JJ: 0:00

And our messaging at this time was we are this all-in-one incident management platform. We had service catalog, we had collaboration, we helped you did your postmortems, you know. We had you know stuff with on-call, we had you know 70 integrations and all of these things. And I started to realize I think this is like intimidating, like complexity-wise for customers and, without changing anything in the product, I changed our messaging from all-in-one incident management platform to we help you manage incidents in Slack, and that was it, and that was the change that took us from 2 in 10 going from demo to trial to almost 9 in 10 going from demo to trial, because people got it.

William: 0:50

Hello everyone. I am your host, William, and while I might just be the lightning on this podcast, everyone knows that after the lightning you get thunder, and that is Yvonne Sharp. How are you doing today, Yvonne?

Eyvonne: 1:06

I don't know about being called thunder. I can be loud and grumbly sometimes, though, so maybe that's appropriate. We are recording on the brink of the Christmas holiday, which means everything is chaos.

William: 1:20

Everything is chaos.

Eyvonne: 1:21

Everything is chaos, trying to get end of year wrapped up, trying to get all the 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 that you're planning Christmas for. You know a new one of three.

William: 1:41

So I'm sure things are chaotic in your world too. First Christmas for the new baby. We're dressing her up in like a hundred different Well, you've seen, I've sent you some pictures we're having a little too much fun with that. Antlers hats and different things. And she's such a good baby, she loves it.

Eyvonne: 1:55

She's too small to roll her eyes at you, so enjoy it while it lasts.

William: 1:58

Exactly, get plenty of selfies. So we know that it happened and I was there, I witnessed it. But today with us on the podcast we have JJ Tang, ceo and co-founder of Rootly. And how are you doing today, jj?

JJ: 2:12

I'm doing. Great Thanks for having me on the podcast. I've been a big fan, so I'm excited to be here.

William: 2:18

Thank you, appreciate that. And you are in which I found out you're in Toronto and it is cold in Toronto, because I was actually recording something with someone else last night in Toronto and they were saying it was like minus six Celsius or I actually just that's 20 degrees Fahrenheit. I think could be wrong. So for all of us that want to be different with our measurements in America, that's 20 degrees, which is very below freezing, which is cold enough.

Eyvonne: 2:44

Yes, anything below zero Celsius. She 20 degrees, which is very cold. It's below freezing, which is cold enough. Yes, anything below zero Celsius. Yvonne loves this kind of weather.

William: 2:47

She thrives in very, very cold climates.

JJ: 2:51

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: 3:02

You heard it here first.

JJ: 3:03

We're a pretty distributed company. The business is headquartered out of San Francisco. A lot of the go-to-market team is here in Toronto. We have a Europe presence and Asia presence, but I'm convinced that the more people are higher in cold, depressing climates, the harder they work because there's simply nothing to do outside. The harder they work because there's simply nothing to do outside. You can't really go for a hike or take your family to the beach. Your job ends up becoming your hobby in many ways.

Eyvonne: 3:33

It's a new founder mode strategy.

William: 3:35

I love it. That's a fair point too.

JJ: 3:37

Yeah, I don't know, Maybe some people in interviews find it a little psychotic, so I don't really bring it up with candidates. You know, with candidates that's my. You know why they're here in Toronto with me, but we're strategically here as well, just because it makes it so much easier doing business in Europe.

William: 3:58

I don't want to wake up at 4am 5am to get on a call yeah, that's never fun, never fun, yeah, so how we're? Can you give us a little? For those in the audience that don'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. You say you launched a startup during COVID which is pretty brave, very brave. So how did you get to that point of launching Rootly? What did you do before that?

JJ: 4:29

Yeah.

JJ: 4:30

So before all of this started, as a kid, I grew up in China, in mainland China, in a city called Suzhou, which was about an hour and a half outside of Shanghai. It was one of the biggest cities in China without an airport, which is kind of interesting, and I went to an international school there, everywhere from middle school all the way until high school. I finished in China and then decided to come to Canada for university, and during university I always thought I would go into some sort of business and I ended up just taking marketing and I was this terrible student because I was laser focused on my social life and going out and making sure I was popular and had friends and my grades unfortunately took a pretty steep nosedive and two years into university I was on the brink of being kicked out. I was on academic probation every single year and I don't think my parents could have been more disappointed in me, considering you know, we didn't grow up with much wealth or much money at all and to go to international school in China it was really expensive. Go to international school in China it was really expensive. It's the equivalent of going to a non-in-state university in the US, but for every single year of high school and middle school. So my parents put all they had into my education and the result I produced them was less than glamorous, I would say. And the reason I went to the international school was, you know, my Mandarin and my Chinese was never that great, so it was difficult for me to compete with local students. So my parents thought, well, if I want to give my child a chance, I better put them in this school.

JJ: 6:19

During university I ended up finding, towards the end I ended up finding a good crowd to run with and they were very keen on internships and technology. And I remember sitting in the library 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 over the summer and I thought to myself, oh, should we be getting internships right now? So I went home and I quickly applied for 100 to 200 jobs and luckily one of them got back to me and that one job was at Cisco. And so that was my first internship during university and that kind of taught me the ropes of what this technology world, what the corporate world kind of looked like. But by the time I finished it was still this very unknown black box. But I think it taught me to be very resourceful and keen about reaching out and finding these opportunities.

JJ: 7:19

And so next year, next academic year, rolls around and it was time for another internship and I thought, you know, I'm going to go try to work at IBM. And everyone was applying at the time and it was really difficult to get a job there or be seen, especially when all these kids had computer science degrees and they were in the business school and I was kind of just escaping by. And so I thought I needed an unfair advantage somehow, and so I cold emailed the CEO and asked her for a coffee when I was in New York the next week and to my disbelief she agreed. And so I went to the IBM headquarters and met her and probably asked her five of the most obvious, dumbest questions any kid would. But I think she was impressed by the fact that I would reach out and that created this big stir internally who's this person that's meeting with the CEO? And that landed me the next internship and subsequently the job afterwards.

JJ: 8:18

And so that's how my whole career kind of got started in the tech world, and so my first job out of school was at IBM. I worked on this, on IBM cloud and on some of their API management and developer tools. The interesting thing was I was a product manager there and very quickly I learned by being someone that wasn't very technical. I was at a disadvantage. It was difficult going to these client sites and being dangerous in these conversations, so I spent every single something clicked in my brain and I thought to myself I have to learn how to code. And so I spent every single hour of my free time learning Ruby on Rails, and so it taught me to be very dangerous technically and helped me accelerate in my career at IBM and subsequently afterwards I was working with a friend of mine and he went over to Instacart and I remember asking him at the time I said what's this Instacart company?

JJ: 9:22

He said, oh, they do grocery delivery. I said, oh, that's kind of cool. I've never used something like that before. And I asked him I said how much are they paying you? And he told me. And after he told me, I said okay, you're gonna have to refer me, we're gonna have to figure something out here. And so a few weeks later I ended up at Instacart building their zero to one enterprise business. We were turning a very consumer focused business into an enterprise business and so that's kind of the last job I had before starting starting Rootlane and maybe I can go into some of the Genesis, but I'll pause there.

William: 9:58

Yeah, that's, that's awesome. I mean, no, no story is. Yvonne, and I have found out no story is like another story and I have found out no story is like another story as far as tech is concerned, it's pretty interesting every time you hear it, and this one, your story, is definitely unique.

Eyvonne: 10:17

Well, and I think we can get stuck in this mindset of either not having all the information or not being in the right place or not knowing what to do.

Eyvonne: 10:28

And I think the thing I take from your story first is you know your willingness to take a risk and, hey, I'm going to email the head of IBM, like that's for a lot of us seems pretty audacious, but when you step back and think about it, worst case scenario is that email 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 just continuing to explore, and then when you find a gap, you just figure out how to fill it.

Eyvonne: 10:57

I like to remind people often that none of us were born knowing any of the things and they can all be learned and and I love that you, you know like, wait, I have a gap. I need, I need to understand how to, because William and I have been on the, the, the GTM side, of product managers who aren't technical and it can be quite painful and and I think that's that that's a lesson you know 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 the future, even if you don't know what that future is going to look like. So I think that's really cool One thing.

JJ: 11:40

Maybe I'll add as well I think there's just one thing I quickly learned in life and in my career and also through school there's so many you know exactly what you're saying there's so many nonlinear paths people can take. You know life is not, it turns out, it's not this meritocracy and you follow this. You know you check this box and you get this job and you know things happen for all kinds of reasons and you know just by reading exactly what you were saying. Reaching out to people, the worst that they can say is no. And when you really embrace that, new opportunities start opening up for you.

JJ: 12:16

I know I talked a little bit about the internship example.

JJ: 12:18

I remember when I was in school, there was this research assistant job and they only wanted PhD students and I ended up figuring out where they were hosting these interviews and where they were hosting these research studies and I just sat outside the researcher's room until they were done for the day and I approached her and I said, hey, I would love to do this.

JJ: 12:39

Here's why I'm a great fit and she ended up making this exception for me. I remember when my wife was doing her master's. She was picking between two schools and one of them was there was a deadline to accept two months earlier, before the other one would even announce if she got in. They haven't even interviewed her yet for it, and so we ended up just cold emailing the dean of the school and they got her in the same week and gave her an offer decision and that was the best choice she could have made and subsequently, you know, rolled over into you know, our own business.

JJ: 13:16

You know, I remember, you know the first hundred customers were ones that I'd closed and I didn't have this vast network of you know. We typically sell to SREs and infrastructure engineers that I knew in the space outside of Instacart and all I did was cold email them and met them where they 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 ones that you only need a few of the yeses to make it work at the end 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 it doesn't matter if you follow all the rules and constraints, if the 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 meet the objectives of what you'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 hit the record button and really came up through Y Combinator and for those of you that aren't aren't familiar with Y Combinator, they're basically just a startup accelerator that I think primarily operates at like the seed round, although they do admit companies, I think, into the program sometimes that have that have already done like fundraising but have like just a lot of high growth potential, I guess. So, really, so you were actually like accepted into their program, which I think they have two batches per year, um, which is really awesome, I think. The success rate is, I think it's like under one percent or something. You know it's. It's really hard to get into this program A lot of applicants, but what was that application process 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 the genesis behind. You know how we ended up in a position to then apply for YC and you know, I think, a lot of companies enter at various stages. You know, some of the companies in our own batch were nothing more than the slide deck and the others were, you know, had pretty serious momentum from a customer standpoint. So my co-founder and I Quinton he was the first SRE at Instacart I owned about I was on the product side owned about a quarter of our revenue at Instacart. I was on the product side. I owned about a quarter of our revenue at Instacart, building our enterprise business.

JJ: 15:55

And what ended up happening when you have a big service area and a large ownership was you have a ton of incidents, and so who better to complain to than the first SRE at Instacart? And I think at one point we both kind of got sick of each other and we said, hey, how are we going to solve this? We started, you know, we realized it was a. You know it was a people process problem, but it was also a tooling challenge. We were just jumping into the single slack channel and hoping. You know, things were, things were working out and it turns out there wasn't the best way to solve these. Solve these incidents and incidents, you know, just for anyone listening for for us was anything that was unplanned work that urgently took us away from our day to day, and that could have been. The website was entirely down or, you know, instacart couldn't batch or find shoppers in time for certain orders.

JJ: 16:48

There was really interesting ones during COVID which I can talk about. I think my favorite one was probably everyone was trying to order toilet paper. I don't know if you guys got caught up in the craze, but it was a nightmare for me because we would send shoppers to the store and there was no toilet paper. And we're trying to build this real-time inventory algorithm and I just decided, hey, we're going to delete toilet paper. So no one could order toilet paper for three months. And that's how we fixed that incident, which was kind of entertaining, but Quentin and I, on the weekend, we started building Brutely as this internal tool and we gained a lot of positive traction and we made sure it was adopted internally and we were obsessed with it. We made sure it was adopted internally and we were obsessed with it. And one day my VP put a one-on-one on my calendar on Monday morning and I thought to myself okay, that's it. I know exactly what this conversation is about, but it wasn't what I thought. He told me hey, you know, that's not really our core competency. We're a grocery delivery company. Focus on that, focus on the revenue generating side of the business. Go buy something. And so I did a quick scan of the market and there was companies out there like PagerDuty and Opstradian, even some of our more direct startup competitors that existed. We didn't feel like they were solving the problem that we wanted, that we were in the way that we were doing it, and so we decided to quit and ended up starting a starting a business around it. And I know, I know I'm kind of skipping over some of the details and I'm glad we really glad, we really did. You know everyone, from fast growing startups like clay and Webflow and Squarespace all the way until NVIDIA and LinkedIn and Dropbox, rely on us for their critical on-call and incident management. So it's been a fun ride.

JJ: 18:39

Then, during that journey, the impetus for Y Combinator and the impetus to even fundraise it was difficult to determine how far along we wanted to be before we went out and raised any money, including from YC. I remember sitting down with Quentin and I said how much do you have left on your bank account, because we've been doing this for a little bit? And he told me I said we should probably raise money and he asked me how much I had and I said, yeah, I'm probably in the same boat. So I think we both realized that was the force and function. Either we were going to raise money or we would have to go get another job to pay our bills. And luckily, you know, we both had partners that were very supportive, that poured everything and still do every single day they probably have a much harder job than me in many ways that were supporting us, and so we.

JJ: 19:38

It was the night before the YC application was due. We said, okay, we'll just pull an all-nighter and get it done, and so it was a very it was very much so on a whim. So it was very much so on a whim, and I think, now that I've seen many applications as well that have succeeded and failed, there's a few things that stand out to me of what makes a really good application. I think YC is not expecting companies to come in and boil the ocean. I think they're expecting companies and founders that have a particular skill set or something that they know about their niche that they can solve. They know these founders are smart enough, or smart companies will eventually find a way to grow it into a larger platform. I think if a company like Datadog was applying and they said that they were doing RUM and telemetry and synthetics and these 90 different products that they have, they would be quite skeptical. But if they said, hey, we're going to do this part of observability really, really well and serve B2B SaaS companies amazingly, that's kind of what made it successful and so that's where we found success. That kind of what made it successful, and so that's where we found success.

JJ: 20:54

We were hyper, hyper focused on incident response in slack actually, and that was our niche and that was our wedge of how we wanted to build traction and I think that was very, I think that was very appealing and we applied during covid and so we were part of I one of six batches that were virtual, so we didn't get the whole in-person experience and there were certainly downsides of it.

JJ: 21:20

We had to work really, really hard in terms of making the most out of the program because you're just on a series of Zoom calls now and the community aspect, which is what you're trading your equity for, in many ways gets a little bit diluted, and so you have to work a bit harder on making sure you're making the right friends and you're leveraging all the right resources. But we certainly don't regret it. It was a great accelerant into our business. The majority of the top YC companies use our product. Everyone from Lattice to Fair to Riplet, webflow and Dropbox all use Rootly, and even the majority of every new batch now uses our product too. So it turns out to be this pretty great go-to-market flywheel and, selfishly, that's what I was in it for. I was convinced that any sort of founder advice that we would get. I could learn many different ways through hundreds of different people, but buying into the community was something that would have been more difficult otherwise.

William: 22:29

Well, kudos doing this successfully during covid. I think one of the big benefits of yc is, like they I mean you basically you basically move out to silicon valley for like a whole quarter of the year and there's this, like you're saying, there's this networking effect where you have all these um, um, yc partners and other experienced founders and all these folks that you mingle with and you you're around, they give you feedback and it's all in person and, yeah, I feel like doing that over zoom would be very tricky, um, but it sounds like it worked, uh, really well for 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. We would have 25 investor meetings a day, just back-to-back, 30 minute Zooms, over and over and over, with no break, and so the throughput was insane and that helped you generate a lot of momentum very quickly, helped you generate a lot of buzz and excitement around your company very quickly, because a lot of times what these investors are looking for is also FOMO. They see their counterparts or their peers getting excited and they think, okay, I don't know much about this business, I don't know much about the space, I actually don't even have enough time to do due diligence on this business or this space or opportunity. But I'm going to use my peers that I deeply trust as this litmus test, and if John's excited, then I have to be excited about it, and so that helped a ton during COVID about it, and so that helped a ton during COVID, which I think was to our advantage.

Eyvonne: 24:35

I was coming into this conversation. One of the things I wanted to talk about was, you know, product market fit how you knew you had it and all of that, but it sounds like but because you were living it day to day. This is a solution that was born out of real, very practical experience for you and your partner, and so that part you had locked right. Like you knew what the product needed to be from personal experience, thinking about growing your company now and and what new challenges you know you're facing now that maybe you you maybe didn't foresee in those very early days. 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 really interesting. Um, and some interesting aspects of, I think, what I would do differently if I were to start another company, maybe not in this space, but in any space. In the early days of Rootly, you know, after our funding, I think you know, we were on cloud nine. We said you know, how can this possibly fail anymore? And immediately afterwards we struggled with sales. People weren't really buying our tool and I sat my co-founder down and I said, okay, this could be one of many things Maybe the product sucks, maybe we're not solving the right problem, maybe we have no idea how to sell. He looked at me. He says I think it's equally all three. And I said to Quinton I said that's not good and so and I think in many ways it was around how we actually position the company we were the feedback we were getting from customers was, hey, this looks really great, but maybe not right now. I don't know if I'm ready for this and I kept getting that feedback over and over. And then I thought to myself like 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 10 customers were. You know, two out of 10 customers are going from a demo into a trial. It wasn't super difficult to get people on the phone, as you can tell. I was probably. You know, I was very relentless on our code outreach and making sure, you know, we were in the right conversations. But two out of 10 were going from a demo into a trial and even less were converting into customers, and so we weren't converting really well.

JJ: 27:11

And so one day, you know, and our messaging at this time was we are this all in one incident management platform? We had service catalog, we had collaboration, we helped you did your postmortems, you know. We had you know stuff with on call, we had, you know, 70 integrations and all of these things. And I started to realize, I think this is like intimidating, like complexity wise for customers, and without changing anything in the product, I changed our messaging from all in one incident management platform to we help you manage incidents in Slack. And that was it, and that was the change that took us from two and 10, going from demo to trial to almost nine and 10, going from demo to trial, almost nine and 10 going from demo to trial, because people got it, people understood, and that allowed us to progressively disclose complexity, as they saw. And so very simple startups and companies that just wanted something out of the box with great opinions and smart defaults that we offered they could just run with it. Larger enterprises like a Squarespace that has many acquisitions and different departments that did things very differently, and the whole security team. Well, they wanted the whole platform and all of the flexibility that came to it, and we presented that.

JJ: 28:29

And product market fit, I think isn't just this aspect of changing how and what the product is. It's changing how people think and perceive your product as well, and that was this massive unlock for us. And now our messaging has changed as well. We have so much more of our product and we're much closer to our original messaging and that's been resonating really well, and so it's never set in stone and I think it would have been far too early for us to give up had we not tried it, and it would have been very difficult for us to completely change the product into something else. And as we continued refining, the messaging was working, but we wanted to make sure that the product itself actually served a need.

JJ: 29:19

I think what a lot of without calling out names what a lot of our competition gets wrong in our space in particular, is they view it very academically, they view it as hey when it comes to incident response and then when it comes to better reliability and SRE principles, there's a bunch of golden rules which I agree with, and I think a lot of companies take these golden principles and create far too rigid opinions inside of their product and that actually ends up on paper it sounds really good, but in reality it actually ends up hurting your business because for a unique company that no two companies are the same and how they manage incidents, what ends up happening is you make the ease of adoption really tough and difficult. And so by working by us being very close to our customer and understanding what were the things that they were truly solving for, what was frustrating about adopting our product, we actually built something somewhat differently that helped companies adopt it quicker, and the way that we did that was for the first hundred customers. There's this way that we did that was for the first 100 customers. There's this especially coming from a product background as well.

JJ: 30:38

You're tempted to make very data-driven decisions. You're tempted to not just act on instinct and you know check amplitude for these user insights and you know how is you know how are these customers logging in what part of the product they're clicking on? And what I said to the team was we're going to delete every single user analytic tool. We have every single dashboard. We have every customer health metric we own inside of Salesforce. We're going to delete it all. And so we had no dashboards. We had zero insight into how our customers were using our product and the only way that we did it was we got on the phone with them and we deeply, deeply understood what was unique about the problem they were solving, because it was such an injustice to the complexities and the nuances of how and the pain that they were feeling in solving these problems by just summarizing it into a few numbers and metrics. And that was a core foundation of how we continue to accelerate our product market fit. And now we have the craziest dashboards humanly imaginable.

Eyvonne: 31:53

I have visceral responses to what you just said. You know I want to stand and cheer. Data matters and it's important, but I think we can over-rotate on the data and not understand the human component and ultimately, we're always selling to people and I think, especially when it comes to incident response, that's a very I'm going to use the word, it's a very emotional job. Right, because things are broken, stuff is down, there are problems that need to be solved there. There, there is a there there's a very whole body experience to incident response. That's not just based in the numbers and you do have to connect with people and those problems that they're experiencing in a way that moves them. And I can't say enough about your example of changing your messaging to doing incident response and Slack and how that is.

Eyvonne: 33:03

Is is easy to build a story around, like you. You can. You can sit down in front of somebody and tell a story. You know, imagine what it would be like if you could sit down at Slack, and these are all of the capabilities that would be available to you in the middle of an incident. And it's incredible. William, I've done a lot of talking. I don't I'll give you a chance to ask a question, but I've. This is great You're.

William: 33:27

You're. You're basically encapsulating what I was going to say. Your messaging example just goes back to that importance of understanding the human aspect of you know what the the problems the technology is supposed to solve. Just a tweak in messaging is all it took, you know, and that almost makes me think too about one of the.

William: 33:50

I think one of the challenges these days with the explosion of software companies is generally like large companies yeah, they can invest in different products that you know kind of solve some niche, like use cases, but a lot of times that product needs to be a must-have and not a nice little accessory, and I think that was that kind of like. Some of the challenge too with the first round of messaging was just kind of like articulating and persuading that this is a must have, like the importance of it. And you know, incident response is not an accessory, it's one of the most important things because it has such a big impact on the human side of incident management as well. I mean, is there a way out there to make it less terrible for people to get woken up at 2am on repeat for things that we could potentially solve? So do you have any thoughts on that, like the must-have versus nice-to-have. Was that something that was in your thoughts earlier on?

JJ: 34:56

Yeah, I think, you know, a company that's born in the Zerp era has this very fortunate tailwind of companies that aren't too concerned as much with their budgets and constraints and, and you know, we've always thought of ourselves. As you know, it was really important to have very strong business fundamentals in terms of the problems that we were solving. We didn't want to create a product that was manufacturing a problem that was a nice to have for people to solve. We wanted to position ourselves in a way that, hey, this is actually a really core part of your infrastructure. And as these companies went through layoffs with the audience that we've sold to and the tool that we have, we've done really well and in fact, we've continued to, year over year, accelerate faster than we could have imagined and I think a lot of it too.

JJ: 35:52

I talked to a lot of founders, know, some of them are going through pivots right now and they and they ask me, like how should I think about this problem as I start something, something new? And I tell them I said, hey, don't just take the traditional advice of like, hey, you have this pain in your life, like go solve it and then build a product and a business around it. In fact, you should work backwards, think about, like, think of something really important that could be solved out there, think about how you would sell that product and if people would buy it. Then formulate if you're going to be excited enough to develop a business and be passionate around it. So almost working in reverse from the sale. I think there's many companies we could have built that I would really struggled with to get off the ground and make successful and luckily, although I didn't have this advice, our company, in many ways, because of the space that we're in, falls into that sweet spot of very in need, critical to the business, likely to survive budget cuts and layoffs. Sres have a ton of political clout inside of their organizations with a lot of decision-making power. I think we were building maybe a social media tool that could be a little bit harder to justify.

JJ: 37:15

But when you're running a company's, all of their most critical and sensitive incidents through your platform it becomes harder to move off of and, you know, even tying it back to some of the product market fit stuff we were talking about. You know, by getting very close to our customers, by not having those dashboards very close to our customers, by not having those dashboards, we actually soon realized that what we were selling wasn't just a product. We're in the business of selling reliability and trust. And so we realized, you know, tooling wasn't going to be the end all be all for these companies If they had a poor process or their people or culture weren't defined correctly. Actually, it still made it hard for them to succeed from a tooling standpoint, and so we quickly turned our business around to also serve that need.

JJ: 38:07

You know we started a program of reliability advocates, whose job was you know they've been at companies where they define the zero to one incident response process. They've been in hundreds, if not thousands, of incidents and their job is to be completely vendor agnostic and all they do is consult for our customers and find, make sure not only are they making the best use of the tool, but also how do they think about, you know, people, problems and, for example, some companies, their SVPs jump into incidents all the time and are very distracting and turning them into these spectator sports. How do you have that conversation with your manager's manager's manager without getting fired, without seeming like a douchebag? And so we help companies even with those type of problems.

Eyvonne: 38:58

Someday William has a story where he was that douchebag. But yeah, we've all been on well, we all haven't, but some of us have been on the 200-person incident calls where you've got leadership begging for updates. Every you know I need a status report every 15 minutes. Well, if I give you your status report every 15 minutes, I can't solve the problem. And what you say about trust is so important.

Eyvonne: 39:24

It's become so clear to me in the last year that all of our systems rely on trust, whether you're talking about economic systems, if you're talking about geopolitical systems, if you're talking about geopolitical systems, if you're talking about systems inside of our companies, if you're talking about how we work with across companies. There has to be a degree of trust for meaningful systems to work. And I think it's so important to call that out how important it is, especially as an early stage startup, to develop a system of trust with your customers and to do it in a way that isn't built solely on reciprocity. Right, we're going to support you, we're going to give you the information you need. We are going to be trusted. We're going to build a community that you can rely on when you're in crisis or a time of need and when you're talking about incident response, every day is a crisis and a time of need. Right, that's the job.

JJ: 40:33

For sure I tend to. I tell this to my team all the time, especially during every All Hands. No one is opening rootly because they're having a fantastic day. We're designing for the worst case scenario. We're designing for the person that is probably having the toughest challenge of their career, potentially that they're navigating through something extremely ambiguous and very stressful. And I also tell the team many other things. You know, because of the trust and how important reliability is as well.

JJ: 41:04

We're also in the business of doing the boring things right. You know we're not in the business of making the tool as flashy as possible and you know to be this consumer app. You know we're here to serve our purpose and we need laser focus on it, and I think you've mentioned some very interesting things around. You know the use cases as well. You know a lot of companies that we serve. You know are other. You know B2B tech companies let's call it where every incident that they're down for you know they're spending. You know, $30,000 a minute because of downtime and that hurts their revenue. That hurts. You know their public reporting and you know it's something their leadership and their board deeply cares about and, over time, because of how many companies we've worked with. There's actually really interesting use cases, probably the two that really really stand out to me. Every single maximum security prison in the US uses our tool for incident response uses our tool for incident response. Every single 9-1-1 call center in Norway, sweden and Finland uses Rootly as well, and so we're the backbone for a lot of these companies and that's really interesting From a peer revenue perspective.

JJ: 42:34

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 of the whales that I think as a business you you have. But I love sharing those stories, in particular with my team too, so they can empathize with how important the things that we're building, because in many cases it can mean life or death for these companies, and I think when you're really far removed it's hard to realize that.

JJ: 43:06

And so every month we love bringing in a customer, a unique customer, to our all hands, and we call it a seeing tour where they reverse demo to us of how important our tool is and that brings our engineers much closer. And on that note as well, not to go on too much of a tangent, we also encourage all of our engineers to directly talk with our customers. There's never sales or customer success in the way. 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 can fix it and that has kept the go-to-market engine and the EPD engine very closely tied to each other, and so you're not spending a lot of wasted effort trying to glue the organization in 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 like two episodes, but we could keep going for a long time. But one thing I wanted to say was Yvonne and I worked in some of the same industries and I know that sometimes bad outages happen or things happen, and to me I always tried to look at those instead of a bad thing. I tried to look at them as an opportunity to do something great, to make it better, and I love that quote from Denzel Washington. Luck is when opportunity meets preparation. I used to use that like all the time.

William: 44:44

But what I you know, kind of like all the things you've been talking about, like the opportunity, is these major incidents that are happening for these companies that they may not have a handle on, and the preparation is how can you be more proactive with these things? So I guess the question is, like what sort of proactive steps should an organization take, you know, before that next big incident? Like hey, things are quiet right now. Like how do we get? 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 said because one of the things we love telling our customers is you know, incidents are one of your best unplanned investments and opportunities to improve. They're going to expose flaws into your system in ways that you never anticipated, excuse me, previously before. And one of the you know, especially when things are quiet, especially when things are going not going wrong. There's a few things we love to communicate One and oftentimes for leaders these feel counterintuitive. When people adopt our tool, the first thing that they see is more incidents. And when you tell the CTO of a company thing that they see is more incidents. And when you tell the CTO of a company, hey, I'm actually going to give you more chaos, suddenly it feels so counterintuitive. And the reason that's important is well, those incidents were occurring anyways, you just weren't reporting them, you were under reporting that we're helping you now see the full picture. So I think, culturally you want to get into this motion of being able to be comfortable, where everyone can declare and report incidents and it's not this silo job of only SREs or only when you believe it's truly, truly a big issue. And you know tooling certainly helps. You know we introduce. You know concepts like triage incidents, where you can go perform an investigation without calling up the whole cavalry, and the other thing is actually around training. So I'll give you a few examples and such, where you know when a new engineer or new employee comes on board, they, you know, they set up their laptop, they get on Slack, they set up Okta and one of the first things that they do is they set up Rootly. And you might be wondering why are they setting up Rootly? And because we have a history of all of your team's incidents and how you collaborate and how your systems are interdependent and how they work. It actually serves as this great onboarding tool where you can look back into and replay how even though I'm brand new and only been here for two weeks how has my team functioned over the last year, and that helps engineers actually ramp up really quickly and gives them a ton of confidence going to brand new incidents.

JJ: 47:44

And the training aspect is also really important. You know you come up to speed, but how do you keep your tools sharp? You know firefighters and you know the military. They train for the worst of worst case scenarios all the time. That may never occur, but they constantly train. But in software we don't necessarily do that. We kind of just say, hey, I'm on call and I'm just going to anticipate the worst and figure it out once I get there. And by not going through, you know, these game day exercises, or you know, having a way to easily execute, that your tool actually becomes rusty over time, over time. And so that's the other thing we encourage is, well, keep practicing, keep finding ways to do game days. And you know, if you use a tool like ours, we obviously have spent a lot of time to facilitate those things.

JJ: 48:32

So we think of our tool as hey, it's not only when things are burning and on fire and it's a disaster. We think of it as that. It's probably one of the best ways 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're training every single week, they're updating their playbooks every single week of how they're going to be ready for it. And so when the when does strike and it always will incidents are inevitable. And I think that's the great thing about our businesses there's an endless supply. They're never going away, no matter what, as long as there's humans involved, I'm sure. And even in a world where there isn't, they're fully prepared for it. And so much of it is helping companies understand this cultural mind shift. But also, you know, it's a process 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 messaged me a second ago Like I can't believe how fast this conversation went. This has been a great conversation. Did you have anything else you want 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 five or six articles based on just this conversation. I love how you talk about how incidents are going to increase when we introduce our tool, and that's a good thing. It makes me think of all the research on psychological safety, especially when you talk about like in health care. You know the safest environments are the ones that report the most errors. It's not because there are actually more errors happening, it's because it's an environment where people are free to talk about them and share them and learn from them. I think there's a just. We could spend an entire episode just talking about the reality of that and how it works. So this is. This has been incredible. I think folks are going to get a 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 on the 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 on LinkedIn and on Twitter, my company. You can find me at rootleadcom as well. But yeah, this has been such an awesome conversation and I totally agree. Time just flew by. We love to do a part two at some point and I realized I actually never answered your question. How do we think about growing?

Eyvonne: 51:20

So We'll get there. I do want to say I'm certain at this stage in your career that mom and dad did not waste their investment in your education. Even though it got a little rocky there in college, I'm sure that it was very worthwhile and that they're incredibly proud of the work that you've done while. And that they're incredibly proud of the work that you've done. Sometimes, college is just a growing 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 time and 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, right now, that's hilarious amazing.