The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source

LIVE from Denver with Nora Jones! (Interview)

Aug 6, 2025

Nora Jones, founder of Jeli.io, shares her insights after the company's acquisition by PagerDuty. She delves into the intricate process of integrating her startup into a larger platform and the emotional journey of this transition. The conversation highlights the role of AI in incident management and the challenges of maintaining human oversight. Nora also discusses workplace communication dynamics and the impact of effective strategies on team dynamics during such significant industry shifts.

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ANECDOTE

Jelly's Origin and PagerDuty Link

Nora Jones built Jelly because she needed better incident management tools based on her real engineering experiences.
Her integration with PagerDuty was foundational, forming a natural path to acquisition.

INSIGHT

Founder Vision Aligns with Industry

Personal gain and industry benefit can align in acquisitions when the goal is wide adoption of valuable tools.
Nora's north star was to get Jelly used broadly, aligning her own success with customer impact.

ADVICE

Expand Features to All Plans

Post-acquisition, expand valuable features to all plan tiers to maximize impact.
Ensure integration aligns with user experience to increase adoption across customer segments.

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We’re LIVE at the historic Oriental Theater in Denver, CO with Nora Jones. Nora is the founder of Jeli.io, recently acquired by PagerDuty and she’s been shaping the way we think about reliability, incident response, and human-centered engineering for years.

We get into the real story behind the deal. Not just the headline, but what it’s like selling your company, what it takes to actually integrate a product into a larger platform, how customers responded, what changed for her team, and why her new role at PagerDuty is basically everything she was building Jeli for.

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Featuring:

Nora Jones – LinkedIn, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!