Tejada: An IPO is only an exit for private investors, not the company
Jennifer Tejada · Hyperscaling At Scale with PagerDuty's CEO, Jennifer Tejada | SaaStr Software Community · Oct 16, 2021 · at 7:01
PagerDuty CEO Jennifer Tejada discusses how founders and tech companies should conceptually view their public market debut.
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“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”
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“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.”
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: 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.”
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.”