Silicon Valley is regaining a standout female chief executive in its slow march toward more diverse and balanced workforces. High-growth IT startup PagerDuty has appointed industry veteran Jennifer Tejada to serve as CEO, with cofounder Alex Solomon stepping into another executive role.
PagerDuty plays in a market deep in the technical side of what is considered the tech industry. The company handles incident responses for IT departments, telling engineers when there's an issue with their operations and helping them solve it faster. While PagerDuty's not a household name, it's a known quantity among operations engineers, working with more than 7,700 customers such as IBM, Red Bull and WeWork and partners with more than 250 other companies such as Cisco and Slack. With Tejada, PagerDuty's hope is to make the company a force known even outside the growing DevOps community.
As she led Keynote to its acquisition by Dynatrace in June 2015, Tejada had heard of PagerDuty and its "almost cult following" among its users, she says. "It was a neat brand, even though it's a small company," she says. By the numbers, PagerDuty was already one of the larger startups in Silicon Valley. The San Francisco-based company grew revenue by 90% and enterprise bookings by 95% in the past year, based on what FORBES estimates to be tens of millions in sales. The company employs more than 200 people and is close to break-even in its cash flow, Tejada says, a relative rarity among high-growth startups. The company's also raised about $40 million from top investors including Andreessen Horowitz and Bessemer Venture Partners, most recently valuing the company north of $200 million, according to data from PitchBook.
"Adding Jennifer to PagerDuty is like adding octane to jet fuel," says Andreessen Horowitz cofounder Marc Andreessen. "Working with PD's brilliant founder Alex [Solomon] and colleagues, we think she'll turn a stealth success into a cornerstone industry franchise."
Tejada says her liberal arts background and early experience managing consumer brands at Proctor & Gamble will give her a fresh perspective when she goes in to close large enterprise deals, a focus for PagerDuty moving forward. "In Silicon Valley we talk a lot about the tech, but at the end of the day a leader needs a solution that they can justify as making them better at their job," she says. That means focusing solutions like PagerDuty on business outcomes that directly impact a company's financial health. "We help you solve problems before they become big problems, and the big problems get to the right people faster so they don't expand," Tejada says. "People get called for problems they can actually solve. And for the organization, you solved the challenge before it has a revenue or public or consumer impact."
PagerDuty found its new CEO through a combination of executive search and investor hustle. After a few months catching her breath, Tejada was ripe for a high-growth, faster-moving startup compared to the private equity-backed Keynote. She spent months with Solomon, the outgoing CEO, to determine a fit; Solomon is staying on as CTO focused on long-term product strategy and will remain on the board.
Tejada rejoins a powerful but still small group of female CEOs still making inroads in the white male-dominated tech CEO ranks. A board member at Puppet Labs, Tejada says she already refers companies to qualified women when they're looking to add new directors and plans to continue PagerDuty's work to support hiring in diverse backgrounds not limited to gender alone. "To the extent we can demonstrate through delivering results, and showing you can build a rich and successful and engaged culture on the back of diversity, even if you have to look a little harder for it, there's an opportunity for me to make an impact," she adds.
