PagerDuty, Inc. (NYSE:PD) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Operator: Okay. Next, can we hear from Mr. Fishbein Joel at Truist. If you would like to go.

Joel Fishbein: Apologies for the technical difficulties earlier and congrats on the great results and on the operating margin surprise. Howard, great work. Just on that vein, Jennifer, in this challenging environment and Howard, obviously the macro uncertainty is out there, you’ve highlighted that on the call. How are you thinking about optionality with regard to balancing growth and profitability at this point? And how are you — how should we be thinking about margins in the future? I mean, I know that we always ask for more and more and more so I figured, I’d throw that out there, but I mean the fact that you guys have big milestone for you guys, love to just hear directionally how we should be thinking about that? Thank you.

Jennifer Tejada: Well, I’ll take a crack at that and then Howard you can jump in. First of all, we are incredibly proud to hit the profitability milestone this quarter, quarter early, it was a lot of work from a lot of people across the organization to structurally improve our cost base, not just make sweeping headcount changes for instance. And I want to congratulate our teams, because they’ve been incredibly disciplined with our capital allocation, which has enabled us to continue to invest in innovation and you’ve seen a slew of new products and services that we’ve come out within the last couple of quarters. We now have an installed base that is available for us to attach those products and services. So from a growth perspective, a lot of that investment is right time, right place for us to go-to-market in an environment where our offerings which improve efficiency, improve productivity, reduce revenue risk, are very relevant and timely.

So I feel like we’ve put ourselves in as good a position as we can be in given the macro and while I can’t see the future or tell you what’s going to happen next week or tomorrow. What I can tell you, is our customers are incredibly engaged. I’ve been spending a lot of time with customers. In the last couple of weeks, we had a large team at Reinvent where customers really want to learn about automation, it was a strong quarter for automation, for instance. And you see that in that large cohort — large customer cohort of customers over 100 — spending over $100,000 growing 31% and also the expansion volumes. So we are absolutely still investing in growth, but being very disciplined and balanced around capital allocation to make sure we can progress against our Rule 40 goal and that we can demonstrate that we are a profitable, durable growth company long-term.

Howard Wilson: Yes, and I think what I would add to Jen’s comments, is, if you have a look at the achievement this year where our guide points to 700 basis points to 800 basis points improvement over last year, we’ve really laid the foundation to continue to improve and expand our margins into next year and I don’t expect the rate of change around that improvement to slow down. And along with that, even this year, we expect our free cash flow to be one or two points better than where we end from an operating margin perspective. And for us that becomes a point of focus for next year. Like how do we ensure that our free cash flow margins are also continuing to be strong, so I think we’ve laid really good foundation. So, we will give you more detailed guidance, of course on our Q4 call, but you can see from the pattern that we’ve been following how we expect to continue to execute.

Joel Fishbein: Okay. Just to follow-up real quickly, just makes it sound like, just to be clear that you are not giving up any growth for the fact that you’re profitable, so that we can continue to see some leverage and the strong growth that you’ve been delivering.

Howard Wilson: Yes. So we’re not providing any specific guidance on growth for next year. We provided the guide for this year, but we certainly again to Jenn’s comment control in what we can control. We know that we have created a — an operating model that is sustainable for the long-term and we expect to be sustainably profitable and to be a profitable grower. Of course, the macro is an environment that is subject to all kinds of things.

Joel Fishbein: Thank you so much.

Howard Wilson: Thanks, Joel.

Jennifer Tejada: Thanks, Joel.

Operator: Okay. Next we’ll hear from Chad with Craig Hallum. Chad Bennett, go ahead.

Chad Bennett: Yes, great. Thanks for taking my questions. Kudos also on the quarter and profitability and all that good stuff, so just thinking about your commentary around new logos, seemed to be a bit more challenging in this environment for anybody, and your net new customer add number, I think was kind of down relatively speaking to prior quarters and so forth, but you speak — spoke very bullishly about cross-sell upsell expansion and so forth and the pipeline there? Net expansion is coming in a little bit, obviously it’s comping against really good numbers, but how should we think about overall relative growth, overall revenue growth relative to net expansion in that delta from where it is today to maybe in a tougher environment for new logos? And I know there is a timing difference in everything and so forth, but should we expect less from new logo contribution if we look out over the next three to four quarters?