Jeff's a CPA whose team took PagerDuty public

Jeff: The goal was to have an IPO.  Of course when they hired me, I didn't know if that was gonna be a real thing.

My whole goal for a company was, okay, how do we maximize revenue recognition?

That top line is the most scrutinized of the P&L or any of the financial statements, frankly. To get the company to a level where we were ready for IPO. And then being a control-based environment then too, was very difficult.

Usually there's a confidential filing that you do first. The people under that tent were very small. I think between five and eight people were actually the ones doing a lot of the pre-work to get the initial confidential S1 filing done. A lot of late nights. A lot of secrecy. I hate that because especially with my teams okay, I gotta cancel a lot of team meetings.

I had to cancel a lot of one-on-ones. I had to, block off times on my calendars that no one else could see. Team was like, what's going on?

Why aren't you available? It was probably like eight months. I was working on it. Just, a group of [00:01:00] five to eight people working with the external lawyers. And so it, it was, very bumpy, very sleep deprived during that time. And then, once that was done and then we're able to, actually bring in the team and we can start working on the real filing, it got better.

The actual feeling once we filed was. Okay, we did that, but also knowing there's a lot more to come only because I was on the accounting side. It was great for the whole team, I think, to be able to celebrate. It was great to actually see it done, see the CEO up there on TV actually ringing the bell. And knowing all that hard work, the late nights and everything paid off not just for me, but for the whole company, right?

I'm always pride myself and my team, I think I was able to build a world class team and they understood what we needed to do and they knew the time and the effort that was gonna take to get us there when they were all on board and we wouldn't have been able to do it without the whole team.