JJ Tang

JJ Tang is co-founder and CEO of Rootly, the incident management company he started with Quentin Rousseau, one of the first site reliability engineers at Instacart, according to RedMonk.

Instacart's Pandemic Surge

Tang worked on the product side at Instacart, building its enterprise and last-mile delivery products. When the pandemic lockdowns began, the company grew "nearly overnight," he told Gremlin, and the systems could not handle the load. Every engineer sat in a single Slack incident channel. "I just got woken up. Did anyone else? Does this look legit?"

He told Dash0 that the shelves ran out of toilet paper and shoppers kept coming back empty-handed. With no time to build a real-time inventory model, he deleted toilet paper from the catalog, and for three months no one could buy it.

Rootly Starts During the Pandemic

He and Rousseau built an internal incident tool. Then his manager told him to stop: incident management tools were not the core competency of a grocery delivery company. "Go buy something," he recalled. When he searched, he found no one solving it the way they were, so the two quit and started Rootly during the pandemic. He works from Toronto, Canada.