Jennifer Tejada (PagerDuty) - Resilience is Everything

Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders (ETL)

Stanford eCorner

Journey, Startups, Education, Stanford, Culture, Strategy, Stanford University, Entrepreneurship, Business, Life Lessons, Thought Leadership, Creativity, Etl, Challenges, Leadership, Innovation, Founders

4.4 • 739 Ratings

🗓️ 16 October 2019

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Not long after landing at PagerDuty in 2016, Jennifer Tejada embarked on that harrowing rite of passage for CEOs of fortunate young startups: the pursuit of an IPO. Tejada raised a $90 million Series D round in late 2018, and saw PagerDuty go public on April 11, 2019. Her path to that point, she observes, was anything but linear. She tells the story of how a very “average” University of Michigan grad ended up becoming the CEO of a public SaaS company, and describes how gritty perseverance, some fortunate early leadership opportunities, and a passion for understanding and embracing different perspectives drove her career forward. She offers strategies that aspiring leaders can employ to challenge themselves and build tenacity while creating diverse, high-performing teams.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Who you are defines how you build.
0:06.7	This is the Entrepreneurial Thought Leader series.
0:10.6	Brought to you by Stanford E-Corner.
0:14.3	On this episode, we're joined by Jennifer Tejada, CEO of PagerDuty,
0:19.4	an incident management platform for software developers. Soon after of PagerDuty, an incident management platform for software developers.
0:23.4	Soon after joining PagerD, Jennifer led the company to a $90 million Series D funding ramp.
0:29.4	In April of 2019, she took the company public as the first female-run enterprise SaaS business
0:35.9	to IPO in over a decade.
0:38.3	Here's Jennifer.
0:39.3	I'm really excited to talk to you about what I learned.
0:45.3	You know, if I go back to 1989, the fall, I know, people like,
0:51.3	1980, like shit, that's a long time ago.
0:53.3	1989 in the fall, I know people were like, 1980, shit, that's a long time ago. 1989, in the fall, I was a freshman at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
1:00.0	We were not as well dressed as you all seem to be, because it was cold that time of year.
1:06.0	We would be, you know, in four layers of clothing.
1:09.0	Sometimes it could snow in October. A few of you are nodding
1:13.0	might have been to the Midwest before. And we didn't have classes on entrepreneurship back then.
1:20.2	It wasn't really a thing. I mean, you had classes on business. You had classes on calculus
1:24.5	in psychology and all the normal freshman weed out classes that you took.
1:28.3	So I first just wanted to recognize Stanford and many of the great universities that I've been involved in
1:34.3	for investing in this concept that is entrepreneurship, because the world needs more entrepreneurs.
1:40.3	The world needs more people who are willing to look at a set of problems that maybe are becoming more important than we think they might be,
	...

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