Jennifer Tejada, PagerDuty | PagerDuty Summit 2017
>> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at PagerDuty Summit. It's our first time at PagerDuty Summit and Pier 27, our first time to this cool venue. It's right on the water between the Bay Bridge and Pier 39, beautiful view outside. Unfortunately, the fire smoke's a little over-the-top. But we're excited to have one of our favorite guests, Jennifer Tejada. She's the CEO at PagerDuty. Jennifer, great to see you. >> Thank you. It's so great to be back, Jeff. >> Absolutely. So this is, what, your second PagerDuty Summit? >> This is our second PagerDuty Summit. >> 500-some-odd people? >> I think we've had 700 through the door already. We've got a few hundred streaming online. Almost twice what we did last year. So we're really excited. We're still in the infancy stages of sponsoring an industry event, and we've been really focused on trying to make it a little different to insure that people walk away with actionable insights, and best practices and learnings they can take immediately back to their teams, and to their companies. So we've had just some awesome guest speakers and panelists here today, and it's been a lot of fun. The PagerDuty band played live at lunch. >> That's right, I saw them at lunchtime. >> Yeah, which was great. So we're having a good time. >> What are they called? The On-Calls. >> The On-Calls. I let them name themselves. >> And so, you've been here a year now. So, how are things moving, how are you moving the company along since you got here? What are some of the strategic things that you've been able to execute, and now you're looking forward? >> So, it's just been an incredible year, honestly. You always hope for a number of things when you come into a new role. You hope that the team rallies around the business. You hope that the opportunity is as significant as you thought it would. You hope that there aren't more bad surprises than you think there are going to be. PagerDuty's been so unique, in that there have been more good surprises than bad surprises. There's so much potential to unlock in the business. But probably the thing that's most amazing about it is the people, the community, and the culture around PagerDuty, and just the sense of alliance towards making the engineering world work better to insure that customer experience and employee experience is better. There's just a real sense of duty there, and there's a sense that the community is there with you trying to make it happen, as opposed to working against you. So a lot of our innovation this year, and I mean, we've released tons of new technology product, including machine learning and analytics, and going from reactive and responsive to proactive. There's a lot of stuff happening. So much of that has come from input from our practitioner community and our customer base. You just don't always have that kind of vocal engagement, that proactive, constructive engagement from your customer base, so that's just been amazing. And the team's awesome. We've expanded into the UK and western Europe over this summer. We opened an office in Sydney recently. We've shifted from being a single-product company to a platform company. We've more than doubled in size, 150 people to over 350 people. We're in 130 countries now, in terms of where our customer base lives, and just around 10 thousand customers, so really, really amazing progress. Sometimes I feel like we're a little bit of a teenage prodigy, you know? We're growing super fast, other kids are starting to learn how to play the piano. It's a little awkward, but we're still really good at what we do. I think the thing that keeps us out in front is our commitment, and all of our efforts being in service to making both the lives better of the practitioners in our community, and creating quantifiable value for our enterprise customers. >> It's interesting to focus on the duty, because that kind of came with the old days of when you were the person that had to wear the pager, right? Whether you're a doctor on call, or you were the IT person. So it's an interesting metaphor, even though probably most of the kids here have never seen a pager. >> No, I remember as a kid, my dad was in healthcare, and he had a pager, and you knew that when the pager went off, it was time. You were on-duty, you were out. And there's an honor in duty, and it is a service to the organization. Adrian Cockcroft was here this morning, VP of architecture from AWS, and known for cloud architecture that he built out at Netflix. And he said something really interesting, which is, he believes all people should be on-call, because you need the pain to go where it's most useful. And if everybody's on-call, it also creates this kind of self-fulfilling cycle. If you know you're going to be on-call, you build better code. If you know you're going to be on-call on the weekend, you don't ship something stupid on Friday night. If you know you're going to be on-call and you're a non-technical person, you align yourselves with people who are technical that can help you when that happens. So there's something sort of magical that happens when you do have that culture of being available on the spot when things don't go as planned. >> And now you've got a whole new rash of technology that you can apply to this, in the area of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Wonder if you could share a little bit, where is that now taking you for the next step? >> I think the biggest opportunity with machine learning for us is that, over the last eight years, we've been collecting a tremendous amount of data. And AI and machine learning are only as good as the data they sit on top of. So we have three really interesting data sets. We have the events and the signals that come from all of the machine instrumentation, the applications, the monitoring environment, the ticketing platforms that we integrate directly to. We have information around the workflow, what works best for most of our customers, what doesn't work. What's the best agile-centric DevOps related workflow that enables ultimate response and ultimate availability and resilience for customers. And then finally, what's going on with the people? Who are the people that work the hardest for you? Who are the people that have the subject matter expertise to be the most useful when things aren't working the way they should? You bring all of that together, and you build a model that starts to learn, which immediately means you can automate a lot of manual process. You can improve the quality of decisions, because you're making those decisions in context. An example would be, if an incident pops up, we see it in the form of a signal or a set of events. And our machine learning will recognize that we've actually seen those events before. And the last time this happened, here's what the outcome was, here's what went well and not so well, here's how you fixed it, and here's the person who was on top of it, here's the expert you need to call. So I've immediately shortened the distance between signal and action. I've gotten the people, now, that are going to come in to that process to respond to either a problem or an opportunity, are already much more prepared to be successful quickly, efficiently, and effectively. >> So you've shortened it and you've increased the probability of success dramatically. >> Exactly. And maybe you don't even need a person. That person can go off and do other more important proactive work. >> But you're all about people. And we first met when you were at Keynote and we brought you out for a Women in Tech interview. So you had a thing on Tuesday night that I want for you to share. What did you do Tuesday night? >> I was just super moved and inspired and excited. I've had the opportunity to attend lots of diversity events, lots of inclusion events, a lot of support groups, I'm asked to speak a lot on behalf of women and under-represented minorities, and I appreciate that, and I see that as my own civic duty to help lead the way and set an example, and reach back for other people and help develop younger women and minorities coming up. But I've found that a lot of these events, it's a bunch of women sitting in a room talking about all the challenges that we're facing. And I don't need to spend more time identifying the problem. I understand the problem. What I really wanted to do was bring together a group of experts who have seen success, who have a demonstrable track record for overcoming some of these barriers and challenges, and have taken that success and applied it into their own organizations, and sort of beating the averages in terms of building inclusive, diverse teams and companies. So Tuesday was all about one, creating a fun environment, we had cocktails, we had entertainment, it was in a great venue at Dirty Habit, where we could have a proactive, constructive, action-oriented conversation about things that are working. Things that you can hear from a female leader who's a public company executive, and take that directly back to your teams. Expert career advice, how some of these women have achieved what they have. And we just had a phenomenal lineup. Yvonne Wassenaar, who's the CEO of Airware, and Andreessen Horowitz come, theCUBE alumni, previously CIO at New Relic. We had Merline Saintil, who's the head of operations for all of product and technology for Intuit. Sheila Jordan, the CIO of Symantec. We had Alvina Antar, who's the CIO at Zuora. And, I'm missing one ... Oh, Rathi Murthy, the CTO at the Gap. And so, just quite an incredible lineup of executives in their own right. The fact that they happen to be a diverse group of women was just all the more interesting. And then we surprised the organization. After about 45 minutes of this discussion, sharing key learning, sharing best practices, we brought in the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus, who are just embarking, in the next 10 days, on a trip called the Lavender Pen Tour, where they're looking to spread love, hope, and social justice, and proof that diversity delivers results, in the southern states, where equality equals gender equality, and I think challenges for equal opportunity for the LGBTQ community are really significant. And Mikkel Svane, who's the CEO of Zendesk, introduced me to Chris, the director there, about a week before, and I was so inspired by what they're doing. This is a group of 450 volunteers, who have day jobs, who perform stunning shows, beautiful music together, that are going to go on four buses for 11 days around the Deep South, and I think, make a big difference. And they're taking the Oakland Interfaith Gospel Choir with them. So just really cool. So they came, and I mean, when's the last time you went to a diversity event and people were singing, and dancing, and toasting? It was just really different, and everybody walked away learning something new, including the number of male executives, champions that I asked to come as my special guest, to support people in building sponsorship, to support these women and these under-represented minorities in finding connections that can help them build their own careers, they learned a lot at the event. It was incredible. I'm really proud of it, and it's the start of something special. >> I love it. I mean, you bring such good energy, both at your day job, and also in this very, very important role that you play, and it's great that you've embraced that, and not only take it seriously, but also have some fun. >> What's the point if you're not going to have fun? You apply the growth mindset to one of the biggest problems in the industry, and you hack it the same way you would a deeply technical problem, or a huge business problem. And when we get constructive and focused like that, amazing things happen. And so I now have people begging to be on the next panel, and we're trying to find the next venue, and got to come up with a name for it, but this is a thing. >> And oh, by the way, there's better business outcomes as well. >> I mean, I did a ton of business that night. Half that panel were customers that are continuing to invest and partner with PagerDuty, and we're excited about the future. And some of those women happen to be machine learning experts, for instance. So, great opportunity for me to partner and get advice on some of the new innovation that we've undertaken. >> Well, Jennifer, thanks for inviting us to be here. We love to keep up with you and everything that you're doing, both before and in your current journey. And congrats on a great event. >> My pleasure. Absolutely. Thanks for having me. >> She's Jennifer Tejada, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE from PagerDuty Summit. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)
SUMMARY :
It's right on the water between the Bay Bridge It's so great to be back, Jeff. So this is, We're still in the infancy stages of sponsoring So we're having a good time. What are they called? I let them name themselves. the company along since you got here? that the community is there with you trying of the kids here have never seen a pager. that can help you when that happens. that you can apply to this, in the area here's the expert you need to call. the probability of success dramatically. And maybe you don't even need a person. And we first met when you were at Keynote and I see that as my own civic duty to help lead the way I mean, you bring such good energy, You apply the growth mindset to one of the biggest problems And oh, by the way, on some of the new innovation that we've undertaken. We love to keep up with you and everything Thanks for having me. Thanks for watching.
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