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PagerDuty (YC S10) Raises $90M at a $1.3B Valuation

forbes.com

71–80 of 109 posts

Re: PagerDuty (YC S10) Raises $90M at a $1.3B Valuation

#71
post #47

Sorry, but the first thing that comes to my mind when I read the headline is that we are in another economic bubble with valuations like this.

I remember when I first ran across PagerDuty I thought to myself, "wait, I think at my last job we just had a couple of perl scripts do that..."

When Dropbox was announced for the first time there was a similar comment. :)

Re: PagerDuty (YC S10) Raises $90M at a $1.3B Valuation

#72
post #70
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what happens when the box those Perl scripts live on goes down, or loses connectivity?

The same thing that happens when PagerDuty's AWS availability zone goes down or loses connectivity. Exactly like it did in June. PagerDuty is not magical.

I don't believe I said, or implied, it was. I also don't think it's particularly apples-to-apples to compare a box with a couple NIH Perl scripts and a service with $100mm+ in annual revenues for whom that's their sole job. I promise you, they aren't just in a single AZ.

Re: PagerDuty (YC S10) Raises $90M at a $1.3B Valuation

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they're really having 100MM recurring revenue, couldn't they just borrow money from the bank without losing equity?

Banks don't like to lend money to company with no tangible assets.

Banks do lend against receivables.

Re: PagerDuty (YC S10) Raises $90M at a $1.3B Valuation

#74

I was a PD customer for 3 years at FarmLogs. There was literally zero innovation or development on that product during the entire time there. It was abandonware. I am shocked that they're dominating this space with such lackluster enthusiasm about their own product. I'm not just referring to a lack of new features... it’s a lack of improving their core product. It's buggy and painful to use. I can’t tell you how many…

I was a PD customer for about the same length of time at my last job, but I do recall a couple of 'innovations'. Incident timelines and incident tracking were pushed reasonably hard, and not at all anything I cared about.

Here's what I'm looking for as a user:

- primary / secondary escalations pulled from a single roster without overlaps - add / remove people from roster without fucking up who's on call next

But it's pretty obvious they're more focused on listening to fence-sitters than paying customers. Which may be a viable strategy, considering their new valuation.

Re: PagerDuty (YC S10) Raises $90M at a $1.3B Valuation

#75
post #53
post #47

Sorry, but the first thing that comes to my mind when I read the headline is that we are in another economic bubble with valuations like this.

They passed $100M in revenue. Assuming their growth and other numbers are good, this isn't crazy at all. The only thing that is different is that this was a private funding rather than an IPO. Used to be that companies would go public by the time they got here.

I noticed you said revenue and not profit. It wasn’t that long ago that companies were expected to make money in order to be considered successful.

Re: PagerDuty (YC S10) Raises $90M at a $1.3B Valuation

#76
post #72
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same thing that happens when PagerDuty's AWS availability zone goes down or loses connectivity. Exactly like it did in June. PagerDuty is not magical.

I don't believe I said, or implied, it was. I also don't think it's particularly apples-to-apples to compare a box with a couple NIH Perl scripts and a service with $100mm+ in annual revenues for whom that's their sole job. I promise you, they aren't just in a single AZ.

No, what you did was infer "a couple perl scripts" meant "a box", as though it's not possible to geodistribute perl scripts. The entire point of the post you replied to was expressing amazement that this task could even warrant someone's entire job, because in many, many IT departments around the world, monitoring is both taken seriously and not nearly as expensive as PagerDuty.

It's a valid opinion, and your faux-Socratic response came off as needlessly condescending, that's all.

And if you read June's outage report, they are in multiple AZs... and it didn't help.

Re: PagerDuty (YC S10) Raises $90M at a $1.3B Valuation

#77
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they're really having 100MM recurring revenue, couldn't they just borrow money from the bank without losing equity?

Article says that it's for potential acquisitions. I'm not a banker, but I assume they don't make loans for those kinds of operations. Also, they charge interest. Ultimately, it's a question of what the most effective (cheapest) way to add capital to the balance sheet is. They almost certainly could have raised venture debt (they probably already have an agreement in place), but this was probably deemed a more cost e…

> I'm not a banker, but I assume they don't make loans for those kinds of operations.

Generally not banks per se, but bondholders definitely do. That’s PE’s entire business model.

Re: PagerDuty (YC S10) Raises $90M at a $1.3B Valuation

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Penny-wise and pound foolish. I can't imagine you are so big that $1/day/user is meaningful and less cost effective than spending an hour on your internal system a week.

As an engineer I agree. But I try hard to keep grounded in the irrational real world that I occupy. So I have to respect the reality that I have to work with the irrationality, not against it.

If you're bearing the costs of irrationality... then that might be something to keep in mind.

Re: PagerDuty (YC S10) Raises $90M at a $1.3B Valuation

#79
post #53
post #47

Sorry, but the first thing that comes to my mind when I read the headline is that we are in another economic bubble with valuations like this.

They passed $100M in revenue. Assuming their growth and other numbers are good, this isn't crazy at all. The only thing that is different is that this was a private funding rather than an IPO. Used to be that companies would go public by the time they got here.

In the first tech bubble, yahoo was making tons of money from ads placed by other startups, who pumped VC money into ads, and VCs spent money liberally since they saw huge returns on yahoo. The whole thing was cyclical.

If Pagerduty makes their money from startup VC money, could a similar thing be happening here?

Re: PagerDuty (YC S10) Raises $90M at a $1.3B Valuation

#80

We just consolidated all our remote offices into a global corporate account, we all had pagerduty setups for our alarming systems, solarwinds, nagios, email, etc. I've been using pagerduty for years, and I've been getting other admins to switch from private emails to it, so no more single point of failures. They just had to be shown how simple it was to configure and use. I won't wake up in the middle of the night to…

Same here. I need a phone call to pay any attention. I use UptimeRobot and their RSS feed to pipe into a Zapier Zap which uses Twilio to call me and read me the site that is down in a British voice haha. Easy to setup, works and really cost effective!
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