Do you remember the last time you were blown away by a talk? Maybe it was the TED talk your friend told you to check out last week. Or the commencement speaker at your relative’s graduation this past May. Or perhaps it was a presenter at a conference you just recently attended.

Take a moment to think about that experience: The electricity that builds when the speaker says something groundbreaking. Sinking into your chair after it ends as you sift through all your revelations and questions. You may not remember exactly what was said but you’ll always remember how you felt! Regardless of the who, the when, or the where, we’ve all experienced this before—and can’t wait to hear from the next inspiring speaker.

As our annual industry conference, PagerDuty Summit 2018 draws closer, we at PagerDuty are getting ready to deliver a world-class lineup of informative talks, immersive workshops, and other fun activities. This time around, we have six incredible keynote speakers—each an expert, thought leader, and trailblazer in their respective fields.

Rathi Murthy

Named one of The Most Influential Women in Bay Area Business 2018 by San Francisco Business Times and one of the 12 Women CTOs to Watch 2017 by Hackbright Academy, Rathi Murthy oversees the Gap, Inc. engineering teams in her role as CTO. With over 20 years of leadership experience at the world’s best technology companies like eBay, Yahoo!, and Sun Microsystems, she is passionate about inspiring others with the lessons she learned in her career, particularly the value of female relationships.

Aaron Levie

The CEO and co-founder of Box, Aaron Levie has spoken at numerous industry events, such as TechCrunch Disrupt, Fortune Brainstorm Tech, and Dreamforce. Inc. Magazine named Levie its Entrepreneur of the Year 2013, citing his ability accurately predict what users want and need. He has also written articles for leading publications, including The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Fortune.

Ray Kurzweil

With Ray Kurzweil, it’s not a question of what he’s done, it’s a question of what he hasn’t done yet. Kurzweil is known as one of the world’s leading futurists, with a 30-year track record of accurate predictions. A frequent speaker on TED, his talks have garnered over five million views, and he has written several best-selling books, including Are We Spiritual Machines?, The Singularity Is Near, and How to Create a Mind.

Kurzweil is also a renowned inventor of many firsts: the first charge-coupled device (CCD) flatbed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition (OCR), the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments (which he won a Grammy for), and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. Kurzweil has been recognized by multiple U.S. presidents and has received other great recognition for these inventions, the most notable being the National Medal of Technology. The Wall Street Journal called him “the restless genius,” Forbes Inc. magazine titled him the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison,” and PBS selected him as one of 16 “revolutionaries who made America.”

At Summit, we look forward to chatting with Kurzweil and picking his brain about where technology is headed next.

John Allspaw

John Allspaw is what our co-founder and CTO, Alex Solomon, calls a “DevOps deity,” so you know this guy is the real deal in digital operations management. The co-founder of Adaptive Capacity Labs, LLC and former chief technology officer (CTO) at Etsy, Allspaw has spent the last decade bridging insights from Human Factors Engineering, Cognitive Systems Engineering, and Resilience Engineering to the domain of software engineering and operations. He began his career running vehicle crash simulations for the U.S. government, and jumped over to the web in 1997, building the technical infrastructures at Salon, InfoWorld, Friendster, and Flickr.

Allspaw’s 17 years working in systems operations in the biotech, government, and online media industries have made on-call engineers and executives alike hungry for his insight. He is the author of The Art of Capacity Planning and Web Operations: Keeping the Data On Time, and he recently gave talks on resilience engineering at the DevOps Enterprise Summit San Francisco 2017 and the Pipeline Conference London 2018. His blog, Kitchen Soap, houses his thoughts on systems safety, software operations, and socio-technical systems. We can’t wait to hear what he believes are the best strategies for improving real-time operations and response orchestration.

Patrick Lencioni

Last but not least, we have Patrick Lencioni, the founder and president of The Table Group, Inc. and best-selling author of The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Death by Meeting, and several books on team performance, organizational health, and effective leadership. As a consultant and speaker, he has worked with thousands of senior executives in organizations ranging from Fortune 500 corporations and professional sports teams to universities and nonprofits, including Southwest Airlines, Barnes & Noble, General Mills, Newell Rubbermaid, SAP, and the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

The Wall Street Journal named Lencioni as “one of the most in-demand speakers in America,” and The One-Minute Manager’s Ken Blanchard described him as “fast defining the next generation of leadership thinkers.” Lencioni’s 11 business books have sold over 5 million copies and been translated into more than 30 languages. We look forward to gaining some wisdom from Lencioni about how to keep teams productive and engaged in the context of a DevOps environment and incident response workflow.

Jennifer Tejada

As PagerDuty’s CEO and fearless leader for the past two years, Jennifer Tejada is an industry veteran with a track record in leading and accelerating growth at enterprise software companies, including Keynote Systems, Inc., and Ventyx Pty Ltd. She sits on the Board of Directors of The Estée Lauder Companies and was named Entrepreneur of the Year 2018 for the Northern California region by Ernst & Young. 

Whatever your role, company, or industry, you’ll learn something from the ideas shared by each of these thought leaders. Sure, you can read their books and blog posts or scour YouTube for an old, blurry 240p version of one of their talks. But wouldn’t it be better if you had the opportunity to engage and interact with them in person? Now’s your chance!

Ready to be blown away? Join us at PagerDuty Summit 2018 to listen to these three keynote speakers as well as several other amazing customer speakers! Register here.