PagerDuty (YC S10) now at $100M in ARR | Hacker News Reader

PagerDuty (YC S10) now at $100M in ARR

pagerduty.com

35 pointsmamatta27 comments

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Back of the envelope guesses for my own satisfaction:

">$100MM yearly" is, let's say, $8.5MM monthly.

">10,000 customers" is <15,000 (or they would have used that), so maybe 11,000 to 13,000.

That's around $650-$750 per customer per month.

"Hundreds of thousands of active users" means maybe 250,000-400,000.

That's 20-35 users per customer, when split between 11,000-13,000 customers.

That comes out to $21-$34 per user per customer per month, average (you can see pricing tiers here: https://www.pagerduty.com/pricing/).

(I don't know if they make money off contracts not available on their pricing page.)

One thing that surprised me about PD is that their enterprise sales team didn’t want to play ball on an all you can eat license for a flat annual price.

Because of this, they are really at risk of being replaced in large companies that can fund a team to maintain a paging system as that ends up being cheaper than 5k licenses.

Pagerduty is great. Well worth it.

Congrats!!! That's amazing!

Great job PagerDuty team! I love your product (except at 3AM). Keep it up.

> Women account for 50 percent of the company’s engineering leadership team

Surely this isn't some coincidence. How does one achieve this without some degree of sexism?

Seriously? I’m sure you’re first to comment about the inherent sexism in 90% male engineering leadership teams.

Companies that focus on seeking out qualified talent from underrepresented groups have a competitive advantage, by exploiting the inherent prejudice in their competitors to access an undervalued talent pool. This in turn attracts even overrepresented talent that is motivated to work for teams with these principles.

No, I'm just not one to declare inherent sexism if it's less than 50%

But you do if it’s 50%, the actual population distribution.

Yeah, not a sexist standard at all.

75% of teachers are women; 84% of nurses are women; 82% of vets are women; 90% of landscapers are men; 88% of truckers are men; 88% of miners are men; 97% of loggers are men;

48% of newspaper publishers are women; 42% of pharmacists are women; 47% of real estate agents are women;

27% of "Computer systems design and related services" are women

Okay, so CS-related jobs clearly are far from the worse in terms of gender ratio. Don't hear much about inherent sexism in other industries. I'm not convinced that this industry is inherently more or less sexist than others, which is why I included some jobs where it's actually close to 50%.

Also, you can't just compare to the general population, because you simply aren't hiring from the general population, as you are hiring people with a specific skillset. That is why many low skilled jobs that aren't labor-intensive are close to 50%

Statistics are from: https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat18.htm

edit: formatting and grammar

> 75% of teachers are women; 84% of nurses are women...

> Don't hear much about inherent sexism in other industries.

You should listen more.[1][2]

[1] https://sites.psu.edu/civic/2017/02/14/gender-discrimination...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/sunday-review/why-dont-mo...

glad you brought those up. Sexism can indeed happen anywhere. No one is saying it doesn't happen (I hope)

However it's not conclusive whether sexism towards men or sexism towards women has made the ratios the way they are. Surely it's some factor, but how much?

Many professions that used to be nearly 100% male are now more than 50% women, while some that used to be nearly 100% has stayed well below 50% women. Why is that? Sexism doesn't explain it for me because that implies people in some professions are inherently more sexist than others and I'm not convinced of that

Look, you seem earnest here. It’s really not a big mystery. Generally, lower paying more menial jobs have been “women’s work” while men have monopolized the higher paying jobs. There are exceptions, status is a factor as well, but generally men have worked together as a class to monopolize the most desirable work. Same for white people. Look for money and status and you’ll find a fairly strong pattern across industries.

He has a point if just by the math. I get it you want to support women, but many companies do discriminate against perfectly qualified men in order to get that. There is a far smaller supply of qualified women in engineering and engineering leadership right now.

I've been on a team before where one member was adamant about throwing out resumes from white men for the sake of diversity. I know it happens.

So yes, the company probably did partake in sexism and discrimination to get there. Otherwise they are very lucky and a statistical outlier when it comes to qualified female applicants applying.

You offer no evidence, only unsourced anecdotes. Reaching out to underrepresented groups is not the same as discriminating against massively overrepresented groups. How likely are women to apply to organizations that reflect status quo sexist attitudes? A reputation for fairness can act as a beacon for undervalued talent.

It’s really disappointing to see organistions legitimize discrimination in their efforts to support diversity for the PR/talent acquisition signaling. Actively discriminating against white men is no different than discriminating against other races and genders.

I too have seen what you’ve described take place.

I think you need to familiarize yourself with employment law. Specifically the idea of a protected class:

Protected Class: The groups protected from the employment discrimination by law. These groups include men and women on the basis of sex; any group which shares a common race, religion, color, or national origin; people over 40; and people with physical or mental handicaps. Every U.S. citizen is a member of some protected class, and is entitled to the benefits of EEO law. However, the EEO laws were passed to correct a history of unfavorable treatment of women and minority group members.

https://www.archives.gov/eeo/terminology.html

The idea that men are being discriminated against is a farce.

It's dscrimination by definition if you're throwing out resumes based on the color of someone's skin and what is between their legs. You can argue all you want that it isn't illegal, but that doesn't make it any less alienating for those of us on the wrong side of it. Equality of opportunity is what we should aim for not equality of outcome.

> He has a point if just by the math

Mathematically the percentage probably falls on a bell curve and is heavily dependent on priors like industry and workplace culture. Given the large number of companies we should expect at least some outliers to occur naturally. Additionally almost every company should expect to be outliers in some kind of arbitrary metric.

I wouldn't say anyone's resume should be thrown out, but building a team with diverse backgrounds and ways of thinking is a reasonable goal. A team of the top n qualified applicants (as individuals) isn't at all likely to be the best qualified team.

You don't have to be sexist to attract women in leadership. Women engineers aren't rare by absolute numbers, but rare as a % portion of total engineering leaders.

If they promise and deliver on a culture where women in leadership can thrive and attempt to recruit smart women, then more women will join. Success breeds success.

Thanks for the thoughtful reply. Having trouble reconciling it with my reasoning though, which is: if some group of people are overrepresented in some category, it is less likely to be a coincidence; i.e., I doubt it's because the people there are just less sexist than everyone else

> if some group of people are overrepresented in some category, it is less likely to be a coincidence; i.e., I doubt it's because the people there are just less sexist

You have simply defined “overrepresentation” in a sexist manner (50% women).

overrepresented given some pool.

Do you have data that suggests said pool is 50%, instead of replying to all my comments and calling me sexist?

“In 1970, only 7.6% of physicians were female. Today, approximately 30% of full time physicians are women and about 50% of medical school students are female. The vast improvement in statistics is not only promising but also inspiring for other divisions of the workforce that have not seen that quick of an improvement. However, upon diving deeper into statistics, it’s clear that gender still plays an unfair role in the success of a doctor. Between 80 to 90 percent of leadership roles in medicine, like medical school deans, are filled by men...”[1]

Your concept of a “pool” is as sexist as thinking that a hospital with more than 7.6% women physicians in 1970 was a result of discrimination against men.

The advance of women in medicine is not an “over representation”. It is closing the gap on underrepresentation due to systemic sexism (with still more work to do). This is beginning to happening in CS and other high wage fields traditionally reserved as men’s work. Your argument merely seeks to bastardize and turn the very terminology of sexism against this effort.

[1] https://sites.psu.edu/civic/2017/02/14/gender-discrimination...

In Sweden during 2012, over 99% of professional stone layers where males. This is professionals that install bathrooms, construct kitchen walls and stone floor. Similar, two other profession during same year had over 99% gender segregation and that was dentist nurses and midwifes with females being the dominating gender.

Then there were additional 3-4 professions with exactly 99% gender segregation. Mechanics (male), nurse secretary (female), but I don't remember the names of the other. All those professions existed where for every minority gender there where hundred or hundreds employed of the majority.

Is this proof of systemic sexism, and if so, what conclusion can we draw? Remember that in Sweden the number of employed women and men is only off by less than 1%, and only 12.5% of the population work in a profession where the majority gender is lesser than 150% to the minority. Of those 12.5%, men was that year slightly more likely to work in a gender equal profession.

I understand your point. I guess I am trying to highlight the fact that most sexism/racism these days are systematic. The people aren't probably less/more sexist than everyone else. But, they can build a culture that is less sexist.

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