While many dream of entrepreneurial fame in the tech world, few realize that what may seem like overnight success is often an accumulation of hard work over many years, not to mention the countless tough decisions for company founders.

Alex Solomon (pictured), co-founder and chief technology officer of PagerDuty Inc., shared his story of co-founding PagerDuty in 2009, the company’s successes and products, and the difficult but rewarding decisions that ultimately brought the company to unicorn status with a valuation of $1.3 billion.

“With my two co-founders and with the great team that we hired, we built the company from zero to over $50 million in annual recurring revenue,” said Solomon, who at the time of PagerDuty’s founding was a first-time entrepreneur.

Solomon spoke with Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the PagerDuty Summit in San Francisco. They discussed PagerDuty’s services in data security, as well as the challenges of co-founding a successful business. (* Disclosure below.)

PagerDuty incident management

While this journey may have seemed from the outside to be quick, PagerDuty has been in operation for nine years, according to Solomon. It took hard work and sacrifices, including Solomon’s decision to step down as the chief executive officer in 2016.

“We had a lot of work to do on the product side of things,” Solomon said of his decision to step down as CEO. “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.”

Ultimately, PagerDuty found Jennifer Tejada to step into the shoes of CEO, and the decision has paid off. Solomon and Tejada were awarded the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award this year. The company is also launching a number of products, including its Event Intelligence product, which is a platform for incident management that filters through all the noise of tools like Slack, ticketing systems, etc., and automatically clusters and correlates incidents so that a company determines the best course of action for fixing issues.

“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?'” Solomon described. “‘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?'”

As systems get increasingly interconnected — APIs, applications, cloud providers, etc. — it’s increasingly difficult to find out where a glitch could be, according to Solomon. “We have the potential to become kind of like the internet weather, where we can [see] problems with the internet,” he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Pager Duty Summit. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for PagerDuty Summit. Neither PagerDuty, Inc., the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE