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

forbes.com

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

#91

Post by skrebbel »

chillacy wrote: post #79
pauldix wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Their homepage gives one absolutely no idea what they do or what it's for, so I strongly doubt they make the most of their money from startups.

Just to illustrate, here's the subheadline from a random company that sells a lot to startups (guess who):

    Modern products for sales, marketing and support to connect with customers and grow faster.
And now the Pagerduty subheadline:

    Resolve and Prevent Business—Impacting Incidents Quickly for Improved MTTA and MTTR
I mean, seriously, "Prevent Business"? Why would you want to prevent business? This stuff is the insanity of million dollar contracts.

(also they wear suits)

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

#92

Post by throwaway2223 »

skrebbel wrote: post #91
chillacy wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Their homepage gives one absolutely no idea what they do or what it's for, so I strongly doubt they make the most of their money from startups. Just to illustrate, here's the subheadline from a random company that sells a lot to startups (guess who): Modern products for sales, marketing and support to connect with customers and grow faster. And now the Pagerduty subheadline: Resolve and Prevent Business—Impacting Inc…

Read carefully – the tagline is Resolve and Prevent Business-Impacting Incidents...

Also, the website seems pretty straightforward: if something bad happens on the servers, PagerDuty helps notify the right person to resolve it.

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

#94

Post by skrebbel »

throwaway2223 wrote: post #92
skrebbel wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their homepage gives one absolutely no idea what they do or what it's for, so I strongly doubt they make the most of their money from startups. Just to illustrate, here's the subheadline from a random company that sells a lot to startups (guess who): Modern products for sales, marketing and support to connect with customers and grow faster. And now the Pagerduty subheadline: Resolve and Prevent Business—Impacting Inc…

Read carefully – the tagline is Resolve and Prevent Business-Impacting Incidents... Also, the website seems pretty straightforward: if something bad happens on the servers, PagerDuty helps notify the right person to resolve it.

Thanks. I had genuinely misread that em dash as, well, an em dash. I hadn't seen that you could it like a single word, which is obviously how it was meant. Edited.

Still, the difference is enormous. Your explanation is so much better. Eg you used words like "servers" and "something bad" and "notify the right person". I still maintain that their landing page scares startup founders away and that we can safely deduct they don't make the majority of their money from VC funded companies.

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

#96

Post by IronWolve »

Cpoll wrote: post #67
IronWolve wrote: post #49

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…

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

Use visual voicemail, then you can clear your voicemails without actually calling it, treat them like texts.

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

#97

Post by daniel_iversen »

indigodaddy wrote: post #88
pauldix wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Except Atlassians market cap is $20 billion :-)

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

#98

Post by borplk »

exclusiv wrote: post #80
IronWolve wrote: post #49

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!

Too many weak points of failure on that setup for an alerting system.

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

#99

Post by vonmoltke »

chimeracoder wrote: post #8
benjaminwootton wrote: post #4

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

> Amazing how a relatively niche product like this can have such a huge valuation. Shows how big the market is. Is PagerDuty exactly "niche"? The core product - providing a third-party system that handles the mechanics of paging people during a production issue - is something that virtually all software companies could use, in theory. It's hard to think of a SaaS company that's less niche than Pagerduty (again, focus…

> The core product - providing a third-party system that handles the mechanics of paging people during a production issue - is something that virtually all software companies could use, in theory.

I think "virtually" is a bit strong. There are still a lot of software companies that build software that doesn't rely on company-controlled production systems.

Also, in practice companies that have large-scale production systems tend to have dedicated 24-hour human monitoring.

Thus, I do think PD is hitting a niche within a niche: small-medium sized companies that rely on always-up servers.

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

#100

Post by hunterjrj »

yashap wrote: post #35
holstvoogd wrote: post #3

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 mean, we have no idea what they’re planning to do with the money, it could be used for acquisitions to branch out from being a “1 product” company. Or it could be pumped into sales and marketing. There’s no guarantee that it’ll be used for new features. Also, I’m a pretty light user of PagerDuty, but what has been getting worse and worse over time? From my usage it’s been reliable software, that lets me set and mod…

My prediction: they'll release yet-another-ITSM tool like ServiceNow, etc.
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