Memory Bank is a reflection on a galvanizing moment in a founder’s journey — a rare glimpse into the human side of their relationship with entrepreneurship and money. Here, JJ Tang, co-founder and CEO of Rootly, reflects on his childhood in Mongolia and how it has shaped his outlook on entrepreneurship.
This story is written in the words of JJ, as told to Mercury writer Shreeda Segan.
I find myself thinking about my childhood in Mongolia a lot as a founder. It was a tough time, and you couldn't pay me to live that again. But when I was living it, I enjoyed it.
Building a company isn't that different in some ways. Every day building Rootly is about tackling a challenge that's harder, day-over-day and year-over-year, than ever before. But my childhood taught me a lot about appreciating the process, with all its highs and lows.
The image of a typical upper-middle-class person is that you’re born into a relatively wealthy family. You go to school. You graduate from a good college. You find your first well-paying job and build a career in your chosen field. Of course, everyone has their challenges, but it’s pretty much smooth sailing. For me, though, I was born in Canada but immediately moved back to inner Mongolia. My dad was making 24,000 CAD a year supporting my mom, himself, and our broader family. The family members were too old to work but could provide my child care, so I was sent to live with my grandparents in Mongolia until I was four years old.
Mongolia is a super cold place — sometimes down to minus 60 Fahrenheit. You have to learn a ton of work ethic to survive there. The whole house we lived in was just a simple brick building all built by us by hand. We slept on this meter and a half tall mud bed. It's literally filled with mud. Even when I was three years old, I had a job. Because I had small arms and hands, my job was to use a little tool to carve small burrow holes through the mud beds so we could run a fire exhaust in the winter to stay warm. With the extreme cold, heating the beds was essential to keep us from dying of hypothermia.
The interesting thing was, as a kid, you never felt like you lacked anything. For fun, my cousin and I would compete over who would pick green onions. Or we would compete to decide who got to eat a leftover fish eyeball, which sounds disgusting now, but it was so special then. Over Chinese New Year, we would get a few pieces of candy. We would treasure it so much that we would keep it in our pockets until it melted. Every single year it stayed there until it disintegrated because we wanted to save it so badly.
When things are hard at Rootly, I often remind the team that this is a very special time in the journey of the company that we all get to be a part of. I focus on building an environment at Rootly that we’ll look back positively on, whether the business succeeds or fails. We’re working hard, but we’re also having fun along the way. Every challenge we face as a team makes us stronger and more resilient so we can tackle even bigger challenges as we grow. I’m grateful that my life taught me early to find joy in the struggles.
Shreeda Segan