S9 E25: JJ Tang, Rootly

Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders

Noah Labhart - Startup Founder & CTO

Tech News, News, Business, Technology, Entrepreneurship, Careers

4.6 • 216 Ratings

🗓️ 21 May 2024

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

JJ Tang grew up in mainland China, though eventually he came to the US for University and stayed. He found a job, started working and eventually, moved to Canada, as the entrepreneur ecosystem was quite friendly. He has worked for companies like Instacart, IBM and Cisco, gaining vast experience in a myriad of roles. But outside of tech, he is engaged to be married in 2025, and is big into road cycling. In addition, he has a dog named Nova, which his current venture centers their merch design around. At Instacart, JJ started to build a tool for infrastructure monitoring. When he realized that building it was cumbersome, and nothing existed in the market, he decided to take one of the companies best SRE and start a company, building this very product. This is the creation story of Rootly. Our Sponsors: * Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.com * Check out Red Hat: https://www.redhat.com * Check out Vanta: https://vanta.com/CODESTORY Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story/donations Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Transcript

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0:00.0	Companies, although on the surface look the same, kind of used the same tools, they all run a really different process based on their culture, based on their communication, based on the processes they have.
0:12.6	So actually the MVP we had at Instacard did not work for other types of companies, which was surprising.
0:18.5	And myself and Quentin, my CTO, we looked at each other and we said,
0:22.2	do we just, do we just make the wrong decision here? As it turns out, we just needed something
0:29.1	a little bit more generic that fit more use cases to begin with. So we started with thinking about
0:34.4	how can we get this in the hands of users as quickly as possible.
0:39.4	I'm JJ Tang. I'm the co-founder and CEO here at Rutley.
0:46.7	This is Code Story. A podcast bringing you interviews with tech visionaries.
0:52.3	It's six months moonlighting.
0:53.7	There's nothing on the backcats.
0:55.8	Who share what it takes to change in industry.
0:58.3	I don't exactly know what to do next.
1:00.2	It took many goes to get right.
1:02.0	Who built the teams that have their back.
1:04.5	The company is its people.
1:06.1	The teams help each other achieve.
1:07.5	Most proud of our team.
1:09.1	Keeping scalability top of mind.
1:11.6	All that infrastructure is up pain.
1:12.9	Yes, we've been fighting it as a group.
1:14.6	Total waste of time.
1:15.9	The stories you don't read in the headlines.
	...

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