 from Union Square in downtown San Francisco. It's theCUBE, covering PagerDuty Summit 18. Now, here's Jeff Frick. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at PagerDuty Summit 2018 at the Western St. Francis Union Square in San Francisco. It's a beautiful day outside, really a historic building and we're happy to be here for our second PagerDuty Summit and our next guest, super excited to have him. We didn't have him last year. He's Alex Solomon, the co-founder and CTO of PagerDuty. Alex, great to see you. Yeah, thanks for having me. Absolutely, so we were just talking a little bit before we turned the cameras on, you started this little adventure in 09, so it's been nine years. So I just love to get your perspective as you come to something like this and look at all these people that are here to see what started as just a germ of an idea back in your head nine years ago. Yeah, it's exciting to see such an amazing conference. We have over 800 people here today and it's definitely buzzing. I can feel the excitement in the air. Well, Ray Kurzweiler is a keynote that's getting right up there and really an amazing story and one of the things that was key to Ray's topic was kind of the accelerating technology curve in terms of power and performance and it's not linear, it accelerates and you guys have seen a huge growth in your business and your throughput and all the incidents that you're reporting and now you're talking about BI and using machine learning and artificial intelligence to make some sense and to help filter through all this phenomenal amount of throughput. So how are you, how do you see that opportunity? How are you guys grasping that opportunity? What are you gonna do with that machine learning? Sure, so about three months ago we launched our new Event Intelligence product which is all about capturing all the signals coming out of all of your different tools. Think like monitoring tools, things like ticketing systems, collaboration tools like Slack and processing all those signals, mostly events and alerts and filtering out the noise. So a lot of alerts and events are not necessarily relevant for someone to get paged about in the middle of the night. Maybe it's a false alert, maybe it's something that has gone up and will fix itself. So it's about filtering out all the noise in there and it's also about automatically clustering and correlating related events. So we take those events in and then we group them together into incidents and we determine the surface area of the problem, which systems are affected and we page those people and only those people so that they can respond to the incident. Right. So do you leverage kind of the total learning of the pager duty system in kind of an anonymized way so you can leverage the multi billions of dollars worth of incidents to get that type of learning? That was one to raise key themes. It helps if you have a billion of something, if you want to start applying some of these machine learning techniques. Exactly, so the more data you have when you're applying AI and ML, the better the results will be. And we have over nine years of data that we've accumulated since founding the company and we leveraged that for pattern recognition. So I'll give you an example. If you're looking at an incident, you just got paged for something or multiple people got paged and you're looking at an evolving situation, our algorithms will automatically look in the past and see has this type of problem happened before? Have you seen this type of incident before? Have you seen these events come in before that are similar to this? And if so, what happened last time? Right. Who solved it? What was the resolution? So you can apply that knowledge to the problem and resolve it much faster. Right. And so you do it both within the existing company and their kind of ecosystem. So yeah, Joe solved it last time, Susie solved it the time before, as well as to get more of an aggregate of kind of an anonymized of, we see this pattern over and over and over, this might be what you're looking at. Yeah. And we haven't done the aggregate picture yet, but it's something that we're very excited about because we have the potential to become kind of like the internet weather where we can tell based on the number of customers that we have problems with the internet such as, let's say, one of the public cloud providers is having an issue. Well, they have lots of customers that are pager duty customers and they can now see, oh, we're seeing all of this additional incident activity in this part of the internet. Right. So there's something going on. Right. And we can start, this is an opportunity that we're very excited about. Start telling, being able to tell, oh, there's a problem with one of the cloud providers, there's a problem with one of the big infrastructure providers that is commonly used by a lot of different companies. Right. Because so many of these systems now are so interdependent. You've got all these APIs for all these different applications, all these different cloud providers and the whole thing stitched together. So trying to figure out where that little, the glitches is not necessarily as easy as when you kind of control everything. Exactly. It's funny too, because Jen had a line from her keynote, which she just triggered. She said, we're the ones that want to be up when the rest of the world seems down. Yeah, exactly. So let me expand on that a little bit. So you were the founder. Jennifer came in a couple of years ago, if I recall. I'm sure everyone loves kind of the classic entrepreneur tale who liked to watch the show. You founded it, you got it to a certain point and at some point you decided going to bring in a new CEO. One of you can talk a little bit about kind of how that process went down, kind of your thoughts as a founder of making that transition to see your company go from this stage to that stage. Sure, sure. So yeah, I was the founding CEO. I built, well, me, not just by myself, but with my two co-founders and with a great team that we hired, we built a company from zero to over 50 million in annual recurring revenue. The company, when we decided to make that transition, I'd gone to about 200 people or so. So a pretty good scale, starting from nothing. Yeah, to 50 million run rate, that's good. Yeah, and I'm a first-time entrepreneur so I haven't done this before. And at that point, we had a lot of work to do on the product side of things, like a lot of exciting new things such as Event Intelligence that we just launched earlier this year and other products around analytics and visibility that we're announcing here today. But I found myself spending a lot of my time inside the building, hiring and managing, and I didn't get enough of an opportunity to talk to customers and think about product and think about the vision. What should we be building next? Right, right. So I wanted to kind of go and focus more of my time in that direction. I initially started by thinking, maybe I can hire a CEO, like a chief operating officer to run sales marketing and I can focus on product and engineering and did a lot of due diligence in talking to other CEOs who had been there and done that and realized that while that may solve some problems, it introduces new ones and that the best bet is to find a world-class CEO. Like the best people out there in the world are gonna command that title and are gonna want that role. And I can still get to focus on product and on talking to customers and on vision by replacing myself and taking on a CTR role. So that's what I ultimately decided to do, had lots of help from the board, was very supportive in this decision and they helped a lot with the interview process and the screening process for finding Jennifer. Well, you did good. We've known Jennifer for a long time. So I think that was one of your better hires in the long history of the company. My best hire. Your best hire, very good. Well, and again, congratulations, it's funny, you know. You see it over and over, right? Overnight successes that are 10 years in the making. You know, clearly your last round of finding was a huge validation on your guy's strategy and where you're taking the company and then I just want to call it to you. You guys were chosen for the Ernst & Young co-founder, the entrepreneur of the year award 2018. So even which is funny, because you're always saying that is maybe a little company just getting started, right? A really early entrepreneur, but you guys have been at this for nine years. Again, really good validation as to where you are in the market and people realizing the value that you guys are delivering. So congratulations on that. Thank you very much. All right, Alex. Well, thanks for taking a few minutes from I'm sure a very busy couple of days and it was great to meet you. Absolutely, thanks for having me on the show. All right, he's Alex, I'm Jeff. We're at PagerDuty Summit 2018. Thanks for watching.