PagerDuty Names Jennifer Tejada CEO
forbes.com
forbes.com
I met the folks at PagerDuty when Blekko was at a Berkeley recruiting meetup. I don't recall the technical lead who I talked to but I do remember that they had all the correct answers for the questions I posed them. At Blekko we were pleased with the high degree of both automation and quick visibility into problems of our ops stack. It was part of our "secret sauce" for being operationally efficient, and the PagerDuty folks had all the same instincts.
Given this announcement, the financials mentioned in the article, I'd expect an S-1 to drop somewhere between October and February. That would be a positive thing both for them and tech in general.
And, I agree. PageDuty is one of those terrible product ideas executed right.
Good luck guys.
The the UX side it can improve - but it's rock solid in what it does! Well done!
But why PagerDuty? I looked at it many times (especially I am an AWS customer so at every convention I see them). I can set up an alert as email or even as SMS message with AWS, by feeding only CRITICAL issues to the ops team. What other features do PagerDuty offer and how did PagerDuty save your day?
-It's easy to set up and manage different on-call schedules
-It's easy for someone to manage their own alert settings (e.g. I can add a bunch of different ways to be contacted, like "text me, then call me after 5 minutes if I haven't ACK'd")
-We've integrated it with our internal metrics collections systems so it's really easy to say, "page someone when ${complex_condition} happens"
-IIRC it's not particularly expensive and totally better than the overhead of setting up and managing your own alerting systems.
Integration was dead simple as well. I couldn't use the official client (because reasons) and it was only a few lines of Python to fire alerts from TIBCO Hawk.
When AWS goes down, Twilio, hipchat, and many other services can go down with it.
After Atlassian acquired StatusPage, I can see them going after PagerDuty (or similar) to complete their devops solution.
Shmidt wasn't a professional CEO, he was a software engineer who worked his way up the ladder and then took his experience as CEO to another company.
Tejada's experience seems to be all related to corporate management, and thus is a professional CEO.
Edit: You've edited your response so many times I can't keep up. I am not arguing any point of view. You unilaterally said that it is always a bad sign when a company brings in an experienced CEO. That is an ignorant stereotype. Sometimes they succeed, sometimes they fail. Sometimes it's a smart hire, sometimes it's not. The late Dave Goldberg taking the reigns at SurveyMonkey was an incredible turning point for the company.
I feel "professional" managers are bad for tech companies. Here are two reasons :
1. A lot of management techniques that are taught in business schools apply to traditional manufacturing based businesses. A lot of these underlying assumptions are invalid in the tech businesses.
2. Tech businesses require a deep understanding of what is possible with the current state of the art. This is requires a deep understanding of technology so that when there are fundamental changes to the landscape (which happens more frequently in tech) the company can adapt and stay relevant.
[1]: http://www.people.hbs.edu/nwasserman/rich_vs_king-proceeding...
She rocks at sales, and she knows how to push back corporate suits (keep them from interfering too much with engineering). She supports her employees over the shareholders. She's great.
That is the Jennifer Tejada I know.