Fresh off of a recent round of venture funding, PagerDuty Inc. sets its sights on hypergrowth as a platform-based company around digital operations. Chief Financial Officer Steven Gatoff (pictured), explained what attracted him to PagerDuty, tying the team’s journey to his previous experience at Rapid7 LLC, moving from a product to a platform-based company in growth stages.

“The whole disruption, the whole notion of driving change if not defining a new industry and the ability, from a financial standpoint … of seeing a company and a product evolve from a very cool software tool to an operations platform,” Gatoff said. “I got lucky enough to get connected with … the team here and realized that it was a similar journey, similar value proposition [to Rapid7], albeit in a much larger [technical account management] across all of operations.” 

Gatoff spoke with Jeff Frick (@jefffrick), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the recent PagerDuty Summit in San Francisco, California. They discussed Gatoff’s role as PagerDuty’s CFO. (* Disclosure below.)

The role of the CFO

Gatoff explained that the role of a CFO in a company at PagerDuty’s current stage is primarily to provide visibility into how funds are being invested. Ultimately, these financial metrics help the company decide how and where funds should be applied to achieve optimal growth.

“What we’re really trying to provide as CFO is visibility. Visibility into what happened, how have we done, what has the performance been, what did we think it was going to be and why did happening,” Gatoff said. “Then visibility going forward. How does the road ahead look financially, where are we growing, how are we growing, how are we investing our funds and what kind of returns are we getting from the profile of investment from cost versus what it generates in revenue and yield?” 

PagerDuty’s interest in innovative technology also helps the CFO push his agenda, as the company looks to artificial intelligence and machine learning processes to automate internal operations. The goal is to empower PagerDuty’s work culture as the company scales, according to Gatoff.

“One of the most significant things that is very difficult … is the whole dynamic of introducing the ability for a company to scale and do things well in large format at low cost, low friction, and not become a bureaucracy,” said Gatoff, going on to note PagerDuty’s desire to not “introduce too much process, too much control, too much front-end prevention, while at the same time making sure people are doing smart things.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of PagerDuty Summit. (* Disclosure: PagerDuty Inc. sponsored this segment on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither PagerDuty nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE