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

forbes.com

81–90 of 109 posts

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

#81
I remember these guys from the first TwilioCon in 2011. It was some sort of group fireside chat IIRC and they were describing how their initial product was all on Amazon with no redundancy. Of course many of their clients were on EC2 as well so when EC2 had an outage they all had to man the phones and call their clients and say "your site is down" haha. Happy for their growth and success.

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

#82

My teammate and I got really excited about pagerduty to replace our phone calling, slack messaging, spreadsheet reading slackbot. But at $29/user/month there's no way in hell management will sign off on it. We are at that point of growth where we need this service but can't justify the risk when we have something ths clunky but basically free. I wish there were more creative pricing models to get us in the door someh…

I'll second the comments about pricing. I attempted to negotiate with PagerDuty (after the sticker shock wore off), and their sales team said, "We're Number 1, so we don't really negotiate. Just pick a plan with less features or designate some users as read-only."

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

#83
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..."

You had a couple of perl scripts that integrate with 3rd parties (Slack, Pingdom, etc), manages complex on-call schedules, make phone calls, send SMSes, handles retries, and is fault tolerant across providers? That's some amazing perl skills. :-)

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

#84

My teammate and I got really excited about pagerduty to replace our phone calling, slack messaging, spreadsheet reading slackbot. But at $29/user/month there's no way in hell management will sign off on it. We are at that point of growth where we need this service but can't justify the risk when we have something ths clunky but basically free. I wish there were more creative pricing models to get us in the door someh…

I'll second the comments about pricing. I attempted to negotiate with PagerDuty (after the sticker shock wore off), and their sales team said, "We're Number 1, so we don't really negotiate. Just pick a plan with less features or designate some users as read-only."

Thanks. It's good to know not to bother. For our needs it probably makes sense just to add openduty or Cabot to our existing engineering services.

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

#85

plz stop.. PD should be a cash cow, stop 'innovating' and 'growing', just deliver what it says on the tin. Over the past few years I've been using PD it is becoming worse and worse, it seems to me because they have to keep their developers busy. They could of course just make the core product better, but thats not cool enough i guess.

I havd this pet theory that keeping the developers busy will be the downfall of the human race.

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

#86

Amazing how a relatively niche product like this can have such a huge valuation. Shows how big the market is.

> Shows how big the market is... I think the huge valuation has more to do with how absurd startup valuations really are[1], and less to do with showing how big the market for a niche product is. [1] Behind the gloss of absurdly high startup valuations https://42floors.com/blog/startups/absurdly-high-valuations Discussed here => https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6874838

Capital market has strong influx which they don't know what to do with. On the other hand they have liability to create money from money. We usually don't realise but investors needs as much opportunity as startups does.

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

#87

plz stop.. PD should be a cash cow, stop 'innovating' and 'growing', just deliver what it says on the tin. Over the past few years I've been using PD it is becoming worse and worse, it seems to me because they have to keep their developers busy. They could of course just make the core product better, but thats not cool enough i guess.

I havd this pet theory that keeping the developers busy will be the downfall of the human race.

"We had some extra cycles so we added a few more neural nodes and a laser . . ."

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

#88
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…

Maybe they can buy Atlassian now.

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

#90
post #68
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't even answer Now if only I could get it to not leave a message.

Yeah, this kind of sound a like a UX bug. Ideally the behaviour could be changed to match the way you’re using it, which is more of a wake up call than a call based notification system.

I feel like the core product is pretty easily replicated with Freeswitch and tailored with a little configuration. Eg: Ring a phone for 30 seconds (so as not to leave a message accidentally), if answered read back the issue (using text to speech), otherwise send the phone a text and .

Having set systems like this up for numerous clients, the latter bit is usually a case of waiting a few minutes for the on call person to either accept the alert, or failing that move onto whoever the fallback is for that person.

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