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How Arijit Mukherji Rose To The Role of CTO

Throughout his career, Arijit Mukherji (LinkedIn | Twitter)has been able to learn, innovate and lead. As the CTO of SignalFx, he gets to do all those things at once.

On an episode of IT Visionaries, Arijit details his rise through the tech industry, including a number of years at Facebook in the midst of its massive growth. Plus, he explains why he wanted to take a risk and join SignalFx, and what it was like rising from Employee No. 1 to the role of CTO.

Here are some of the key insights he shared.

When the interest in start-ups was born

Arijit graduated from college in the late 1990s, which was the peak of the internet boom. He was offered a position at a start-up but instead took a job with Cisco. Eventually, the start-up went on to have a successful IPO and Arijit was wondering if he had made a mistake not taking a risk to join them at the beginning. It made him evaluate the position he was in and do a cost-benefit analysis of staying at a big company versus branching out and taking advantage of all the opportunities around him. In the end, that’s what led him to take a risk at a company called Facebook.

“I’m in Silicon Valley,” he says. “This is where the action is, this is where you stay. Of course, it’s expensive to stay, but there’s so much opportunity. If I remained in a big company, then am I really exploiting the opportunity that’s around me? Like if I’m going to keep on working just in a big company, might as well move somewhere different and great quality of life.”

But Arijit also explains that there are risks when you bet on a start-up company. And he explains that when he is deciding whether or not to take a bet, there are a few things he looks at, but ultimately luck plays a role.  

“A successful company has a lot that needs to go right in order to make that successful, right?” he explains. “It’s not just the technology, it’s not just a market fit and not just a CEO. You need a lot of things. You need a whole lot of luck at the same time.”

Ascending to the role of CTO

As CTO, Arijit has to focus on a number of different areas including engineering, product marketing, sales, and others. It was an adjustment for Arijit when he became the CTO. And the biggest area of focus for Arijit, as well as SignalFx in general, is observability and real-time monitoring.

“I feel like part of my role is to make observability a thing because there are huge parts of the world where it’s still maybe not as advanced as it can and should be,” Arijit says. “And I feel that as the world becomes more modern and becomes more cloud native, it’s a function I consider myself an evangelist for in some sense.”

Although he was still working on a lot of the technology for SignalFx, Arijit was now much more involved in the business side of things as well. He also found that as CTO people seek you out, internally and externally, and they offer ideas and meaningful conversations.

“I don’t feel any different, but yes, the title does make a difference,” Arijit admits. “Obviously being in this role, I now get exposed to many other things on the business side of things and with things like fundraising and so on. And it’s fascinating to see how that part of the world works in some sense because while you’re working on technology while you’re coding and so on, or even managing like you still sort of your, your environment is still the technology stuff, technical stuff itself, but there’s so much else going on. So for me, the fascinating bit is seeing how businesses work and businesses succeed and what are the challenges, and I also get obviously a lot more visibility into what happens on the sales side, on the marketing side.”

Keeping up with the pace of change

In today’s world, technology is changing so rapidly and as a result, how people work and the way companies run are changing, too. In order to stay on top, you have to be working on new projects constantly.

“If you look at companies like Google and Facebook, they always have no end of projects that they will try and 90% of them will fail,” he says. “And the cynical view is that, look, they’re trying all these things and they’re not succeeding and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But my view is at least they’re trying. And even if one or two of those succeed, that’s great as opposed to not trying and then falling over and dying at some point. Right. So it has almost become a requirement in order to have any kind of long term success.”

Ideas for new projects come from all over. And because Arijit’s job allows him to be face to face with customers and go to conferences to hear what other consumers and peers are doing, the opportunities for inspiration are everywhere. At SignalFx there are also internal tech talks and hackathons to keep everyone engaged.

Listen to the entire interview here.

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