Jennifer Tejada
Executive Chair, PagerDuty. On 3 shows, 4 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
executiveinvestor@jenntejada ↗LinkedIn ↗pagerduty.com ↗
Tejada served as CEO of PagerDuty from 2016 until 2026, leading the digital operations platform through its 2019 New York Stock Exchange IPO and global enterprise scaling. She previously served as CEO of Keynote Systems through its acquisition by Dynatrace and serves on the board of directors of The Estée Lauder Companies.
3shows
4appearances
42statements
5resolved
4supported
0contradicted
80%fully supported
4said about them ↓ Everything Jennifer Tejada said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Going public forces executives into fear-based, short-term decision-making
“Since I've taken the company public, you're actually kind of trained and modeled to constantly be managing risk. Like, you know, if you do this, what will the street think? If this happens, then how will that impact the stock price? And it's a lot of short-ter…”
Fast decisions made with limited information outperform slower, data-heavy ones
“If you look back on decisions that you've made in the past, ones where you've had a lot of information, ones where you've had very little information and kept score, I think you would find that the quality of the decisions you made with less information is jus…”
Tejada: All PagerDuty board members except the CEO were conflicted during fundraising
“Today, my board
Looks like a lot of venture backboards.
We have two founders and two investors and me.
It has to change because just think of the conflict, right?
I just raised around.
Everybody on the board was conflicted except me.”
Tejada: Public companies must beat and raise guidance, not just meet it
“It's not enough to meet your guidance. You have to beat your guidance and you have to raise and you have to have Not only great instrumentation on your pipeline and confidence in your leadership, but you also have to have really strong fidelity in how you thin…”
Tejada: Public markets do not forgive executive leadership gaps
“You want to have people lined up in the dugout ready to take on the next job, and that is so much more important in the public market because The market's not going to give you grace if you have an open role or a leadership gap that you can't manage.”
Tech industry faces executive talent shortage within 20 years, predicts Tejada
“And they're in a hurry, but I think we could end up 20 years from now without really well-trained executives leading businesses, because the foundational companies that used to do that for the industry are not anymore.”
Leaders without self-doubt exhibit concerning levels of arrogance and narcissism
“I think anybody who runs a meaningfully sized company or is responsible for the employment of hundreds of people or has a duty of care in a leadership role is going to doubt themselves. It's natural. And frankly, if you're not, I'd be nervous about the level o…”
Tejada: PagerDuty leadership is gender balanced and 65% immigrant
“Our leadership team is gender balanced. That was not easy to do. 65% of our leadership team is born outside the U.S.”
Tejada: Former operators understand board trade-offs better than pure investors
“When you're having conversations around executive comp or employee stock plans or et cetera, it's really great to have somebody in the room that has been through that process and really understands the trade-offs in the way an investor just may not be able to …”
Tejada: An IPO is only an exit for private investors, not the company
“I think the IPO is a really important milestone, and sometimes in Silicon Valley,
We treat it more like an exit, but it's only an exit for your private investors. It's a really important milestone for the company”
Tejada: Scaling requires actively evolving culture rather than protecting early-stage habits
“And it's actually not about protecting the culture. It's about developing the culture, building the culture that you need for the future on the strong foundation that you had as a startup, as a smaller company.”
Tejada: PagerDuty raised an unneeded Series D to test investor narrative
“And so we did not need the cash, but we raised a Series D about, you know, six, eight months before we went public in order to test our story and our narrative and our performance out in front of a number of what we now call crossover investors.”
CEOs must understand every corporate function before leading, says Tejada
“When you're the CEO, there's not a ton of time for on the job training. You really need to understand what you have in front of you and what you're working with. And that includes having some wherewithal and understanding of what each function is meant to deli…”
Professionals must feel slightly scared to remain open to possibilities
“If you're not a little bit scared in everything that you're doing, you're not being open enough to the possibilities that are out there.”
Walking one-on-ones yield more candid conversations than video calls
“I find when we're walking, we have a more candid Conversation. More emotion is leveraged in those conversations than when we're on video going through to do lists.”
Uncomfortable team accountability is a muscle that must be built deliberately
“Like you have to build that muscle to be able to have an uncomfortable conversation within a team and being comfortable and holding each other accountable to goals and commitments that we've made. And that's a muscle that doesn't just come naturally. You actua…”
Corporate board members operate on only 10% of executive management data
“When you're a board member, you're asked to approve Or advise on the basis of having about 10% of the data you're used to having as an operator.”
Early PagerDuty meetings were overly polite and unproductive, says Tejada
“And what I found was that everybody was being very careful not to get in anybody else's backyard, not to get in anybody else's grill. And it was a very nice conversation. Meetings were very pleasant, but they weren't terribly productive. And we tended to be fo…”
High-growth companies almost never reach team norming due to rapid scaling
“In a high growth company, you almost never get to norming. Like there's just no stasis because the company is changing so fast because of the scaling. And so you're kind of constantly pivoting back and forth between forming and storming. And if that's uncomfor…”
Bad news never improves with age, requiring full board transparency
“So I think part of good board management is transparency. We have a no surprises policy in my team and my board because bad news doesn't get better with age.”
The best board members ask few but highly insightful questions
“I mean, I think the most phenomenal board members I work with are the ones that ask super insightful questions in the right moment.”
Diversity must be managed like a core business initiative with explicit goals
“Treat it like a business initiative as opposed to a box checking exercise or something that HR owns. And with any important business initiative, you set explicit measurable goals with explicit milestone timing, timeframes, and you allocate resources and leader…”
Tejada: Traditional Enterprise Sales Failed For PagerDuty's Developer-First Audience
“If we tried to bring in kind of the Oracle, Splunk, elephant hunting motion, it didn't work for the way our users who tended to be developers wanted to engage with our product, and so we really had to build our own model, and it was a lot of experiments.”
The other half of the tape: Jennifer Tejada's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 4 times in 3 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Byron Deeter 2Jason Lemkin 1Harry Stebbings 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 4
2024 1 mention in 1 episode
2020 1 mention in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Jennifer's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20VCLEDGER | Executive Chair, PagerDuty | 1 | 15 | 0% 0/1 | full record on 20VC → |
 SAASTRLEDGER | Executive Chair, PagerDuty | 2 | 15 | 100% 4/4 | full record on the Official SaaStr Podcast → |
 a16zLEDGER | Executive Chair, PagerDuty | 1 | 12 | — | full record on the a16z Podcast → |