Jennifer Tejada (30:19):
Well, PagerDuty has been innovating for the vast majority of its history. So I wouldn't compare us to Kodak anytime soon, but that doesn't mean we rest on our laurels. As recently as this year's company kickoff, the theme was no limits. And it's really about encouraging a culture of experimentation, encouraging people to feel uncomfortable, or get comfortable feeling uncomfortable, meaning they're pushing themselves a little bit. They're trying to find new ways to do things as opposed to just accepting the status quo because that's how innovation happens. It's also how you continue a dialogue with your customers to really understand the problems that they still have that no one else is solving for them. And that's where innovation and opportunity comes from.
Josh King (31:02):
You've estimated the digital operations management, the market that you are operating in could be worth about $25 billion based on the fact that every company will essentially become a software or tech company in order to survive, therefore needing a platform to provide the digital services necessary to perfect online user experiences. What does PagerDuty look like five years down the road you think?
Jennifer Tejada (31:25):
Well, I think down the road, you're going to see a platform that's used by employees across the business led by developers potentially, but then shared by coworkers in different departments within PagerDuty. And I think you're going to see a shift from just reactive work to proactive work or teams using PagerDuty to notify them of an opportunity and orchestrate people into that workflow to leverage that opportunity as opposed to just managing problems and challenges. And I think you'll see a global company that continues to set an example for what the future of the tech industry should look like instead of just leveraging best practices from the past.
Josh King (32:04):
The NYSE ticker symbol is PD. PagerDuty going public on the New York Stock Exchange today. Jennifer Tejada, it's CEO, congratulations on everything you've accomplished. And the road from here.
Jennifer Tejada (32:14):
Thank you so much. And we're just getting started.
Josh King (32:17):
That's our conversation for this week. Our guest was Jennifer Tejada, CEO of PagerDuty. If you like what you were heard, please rate us on iTunes so other folks know where to find us. And if you get a comment or question, you'd like one of our experts to tackle on a future show, email us at [email protected] or tweet us @icehousepodcast. Our show is produced by Theresa DeLuca and Pete Ash with production assistance crew Ken Abel. I'm Josh king, your host signing off from the library of the New York Stock Exchange. Thanks for listening. Talk to you next week.
Speaker 1 (32:50):
Information contained in this podcast was obtained in part from publicly available sources and not independently verified. Neither ICE nor is affiliates make any representations or warranties express or implied as to the accuracy or completeness of the information and do not sponsor, approve or endorse any of the content here in. All of which is presented solely for informational and educational purposes. Nothing here in constitution offered to sell a solicitation of an offer to buy any security or a recommendation of any security or trading practice. Some portions of the preceding conversation may have been edited for the purposes of [inaudible 00:33:22] clarity.
