Hello, World
On-call is the junk drawer of operations. It’s the landing place of all of the flotsam, from maintenance to customer outages to who-even-knows-what other unwelcome surprises. Even worse, this junk drawer comes with a schedule where a random person is tasked months in advance to somehow make use of its contents.
On-call, you must always be ready to investigate every alert that goes bump in the night, 24/7. With hypercortisolism as your baseline, you then plan your life around this duty. Changing the schedule - even for something as predictable as a dentist appointment - can feel like untying and re-tying a Gordian knot. Adding insult to injury, every team in the organization tends to do all of this a little differently.
I have been on call for 30 years. Being on-call sucks. Managing on-call sucks more.
We’re (finally) building a better solution. Meet Hotpot.
Our team has decades of experience building and running software systems, from building Stripe’s observability and compute teams, to leading observability at Twitter and merchant services at Amazon. We even led a team at NASA, where the term mission-critical takes on a whole new meaning. We’ve been on call a lot.
We’ve experienced the pain points firsthand – scheduling chaos, noise, toil, fatigue, burnout and the turnover that follows- and we’re addressing them with best practices shaped by our careers, along with insights from resilience engineering, cognitive systems engineering, and organizational management. The result is a tool that allows every team to practice measurably amazing on-call experience, where teams across an entire organization can share expertise and capacity when they need it most.
We’re excited to announce our pre-seed round with backing from The General Partnership, Amplify Partners, Essence VC, Fairchild Fund, and Andrew Miklas (co-founder of PagerDuty). In the coming months, we will share more operational advancements that improve on-call and day-to-day systems operations, so any organization, big or small, can have a world-class on-call program with off-the-shelf ease.
We need you!
If this all sounds rad and interesting to you, reach out! Big company or small, we can work with your existing tools to keep everything zero-risk on your end. And if you are getting your first on-call program set up, we can make starting on the right foot easy.
You can also follow our work on this blog or keep up with our changelog until we show so much cool stuff you just have to check it out.
In the coming years, we’re going to regale you with lots of content that hopefully does great on Hacker News by pointing out the lessons we’ve learned from our work on socio-technical change at tech companies, how other industries handle these kinds of issues, and our deep respect for academic work like cognitive systems engineering and complex systems theory. That’s not today’s post, though. Today’s post asks you to join our waitlist, see a demo, and hopefully join us on this journey.