On the TechTO stage ×1
First seen on a TechTO stage in 2026. Every TechTO talk is searchable — ask the archive about JJ ↗
In their words
What I tell my team all the time is there's no referees in capitalism. And our creativity is what's going to help us punch above our weight class.
Just go do it. There's no referees in capitalism. Who's going to stop you?
Building culture is incredibly deliberate. It is not something that just happens.
Around the web ×4
Quick answers
What is Rootly?
Rootly is an AI-native on-call and incident management platform headquartered in Toronto with over 100 employees. Customers include Wealthsimple, LinkedIn, DoorDash, Figma, and Dropbox. Tang and his co-founder, one of the first site reliability engineers, began building it on the side as an internal tool at Instacart before friends offered to pay for it.
How did Rootly win Canva as an early customer?
With just two people on the team and Canva headquartered in Sydney, Australia, they set alarms in two-hour increments every night for more than a year to answer Canva's Slack support questions, so Canva never went more than two hours without a response. That support, cited across G2 reviews, won the deal and snowballed into Grammarly, Rivian, and Tripadvisor.
What marketing stunt did Rootly pull on competitor PagerDuty?
PagerDuty's Toronto office is right next to Rootly's. After spotting two informational TV screens in their elevator, Tang paid the screen's owner for two and a half years — exactly when PagerDuty's lease ends — to run a Rootly hiring ad plus a carousel of logos that churned off PagerDuty's platform, updated every quarter.