Incidents suck, but they don’t have to. Our investment in Rootly.
We’re excited to announce that we’re leading Rootly’s $12M Series A, alongside Gradient Ventures and XYZ Venture Capital, and that Roseanne Wincek will be joining the company’s board of directors. Rootly provides tools for companies to manage their incidents directly from Slack. Their flexible incident response management product helps companies like NVIDIA, Figma, Tripadvisor, and Ford manage incidents in a way that is tailored to their organization’s specific workflow.
Seven years after Google published its Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) handbook and four years after the IPOs of companies like Datadog and Pagerduty, it can be easy to dismiss incident response as a solved problem. However, it turns out that the challenges SRE teams face today are not tooling problems, they’re people and process problems. A 2022 survey of SREs found that “lack of staff with necessary skill sets” was the #1 challenge to implementing a successful SRE operating model. And despite the ‘handbook’ being written seven years ago, the internal processes to manage an incident vary widely from company to company. All too often the same handful of experienced SREs who know the process are tapped to put out fires at 3 o’clock in the morning, which leads to significant burnout and turnover.
Rootly puts teams on the same page, in the tool that they use most, and empowers every team member to resolve incidents. At Renegade, we invest in companies that we believe can become movements. Usually, we say that movements are companies that can become verbs. There are 3 hallmarks that movements possess:
Purpose driven: JJ Tang, Co-founder & CEO, and Quentin Rousseau, Co-founder & CTO, worked together at Instacart where Quentin was in the trenches on the SRE team. They’ve felt firsthand what happens when outages happen at a large scale organization, and this experience was the inspiration for Rootly. We love teams that can make customer empathy a key competitive advantage.
Attacking a market at a tipping point: Incident Response is no longer an SRE-only problem. When asked which groups they collaborate with “often”, 38% of SREs mentioned product, 35% mentioned customer support, and 25% mentioned executives. Yet, the current set of tooling does not support this new paradigm. Rootly empowers non-SREs to be equal members of the incident response process, so much so that many Rootly customers actually see an increase in incidents after adopting the product. These are often incidents that would have never been reported which could be silently impacting the customer experience or snowballing into a larger problem.
Building a compounding advantage: We often say at Renegade that we look for companies that can own a workflow. Once adopted, Rootly quickly becomes the command center for incidents by pulling in relevant information from adjacent tools in the stack and summarizing incidents for use in post-mortems. Incidents can be extremely high-stress moments for a company, but - when handled exceptionally well - they can also create opportunities to accelerate trust and customer loyalty. Rootly has become an invaluable, trusted resource for its customers and we believe this makes them uniquely capable of owning the broader incident response flow.
We are thrilled to partner with JJ, Quentin, and the entire Rootly team. If you would like to partner with them too, check out their open positions.