Jennifer Tejada CEO of PagerDuty on Leadership, AI, and Digital Transformation

Well, my pleasure. It's great to be back to Wharton.

Sure. So PagerDuty is a pure software as a service platform that exists to help the largest and most innovative companies in the world deliver reliable and highly available technology services. And if you think about how any business runs that you interact with as a consumer, all of those businesses are running on software and increasingly data and AI today. And the challenge is you become really reliant on the convenience, or the 24 by seven on demand availability of something, and when suddenly your brand experience isn't available to you or doesn't work effectively because of a technology challenge, you don't blame the technology, you blame the brand as a consumer. And so, as the world's been, so to speak, eaten by software and become more technology driven, reliable and available technical infrastructure, software services, applications, and increasingly, LLMs and agents have become mission critical and important. And software, like human beings, is imperfect, and we're also deploying an unprecedented amount of software and technology into the ecosystem, and now new technology in the form of LLMs, agents, applications, integrations, APIs. All that complexity leads to the storming of breakdowns, or what we call incidents. And so the way our customers think about us is we help them manage their digital operations. And increasingly, whether you're a financial services business or online travel and hospitality, a tech company, you know, a ride share platform, all of these platforms increasingly deliver the vast majority of their brand services, their experience, they drive their revenue, driven transactions, all through technology. And so it has to work, and it has to work perfectly all the time.

For sure. Yeah, the way I think about it is you would never think of NASA's mission control as back office, but that is kind of how this works. You have a combination of technology, people, and AI watching how a very complex technology organization operates, and giving you an early read on, you know, where are some things that are looking like they're acting outside of their traditional operating boundaries? Or, where do you see an early sign that something bad is about to happen? And so the goal for us and for our customers is not to just help them respond more effectively when things don't work the way they're supposed to, but to help prevent big issues from happening, and likewise, to learn from every challenge that runs on the platform. And so we've been in the AI business now for almost 16 years. We've been collecting a significant amount of proprietary data since the very beginning of PagerDuty. We started with machine learning and algorithmic AI, analytical AI, and in the past year and a half, have added generative AI, and just yesterday, announced agentic AI in our platform.

Yeah.

That's right.

It's unusually long for our industry, for sure, particularly for somebody who isn't the original founder.

That's right.

That's a great question. You know, in my early days at Procter & Gamble, in probably some of the first management training that I received there, and they did this tremendous job of putting you through an academy of job specific coursework. And one of the things they would say is, 'Act and think like an owner,' which goes a little further than, 'Spend the company's money like you would your own,' right? Some people don't spend their money wisely, right? So that might not actually be a good metaphor. But acting and thinking like an owner isn't just about, you know, trying to drive the share price or the share value up. It's, if you were running this job, or your team like it was your very own business, and that you owned all the investment in, all the outcomes, all the growth, all the challenges, like, how might you think differently? And I think so much about being a CEO, particularly in a culture of innovation, in a high growth startup, in an early public company, is about having that ownership mindset. And in some ways, you know, the company was founded by three co-founders. I sort of became the re-founder or the adoptive parent. And what's interesting about that in the early days, is you're raising that child with the other parents sitting nearby, looking on, right? And so there's a very high standard for how you adapt the company over time, how you develop new capabilities on an existing foundation, how you drive disruption, even when you may be attacking somebody's sacred cows, so to speak. And probably the most exciting thing for me has been how you first to reinvent yourself. We've been through many chapters and many transitions as a company. We were very small. You know, 30 million in ARR when I joined, less than 200 people. And now we're over 1,000 people, and close to a half a billion in ARR. And so -- and we went from being this private, you know, series A backed startup, to being a public company traded on the New York Stock Exchange for now almost six years. And so through all those chapters as a leader, it's never boring, right? You're always having to anticipate, like, what does the next leg of the journey look like? How do we need to be prepared for that? And as you get bigger, those preparation cycles take longer. You need to be further out in front of kind of what's coming. And one of the things I'm really proud of is, we did, I think, quite a good job of future proofing our platform for big data, for AI and machine learning, and now generative. We rallied around one of our core value propositions, which is trust. So you know, PagerDuty's core reliability engineering is critically important, because if we have to be up when the rest of the world is down, and our customers hold us to a much higher standard than most technology and SaaS platforms. And so in the 16 years of the company's existence, we've never had a maintenance window. A maintenance window is when you log on to something and it says, 'Sorry, we're not available. We'll be right back.' Can you imagine if you were undergoing a major technology incident, a ransomware attack here at Wharton, and the one platform that is supposed to help you detect that and manage it and resolve it and remediate is like not available for that hour? So that -- our ability to keep innovating and expanding our product set and our platform, while at the same time, delivering the level of fidelity and reliability and trust that our customers, some of the most -- I think, like most critical and highest standard holding customers out there in the marketplace, to live up to that ongoing standard, as the bar keeps getting higher because the technology gets more complex, has been a really big challenge. And we've done it while delivering very high gross margins, while continuing to grow, and, you know, while becoming a profitable company and a company that produces a lot of cash flow.

No.