Why I Build: Avoca Software Engineer, Rong
We don't have quarterly product reviews. We have: ship at night, call in the morning, get a customer’s screenshot by 4 PM, push a config change by 6 PM.
Growing up with the problem
Growing up, my mom sold life insurance during the day and health supplements at night. The phone rang during dinner. It rang during my commute to school. It rang on weekends and it rang on holidays because when you run a business that depends on picking up, you pick up. Avoca's co-founders had similar childhoods. Apurva and Tyson both grew up answering the phones for their moms' businesses, in recruiting and acupuncture, respectively.
Three different households, three different industries, the same sound: a phone that never stopped ringing and a business that couldn’t afford to let it.
When they started Avoca, they didn't need a market research deck. They already knew it by sound. I joined for the same reason. Not because the market was large, though it is. Rather, the problem was mine.
Sitting in the room where the work happens
At Avoca, the way we build starts with a rule that isn't written down anywhere: go sit in the room where the work happens. Early in my tenure, I drove out to Yost & Campbell, an HVAC, plumbing, and electrical company serving the Bronx, Yonkers, and Westchester, for an on-site in New York. I booked another on-site the moment the first one ended and rearranged my schedule to make it happen.
I needed to watch their team work in real time. You can't understand how these businesses operate from a Slack message. You have to be in the room, watch the boards move,, and hear the frustration when something breaks for a customer.
One Wednesday morning, their president, Sam, called in early. His operations lead AJ put it plainly: "This isn't ready for prime time."
I shipped three fixes that night.The next morning, Sam opened our call: "This morning was very, very, very, very good compared to yesterday. The features that you just recently implemented are paying some good dividends." We went from daily calls to weekly.
Listen, ship, call back
That cycle (listen, ship, call back) is how everything gets built here. With another customer, I discovered a bug where some text messages had silently failed. Our internal dashboard said "sent."
I approached the client with the truth, showed the data, and started the fix in the same conversation. His response wasn't to lose trust. It was to move our communication to text messages so the feedback loop could be even tighter. We don't have quarterly product reviews. We have: ship at night, call in the morning, get a customer’s screenshot by 4 PM, push a config change by 6 PM.
Who I build with
But the thing I love talking about most isn't what we build. It's who builds it.
The people at Avoca are the reason I'm here. Not the market size, not the tech stack; the people. Everyone I work with is ambitious in a way that extends beyond this company. National-level athletes. Best-selling authors. Former YC founders. People who push themselves in the gym and in their careers, on weekdays and weekends. People who live like the main character of their own story, because they believe in what they're doing.
They're not just colleagues. These are the people I call when things get hard, not about code, about life. We grab dinner and talk about music and anthropology and family, then go back to debugging optimizer runs at midnight. The relationships are whole. Not transactional. From engineering to sales to customer support, everyone took a different path here, and everyone chose this place because the mission felt personal.
When we interview, we're not just screening for technical skill. We're looking for people who feel something about the problem. The bar is high because the stakes are real: every feature we ship lands on the desk of someone whose livelihood depends on it working. That gravity filters for a certain kind of person; one who is both a high achiever and genuinely empathetic. We haven't found that combination to be common. When we find it, we hold on.
