[ Got to confirm that Forbes has backed off a bit on their ad-blocker denial -- interesting. ]
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.
PagerDuty is one of the unique companies you can hate (because it wakes you up in the middle of the night) but also love and recommend to everyone. If you don't have it in your stack, get it.
I have no relation to anyone working at PageDuty. I'd like some real customer experience (but I can't tell if you are really a customer or not). Sorry if this is not allowed.
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?
We use it at my company. I'm not intimately familiar with all the features, but here's what I can tell you:
-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.
Pagerduty puts alot of focus on reliability. They have redundant telephony providers and are hosted in multiple cloud provider data centers. You don't want your alerting service to go down with your service.
When AWS goes down, Twilio, hipchat, and many other services can go down with it.
Others have already mentioned most of what I like, but I'm also a fan of the muting. If an alert has already fired, additional instances of the same problem don't result in a new alert. No more opening your mail client to find 5000 emails with the same stupid "An error happened" subject line.
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.
OT but what's with the splash screen? I can't get pass it (Chrome, Android). This is the second time today I've been unable to read a Forbes article. Why do they care so much about showing me some useless quote that they risk making the site unusable?
It happened to me too (Chrome, desktop), but after backing out and loading the page again it didn't stop at the spash screen. It seems as though the first load sets a cookie to indicate you've seen it on the first visit.
The quote page usually contains a large ad. If you have an ad blocker, it looks like they care about the quote, but that's just extra flourish and not the primary purpose.
Tejada's experience seems to be all related to corporate management
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.
No one said that professional CEOs always fail. I said it's a bad sign when one is hired. Are you arguing it's a good sign, or that tech companies do better with non-founder managers?
Yes, and I am telling you that is an ignorant stereotype.
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.
Also in this case the CEO is staying on as CTO which is a good sign that this is a strategic hire rather than some internal issues leading to ousting of the CEO.
Founder CEO staying on as quasi CTO while professional CEOs are brought in? Nobody tell OP about what Larry Ellison's done with Mark Hurd and Safra Catz.
The parent unilaterally said that it was a bad sign. That is an expression of certainty. Not 'it could be a bad sign,' or 'I believe it's a bad sign,' but 'it is a bad sign.' That is demonstrably and obviously false. I know what they said, and what they said is a ridiculous, stereotypical view of the value of professional managers who often lend far more value than technical people want to give them credit for.
If you want to point out the kind of value professional managers bring to the table, please do so. Such an approach, in my opinion, makes the debate productive and moves the discussion forward.
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.
There is no discussion. OP made an incorrect, absolutist statement that was ignorant and demonstrably false and I am pointing that out. Your view, frankly, is just as ignorant. You assume that world-class business schools like HBS only teach things that apply to traditional manufacturing businesses... Perhaps you ought to look at what a management student learns before asserting that. It's an incorrect viewpoint. The comment below this is literally an HBS article stating that professional managers are actually often better for the company than being founder-led. We cannot have a discussion that goes anywhere if one side of it is (1) anecdotal feelings that are not backed by research and (2) demonstrably false and ignorant statements.
There's actually a study ("Rich vs King", [1]) by HBS showing that, controlling for other factors, bringing in a professional CEO can actually maximize the value of the founders' equity.
I think in a way yes. Since Larry Page and Sergey Brin have left to do Alphabet, nothing of value has been released. Quality seems to be also down while ads are way more agressive. I wouldn't buy GOOGL.
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.