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PagerDuty S-1
- walshemj 8y agoWhy would any sane person buy shares with this power vested in the board "authorize our board of directors to issue, without further action by the stockholders, shares of undesignated preferred stock with terms, rights, and preferences determined by our board of directors that may be senior to our common stock;"
- sporter 8y agoThis language describes "blank check" preferred stock -- which about 98% of IPO companies have in their governing docs. So, while you might not agree with the philosophy behind it, if it is a veto item on investing, you will have a pretty limited portfolio. See page 12 of this IPO study https://alerts.davispolk.com/10/3818/uploads/2018-non-controlled-ipo-survey.7.9.2018.pdf https://alerts.davispolk.com/10/3818/uploads/2018-non-contro...
- walshemj 8y agoId rather stick to shares where shareholders have to agree to disallowing pre-emption rights.
- miketery 8y agoI believe this is how it typically works. The board is hired by the shareholders to act in their interest. The board has a lot of powers. The shareholder if unhappy with the boards performance can fire the board.
- walshemj 8y agoDid you not read the bit without further reference to share holders - the board can issue new shares to dilute existing share holders.
- teej 8y ago> 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.
- krn 8y ago> 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.
- penagwin 8y agoPart of what Businesses pay for is support. Heck think of all the free databases/open source stuff that is funded not by the code but buy offering support/integration. EDIT: Funny though, as a consumer I'd pay a little more, say 20% more for my comcast bill if they had what I'd describe is "nice and helpful support", but if that was the case, my bill would likely be accurate, and we wouldn't have all these BS fees and charges showing up out of nowhere, which coincidentally can make my bill 20% higher then advertised.
- zeroonetwothree 8y agoYou can get Comcast Business service. That's basically what it is. They have very good support but costs a bit more.
- mlthoughts2018 8y agoIt’s still usually viewed as a cost center by management in either case, and employees in support roles are notoriously underpaid, overworked and at risk of inexplicable layoffs. I would love to see more companies treat support technicians and customer support agents like prized human capital, give them good job security, don’t try to outsource or downsize them, and give them top class compensation to make them very proud to do the job.
- cm2012 8y agoProfessional 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, changes in search engine use, and changes in the search algorithms used by major search engines." Also, they only have 5000 FB likes - if they were spending $100k+ a month on FB these likes would be higher as a byproduct of the paid spend. I do a ton of B2B/SMB FB advertising, my guess is that they could move some spend to FB from AdWords and see better ROI.
- teej 8y agoThe Facebook advertising spend is most likely remarketing, not post/page promotion.
- ttul 8y agoCould 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.
- cm2012 8y agoI'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 https://www.facebook.com/pg/PagerDuty/ads/?ref=page_internal
- hn_throwaway_99 8y agoJesus, do people really like company FB pages (especially B2B companies) at all these days?
- cm2012 8y agoFor every $ spent in fb newsfeed ad spend, you'll get some folks liking your page.
- umeshunni 8y ago2017: $79.6M revenue, ($38M)in losses. 9 months of 2018: $84M revenue, ($34.5M) in losses. Costs seem generally under control except the significant growth (+66%) in G&A expenses. Why the hurry to IPO?
- jedberg 8y agoGood market now, bad market likely in a year or two.
- taf2 8y agoWhy do you think bad market likely in a year or two?
- jedberg 8y agoWe're way overdue for a recession, there are already signs of slowing, and historically after massive tax cuts for the rich, a recession follows a couple years later after the piper has to be paid. Signs all point to a recession in one to two years.
- dtehranian 8y ago> Signs all point to a recession in one to two years. People have been saying this for the past 7 years.
- jedberg 8y agoMaybe, but people who actually know what they're talking about have only been saying it recently.
- stefanmichael 8y ago> citation needed
- stygiansonic 8y agoInteresting that they reference their Glassdoor rating: The strength of our culture is key to attracting and retaining the best talent, as demonstrated by our high employee retention rates, and, as of January 31, 2019, a Glassdoor rating of 4.5 out of 5 and 100% approval rating of our chief executive officer.
- techntoke 8y agoPretty funny considering that Glassdoor will delete negative reviews.
- HenryBemis 8y agoI've read some pretty negative reviews when searching info for a company. As long as it 'looks & feels real' they it let them. Someone already posted the glassdoor takedown rules and they seem reasonable.
- eastendguy 8y agoUh, 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 ;-)
- ezekg 8y agoThat's so unfortunate. I remember back when Glassdoor prided themselves on not doing that.
- downrightmike 8y agoOh look a penny..
- log_n 8y agoPotentially leaving them open to the pettiest securities fraud suit ever.
- whalesalad 8y agoPagerDuty feels like abandonware. It hasn't changed in the last 4-5 years.
- techntoke 8y agoAgreed, too many good open source solutions now. No one thinks of alerting as paging anymore. You can use email to text now, chat solutions like Slack/Mattermost/etc. You no longer need an SMS gateway and if you do then Prometheus supports Twilio. All PagerDuty has going for it is a sales team trying to get managers to sign up for a service before exploring alternatives.
- jessemillar 8y agoOut of genuine curiosity, do you have a list of good alternatives or some reading material on "paging" best practices? My team uses PagerDuty but I've never really questioned if there's a better method out there because the system PagerDuty replaced for us was so terrible that PagerDuty seemed like a godsend.
- lozenge 8y agoGoogle's free SRE handbook has some info.
- wbronitsky 8y agoYou guys are out here giving very strong dismissals of a very good service, and then referring us to a resource you wont even bother to link? Maybe you can link the actual resources to prove your argument instead of assuming you are correct and dismissing people to figure it out on their own. Usually, the standard for conversations here is held to a higher, non-twitter level, and I for one enjoy conversations held to higher standards.
- jonlucc 8y agoI think they must be referring to this: https://landing.google.com/sre/sre-book/toc/index.html https://landing.google.com/sre/sre-book/toc/index.html
- thanatos_dem 8y ago<rant> I run a service that integrates with pager duty on behalf of our users, and man oh man did they make some poor design choices with their API. The most glaring one is their integration keys, which is how you trigger an alert. They’re just v4 uuids with the hyphens removed, or in other words, completely random. This is fine by itself, except they have two versions of their event API, and keys for the v1 API don’t work with v2 and vice versa. And there’s no way to distinguish what version a given key is for, since it’s just a jumble of bytes. We can’t even look up the service integration to find out what version it should be. We can using yet another different API, but even then it’s not clearly distinguished. So now our users are confused about what version they should use. We only supported v1 for a while since there was no way to distinguish, but users kept using v2, which was failing cryptically. So now we need to try v1, and if it fails try v2. But that means that our monitoring on errors are all fucky now since half the errors arent real errors. In the grand scheme of things I guess it’s a relatively small design issue, but it sitting right in the middle of their one and only critical path, which makes it really painful. I’ve alrwady contacted support about it and their response has been, more or less, “oh, uhhh... huh.” </rant>
- jedberg 8y agoDo the same calls to the same APIs from the same customers ever change from v1 to v2 (or vice versa)? If not, can you record if it was v1/2 and then always make the same call after that? And then don't record errors for your initial probe request? Then your data will be clean and you'll make a lot less calls.
- thanatos_dem 8y agoYeah, we have some caching and retain metadata to avoid making more calls than we need to. It’s just frustrating that we need to keep this information around on our side to mitigate issues with the API that is central to their entire business.
- buryat 8y agothat's it, this comment is a nail in the coffin of their future IPO.
- throwawaykings 8y agoThis makes them probably the second ever YC company to go public, the first being Dropbox. Also related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=758653 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=758653
- teej 8y agoSuper 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.
- skinnymuch 8y agoThanks for this! Love to see quick math. How do you account for dilution though? I’m not too familiar with how it all works, but in this case does it not matter because the amount of shares stays the same? Only total shares have changed? And yeah Stripe will be a crazy multiplier that has to be at least 2000x and could be over 3000x like you said. I’m guessing they never sold any shares. Especially seeing Square’s market cap above $30B and PayPal at $120B.
- raiyu 8y agoThey just raised a round in September of 2018 at $1.3B so it will be interesting to see where the public market values the company. 2017 revenue: $79.6MM 2018 revenue (est): $117.8MM 2019 revenue (est): $164.9MM 2020 revenue (est): $214.3MM Safe guess potentially 10x current year (2019) which would be $1.6B. Considering that they need an IPO pop the shares would be priced about 20-25% lower, bringing them back to that $1.3B private round valuation. Unless the bankers are very optimistic and it will trade higher in which case they would be looking to price at the $1.6-1.7B range and hope that it pops to $2B at open.
- jgalt212 8y agoYou need to dream bigger. Palantir looking to go public at 45X revenues. https://news.crunchbase.com/news/palantirs-2018-revenue-said-to-exceed-prior-forecast-approaching-1b/ https://news.crunchbase.com/news/palantirs-2018-revenue-said...
- nojvek 8y ago2B would be a reasonable price. Who knows, they may get acquired by the tech behemoths.
- chx 8y agoI 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.
- motakuk 8y agoThe feature we need to add to https://amixr.io https://amixr.io . No idea how exactly but we need to...
- DKnoll 8y agoIf I worked in the same office as you I would 100% play Jingle Cats when walking past. If I don't change my page sound frequently enough I start getting a weird Pavlovian response.
- crooked-v 8y ago> If I don't change my page sound frequently enough I start getting a weird Pavlovian response. I had to do the same with my alarm clock, and eventually settled on talk radio because it didn't seem to cause the same effect.
- gotocake 8y agoWhen I was a kid I got a two deck cassette player and alarm clock combo. I used it as my alarm for about 16 years, and I still get a weird feeling if I hear that precise tone. It makes me feel a bit sleepy and disoriented for a split second. With the same clock I also started to wake up to the sound of the system powering up the speakers to play the torn before the tone sounded. It seems I’d slap the snooze button in my sleep so I had to get a new alarm.
- chx 8y agoWe get paged extremely rarely. The last one was Nov 23. So no weird reflex here.
- deathanatos 8y agoI use the second photo from here[1] as the background on the caller when I get paged. [1]: https://grist.org/climate-energy/these-new-high-res-photos-of-deepwater-horizon-will-make-you-go-holy/ https://grist.org/climate-energy/these-new-high-res-photos-o...
- nicholasjbs 8y agoCongrats to the whole PagerDuty team! We were in the same YC batch (S'10), and the founders were all kind, smart people. They were also determined and hard-working: I believe they'd been rejected by YC three times before getting in.
- lucb1e 8y agoTo save anyone else from staring at the page for a minute (wondering if it's linked just because it looks like 1992 called, not knowing what the "sec" USA government department does or what an S-1 form is): PagerDuty seems to be going to the stock market.
- ChaseSommer 8y agoThanks, I was quite confused.
- ikarandeep 8y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=758653 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=758653 its cool to see how far they've come
- us0r 8y ago>In October 2018, the Company entered into a cloud services agreement for third-party hosting of the Company’s software platform through October 2021. The Company is committed to spend a total of $13.5 million for the services through the term of the agreement Not as bad as some of the others lately but this works out to around 375k/month.
- zsj888 8y agoAm I reading it wrong? They don't fill the data in section MANAGEMENT’S DISCUSSION AND ANALYSIS OF FINANCIAL CONDITION AND RESULTS OF OPERATIONS: ....The majority of our revenue is derived from midmarket and enterprise customers. As of January 31, 2019, we had more than customers globally, with [missing #?] customers having ARR in excess of $100,000, and [missing #?] customers having ARR in excess of $1,000,000. Our 10 largest customers represented approximately [missing #?] % of our revenue for the fiscal year ended January 31, 2019, and no single customer represented more than [missing #?] % of our revenue in the same period, highlighting the breadth of our customer base. We serve a vital role in our customers’ digital operations and grow with them as their needs expand. As such, we have developed a loyal customer base, with total ARR churn representing less than [missing #?] % of beginning ARR for the fiscal year ended January 31, 2019. Our ARR churn rate represents lost revenue from customers that contributed no revenue in the measurement period but did contribute revenue in the equivalent prior year period. We generally bill monthly subscriptions monthly and subscriptions with terms of greater than one year annually in advance.
- duncan-donuts 8y agoI must admit I didn’t read it, but that seems like that would be pretty embarrassing. Maybe it’s not required? Idk, seems like a huge oversight for any company, let alone one that seems to have their shit together.
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- carlosaguayo 8y agoThere are many fields that can be left blank when filing an S1. They get filled in as time moves on, but need to be complete before the IPO takes place.
- zsj888 8y agothank you.
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- ec109685 8y agoPagerDuty is super expensive. With Slack or another messaging app, you just need a system that will support a schedule and route to engineers appropriately as well as post to the slack channel. A lot of the bells and whistles they have aren't useful. Engineers never need to actually use the Pager Duty website and only use the app for ack'ing the page or just do that in Slack. This feels like it should be more of a commodity. E.g. a service like OpsGenie can undercut them. $100 a month per user on their enterprise plan is insane for what they offer: https://www.pagerduty.com/pricing/ https://www.pagerduty.com/pricing/
- awakeasleep 8y agoWhat industry are you in where you care about getting paged after hours, but you're happy tying your paging to Slack's availability, and you have the engineering time to devote to recreating and maintaining a paging system? I'm sure there are industries where that makes sense, but I bet you can imagine there are industries and companies where that doesn't add up.
- sanxiyn 8y agoWe reimplemented paging system with Slack plus Twilio fallback, it made sense for us, but yes I think that's rare. Yes, Slack only was completely unacceptable and we already had Twilio account used for other things.
- damagednoob 8y agoI haven't created my own paging system but I've gotten quite far with Zabbix and Twilio. Zabbix's feature set includes the ability to define teams and schedules and execute a custom command when downtime is detected. That being said, I was happy to hear that my new work had a PagerDuty account because the fewer things I have to host and maintain the better.
- ec109685 8y agoYou still need something like PagerDuty, OpsGenie, etc. for the on call rotation and routing. All I am saying is all the other 1000 features they offer and charge for aren’t needed when you don’t really use their web site at all.
- kevintb 8y agoCongrats on PagerDuty!