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PagerDuty S-1

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Re: PagerDuty S-1

#71

This makes them probably the second ever YC company to go public, the first being Dropbox. Also related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=758653

Super quick napkin math on YC's investment. Many of these assumptions will be wrong.

    YC investment: $120,000 [0]
    YC shares: 1,050,000 [1]
    PD market cap: $1.3 billion [2]
    PD share price: $20.23
    YC investment value: $21.25 million
    YC ROI: 175x
This is a ~4x return on the S10 batch. In that same batch you have Stripe, which looks like it could be a 3000x+ return for YC.

Notes

[0] - This could be less, I don't remember the dates YC started messing with this.

[1] - The 3 founders hold 13,670,067 shares, or 91% of 15M shares. I assume YC has 7% of 15M.

[2] - I assume their Sep 2018 raise valuation as the price. I'm not confident the public will value this the same.

Re: PagerDuty S-1

#72
post #15
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good market now, bad market likely in a year or two.

Why do you think bad market likely in a year or two?

Compared to earlier periods in history, us stock market prices have been very high for past few years. this doesn't necessarily mean us stocks are overvalued -- maybe all alternative investments have similarly high prices, or equivalently, low yields. But, lots more room for stock prices to go down in future than to go up.

Ignoring hand waving comments about market prices, re: us economy, arguably we might be about to see an upward trend in the unemployment rate, which is a leading indicator of recession, although perhaps part of the increased unemployment in the last published statistics was caused by the government shutdown.

https://financial-charts.effingapp.com/usa-unemployment

Re: PagerDuty S-1

#73
post #3
post #2

> If we fail to offer high-quality support, our business and reputation could suffer. I don't know how common this is in S-1 filings but it stuck out to me. Support is often viewed as a cost center, I love that PagerDuty makes it such a high priority. Edit: After some research, it turns out this is common. Docusign, Dropbox, Okta, Zuora, and MongoDB all have this statement exactly or similar.

> Support is often viewed as a cost center Support is a cost-center for B2C companies, but one of the most important parts for B2B.

Support is a cost-center for most B2C companies.

Re: PagerDuty S-1

#74
post #16
post #4

Professional marketer perspective: Sales and Marketing is around 60% of revenue at 47 million a year. Advertising is around 5 million a year, so the rest of the spend looks like sales costs, content production, and maybe event marketing. The media spend seems to be mostly adwords: "The effectiveness of our online advertising has varied over time and may vary in the future due to competition for key search terms, chan…

The Facebook advertising spend is most likely remarketing, not post/page promotion.

Could be. We have used Facebook ads to provide branding cover at events. You set a super tight geofence for the campaign and saturate everyone at the conference. The modern equivalent of putting ads in the conference bathroom.

Re: PagerDuty S-1

#75
post #65

PagerDuty feels like abandonware. It hasn't changed in the last 4-5 years.

When I call my insurance or bank, I get a pleasant voice interface. When PagerDuty calls my carphone (or worse, my motorcycle helmet communicator), I get an inhuman civil defense robot from 1980 that only accepts touch-tone inputs.

But, it absolutely never fails.

Re: PagerDuty S-1

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh, that is a big negative sign for me, because they have an an "employer active" account. In other words, they pay for the privilege to get reviews deleted. > 100% approval rating of our chief executive officer. So I am 99.99% sure that HR was tasked with removing bad reviews ;-)

Is there any evidence that glassdoor lets employers do this? I think glassdoor actually specifically says that they won't, unless it violates a law somehow. They even specifically state that they "don’t take sides in factual or contractual disputes between employers and reviewers." https://help.glassdoor.com/article/I-m-an-employer-What-can-...

Also anecdotal: our employer "highly encouraged" us to write glowing reviews of the company as a marketing effort to make the company look better to potential hires.

Re: PagerDuty S-1

#77

PagerDuty feels like abandonware. It hasn't changed in the last 4-5 years.

Well compared to victorops it's 5 years ahead. We recently switched off victorops to PD. The victor-ops scheduling UI is crazy clunky. Also PD seems to page faster, and the mobile app is better.

Re: PagerDuty S-1

#78
I set my PagerDuty to the meow sound and I often refer to our processes as meow driven development as in I don't like my phone to meow desperately.

Re: PagerDuty S-1

#79
post #16
post #4

Professional marketer perspective: Sales and Marketing is around 60% of revenue at 47 million a year. Advertising is around 5 million a year, so the rest of the spend looks like sales costs, content production, and maybe event marketing. The media spend seems to be mostly adwords: "The effectiveness of our online advertising has varied over time and may vary in the future due to competition for key search terms, chan…

The Facebook advertising spend is most likely remarketing, not post/page promotion.

I'm sure they do remarketing. I'm saying that their pure acquisition spend on FB doesn't look high.

Edit: They have no live ads, so they are not running FB retargeting even:

https://www.facebook.com/pg/PagerDuty/ads/?ref=page_internal

Re: PagerDuty S-1

#80
post #75
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I call my insurance or bank, I get a pleasant voice interface. When PagerDuty calls my carphone (or worse, my motorcycle helmet communicator), I get an inhuman civil defense robot from 1980 that only accepts touch-tone inputs.

But, it absolutely never fails.

I don't know if I would go that far, but the service is quite reliable. I have experienced some spot issues with message and alert delivery over the years, but overall, reliability is strong with this tool
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