PagerDuty’s Humble Origins
In a recent interview, PagerDuty Co-founder Alex Solomon shared the story of how he and his fellow co-founders Andrew Miklas and Baskar Puvanathasan came up with the idea of starting a new company—and how they chose a name.
The short version: When he was an engineer at Amazon, Alex witnessed some major transformations at the online retail giant, including moving from a monolithic code base to a micro-services-based architecture.
With this change, Amazon radically changed the way it approached engineering—engineers now didn’t just write code, they were also responsible for testing, deploying, and managing that code in production. This also meant that they were on call to respond when their code broke something, which eventually became known internally as “pager duty.”
Most importantly though, Alex shared insights in the interview about why he decided to replace himself as CEO at PagerDuty and how the decision has contributed to the company’s quick growth.
“We were becoming quite a big company and even considering a possible IPO at some point,” Alex said. “I have not done that level of scale before and thought, wow, I might need some help with this.”
“We were becoming quite a big company and even considering a possible IPO at some point,” Alex said. “I have not done that level of scale before and thought, wow, I might need some help with this.”
Check out the entire story of our humble co-founder on the Startup Daily.