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.”