Jennifer Tejada, CEO of PagerDuty

Jennifer Tejada is the CEO of PagerDuty. In a world that’s always on, PagerDuty is the leading platform for real-time operations for IT and DevOps. In this conversation, Jennifer discusses the early days, how she was recruited to become an outside CEO and the path toward PagerDuty’s successful IPO. Plus, Ethan Kurzweil, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, joins the conversation and talks about how he led the Series B investment in PagerDuty in 2014.

Key takeaways from this episode include:

• Why it’s important to position new leadership as a milestone of success: “I wanted my transition into PagerDuty to be a victory lap for [Alex, the founder], and to be a celebration of what Dutonians had built to this point and be a milestone. This was all a sign of what was possible for us in the future,” said Jennifer. “For me, that meant coming into that transition with a lot of humility and grace and appreciation and honor for all of the things the company had built so far.”
• Why company culture is a strategic initiative: “Culture is really defined by the lowest level of behavior you’re willing to tolerate, not the highest aspiration that you have in a business. We don’t hire brilliant jerks. If we identify people who are disruptive, we work with them to change their behavior,” said Jennifer. “Culture has become a force multiplier for us as a business. It’s allowed us to demonstrate more inclusive leadership in terms of the diversity of our employee base and the balance in diversity of our board and our leadership team. Which means there are people from all walks of life that are attracted to work at PagerDuty and stay at PagerDuty and it allows us to compete more effectively—and sometimes out-compete for talent.”
• The importance of delegation, especially in times of crisis: “One of the things that I’ve learned from PagerDuty and from particularly the developer community at PagerDuty is that when you undergo a major incident, the incident commander is in control and makes the decisions, not the CEO,” said Jennifer. “And thank God for that, because, at the time of one previous incident, I was traveling for business and had intermittent WiFi connection. I was really pleased with how the team managed the crisis, especially in terms of how we communicated and helped our customers during that time. When trust is your number one value proposition to your customers, your reliability is where they count on you for, literally our customers feel that if the whole world is down, at least PagerDuty will be up.”
• The benefits of pressure testing your own convictions. “One of the lessons you learn as a leader is that you’re always going to be tested—your conviction, your vision, your beliefs will be tested constantly, and that’s sort of part of the cycle,” said Jennifer. “People need to test your conviction in order to believe in it themselves.”