January 21, 2025 • 52 mins
Finding product-market fit is a psychological puzzle, especially for first-time founders launching during a pandemic. Meet JJ Tang, Co-Founder and CEO of Rootly. In this episode, JJ shares his journey—from growing up in China to attending university in Canada and founding a successful incident management platform used by giants like Cisco, NVIDIA, Canva, LinkedIn, and more. We explore valuable lessons from Y Combinator’s S21 batch, the role of messaging in achieving product-market fit, and JJ’s fresh insights on building trust, understanding customer needs, and why incident management is as much about people as it is about technology.
Where to Find JJ Tang
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jjrichardtang/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/jjrichardtang
Show Links
- Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/
- Forbes 30 Under 30: https://www.forbes.com/profile/jj-tang/
- Rootly: https://rootly.com/
- Instacart: https://www.instacart.com/
Follow, Like, and Subscribe!
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
JJ (00:00):
And our messaging at this time was we are this all-in-one
incident management platform.
We had service catalog, we hadcollaboration, we helped you did
your postmortems, you know.
We had you know stuff withon-call, we had you know 70
integrations and all of thesethings.
And I started to realize Ithink this is like intimidating,
like complexity-wise forcustomers and, without changing
(00:21):
anything in the product, Ichanged our messaging from
all-in-one incident managementplatform to we help you manage
incidents in Slack, and that wasit, and that was the change
that took us from 2 in 10 goingfrom demo to trial to almost 9
in 10 going from demo to trial,because people got it.
William (00:50):
Hello everyone.
I am your host, William, andwhile I might just be the
lightning on this podcast,everyone knows that after the
lightning you get thunder, andthat is Yvonne Sharp.
How are you doing today, Yvonne?
Eyvonne (01:06):
I don't know about being called thunder.
I can be loud and grumblysometimes, though, so maybe
that's appropriate.
We are recording on the brinkof the Christmas holiday, which
means everything is chaos.
William (01:20):
Everything is chaos.
Eyvonne (01:21):
Everything is chaos, trying to get end of year
wrapped up, trying to get allthe personal stuff sorted out so
that we can celebrate in a week, and yeah, so it's been a
little wild in my world.
How about you?
You've got a new one thatyou're planning Christmas for.
You know a new one of three.
William (01:41):
So I'm sure things are chaotic in your world too.
First Christmas for the newbaby.
We're dressing her up in like ahundred different Well, you've
seen, I've sent you somepictures we're having a little
too much fun with that.
Antlers hats and differentthings.
And she's such a good baby, sheloves it.
Eyvonne (01:55):
She's too small to roll her eyes at you, so enjoy it
while it lasts.
William (01:58):
Exactly, get plenty of selfies.
So we know that it happened andI was there, I witnessed it.
But today with us on thepodcast we have JJ Tang, ceo and
co-founder of Rootly.
And how are you doing today, jj?
JJ (02:12):
I'm doing.
Great Thanks for having me onthe podcast.
I've been a big fan, so I'mexcited to be here.
William (02:18):
Thank you, appreciate that.
And you are in which I foundout you're in Toronto and it is
cold in Toronto, because I wasactually recording something
with someone else last night inToronto and they were saying it
was like minus six Celsius or Iactually just that's 20 degrees
Fahrenheit.
I think could be wrong.
So for all of us that want tobe different with our
(02:39):
measurements in America, that's20 degrees, which is very below
freezing, which is cold enough.
Eyvonne (02:44):
Yes, anything below zero Celsius.
She 20 degrees, which is verycold.
It's below freezing, which iscold enough.
Yes, anything below zeroCelsius.
Yvonne loves this kind ofweather.
William (02:47):
She thrives in very, very cold climates.
JJ (02:51):
It's pretty cold and miserable outside, but I have a
theory it's not very data-driven, nor have I ever really said it
publicly either.
Eyvonne (03:02):
You heard it here first .
JJ (03:03):
We're a pretty distributed company.
The business is headquarteredout of San Francisco.
A lot of the go-to-market teamis here in Toronto.
We have a Europe presence andAsia presence, but I'm convinced
that the more people are higherin cold, depressing climates,
the harder they work becausethere's simply nothing to do
outside.
The harder they work becausethere's simply nothing to do
(03:26):
outside.
You can't really go for a hikeor take your family to the beach
.
Your job ends up becoming yourhobby in many ways.
Eyvonne (03:33):
It's a new founder mode strategy.
William (03:35):
I love it.
That's a fair point too.
JJ (03:37):
Yeah, I don't know, Maybe some people in interviews find
it a little psychotic, so Idon't really bring it up with
candidates.
You know, with candidatesthat's my.
You know why they're here inToronto with me, but we're
strategically here as well, justbecause it makes it so much
easier doing business in Europe.
William (03:58):
I don't want to wake up at 4am 5am to get on a call
yeah, that's never fun, neverfun, yeah, so how we're?
Can you give us a little?
For those in the audience thatdon't know you, can you give us
a little bit of a background?
How did you end up in tech?
And this is your.
This is your first startup,which you told me you happened
during COVID.
(04:18):
You say you launched a startupduring COVID which is pretty
brave, very brave.
So how did you get to thatpoint of launching Rootly?
What did you do before that?
JJ (04:29):
Yeah.
So before all of this started,as a kid, I grew up in China, in
mainland China, in a citycalled Suzhou, which was about
an hour and a half outside ofShanghai.
It was one of the biggestcities in China without an
airport, which is kind ofinteresting, and I went to an
international school there,everywhere from middle school
(04:53):
all the way until high school.
I finished in China and thendecided to come to Canada for
university, and duringuniversity I always thought I
would go into some sort ofbusiness and I ended up just
taking marketing and I was thisterrible student because I was
laser focused on my social lifeand going out and making sure I
(05:17):
was popular and had friends andmy grades unfortunately took a
pretty steep nosedive and twoyears into university I was on
the brink of being kicked out.
I was on academic probationevery single year and I don't
think my parents could have beenmore disappointed in me,
considering you know, we didn'tgrow up with much wealth or much
(05:38):
money at all and to go tointernational school in China it
was really expensive.
Go to international school inChina it was really expensive.
It's the equivalent of going toa non-in-state university in
the US, but for every singleyear of high school and middle
school.
So my parents put all they hadinto my education and the result
(05:59):
I produced them was less thanglamorous, I would say.
And the reason I went to theinternational school was, you
know, my Mandarin and my Chinesewas never that great, so it was
difficult for me to competewith local students.
So my parents thought, well, ifI want to give my child a
chance, I better put them inthis school.
(06:19):
During university I ended upfinding, towards the end I ended
up finding a good crowd to runwith and they were very keen on
internships and technology.
And I remember sitting in thelibrary one day and one of my
friends came in and says oh yeah, I'm going to be interning at
this bank over the winter.
And I thought to myself overthe summer and I thought to
(06:41):
myself, oh, should we be gettinginternships right now?
So I went home and I quicklyapplied for 100 to 200 jobs and
luckily one of them got back tome and that one job was at Cisco
.
And so that was my firstinternship during university and
(07:01):
that kind of taught me theropes of what this technology
world, what the corporate worldkind of looked like.
But by the time I finished itwas still this very unknown
black box.
But I think it taught me to bevery resourceful and keen about
reaching out and finding theseopportunities.
And so next year, next academicyear, rolls around and it was
(07:22):
time for another internship andI thought, you know, I'm going
to go try to work at IBM.
And everyone was applying atthe time and it was really
difficult to get a job there orbe seen, especially when all
these kids had computer sciencedegrees and they were in the
business school and I was kindof just escaping by.
And so I thought I needed anunfair advantage somehow, and so
(07:45):
I cold emailed the CEO andasked her for a coffee when I
was in New York the next weekand to my disbelief she agreed.
And so I went to the IBMheadquarters and met her and
probably asked her five of themost obvious, dumbest questions
any kid would.
But I think she was impressedby the fact that I would reach
(08:06):
out and that created this bigstir internally who's this
person that's meeting with theCEO?
And that landed me the nextinternship and subsequently the
job afterwards.
And so that's how my wholecareer kind of got started in
the tech world, and so my firstjob out of school was at IBM.
(08:26):
I worked on this, on IBM cloudand on some of their API
management and developer tools.
The interesting thing was I wasa product manager there and
very quickly I learned by beingsomeone that wasn't very
technical.
I was at a disadvantage.
It was difficult going to theseclient sites and being
(08:50):
dangerous in these conversations, so I spent every single
something clicked in my brainand I thought to myself I have
to learn how to code.
And so I spent every singlehour of my free time learning
Ruby on Rails, and so it taughtme to be very dangerous
technically and helped meaccelerate in my career at IBM
(09:10):
and subsequently afterwards Iwas working with a friend of
mine and he went over toInstacart and I remember asking
him at the time I said what'sthis Instacart company?
He said, oh, they do grocerydelivery.
I said, oh, that's kind of cool.
I've never used something likethat before.
And I asked him I said how muchare they paying you?
And he told me.
(09:31):
And after he told me, I saidokay, you're gonna have to refer
me, we're gonna have to figuresomething out here.
And so a few weeks later Iended up at Instacart building
their zero to one enterprisebusiness.
We were turning a very consumerfocused business into an
enterprise business and sothat's kind of the last job I
had before starting startingRootlane and maybe I can go into
(09:54):
some of the Genesis, but I'llpause there.
William (09:58):
Yeah, that's, that's awesome.
I mean, no, no story is.
Yvonne, and I have found out nostory is like another story and
I have found out no story islike another story as far as
tech is concerned, it's prettyinteresting every time you hear
it, and this one, your story, isdefinitely unique.
Eyvonne (10:17):
Well, and I think we can get stuck in this mindset of
either not having all theinformation or not being in the
right place or not knowing whatto do.
And I think the thing I takefrom your story first is you
know your willingness to take arisk and, hey, I'm going to
email the head of IBM, likethat's for a lot of us seems
(10:39):
pretty audacious, but when youstep back and think about it,
worst case scenario is thatemail goes into a bit bucket and
nobody sees it and there's,there's, there's no downside and
a ton of upside and and justcontinuing to explore, and then
when you find a gap, you justfigure out how to fill it.
I like to remind people oftenthat none of us were born
(11:00):
knowing any of the things andthey can all be learned and and
I love that you, you know like,wait, I have a gap.
I need, I need to understandhow to, because William and I
have been on the, the, the GTMside, of product managers who
aren't technical and it can bequite painful and and I think
(11:22):
that's that that's a lesson youknow Just, if you find a gap,
figure out how to fill it.
It doesn't have to stay there,it doesn't have to be that way.
Just continue to grow and learn, and that will build a platform
that you can build on in thefuture, even if you don't know
what that future is going tolook like.
So I think that's really coolOne thing.
JJ (11:40):
Maybe I'll add as well I think there's just one thing I
quickly learned in life and inmy career and also through
school there's so many you knowexactly what you're saying
there's so many nonlinear pathspeople can take.
You know life is not, it turnsout, it's not this meritocracy
and you follow this.
You know you check this box andyou get this job and you know
(12:02):
things happen for all kinds ofreasons and you know just by
reading exactly what you weresaying.
Reaching out to people, theworst that they can say is no.
And when you really embracethat, new opportunities start
opening up for you.
I know I talked a little bitabout the internship example.
I remember when I was in school,there was this research
assistant job and they onlywanted PhD students and I ended
(12:25):
up figuring out where they werehosting these interviews and
where they were hosting theseresearch studies and I just sat
outside the researcher's roomuntil they were done for the day
and I approached her and I said, hey, I would love to do this.
Here's why I'm a great fit andshe ended up making this
exception for me.
I remember when my wife wasdoing her master's.
(12:47):
She was picking between twoschools and one of them was
there was a deadline to accepttwo months earlier, before the
other one would even announce ifshe got in.
They haven't even interviewedher yet for it, and so we ended
up just cold emailing the deanof the school and they got her
in the same week and gave her anoffer decision and that was the
(13:09):
best choice she could have madeand subsequently, you know,
rolled over into you know, ourown business.
You know, I remember, you knowthe first hundred customers were
ones that I'd closed and Ididn't have this vast network of
you know.
We typically sell to SREs andinfrastructure engineers that I
knew in the space outside ofInstacart and all I did was cold
(13:31):
email them and met them wherethey were and go to all the
events and you kind of just yeah, you take a lot of no's on the
chin, but the yeses are the onesthat you only need a few of the
yeses to make it work at theend of the day.
William (13:44):
I love that.
Eyvonne (13:45):
When I think, something that I've been reinforcing
lately in my world is that itdoesn't matter if you follow all
the rules and constraints, ifthe outcome stinks right, Like
you know, if the product, yes,you stayed within the boundaries
of what you were asked to do,but the outcome actually doesn't
(14:06):
meet the objectives of whatyou're trying to achieve, then
then something needs to give,and, and what should give are
those artificial constraints,not the outcome, and and that's
I love it, it's a great story.
William (14:22):
Yeah, that is a great story and so, like we were, so
we were talking before we hitthe record button and really
came up through Y Combinator andfor those of you that aren't
aren't familiar with YCombinator, they're basically
just a startup accelerator thatI think primarily operates at
like the seed round, althoughthey do admit companies, I think
(14:45):
, into the program sometimesthat have that have already done
like fundraising but have likejust a lot of high growth
potential, I guess.
So, really, so you wereactually like accepted into
their program, which I thinkthey have two batches per year,
um, which is really awesome, Ithink.
The success rate is, I thinkit's like under one percent or
(15:06):
something.
You know it's.
It's really hard to get intothis program A lot of applicants
, but what was that applicationprocess like for Y Combinator?
JJ (15:18):
Yeah, maybe just even taking a quick step back, I'm happy to
share a little bit of thegenesis behind.
You know how we ended up in aposition to then apply for YC
and you know, I think, a lot ofcompanies enter at various
stages.
You know, some of the companiesin our own batch were nothing
more than the slide deck and theothers were, you know, had
(15:39):
pretty serious momentum from acustomer standpoint.
So my co-founder and I Quintonhe was the first SRE at
Instacart I owned about I was onthe product side owned about a
quarter of our revenue atInstacart.
I was on the product side.
I owned about a quarter of ourrevenue at Instacart, building
our enterprise business.
And what ended up happening whenyou have a big service area and
(15:59):
a large ownership was you havea ton of incidents, and so who
better to complain to than thefirst SRE at Instacart?
And I think at one point weboth kind of got sick of each
other and we said, hey, how arewe going to solve this?
We started, you know, werealized it was a.
You know it was a peopleprocess problem, but it was also
a tooling challenge.
(16:20):
We were just jumping into thesingle slack channel and hoping.
You know, things were, thingswere working out and it turns
out there wasn't the best way tosolve these.
Solve these incidents andincidents, you know, just for
anyone listening for for us wasanything that was unplanned work
that urgently took us away fromour day to day, and that could
have been.
(16:40):
The website was entirely downor, you know, instacart couldn't
batch or find shoppers in timefor certain orders.
There was really interestingones during COVID which I can
talk about.
I think my favorite one wasprobably everyone was trying to
order toilet paper.
I don't know if you guys gotcaught up in the craze, but it
was a nightmare for me becausewe would send shoppers to the
(17:02):
store and there was no toiletpaper.
And we're trying to build thisreal-time inventory algorithm
and I just decided, hey, we'regoing to delete toilet paper.
So no one could order toiletpaper for three months.
And that's how we fixed thatincident, which was kind of
entertaining, but Quentin and I,on the weekend, we started
building Brutely as thisinternal tool and we gained a
(17:24):
lot of positive traction and wemade sure it was adopted
internally and we were obsessedwith it.
We made sure it was adoptedinternally and we were obsessed
with it.
And one day my VP put aone-on-one on my calendar on
Monday morning and I thought tomyself okay, that's it.
I know exactly what thisconversation is about, but it
wasn't what I thought.
He told me hey, you know,that's not really our core
(17:47):
competency.
We're a grocery deliverycompany.
Focus on that, focus on therevenue generating side of the
business.
Go buy something.
And so I did a quick scan ofthe market and there was
companies out there likePagerDuty and Opstradian, even
some of our more direct startupcompetitors that existed.
We didn't feel like they weresolving the problem that we
(18:08):
wanted, that we were in the waythat we were doing it, and so we
decided to quit and ended upstarting a starting a business
around it.
And I know, I know I'm kind ofskipping over some of the
details and I'm glad we reallyglad, we really did.
You know everyone, from fastgrowing startups like clay and
Webflow and Squarespace all theway until NVIDIA and LinkedIn
(18:32):
and Dropbox, rely on us fortheir critical on-call and
incident management.
So it's been a fun ride.
Then, during that journey, theimpetus for Y Combinator and the
impetus to even fundraise itwas difficult to determine how
far along we wanted to be beforewe went out and raised any
(18:56):
money, including from YC.
I remember sitting down withQuentin and I said how much do
you have left on your bankaccount, because we've been
doing this for a little bit?
And he told me I said we shouldprobably raise money and he
asked me how much I had and Isaid, yeah, I'm probably in the
same boat.
So I think we both realizedthat was the force and function.
(19:16):
Either we were going to raisemoney or we would have to go get
another job to pay our bills.
And luckily, you know, we bothhad partners that were very
supportive, that pouredeverything and still do every
single day they probably have amuch harder job than me in many
ways that were supporting us,and so we.
(19:38):
It was the night before the YCapplication was due.
We said, okay, we'll just pullan all-nighter and get it done,
and so it was a very it was verymuch so on a whim.
So it was very much so on awhim, and I think, now that I've
(19:58):
seen many applications as wellthat have succeeded and failed,
there's a few things that standout to me of what makes a really
good application.
I think YC is not expectingcompanies to come in and boil
the ocean.
I think they're expectingcompanies and founders that have
a particular skill set orsomething that they know about
their niche that they can solve.
They know these founders aresmart enough, or smart companies
(20:22):
will eventually find a way togrow it into a larger platform.
I think if a company likeDatadog was applying and they
said that they were doing RUMand telemetry and synthetics and
these 90 different productsthat they have, they would be
quite skeptical.
But if they said, hey, we'regoing to do this part of
observability really, reallywell and serve B2B SaaS
(20:45):
companies amazingly, that's kindof what made it successful and
so that's where we found success.
That kind of what made itsuccessful, and so that's where
we found success.
We were hyper, hyper focused onincident response in slack
actually, and that was our nicheand that was our wedge of how
we wanted to build traction andI think that was very, I think
that was very appealing and weapplied during covid and so we
(21:09):
were part of I one of sixbatches that were virtual, so we
didn't get the whole in-personexperience and there were
certainly downsides of it.
We had to work really, reallyhard in terms of making the most
out of the program becauseyou're just on a series of Zoom
calls now and the communityaspect, which is what you're
(21:29):
trading your equity for, in manyways gets a little bit diluted,
and so you have to work a bitharder on making sure you're
making the right friends andyou're leveraging all the right
resources.
But we certainly don't regretit.
It was a great accelerant intoour business.
The majority of the top YCcompanies use our product.
(21:51):
Everyone from Lattice to Fairto Riplet, webflow and Dropbox
all use Rootly, and even themajority of every new batch now
uses our product too.
So it turns out to be thispretty great go-to-market
flywheel and, selfishly, that'swhat I was in it for.
(22:12):
I was convinced that any sortof founder advice that we would
get.
I could learn many differentways through hundreds of
different people, but buyinginto the community was something
that would have been moredifficult otherwise.
William (22:29):
Well, kudos doing this successfully during covid.
I think one of the big benefitsof yc is, like they I mean you
basically you basically move outto silicon valley for like a
whole quarter of the year andthere's this, like you're saying
, there's this networking effectwhere you have all these um, um
, yc partners and otherexperienced founders and all
(22:52):
these folks that you mingle withand you you're around, they
give you feedback and it's allin person and, yeah, I feel like
doing that over zoom would bevery tricky, um, but it sounds
like it worked, uh, really wellfor you so that's awesome.
JJ (23:10):
We also did our whole fundra or Sand Hill or any of these
places.
We were a lot more productive.
(23:38):
We would have 25 investormeetings a day, just
back-to-back, 30 minute Zooms,over and over and over, with no
break, and so the throughput wasinsane and that helped you
generate a lot of momentum veryquickly, helped you generate a
lot of buzz and excitementaround your company very quickly
(23:59):
, because a lot of times whatthese investors are looking for
is also FOMO.
They see their counterparts ortheir peers getting excited and
they think, okay, I don't knowmuch about this business, I
don't know much about the space,I actually don't even have
enough time to do due diligenceon this business or this space
or opportunity.
But I'm going to use my peersthat I deeply trust as this
(24:22):
litmus test, and if John'sexcited, then I have to be
excited about it, and so thathelped a ton during COVID about
it, and so that helped a tonduring COVID, which I think was
to our advantage.
Eyvonne (24:35):
I was coming into this conversation.
One of the things I wanted totalk about was, you know,
product market fit how you knewyou had it and all of that, but
it sounds like but because youwere living it day to day.
This is a solution that wasborn out of real, very practical
experience for you and yourpartner, and so that part you
(24:55):
had locked right.
Like you knew what the productneeded to be from personal
experience, thinking aboutgrowing your company now and and
what new challenges you knowyou're facing now that maybe you
you maybe didn't foresee inthose very early days.
(25:19):
Or what's next?
JJ (25:22):
Yeah, happy to talk about that, maybe quickly on the
product market fit from cause.
I think that's reallyinteresting.
Um, and some interestingaspects of, I think, what I
would do differently if I wereto start another company, maybe
not in this space, but in anyspace.
In the early days of Rootly,you know, after our funding, I
(25:44):
think you know, we were on cloudnine.
We said you know, how can thispossibly fail anymore?
And immediately afterwards westruggled with sales.
People weren't really buyingour tool and I sat my co-founder
down and I said, okay, thiscould be one of many things
Maybe the product sucks, maybewe're not solving the right
(26:07):
problem, maybe we have no ideahow to sell.
He looked at me.
He says I think it's equallyall three.
And I said to Quinton I saidthat's not good and so and I
think in many ways it was aroundhow we actually position the
company we were the feedback wewere getting from customers was,
(26:28):
hey, this looks really great,but maybe not right now.
I don't know if I'm ready forthis and I kept getting that
feedback over and over.
And then I thought to myselflike how could you not need
something like this?
And it was very frustrating.
And, to give you a sense.
You know, maybe one out of 10customers were.
You know, two out of 10customers are going from a demo
(26:49):
into a trial.
It wasn't super difficult toget people on the phone, as you
can tell.
I was probably.
You know, I was very relentlesson our code outreach and making
sure, you know, we were in theright conversations.
But two out of 10 were goingfrom a demo into a trial and
even less were converting intocustomers, and so we weren't
converting really well.
(27:11):
And so one day, you know, andour messaging at this time was
we are this all in one incidentmanagement platform?
We had service catalog, we hadcollaboration, we helped you did
your postmortems, you know.
We had you know stuff with oncall, we had, you know, 70
integrations and all of thesethings.
And I started to realize, Ithink this is like intimidating,
like complexity wise forcustomers, and without changing
(27:36):
anything in the product, Ichanged our messaging from all
in one incident managementplatform to we help you manage
incidents in Slack.
And that was it, and that wasthe change that took us from two
and 10, going from demo totrial to almost nine and 10,
going from demo to trial, almostnine and 10 going from demo to
trial, because people got it,people understood, and that
(27:58):
allowed us to progressivelydisclose complexity, as they saw
.
And so very simple startups andcompanies that just wanted
something out of the box withgreat opinions and smart
defaults that we offered theycould just run with it.
Larger enterprises like aSquarespace that has many
acquisitions and differentdepartments that did things very
(28:20):
differently, and the wholesecurity team.
Well, they wanted the wholeplatform and all of the
flexibility that came to it, andwe presented that.
And product market fit, I thinkisn't just this aspect of
changing how and what theproduct is.
It's changing how people thinkand perceive your product as
(28:42):
well, and that was this massiveunlock for us.
And now our messaging haschanged as well.
We have so much more of ourproduct and we're much closer to
our original messaging andthat's been resonating really
well, and so it's never set instone and I think it would have
been far too early for us togive up had we not tried it, and
(29:03):
it would have been verydifficult for us to completely
change the product intosomething else.
And as we continued refining,the messaging was working, but
we wanted to make sure that theproduct itself actually served a
need.
I think what a lot of withoutcalling out names what a lot of
our competition gets wrong inour space in particular, is they
(29:28):
view it very academically, theyview it as hey when it comes to
incident response and then whenit comes to better reliability
and SRE principles, there's abunch of golden rules which I
agree with, and I think a lot ofcompanies take these golden
principles and create far toorigid opinions inside of their
(29:52):
product and that actually endsup on paper it sounds really
good, but in reality it actuallyends up hurting your business
because for a unique companythat no two companies are the
same and how they manageincidents, what ends up
happening is you make the easeof adoption really tough and
difficult.
And so by working by us beingvery close to our customer and
(30:16):
understanding what were thethings that they were truly
solving for, what wasfrustrating about adopting our
product, we actually builtsomething somewhat differently
that helped companies adopt itquicker, and the way that we did
that was for the first hundredcustomers.
There's this way that we didthat was for the first 100
customers.
(30:36):
There's this especially comingfrom a product background as
well.
You're tempted to make verydata-driven decisions.
You're tempted to not just acton instinct and you know check
amplitude for these userinsights and you know how is you
know how are these customerslogging in what part of the
product they're clicking on?
And what I said to the team waswe're going to delete every
(31:01):
single user analytic tool.
We have every single dashboard.
We have every customer healthmetric we own inside of
Salesforce.
We're going to delete it all.
And so we had no dashboards.
We had zero insight into howour customers were using our
product and the only way that wedid it was we got on the phone
with them and we deeply, deeplyunderstood what was unique about
(31:25):
the problem they were solving,because it was such an injustice
to the complexities and thenuances of how and the pain that
they were feeling in solvingthese problems by just
summarizing it into a fewnumbers and metrics.
And that was a core foundationof how we continue to accelerate
our product market fit.
(31:46):
And now we have the craziestdashboards humanly imaginable.
Eyvonne (31:53):
I have visceral responses to what you just said.
You know I want to stand andcheer.
Data matters and it's important, but I think we can over-rotate
on the data and not understandthe human component and
ultimately, we're always sellingto people and I think,
(32:16):
especially when it comes toincident response, that's a very
I'm going to use the word, it'sa very emotional job.
Right, because things arebroken, stuff is down, there are
problems that need to be solvedthere.
There, there is a there there'sa very whole body experience to
(32:37):
incident response.
That's not just based in thenumbers and you do have to
connect with people and thoseproblems that they're
experiencing in a way that movesthem.
And I can't say enough aboutyour example of changing your
messaging to doing incidentresponse and Slack and how that
(33:02):
is.
Is is easy to build a storyaround, like you.
You can.
You can sit down in front ofsomebody and tell a story.
You know, imagine what it wouldbe like if you could sit down
at Slack, and these are all ofthe capabilities that would be
available to you in the middleof an incident.
And it's incredible.
William, I've done a lot oftalking.
I don't I'll give you a chanceto ask a question, but I've.
(33:25):
This is great You're.
William (33:27):
You're.
You're basically encapsulatingwhat I was going to say.
Your messaging example justgoes back to that importance of
understanding the human aspectof you know what the the
problems the technology issupposed to solve.
Just a tweak in messaging isall it took, you know, and that
almost makes me think too aboutone of the.
(33:50):
I think one of the challengesthese days with the explosion of
software companies is generallylike large companies yeah, they
can invest in differentproducts that you know kind of
solve some niche, like use cases, but a lot of times that
product needs to be a must-haveand not a nice little accessory,
(34:12):
and I think that was that kindof like.
Some of the challenge too withthe first round of messaging was
just kind of like articulatingand persuading that this is a
must have, like the importanceof it.
And you know, incident responseis not an accessory, it's one
of the most important thingsbecause it has such a big impact
(34:33):
on the human side of incidentmanagement as well.
I mean, is there a way outthere to make it less terrible
for people to get woken up at2am on repeat for things that we
could potentially solve?
So do you have any thoughts onthat, like the must-have versus
nice-to-have.
Was that something that was inyour thoughts earlier on?
JJ (34:56):
Yeah, I think, you know, a company that's born in the Zerp
era has this very fortunatetailwind of companies that
aren't too concerned as muchwith their budgets and
constraints and, and you know,we've always thought of
ourselves.
As you know, it was reallyimportant to have very strong
business fundamentals in termsof the problems that we were
(35:19):
solving.
We didn't want to create aproduct that was manufacturing a
problem that was a nice to havefor people to solve.
We wanted to position ourselvesin a way that, hey, this is
actually a really core part ofyour infrastructure.
And as these companies wentthrough layoffs with the
audience that we've sold to andthe tool that we have, we've
(35:41):
done really well and in fact,we've continued to, year over
year, accelerate faster than wecould have imagined and I think
a lot of it too.
I talked to a lot of founders,know, some of them are going
through pivots right now andthey and they ask me, like how
should I think about thisproblem as I start something,
(36:02):
something new?
And I tell them I said, hey,don't just take the traditional
advice of like, hey, you havethis pain in your life, like go
solve it and then build aproduct and a business around it
.
In fact, you should workbackwards, think about, like,
think of something reallyimportant that could be solved
out there, think about how youwould sell that product and if
(36:24):
people would buy it.
Then formulate if you're goingto be excited enough to develop
a business and be passionatearound it.
So almost working in reversefrom the sale.
I think there's many companieswe could have built that I would
really struggled with to getoff the ground and make
successful and luckily, althoughI didn't have this advice, our
(36:47):
company, in many ways, becauseof the space that we're in,
falls into that sweet spot ofvery in need, critical to the
business, likely to survivebudget cuts and layoffs.
Sres have a ton of politicalclout inside of their
organizations with a lot ofdecision-making power.
I think we were building maybea social media tool that could
(37:11):
be a little bit harder tojustify.
But when you're running acompany's, all of their most
critical and sensitive incidentsthrough your platform it
becomes harder to move off ofand, you know, even tying it
back to some of the productmarket fit stuff we were talking
about.
You know, by getting very closeto our customers, by not having
(37:32):
those dashboards very close toour customers, by not having
those dashboards, we actuallysoon realized that what we were
selling wasn't just a product.
We're in the business ofselling reliability and trust.
And so we realized, you know,tooling wasn't going to be the
end all be all for thesecompanies If they had a poor
process or their people orculture weren't defined
(37:55):
correctly.
Actually, it still made it hardfor them to succeed from a
tooling standpoint, and so wequickly turned our business
around to also serve that need.
You know we started a program ofreliability advocates, whose
job was you know they've been atcompanies where they define the
zero to one incident responseprocess.
(38:16):
They've been in hundreds, ifnot thousands, of incidents and
their job is to be completelyvendor agnostic and all they do
is consult for our customers andfind, make sure not only are
they making the best use of thetool, but also how do they think
about, you know, people,problems and, for example, some
companies, their SVPs jump intoincidents all the time and are
(38:39):
very distracting and turningthem into these spectator sports
.
How do you have thatconversation with your manager's
manager's manager withoutgetting fired, without seeming
like a douchebag?
And so we help companies evenwith those type of problems.
Eyvonne (38:58):
Someday William has a story where he was that
douchebag.
But yeah, we've all been onwell, we all haven't, but some
of us have been on the200-person incident calls where
you've got leadership beggingfor updates.
Every you know I need a statusreport every 15 minutes.
(39:18):
Well, if I give you your statusreport every 15 minutes, I
can't solve the problem.
And what you say about trust isso important.
It's become so clear to me inthe last year that all of our
systems rely on trust, whetheryou're talking about economic
systems, if you're talking aboutgeopolitical systems, if you're
talking about geopoliticalsystems, if you're talking about
systems inside of our companies, if you're talking about how we
(39:41):
work with across companies.
There has to be a degree oftrust for meaningful systems to
work.
And I think it's so importantto call that out how important
it is, especially as an earlystage startup, to develop a
system of trust with yourcustomers and to do it in a way
(40:06):
that isn't built solely onreciprocity.
Right, we're going to supportyou, we're going to give you the
information you need.
We are going to be trusted.
We're going to build acommunity that you can rely on
when you're in crisis or a timeof need and when you're talking
about incident response, everyday is a crisis and a time of
(40:28):
need.
Right, that's the job.
JJ (40:33):
For sure I tend to.
I tell this to my team all thetime, especially during every
All Hands.
No one is opening rootlybecause they're having a
fantastic day.
We're designing for the worstcase scenario.
We're designing for the personthat is probably having the
toughest challenge of theircareer, potentially that they're
navigating through somethingextremely ambiguous and very
(40:56):
stressful.
And I also tell the team manyother things.
You know, because of the trustand how important reliability is
as well.
We're also in the business ofdoing the boring things right.
You know we're not in thebusiness of making the tool as
flashy as possible and you knowto be this consumer app.
You know we're here to serveour purpose and we need laser
(41:19):
focus on it, and I think you'vementioned some very interesting
things around.
You know the use cases as well.
You know a lot of companiesthat we serve.
You know are other.
You know B2B tech companieslet's call it where every
incident that they're down foryou know they're spending.
You know, $30,000 a minutebecause of downtime and that
(41:45):
hurts their revenue.
That hurts.
You know their public reportingand you know it's something
their leadership and their boarddeeply cares about and, over
time, because of how manycompanies we've worked with.
There's actually reallyinteresting use cases, probably
the two that really really standout to me.
Every single maximum securityprison in the US uses our tool
(42:11):
for incident response uses ourtool for incident response.
Every single 9-1-1 call centerin Norway, sweden and Finland
uses Rootly as well, and sowe're the backbone for a lot of
these companies and that'sreally interesting From a peer
(42:33):
revenue perspective.
It is not that big for us.
We work with, you know,nvidia's and the Cisco's of the
world like those.
Those are, you know, kind ofthe whales that I think as a
business you you have.
But I love sharing thosestories, in particular with my
team too, so they can empathizewith how important the things
(42:55):
that we're building, because inmany cases it can mean life or
death for these companies, and Ithink when you're really far
removed it's hard to realizethat.
And so every month we lovebringing in a customer, a unique
customer, to our all hands, andwe call it a seeing tour where
(43:15):
they reverse demo to us of howimportant our tool is and that
brings our engineers much closer.
And on that note as well, notto go on too much of a tangent,
we also encourage all of ourengineers to directly talk with
our customers.
There's never sales or customersuccess in the way.
(43:38):
When they run into an issue,they're in a Slack channel with
us or they're on a call with us,directly with the engineer that
maybe pushed the code or canfix it and that has kept the
go-to-market engine and the EPDengine very closely tied to each
other, and so you're notspending a lot of wasted effort
(44:01):
trying to glue the organizationin these ways, because it kind
of just does it itself.
William (44:06):
You're hitting on so many amazing things.
I don't even this could be liketwo episodes, but we could keep
going for a long time.
But one thing I wanted to saywas Yvonne and I worked in some
of the same industries and Iknow that sometimes bad outages
happen or things happen, and tome I always tried to look at
(44:28):
those instead of a bad thing.
I tried to look at them as anopportunity to do something
great, to make it better, and Ilove that quote from Denzel
Washington.
Luck is when opportunity meetspreparation.
I used to use that like all thetime.
But what I you know, kind oflike all the things you've been
talking about, like theopportunity, is these major
(44:51):
incidents that are happening forthese companies that they may
not have a handle on, and thepreparation is how can you be
more proactive with these things?
So I guess the question is,like what sort of proactive
steps should an organizationtake, you know, before that next
big incident?
Like hey, things are quietright now.
Like how do we get?
(45:12):
How do we get a handle on this,so they can be prepared for the
future incidents?
JJ (45:17):
Yeah, I think, many different things to unpack there
and I love what you saidbecause one of the things we
love telling our customers isyou know, incidents are one of
your best unplanned investmentsand opportunities to improve.
They're going to expose flawsinto your system in ways that
you never anticipated, excuse me, previously before.
(45:40):
And one of the you know,especially when things are quiet
, especially when things aregoing not going wrong.
There's a few things we love tocommunicate One and oftentimes
for leaders these feelcounterintuitive.
When people adopt our tool, thefirst thing that they see is
more incidents.
(46:00):
And when you tell the CTO of acompany thing that they see is
more incidents.
And when you tell the CTO of acompany, hey, I'm actually going
to give you more chaos,suddenly it feels so
counterintuitive.
And the reason that's importantis well, those incidents were
occurring anyways, you justweren't reporting them, you were
under reporting that we'rehelping you now see the full
picture.
So I think, culturally you wantto get into this motion of
(46:24):
being able to be comfortable,where everyone can declare and
report incidents and it's notthis silo job of only SREs or
only when you believe it's truly, truly a big issue.
And you know tooling certainlyhelps.
You know we introduce.
You know concepts like triageincidents, where you can go
perform an investigation withoutcalling up the whole cavalry,
(46:49):
and the other thing is actuallyaround training.
So I'll give you a few examplesand such, where you know when a
new engineer or new employeecomes on board, they, you know,
they set up their laptop, theyget on Slack, they set up Okta
and one of the first things thatthey do is they set up Rootly.
(47:13):
And you might be wondering whyare they setting up Rootly?
And because we have a historyof all of your team's incidents
and how you collaborate and howyour systems are interdependent
and how they work.
It actually serves as thisgreat onboarding tool where you
can look back into and replayhow even though I'm brand new
and only been here for two weekshow has my team functioned over
(47:35):
the last year, and that helpsengineers actually ramp up
really quickly and gives them aton of confidence going to brand
new incidents.
And the training aspect is alsoreally important.
You know you come up to speed,but how do you keep your tools
sharp?
You know firefighters and youknow the military.
They train for the worst ofworst case scenarios all the
(47:55):
time.
That may never occur, but theyconstantly train.
But in software we don'tnecessarily do that.
We kind of just say, hey, I'mon call and I'm just going to
anticipate the worst and figureit out once I get there.
And by not going through, youknow, these game day exercises,
or you know, having a way toeasily execute, that your tool
(48:16):
actually becomes rusty over time, over time.
And so that's the other thingwe encourage is, well, keep
practicing, keep finding ways todo game days.
And you know, if you use a toollike ours, we obviously have
spent a lot of time tofacilitate those things.
So we think of our tool as hey,it's not only when things are
(48:36):
burning and on fire and it's adisaster.
We think of it as that.
It's probably one of the bestways that you can prepare for
the worst case scenarios.
You know the 911 call centers.
I'll use an example.
They have two incidents a year,maybe lasting for less than a
few minutes each, but they'retraining every single week,
they're updating their playbooksevery single week of how
(48:58):
they're going to be ready for it.
And so when the when doesstrike and it always will
incidents are inevitable.
And I think that's the greatthing about our businesses
there's an endless supply.
They're never going away, nomatter what, as long as there's
humans involved, I'm sure.
And even in a world where thereisn't, they're fully prepared
(49:21):
for it.
And so much of it is helpingcompanies understand this
cultural mind shift.
But also, you know, it's aprocess and a tooling problem
too.
William (49:32):
Great answer.
I love that, all of it.
It looks like we are coming.
I can't.
Yvonne just actually messagedme a second ago Like I can't
believe how fast thisconversation went.
This has been a greatconversation.
Did you have anything else youwant to tee up, yvonne, with the
few minutes we have left?
Eyvonne (49:51):
Well, I have so many thoughts.
I feel like I could write fiveor six articles based on just
this conversation.
I love how you talk about howincidents are going to increase
when we introduce our tool, andthat's a good thing.
It makes me think of all theresearch on psychological safety
(50:12):
, especially when you talk aboutlike in health care.
You know the safestenvironments are the ones that
report the most errors.
It's not because there areactually more errors happening,
it's because it's an environmentwhere people are free to talk
about them and share them andlearn from them.
I think there's a just.
We could spend an entireepisode just talking about the
(50:34):
reality of that and how it works.
So this is.
This has been incredible.
I think folks are going to geta ton from it and we may have to
tee up a part two.
William (50:45):
I think so.
Where?
Where can the world find you onthe internet?
Are you on the social medias?
What do you work in?
Where's your watering holes?
JJ (50:56):
I try to be as many places as possible.
People can certainly find me onLinkedIn and on Twitter, my
company.
You can find me at rootleadcomas well.
But yeah, this has been such anawesome conversation and I
totally agree.
Time just flew by.
We love to do a part two atsome point and I realized I
(51:18):
actually never answered yourquestion.
How do we think about growing?
Eyvonne (51:20):
So We'll get there.
I do want to say I'm certain atthis stage in your career that
mom and dad did not waste theirinvestment in your education.
Even though it got a littlerocky there in college, I'm sure
that it was very worthwhile andthat they're incredibly proud
(51:41):
of the work that you've donewhile.
And that they're incrediblyproud of the work that you've
done.
Sometimes, college is just agrowing and learning time right.
JJ (51:49):
So yeah, it's incredible.
I really appreciate that.
And parents are the cutest.
My mom comes over all the timeand she always asks me do you
need money still?
And she'll try to slip me $100,a hundred dollars, and he said
I might think I'm okay, rightnow, that's hilarious amazing.
And our messaging at this time was we are this all-in-one
incident management platform.
We had service catalog, we hadcollaboration, we helped you did
your postmortems, you know.
We had you know stuff withon-call, we had you know 70
integrations and all of thesethings.
And I started to realize Ithink this is like intimidating,
like complexity-wise forcustomers and, without changing
(00:21):
anything in the product, Ichanged our messaging from
all-in-one incident managementplatform to we help you manage
incidents in Slack, and that wasit, and that was the change
that took us from 2 in 10 goingfrom demo to trial to almost 9
in 10 going from demo to trial,because people got it.
William (00:50):
Hello everyone.
I am your host, William, andwhile I might just be the
lightning on this podcast,everyone knows that after the
lightning you get thunder, andthat is Yvonne Sharp.
How are you doing today, Yvonne?
Eyvonne (01:06):
I don't know about being called thunder.
I can be loud and grumblysometimes, though, so maybe
that's appropriate.
We are recording on the brinkof the Christmas holiday, which
means everything is chaos.
William (01:20):
Everything is chaos.
Eyvonne (01:21):
Everything is chaos, trying to get end of year
wrapped up, trying to get allthe personal stuff sorted out so
that we can celebrate in a week, and yeah, so it's been a
little wild in my world.
How about you?
You've got a new one thatyou're planning Christmas for.
You know a new one of three.
William (01:41):
So I'm sure things are chaotic in your world too.
First Christmas for the newbaby.
We're dressing her up in like ahundred different Well, you've
seen, I've sent you somepictures we're having a little
too much fun with that.
Antlers hats and differentthings.
And she's such a good baby, sheloves it.
Eyvonne (01:55):
She's too small to roll her eyes at you, so enjoy it
while it lasts.
William (01:58):
Exactly, get plenty of selfies.
So we know that it happened andI was there, I witnessed it.
But today with us on thepodcast we have JJ Tang, ceo and
co-founder of Rootly.
And how are you doing today, jj?
JJ (02:12):
I'm doing.
Great Thanks for having me onthe podcast.
I've been a big fan, so I'mexcited to be here.
William (02:18):
Thank you, appreciate that.
And you are in which I foundout you're in Toronto and it is
cold in Toronto, because I wasactually recording something
with someone else last night inToronto and they were saying it
was like minus six Celsius or Iactually just that's 20 degrees
Fahrenheit.
I think could be wrong.
So for all of us that want tobe different with our
(02:39):
measurements in America, that's20 degrees, which is very below
freezing, which is cold enough.
Eyvonne (02:44):
Yes, anything below zero Celsius.
She 20 degrees, which is verycold.
It's below freezing, which iscold enough.
Yes, anything below zeroCelsius.
Yvonne loves this kind ofweather.
William (02:47):
She thrives in very, very cold climates.
JJ (02:51):
It's pretty cold and miserable outside, but I have a
theory it's not very data-driven, nor have I ever really said it
publicly either.
Eyvonne (03:02):
You heard it here first .
JJ (03:03):
We're a pretty distributed company.
The business is headquarteredout of San Francisco.
A lot of the go-to-market teamis here in Toronto.
We have a Europe presence andAsia presence, but I'm convinced
that the more people are higherin cold, depressing climates,
the harder they work becausethere's simply nothing to do
outside.
The harder they work becausethere's simply nothing to do
(03:26):
outside.
You can't really go for a hikeor take your family to the beach
.
Your job ends up becoming yourhobby in many ways.
Eyvonne (03:33):
It's a new founder mode strategy.
William (03:35):
I love it.
That's a fair point too.
JJ (03:37):
Yeah, I don't know, Maybe some people in interviews find
it a little psychotic, so Idon't really bring it up with
candidates.
You know, with candidatesthat's my.
You know why they're here inToronto with me, but we're
strategically here as well, justbecause it makes it so much
easier doing business in Europe.
William (03:58):
I don't want to wake up at 4am 5am to get on a call
yeah, that's never fun, neverfun, yeah, so how we're?
Can you give us a little?
For those in the audience thatdon't know you, can you give us
a little bit of a background?
How did you end up in tech?
And this is your.
This is your first startup,which you told me you happened
during COVID.
(04:18):
You say you launched a startupduring COVID which is pretty
brave, very brave.
So how did you get to thatpoint of launching Rootly?
What did you do before that?
JJ (04:29):
Yeah.
So before all of this started,as a kid, I grew up in China, in
mainland China, in a citycalled Suzhou, which was about
an hour and a half outside ofShanghai.
It was one of the biggestcities in China without an
airport, which is kind ofinteresting, and I went to an
international school there,everywhere from middle school
(04:53):
all the way until high school.
I finished in China and thendecided to come to Canada for
university, and duringuniversity I always thought I
would go into some sort ofbusiness and I ended up just
taking marketing and I was thisterrible student because I was
laser focused on my social lifeand going out and making sure I
(05:17):
was popular and had friends andmy grades unfortunately took a
pretty steep nosedive and twoyears into university I was on
the brink of being kicked out.
I was on academic probationevery single year and I don't
think my parents could have beenmore disappointed in me,
considering you know, we didn'tgrow up with much wealth or much
(05:38):
money at all and to go tointernational school in China it
was really expensive.
Go to international school inChina it was really expensive.
It's the equivalent of going toa non-in-state university in
the US, but for every singleyear of high school and middle
school.
So my parents put all they hadinto my education and the result
(05:59):
I produced them was less thanglamorous, I would say.
And the reason I went to theinternational school was, you
know, my Mandarin and my Chinesewas never that great, so it was
difficult for me to competewith local students.
So my parents thought, well, ifI want to give my child a
chance, I better put them inthis school.
(06:19):
During university I ended upfinding, towards the end I ended
up finding a good crowd to runwith and they were very keen on
internships and technology.
And I remember sitting in thelibrary one day and one of my
friends came in and says oh yeah, I'm going to be interning at
this bank over the winter.
And I thought to myself overthe summer and I thought to
(06:41):
myself, oh, should we be gettinginternships right now?
So I went home and I quicklyapplied for 100 to 200 jobs and
luckily one of them got back tome and that one job was at Cisco
.
And so that was my firstinternship during university and
(07:01):
that kind of taught me theropes of what this technology
world, what the corporate worldkind of looked like.
But by the time I finished itwas still this very unknown
black box.
But I think it taught me to bevery resourceful and keen about
reaching out and finding theseopportunities.
And so next year, next academicyear, rolls around and it was
(07:22):
time for another internship andI thought, you know, I'm going
to go try to work at IBM.
And everyone was applying atthe time and it was really
difficult to get a job there orbe seen, especially when all
these kids had computer sciencedegrees and they were in the
business school and I was kindof just escaping by.
And so I thought I needed anunfair advantage somehow, and so
(07:45):
I cold emailed the CEO andasked her for a coffee when I
was in New York the next weekand to my disbelief she agreed.
And so I went to the IBMheadquarters and met her and
probably asked her five of themost obvious, dumbest questions
any kid would.
But I think she was impressedby the fact that I would reach
(08:06):
out and that created this bigstir internally who's this
person that's meeting with theCEO?
And that landed me the nextinternship and subsequently the
job afterwards.
And so that's how my wholecareer kind of got started in
the tech world, and so my firstjob out of school was at IBM.
(08:26):
I worked on this, on IBM cloudand on some of their API
management and developer tools.
The interesting thing was I wasa product manager there and
very quickly I learned by beingsomeone that wasn't very
technical.
I was at a disadvantage.
It was difficult going to theseclient sites and being
(08:50):
dangerous in these conversations, so I spent every single
something clicked in my brainand I thought to myself I have
to learn how to code.
And so I spent every singlehour of my free time learning
Ruby on Rails, and so it taughtme to be very dangerous
technically and helped meaccelerate in my career at IBM
(09:10):
and subsequently afterwards Iwas working with a friend of
mine and he went over toInstacart and I remember asking
him at the time I said what'sthis Instacart company?
He said, oh, they do grocerydelivery.
I said, oh, that's kind of cool.
I've never used something likethat before.
And I asked him I said how muchare they paying you?
And he told me.
(09:31):
And after he told me, I saidokay, you're gonna have to refer
me, we're gonna have to figuresomething out here.
And so a few weeks later Iended up at Instacart building
their zero to one enterprisebusiness.
We were turning a very consumerfocused business into an
enterprise business and sothat's kind of the last job I
had before starting startingRootlane and maybe I can go into
(09:54):
some of the Genesis, but I'llpause there.
William (09:58):
Yeah, that's, that's awesome.
I mean, no, no story is.
Yvonne, and I have found out nostory is like another story and
I have found out no story islike another story as far as
tech is concerned, it's prettyinteresting every time you hear
it, and this one, your story, isdefinitely unique.
Eyvonne (10:17):
Well, and I think we can get stuck in this mindset of
either not having all theinformation or not being in the
right place or not knowing whatto do.
And I think the thing I takefrom your story first is you
know your willingness to take arisk and, hey, I'm going to
email the head of IBM, likethat's for a lot of us seems
(10:39):
pretty audacious, but when youstep back and think about it,
worst case scenario is thatemail goes into a bit bucket and
nobody sees it and there's,there's, there's no downside and
a ton of upside and and justcontinuing to explore, and then
when you find a gap, you justfigure out how to fill it.
I like to remind people oftenthat none of us were born
(11:00):
knowing any of the things andthey can all be learned and and
I love that you, you know like,wait, I have a gap.
I need, I need to understandhow to, because William and I
have been on the, the, the GTMside, of product managers who
aren't technical and it can bequite painful and and I think
(11:22):
that's that that's a lesson youknow Just, if you find a gap,
figure out how to fill it.
It doesn't have to stay there,it doesn't have to be that way.
Just continue to grow and learn, and that will build a platform
that you can build on in thefuture, even if you don't know
what that future is going tolook like.
So I think that's really coolOne thing.
JJ (11:40):
Maybe I'll add as well I think there's just one thing I
quickly learned in life and inmy career and also through
school there's so many you knowexactly what you're saying
there's so many nonlinear pathspeople can take.
You know life is not, it turnsout, it's not this meritocracy
and you follow this.
You know you check this box andyou get this job and you know
(12:02):
things happen for all kinds ofreasons and you know just by
reading exactly what you weresaying.
Reaching out to people, theworst that they can say is no.
And when you really embracethat, new opportunities start
opening up for you.
I know I talked a little bitabout the internship example.
I remember when I was in school,there was this research
assistant job and they onlywanted PhD students and I ended
(12:25):
up figuring out where they werehosting these interviews and
where they were hosting theseresearch studies and I just sat
outside the researcher's roomuntil they were done for the day
and I approached her and I said, hey, I would love to do this.
Here's why I'm a great fit andshe ended up making this
exception for me.
I remember when my wife wasdoing her master's.
(12:47):
She was picking between twoschools and one of them was
there was a deadline to accepttwo months earlier, before the
other one would even announce ifshe got in.
They haven't even interviewedher yet for it, and so we ended
up just cold emailing the deanof the school and they got her
in the same week and gave her anoffer decision and that was the
(13:09):
best choice she could have madeand subsequently, you know,
rolled over into you know, ourown business.
You know, I remember, you knowthe first hundred customers were
ones that I'd closed and Ididn't have this vast network of
you know.
We typically sell to SREs andinfrastructure engineers that I
knew in the space outside ofInstacart and all I did was cold
(13:31):
email them and met them wherethey were and go to all the
events and you kind of just yeah, you take a lot of no's on the
chin, but the yeses are the onesthat you only need a few of the
yeses to make it work at theend of the day.
William (13:44):
I love that.
Eyvonne (13:45):
When I think, something that I've been reinforcing
lately in my world is that itdoesn't matter if you follow all
the rules and constraints, ifthe outcome stinks right, Like
you know, if the product, yes,you stayed within the boundaries
of what you were asked to do,but the outcome actually doesn't
(14:06):
meet the objectives of whatyou're trying to achieve, then
then something needs to give,and, and what should give are
those artificial constraints,not the outcome, and and that's
I love it, it's a great story.
William (14:22):
Yeah, that is a great story and so, like we were, so
we were talking before we hitthe record button and really
came up through Y Combinator andfor those of you that aren't
aren't familiar with YCombinator, they're basically
just a startup accelerator thatI think primarily operates at
like the seed round, althoughthey do admit companies, I think
(14:45):
, into the program sometimesthat have that have already done
like fundraising but have likejust a lot of high growth
potential, I guess.
So, really, so you wereactually like accepted into
their program, which I thinkthey have two batches per year,
um, which is really awesome, Ithink.
The success rate is, I thinkit's like under one percent or
(15:06):
something.
You know it's.
It's really hard to get intothis program A lot of applicants
, but what was that applicationprocess like for Y Combinator?
JJ (15:18):
Yeah, maybe just even taking a quick step back, I'm happy to
share a little bit of thegenesis behind.
You know how we ended up in aposition to then apply for YC
and you know, I think, a lot ofcompanies enter at various
stages.
You know, some of the companiesin our own batch were nothing
more than the slide deck and theothers were, you know, had
(15:39):
pretty serious momentum from acustomer standpoint.
So my co-founder and I Quintonhe was the first SRE at
Instacart I owned about I was onthe product side owned about a
quarter of our revenue atInstacart.
I was on the product side.
I owned about a quarter of ourrevenue at Instacart, building
our enterprise business.
And what ended up happening whenyou have a big service area and
(15:59):
a large ownership was you havea ton of incidents, and so who
better to complain to than thefirst SRE at Instacart?
And I think at one point weboth kind of got sick of each
other and we said, hey, how arewe going to solve this?
We started, you know, werealized it was a.
You know it was a peopleprocess problem, but it was also
a tooling challenge.
(16:20):
We were just jumping into thesingle slack channel and hoping.
You know, things were, thingswere working out and it turns
out there wasn't the best way tosolve these.
Solve these incidents andincidents, you know, just for
anyone listening for for us wasanything that was unplanned work
that urgently took us away fromour day to day, and that could
have been.
(16:40):
The website was entirely downor, you know, instacart couldn't
batch or find shoppers in timefor certain orders.
There was really interestingones during COVID which I can
talk about.
I think my favorite one wasprobably everyone was trying to
order toilet paper.
I don't know if you guys gotcaught up in the craze, but it
was a nightmare for me becausewe would send shoppers to the
(17:02):
store and there was no toiletpaper.
And we're trying to build thisreal-time inventory algorithm
and I just decided, hey, we'regoing to delete toilet paper.
So no one could order toiletpaper for three months.
And that's how we fixed thatincident, which was kind of
entertaining, but Quentin and I,on the weekend, we started
building Brutely as thisinternal tool and we gained a
(17:24):
lot of positive traction and wemade sure it was adopted
internally and we were obsessedwith it.
We made sure it was adoptedinternally and we were obsessed
with it.
And one day my VP put aone-on-one on my calendar on
Monday morning and I thought tomyself okay, that's it.
I know exactly what thisconversation is about, but it
wasn't what I thought.
He told me hey, you know,that's not really our core
(17:47):
competency.
We're a grocery deliverycompany.
Focus on that, focus on therevenue generating side of the
business.
Go buy something.
And so I did a quick scan ofthe market and there was
companies out there likePagerDuty and Opstradian, even
some of our more direct startupcompetitors that existed.
We didn't feel like they weresolving the problem that we
(18:08):
wanted, that we were in the waythat we were doing it, and so we
decided to quit and ended upstarting a starting a business
around it.
And I know, I know I'm kind ofskipping over some of the
details and I'm glad we reallyglad, we really did.
You know everyone, from fastgrowing startups like clay and
Webflow and Squarespace all theway until NVIDIA and LinkedIn
(18:32):
and Dropbox, rely on us fortheir critical on-call and
incident management.
So it's been a fun ride.
Then, during that journey, theimpetus for Y Combinator and the
impetus to even fundraise itwas difficult to determine how
far along we wanted to be beforewe went out and raised any
(18:56):
money, including from YC.
I remember sitting down withQuentin and I said how much do
you have left on your bankaccount, because we've been
doing this for a little bit?
And he told me I said we shouldprobably raise money and he
asked me how much I had and Isaid, yeah, I'm probably in the
same boat.
So I think we both realizedthat was the force and function.
(19:16):
Either we were going to raisemoney or we would have to go get
another job to pay our bills.
And luckily, you know, we bothhad partners that were very
supportive, that pouredeverything and still do every
single day they probably have amuch harder job than me in many
ways that were supporting us,and so we.
(19:38):
It was the night before the YCapplication was due.
We said, okay, we'll just pullan all-nighter and get it done,
and so it was a very it was verymuch so on a whim.
So it was very much so on awhim, and I think, now that I've
(19:58):
seen many applications as wellthat have succeeded and failed,
there's a few things that standout to me of what makes a really
good application.
I think YC is not expectingcompanies to come in and boil
the ocean.
I think they're expectingcompanies and founders that have
a particular skill set orsomething that they know about
their niche that they can solve.
They know these founders aresmart enough, or smart companies
(20:22):
will eventually find a way togrow it into a larger platform.
I think if a company likeDatadog was applying and they
said that they were doing RUMand telemetry and synthetics and
these 90 different productsthat they have, they would be
quite skeptical.
But if they said, hey, we'regoing to do this part of
observability really, reallywell and serve B2B SaaS
(20:45):
companies amazingly, that's kindof what made it successful and
so that's where we found success.
That kind of what made itsuccessful, and so that's where
we found success.
We were hyper, hyper focused onincident response in slack
actually, and that was our nicheand that was our wedge of how
we wanted to build traction andI think that was very, I think
that was very appealing and weapplied during covid and so we
(21:09):
were part of I one of sixbatches that were virtual, so we
didn't get the whole in-personexperience and there were
certainly downsides of it.
We had to work really, reallyhard in terms of making the most
out of the program becauseyou're just on a series of Zoom
calls now and the communityaspect, which is what you're
(21:29):
trading your equity for, in manyways gets a little bit diluted,
and so you have to work a bitharder on making sure you're
making the right friends andyou're leveraging all the right
resources.
But we certainly don't regretit.
It was a great accelerant intoour business.
The majority of the top YCcompanies use our product.
(21:51):
Everyone from Lattice to Fairto Riplet, webflow and Dropbox
all use Rootly, and even themajority of every new batch now
uses our product too.
So it turns out to be thispretty great go-to-market
flywheel and, selfishly, that'swhat I was in it for.
(22:12):
I was convinced that any sortof founder advice that we would
get.
I could learn many differentways through hundreds of
different people, but buyinginto the community was something
that would have been moredifficult otherwise.
William (22:29):
Well, kudos doing this successfully during covid.
I think one of the big benefitsof yc is, like they I mean you
basically you basically move outto silicon valley for like a
whole quarter of the year andthere's this, like you're saying
, there's this networking effectwhere you have all these um, um
, yc partners and otherexperienced founders and all
(22:52):
these folks that you mingle withand you you're around, they
give you feedback and it's allin person and, yeah, I feel like
doing that over zoom would bevery tricky, um, but it sounds
like it worked, uh, really wellfor you so that's awesome.
JJ (23:10):
We also did our whole fundra or Sand Hill or any of these
places.
We were a lot more productive.
(23:38):
We would have 25 investormeetings a day, just
back-to-back, 30 minute Zooms,over and over and over, with no
break, and so the throughput wasinsane and that helped you
generate a lot of momentum veryquickly, helped you generate a
lot of buzz and excitementaround your company very quickly
(23:59):
, because a lot of times whatthese investors are looking for
is also FOMO.
They see their counterparts ortheir peers getting excited and
they think, okay, I don't knowmuch about this business, I
don't know much about the space,I actually don't even have
enough time to do due diligenceon this business or this space
or opportunity.
But I'm going to use my peersthat I deeply trust as this
(24:22):
litmus test, and if John'sexcited, then I have to be
excited about it, and so thathelped a ton during COVID about
it, and so that helped a tonduring COVID, which I think was
to our advantage.
Eyvonne (24:35):
I was coming into this conversation.
One of the things I wanted totalk about was, you know,
product market fit how you knewyou had it and all of that, but
it sounds like but because youwere living it day to day.
This is a solution that wasborn out of real, very practical
experience for you and yourpartner, and so that part you
(24:55):
had locked right.
Like you knew what the productneeded to be from personal
experience, thinking aboutgrowing your company now and and
what new challenges you knowyou're facing now that maybe you
you maybe didn't foresee inthose very early days.
(25:19):
Or what's next?
JJ (25:22):
Yeah, happy to talk about that, maybe quickly on the
product market fit from cause.
I think that's reallyinteresting.
Um, and some interestingaspects of, I think, what I
would do differently if I wereto start another company, maybe
not in this space, but in anyspace.
In the early days of Rootly,you know, after our funding, I
(25:44):
think you know, we were on cloudnine.
We said you know, how can thispossibly fail anymore?
And immediately afterwards westruggled with sales.
People weren't really buyingour tool and I sat my co-founder
down and I said, okay, thiscould be one of many things
Maybe the product sucks, maybewe're not solving the right
(26:07):
problem, maybe we have no ideahow to sell.
He looked at me.
He says I think it's equallyall three.
And I said to Quinton I saidthat's not good and so and I
think in many ways it was aroundhow we actually position the
company we were the feedback wewere getting from customers was,
(26:28):
hey, this looks really great,but maybe not right now.
I don't know if I'm ready forthis and I kept getting that
feedback over and over.
And then I thought to myselflike how could you not need
something like this?
And it was very frustrating.
And, to give you a sense.
You know, maybe one out of 10customers were.
You know, two out of 10customers are going from a demo
(26:49):
into a trial.
It wasn't super difficult toget people on the phone, as you
can tell.
I was probably.
You know, I was very relentlesson our code outreach and making
sure, you know, we were in theright conversations.
But two out of 10 were goingfrom a demo into a trial and
even less were converting intocustomers, and so we weren't
converting really well.
(27:11):
And so one day, you know, andour messaging at this time was
we are this all in one incidentmanagement platform?
We had service catalog, we hadcollaboration, we helped you did
your postmortems, you know.
We had you know stuff with oncall, we had, you know, 70
integrations and all of thesethings.
And I started to realize, Ithink this is like intimidating,
like complexity wise forcustomers, and without changing
(27:36):
anything in the product, Ichanged our messaging from all
in one incident managementplatform to we help you manage
incidents in Slack.
And that was it, and that wasthe change that took us from two
and 10, going from demo totrial to almost nine and 10,
going from demo to trial, almostnine and 10 going from demo to
trial, because people got it,people understood, and that
(27:58):
allowed us to progressivelydisclose complexity, as they saw
.
And so very simple startups andcompanies that just wanted
something out of the box withgreat opinions and smart
defaults that we offered theycould just run with it.
Larger enterprises like aSquarespace that has many
acquisitions and differentdepartments that did things very
(28:20):
differently, and the wholesecurity team.
Well, they wanted the wholeplatform and all of the
flexibility that came to it, andwe presented that.
And product market fit, I thinkisn't just this aspect of
changing how and what theproduct is.
It's changing how people thinkand perceive your product as
(28:42):
well, and that was this massiveunlock for us.
And now our messaging haschanged as well.
We have so much more of ourproduct and we're much closer to
our original messaging andthat's been resonating really
well, and so it's never set instone and I think it would have
been far too early for us togive up had we not tried it, and
(29:03):
it would have been verydifficult for us to completely
change the product intosomething else.
And as we continued refining,the messaging was working, but
we wanted to make sure that theproduct itself actually served a
need.
I think what a lot of withoutcalling out names what a lot of
our competition gets wrong inour space in particular, is they
(29:28):
view it very academically, theyview it as hey when it comes to
incident response and then whenit comes to better reliability
and SRE principles, there's abunch of golden rules which I
agree with, and I think a lot ofcompanies take these golden
principles and create far toorigid opinions inside of their
(29:52):
product and that actually endsup on paper it sounds really
good, but in reality it actuallyends up hurting your business
because for a unique companythat no two companies are the
same and how they manageincidents, what ends up
happening is you make the easeof adoption really tough and
difficult.
And so by working by us beingvery close to our customer and
(30:16):
understanding what were thethings that they were truly
solving for, what wasfrustrating about adopting our
product, we actually builtsomething somewhat differently
that helped companies adopt itquicker, and the way that we did
that was for the first hundredcustomers.
There's this way that we didthat was for the first 100
customers.
(30:36):
There's this especially comingfrom a product background as
well.
You're tempted to make verydata-driven decisions.
You're tempted to not just acton instinct and you know check
amplitude for these userinsights and you know how is you
know how are these customerslogging in what part of the
product they're clicking on?
And what I said to the team waswe're going to delete every
(31:01):
single user analytic tool.
We have every single dashboard.
We have every customer healthmetric we own inside of
Salesforce.
We're going to delete it all.
And so we had no dashboards.
We had zero insight into howour customers were using our
product and the only way that wedid it was we got on the phone
with them and we deeply, deeplyunderstood what was unique about
(31:25):
the problem they were solving,because it was such an injustice
to the complexities and thenuances of how and the pain that
they were feeling in solvingthese problems by just
summarizing it into a fewnumbers and metrics.
And that was a core foundationof how we continue to accelerate
our product market fit.
(31:46):
And now we have the craziestdashboards humanly imaginable.
Eyvonne (31:53):
I have visceral responses to what you just said.
You know I want to stand andcheer.
Data matters and it's important, but I think we can over-rotate
on the data and not understandthe human component and
ultimately, we're always sellingto people and I think,
(32:16):
especially when it comes toincident response, that's a very
I'm going to use the word, it'sa very emotional job.
Right, because things arebroken, stuff is down, there are
problems that need to be solvedthere.
There, there is a there there'sa very whole body experience to
(32:37):
incident response.
That's not just based in thenumbers and you do have to
connect with people and thoseproblems that they're
experiencing in a way that movesthem.
And I can't say enough aboutyour example of changing your
messaging to doing incidentresponse and Slack and how that
(33:02):
is.
Is is easy to build a storyaround, like you.
You can.
You can sit down in front ofsomebody and tell a story.
You know, imagine what it wouldbe like if you could sit down
at Slack, and these are all ofthe capabilities that would be
available to you in the middleof an incident.
And it's incredible.
William, I've done a lot oftalking.
I don't I'll give you a chanceto ask a question, but I've.
(33:25):
This is great You're.
William (33:27):
You're.
You're basically encapsulatingwhat I was going to say.
Your messaging example justgoes back to that importance of
understanding the human aspectof you know what the the
problems the technology issupposed to solve.
Just a tweak in messaging isall it took, you know, and that
almost makes me think too aboutone of the.
(33:50):
I think one of the challengesthese days with the explosion of
software companies is generallylike large companies yeah, they
can invest in differentproducts that you know kind of
solve some niche, like use cases, but a lot of times that
product needs to be a must-haveand not a nice little accessory,
(34:12):
and I think that was that kindof like.
Some of the challenge too withthe first round of messaging was
just kind of like articulatingand persuading that this is a
must have, like the importanceof it.
And you know, incident responseis not an accessory, it's one
of the most important thingsbecause it has such a big impact
(34:33):
on the human side of incidentmanagement as well.
I mean, is there a way outthere to make it less terrible
for people to get woken up at2am on repeat for things that we
could potentially solve?
So do you have any thoughts onthat, like the must-have versus
nice-to-have.
Was that something that was inyour thoughts earlier on?
JJ (34:56):
Yeah, I think, you know, a company that's born in the Zerp
era has this very fortunatetailwind of companies that
aren't too concerned as muchwith their budgets and
constraints and, and you know,we've always thought of
ourselves.
As you know, it was reallyimportant to have very strong
business fundamentals in termsof the problems that we were
(35:19):
solving.
We didn't want to create aproduct that was manufacturing a
problem that was a nice to havefor people to solve.
We wanted to position ourselvesin a way that, hey, this is
actually a really core part ofyour infrastructure.
And as these companies wentthrough layoffs with the
audience that we've sold to andthe tool that we have, we've
(35:41):
done really well and in fact,we've continued to, year over
year, accelerate faster than wecould have imagined and I think
a lot of it too.
I talked to a lot of founders,know, some of them are going
through pivots right now andthey and they ask me, like how
should I think about thisproblem as I start something,
(36:02):
something new?
And I tell them I said, hey,don't just take the traditional
advice of like, hey, you havethis pain in your life, like go
solve it and then build aproduct and a business around it
.
In fact, you should workbackwards, think about, like,
think of something reallyimportant that could be solved
out there, think about how youwould sell that product and if
(36:24):
people would buy it.
Then formulate if you're goingto be excited enough to develop
a business and be passionatearound it.
So almost working in reversefrom the sale.
I think there's many companieswe could have built that I would
really struggled with to getoff the ground and make
successful and luckily, althoughI didn't have this advice, our
(36:47):
company, in many ways, becauseof the space that we're in,
falls into that sweet spot ofvery in need, critical to the
business, likely to survivebudget cuts and layoffs.
Sres have a ton of politicalclout inside of their
organizations with a lot ofdecision-making power.
I think we were building maybea social media tool that could
(37:11):
be a little bit harder tojustify.
But when you're running acompany's, all of their most
critical and sensitive incidentsthrough your platform it
becomes harder to move off ofand, you know, even tying it
back to some of the productmarket fit stuff we were talking
about.
You know, by getting very closeto our customers, by not having
(37:32):
those dashboards very close toour customers, by not having
those dashboards, we actuallysoon realized that what we were
selling wasn't just a product.
We're in the business ofselling reliability and trust.
And so we realized, you know,tooling wasn't going to be the
end all be all for thesecompanies If they had a poor
process or their people orculture weren't defined
(37:55):
correctly.
Actually, it still made it hardfor them to succeed from a
tooling standpoint, and so wequickly turned our business
around to also serve that need.
You know we started a program ofreliability advocates, whose
job was you know they've been atcompanies where they define the
zero to one incident responseprocess.
(38:16):
They've been in hundreds, ifnot thousands, of incidents and
their job is to be completelyvendor agnostic and all they do
is consult for our customers andfind, make sure not only are
they making the best use of thetool, but also how do they think
about, you know, people,problems and, for example, some
companies, their SVPs jump intoincidents all the time and are
(38:39):
very distracting and turningthem into these spectator sports
.
How do you have thatconversation with your manager's
manager's manager withoutgetting fired, without seeming
like a douchebag?
And so we help companies evenwith those type of problems.
Eyvonne (38:58):
Someday William has a story where he was that
douchebag.
But yeah, we've all been onwell, we all haven't, but some
of us have been on the200-person incident calls where
you've got leadership beggingfor updates.
Every you know I need a statusreport every 15 minutes.
(39:18):
Well, if I give you your statusreport every 15 minutes, I
can't solve the problem.
And what you say about trust isso important.
It's become so clear to me inthe last year that all of our
systems rely on trust, whetheryou're talking about economic
systems, if you're talking aboutgeopolitical systems, if you're
talking about geopoliticalsystems, if you're talking about
systems inside of our companies, if you're talking about how we
(39:41):
work with across companies.
There has to be a degree oftrust for meaningful systems to
work.
And I think it's so importantto call that out how important
it is, especially as an earlystage startup, to develop a
system of trust with yourcustomers and to do it in a way
(40:06):
that isn't built solely onreciprocity.
Right, we're going to supportyou, we're going to give you the
information you need.
We are going to be trusted.
We're going to build acommunity that you can rely on
when you're in crisis or a timeof need and when you're talking
about incident response, everyday is a crisis and a time of
(40:28):
need.
Right, that's the job.
JJ (40:33):
For sure I tend to.
I tell this to my team all thetime, especially during every
All Hands.
No one is opening rootlybecause they're having a
fantastic day.
We're designing for the worstcase scenario.
We're designing for the personthat is probably having the
toughest challenge of theircareer, potentially that they're
navigating through somethingextremely ambiguous and very
(40:56):
stressful.
And I also tell the team manyother things.
You know, because of the trustand how important reliability is
as well.
We're also in the business ofdoing the boring things right.
You know we're not in thebusiness of making the tool as
flashy as possible and you knowto be this consumer app.
You know we're here to serveour purpose and we need laser
(41:19):
focus on it, and I think you'vementioned some very interesting
things around.
You know the use cases as well.
You know a lot of companiesthat we serve.
You know are other.
You know B2B tech companieslet's call it where every
incident that they're down foryou know they're spending.
You know, $30,000 a minutebecause of downtime and that
(41:45):
hurts their revenue.
That hurts.
You know their public reportingand you know it's something
their leadership and their boarddeeply cares about and, over
time, because of how manycompanies we've worked with.
There's actually reallyinteresting use cases, probably
the two that really really standout to me.
Every single maximum securityprison in the US uses our tool
(42:11):
for incident response uses ourtool for incident response.
Every single 9-1-1 call centerin Norway, sweden and Finland
uses Rootly as well, and sowe're the backbone for a lot of
these companies and that'sreally interesting From a peer
(42:33):
revenue perspective.
It is not that big for us.
We work with, you know,nvidia's and the Cisco's of the
world like those.
Those are, you know, kind ofthe whales that I think as a
business you you have.
But I love sharing thosestories, in particular with my
team too, so they can empathizewith how important the things
(42:55):
that we're building, because inmany cases it can mean life or
death for these companies, and Ithink when you're really far
removed it's hard to realizethat.
And so every month we lovebringing in a customer, a unique
customer, to our all hands, andwe call it a seeing tour where
(43:15):
they reverse demo to us of howimportant our tool is and that
brings our engineers much closer.
And on that note as well, notto go on too much of a tangent,
we also encourage all of ourengineers to directly talk with
our customers.
There's never sales or customersuccess in the way.
(43:38):
When they run into an issue,they're in a Slack channel with
us or they're on a call with us,directly with the engineer that
maybe pushed the code or canfix it and that has kept the
go-to-market engine and the EPDengine very closely tied to each
other, and so you're notspending a lot of wasted effort
(44:01):
trying to glue the organizationin these ways, because it kind
of just does it itself.
William (44:06):
You're hitting on so many amazing things.
I don't even this could be liketwo episodes, but we could keep
going for a long time.
But one thing I wanted to saywas Yvonne and I worked in some
of the same industries and Iknow that sometimes bad outages
happen or things happen, and tome I always tried to look at
(44:28):
those instead of a bad thing.
I tried to look at them as anopportunity to do something
great, to make it better, and Ilove that quote from Denzel
Washington.
Luck is when opportunity meetspreparation.
I used to use that like all thetime.
But what I you know, kind oflike all the things you've been
talking about, like theopportunity, is these major
(44:51):
incidents that are happening forthese companies that they may
not have a handle on, and thepreparation is how can you be
more proactive with these things?
So I guess the question is,like what sort of proactive
steps should an organizationtake, you know, before that next
big incident?
Like hey, things are quietright now.
Like how do we get?
(45:12):
How do we get a handle on this,so they can be prepared for the
future incidents?
JJ (45:17):
Yeah, I think, many different things to unpack there
and I love what you saidbecause one of the things we
love telling our customers isyou know, incidents are one of
your best unplanned investmentsand opportunities to improve.
They're going to expose flawsinto your system in ways that
you never anticipated, excuse me, previously before.
(45:40):
And one of the you know,especially when things are quiet
, especially when things aregoing not going wrong.
There's a few things we love tocommunicate One and oftentimes
for leaders these feelcounterintuitive.
When people adopt our tool, thefirst thing that they see is
more incidents.
(46:00):
And when you tell the CTO of acompany thing that they see is
more incidents.
And when you tell the CTO of acompany, hey, I'm actually going
to give you more chaos,suddenly it feels so
counterintuitive.
And the reason that's importantis well, those incidents were
occurring anyways, you justweren't reporting them, you were
under reporting that we'rehelping you now see the full
picture.
So I think, culturally you wantto get into this motion of
(46:24):
being able to be comfortable,where everyone can declare and
report incidents and it's notthis silo job of only SREs or
only when you believe it's truly, truly a big issue.
And you know tooling certainlyhelps.
You know we introduce.
You know concepts like triageincidents, where you can go
perform an investigation withoutcalling up the whole cavalry,
(46:49):
and the other thing is actuallyaround training.
So I'll give you a few examplesand such, where you know when a
new engineer or new employeecomes on board, they, you know,
they set up their laptop, theyget on Slack, they set up Okta
and one of the first things thatthey do is they set up Rootly.
(47:13):
And you might be wondering whyare they setting up Rootly?
And because we have a historyof all of your team's incidents
and how you collaborate and howyour systems are interdependent
and how they work.
It actually serves as thisgreat onboarding tool where you
can look back into and replayhow even though I'm brand new
and only been here for two weekshow has my team functioned over
(47:35):
the last year, and that helpsengineers actually ramp up
really quickly and gives them aton of confidence going to brand
new incidents.
And the training aspect is alsoreally important.
You know you come up to speed,but how do you keep your tools
sharp?
You know firefighters and youknow the military.
They train for the worst ofworst case scenarios all the
(47:55):
time.
That may never occur, but theyconstantly train.
But in software we don'tnecessarily do that.
We kind of just say, hey, I'mon call and I'm just going to
anticipate the worst and figureit out once I get there.
And by not going through, youknow, these game day exercises,
or you know, having a way toeasily execute, that your tool
(48:16):
actually becomes rusty over time, over time.
And so that's the other thingwe encourage is, well, keep
practicing, keep finding ways todo game days.
And you know, if you use a toollike ours, we obviously have
spent a lot of time tofacilitate those things.
So we think of our tool as hey,it's not only when things are
(48:36):
burning and on fire and it's adisaster.
We think of it as that.
It's probably one of the bestways that you can prepare for
the worst case scenarios.
You know the 911 call centers.
I'll use an example.
They have two incidents a year,maybe lasting for less than a
few minutes each, but they'retraining every single week,
they're updating their playbooksevery single week of how
(48:58):
they're going to be ready for it.
And so when the when doesstrike and it always will
incidents are inevitable.
And I think that's the greatthing about our businesses
there's an endless supply.
They're never going away, nomatter what, as long as there's
humans involved, I'm sure.
And even in a world where thereisn't, they're fully prepared
(49:21):
for it.
And so much of it is helpingcompanies understand this
cultural mind shift.
But also, you know, it's aprocess and a tooling problem
too.
William (49:32):
Great answer.
I love that, all of it.
It looks like we are coming.
I can't.
Yvonne just actually messagedme a second ago Like I can't
believe how fast thisconversation went.
This has been a greatconversation.
Did you have anything else youwant to tee up, yvonne, with the
few minutes we have left?
Eyvonne (49:51):
Well, I have so many thoughts.
I feel like I could write fiveor six articles based on just
this conversation.
I love how you talk about howincidents are going to increase
when we introduce our tool, andthat's a good thing.
It makes me think of all theresearch on psychological safety
(50:12):
, especially when you talk aboutlike in health care.
You know the safestenvironments are the ones that
report the most errors.
It's not because there areactually more errors happening,
it's because it's an environmentwhere people are free to talk
about them and share them andlearn from them.
I think there's a just.
We could spend an entireepisode just talking about the
(50:34):
reality of that and how it works.
So this is.
This has been incredible.
I think folks are going to geta ton from it and we may have to
tee up a part two.
William (50:45):
I think so.
Where?
Where can the world find you onthe internet?
Are you on the social medias?
What do you work in?
Where's your watering holes?
JJ (50:56):
I try to be as many places as possible.
People can certainly find me onLinkedIn and on Twitter, my
company.
You can find me at rootleadcomas well.
But yeah, this has been such anawesome conversation and I
totally agree.
Time just flew by.
We love to do a part two atsome point and I realized I
(51:18):
actually never answered yourquestion.
How do we think about growing?
Eyvonne (51:20):
So We'll get there.
I do want to say I'm certain atthis stage in your career that
mom and dad did not waste theirinvestment in your education.
Even though it got a littlerocky there in college, I'm sure
that it was very worthwhile andthat they're incredibly proud
(51:41):
of the work that you've donewhile.
And that they're incrediblyproud of the work that you've
done.
Sometimes, college is just agrowing and learning time right.
JJ (51:49):
So yeah, it's incredible.
I really appreciate that.
And parents are the cutest.
My mom comes over all the timeand she always asks me do you
need money still?
And she'll try to slip me $100,a hundred dollars, and he said
I might think I'm okay, rightnow, that's hilarious amazing.
Popular Podcasts
Fudd Around And Find Out
UConn basketball star Azzi Fudd brings her championship swag to iHeart Women’s Sports with Fudd Around and Find Out, a weekly podcast that takes fans along for the ride as Azzi spends her final year of college trying to reclaim the National Championship and prepare to be a first round WNBA draft pick. Ever wonder what it’s like to be a world-class athlete in the public spotlight while still managing schoolwork, friendships and family time? It’s time to Fudd Around and Find Out!
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.