S7E8: Edith Harbaugh on Unlocking Feature Flagging and Feature Management at Scale with LaunchDarkly

We originally planned to be a self-serve solution, so we built the self-serve to sign up with a credit card, and I made all my spreadsheet models about this many people land on the landing page, this many people sign up for a trial, this many people convert, we make this much money. We put the self-serve flow in and absolutely nobody signed up. It was devastating.

Welcome back to the 7th season of The Room Podcast. If you've been here for a while, you might remember Claudia and me have been on a journey to navigate our early 20s careers in Silicon Valley. We started this podcast about 2 years ago now, which is pretty wild, in the middle of a pandemic, recording from our bedrooms. Since then, a lot has changed both in the macro economy as well as in our own jobs and careers. So let's get you up to date on what's going on with us. Since 2020, Claudia has left Uber and become a full-time co-CEO and founder of Pryve, a startup unlocking and disrupting recurring revenue for e-commerce brands.

And Madison is now a partner over seed investments at Defy VC, an early-stage venture firm in the Bay Area. Totally crushing it, and I'm so lucky to have her as an investor in Pryve. We're two women navigating our careers and asking the people who inspire us to shed light on their stories. Unlocking Access starts with a conversation and context. We open the door to moments in technology history that traditionally happen behind closed doors. Mads, can you tell us what to look forward to this season?

Absolutely. This season, you can expect a really exciting 8-person roster of founders that you've definitely heard of. First up is Spencer Raskov and his journey to building Zillow. Second, we have Kelsey Millard and her vision for the future of primary care, which is being empowered by the Sitka platform. We also have a look into the future of the modern data stack with Kashish Gupta, the founder of Highspot, where he's going to share his belief in the need for reverse ETL. And amidst a backdrop of a lot of macroeconomic turmoil, our guests are going to bring you into the room where they're making important decisions on navigating a downturn. In real time. Claudia, where can people find more about our key themes and guests each week?

Great question, Mads. Every week we launch a newsletter and related resources alongside the episode that helps our listeners get tactical. If you're local to SF, hit us up. We have an exciting schedule of in-person events, fireside chats, and pop-ups where we would love to meet you. Well, sounds like we're ready to open the door to this week's room.

Support for The Room comes from Silicon Valley Bank.

What's next?

What if? Now what?

Silicon Valley Bank understands these questions can keep founders up at night like Claudia. For over 35 years, Silicon Valley Bank has helped high-growth companies through scalable financial solutions, plus insights and expertise that many other banks just can't, which could be why 50% of US-based venture-backed tech and life science companies bank with SVB. Learn more at svb.com/next. Silicon Valley Bank. Built for what's next. In our 8th and final episode of the 7th season, Claudia and I sit down with Edith Harbaugh, CEO and co-founder of LaunchDarkly, today's industry-leading feature flag and management platform. Edith's story of being a builder really begins in high school, where she was a computer science camp counselor in the D.C. area. Teaching younger kids how to code Logo and BASIC. She then moved out to California to attend Harvey Mudd, where she studied engineering. Shortly after graduating, she began her career as a software engineer at Epicentric, which ultimately got bought by Vignette. It was really her time at TripIt starting in 2010, however, which launched the original idea for LaunchDarkly. After a unique experience deploying a specific sensitive feature which would scrape a user's Gmail inbox for their travel itineraries, Edith realized the power of toggle management. Interestingly, back in 2014, a development team and product manager really only had two options: don't toggle a feature at all pre-production, or build a homegrown solution to test. Edith had a vision for a better future for feature management. This is when she went to her friend John Kodmahl, her now co-founder and CTO, with the idea. They left TripIt and Atlassian retrospectively that year to get started. Today, LaunchDarkly is valued at over $3 billion by top-tier VCs such as Insight, Bessemer, Redpoint, and others. While the original idea was around feature flagging, they unlocked the power of feature management which has led to the platform of LaunchDarkly today. What does this mean by the numbers? Well, LaunchDarkly has deployed peaks of trillion feature flags each day. We can understand why Edith has been named to the Forbes Cloud 100 list and Entrepreneur's 100 Women of Influence as well. In today's episode, we explore insights and themes such as the trade-offs to a development team of building versus buying, the need for feature management across startups and the enterprise, and how trust drives your go-to-market strategy with early customers. Let's open the door. Edith, thank you so much for joining us today in The Room.

Thanks for having me.

We're really excited to have you here and talk about the journey to starting and scaling LaunchDarkly. But with all of our guests, we love to start at the beginning, and we're curious, where did you grow up, and how has that shaped your view of the world?

[Speaker:MADISON McILWAIN] I grew up in Arlington, Virginia, which is right across the Potomac River from Washington, DC, and I don't think I realized how unique I was at the time in terms of like our field trips would be to go see DARPA and try out email. My summer jobs were working for defense contractors, And one of my first real jobs as an intern, it was I programmed Visual Basic for defense contractor. So I just assumed this was what everybody else did, that they were steeped in programming. Also over the summer, I was a camp counselor teaching little kids Logo and Basic, and this was such a fun job. And now some of those campers that I used to teach are professionals and work at companies like Cruise or have even started their own companies. I just grew up assuming that programming was fun.

That's an amazing backdrop to what would be an incredible career in both programming yourself, but then also scaling a company that's helping make programmers' lives easier. But alongside all of those projects and internships and exposure touchpoints, Did you yourself ever think that you would become a founder?

It's funny because at the computer camp I was talking about, I started as a counselor and then I was the director. And if you wanna talk about managing challenges, try managing a bunch of 19-year-olds and then 14-year-old camp counselors who it's their own first job. So I always wanted to be a founder. I didn't really think I knew anything beyond software. I didn't have an idea for anything I thought relevant beyond software. So it was a huge pleasant surprise when I finally realized that software was something that I could found a company around.

You know, it's interesting, we talked to a few guests now and everyone has a different relationship to the identity of being a founder and an entrepreneur. For some, it's something that they've been doing since they were 5. For others, it was something they had to grow into feeling comfortable about, but knowing that their unique skillset is what enabled them to solve this problem in the world. It was inevitable that at the end of the day they were gonna take on this identity. And for you, after growing up on the East Coast, you shipped out to California to attend Harvey Mudd for undergrad where you studied engineering, and then you did go on to become both an analyst and designer for Epicentric, which you stayed at your first job through their acquisition to Vignette. Interesting as a young employee to be going through an acquisition like that. We're curious, how did that experience shape your early career?

I got an engineering degree at Harvey Mudd College, and the really nice thing about Harvey Mudd is it's part of the Claremont Colleges, so you could take classes at any of the other Claremont Colleges. So I actually took a lot of econ classes at Pomona, and I even took a course around mergers and acquisitions at Claremont Graduate School. Which was super fun 'cause it was all free for me. It was included in my price of tuition, which I guess also tells you something of my own character that I love taking more classes for free and I would try to take as many as I could. So I was at Epicentric, I joined there in as a really junior employee and I actually got patents for some of the stuff I designed because it was so novel at the time around delegating admin in a web framework. And then we got acquired by Vignette, and it was, number one, this big culture shock. We were this San Francisco company, and we got acquired by a Texas company. And I still remember we got the director of engineering up from Texas, and we took him out to the nicest sushi restaurant by our office. And after eating the equivalent of about $500 of sushi, He said, "Great, where's our real steak dinner?" We're all like, "We just spent our entire expense budget." There are good parts of it though. I got to see a lot of customers. Vignette was a global organization, and I moved at that point from being in engineering to product manager, 'cause I wanted to be closer to what the customers actually wanted. And I got to travel all over the world to see Vignette customers. So I went to Spain, to Italy, to France, and what I learned was that the customers were universally very unhappy with Vignette. Vignette was an early web company, and I still remember sitting in with our solution engineer in a newspaper in Italy, and I don't speak any Italian whatsoever. So the customer, this lovely Italian woman, would talk for about 5 minutes, very animated about all the things she didn't like about the product. And then the solution engineer would turn to me and translate and said, "She's very unhappy. She doesn't like the way you handle updates." And then the Italian customer would tap his shoulder and she didn't understand what he had said, but You would say, I only talked for 30 seconds and she said talk for 5 minutes, so she has a lot more to say now. So from that, I really learned that you could build a product, you could design a product, you can have patents on a product, but if customers aren't happy, they're not happy and they'll tell you. That was a real learning moment to me that software really does matter to customers. The things that I designed that I thought were just a fancy patent diagram actually really changed people's lives. Sometimes for the negative, like if our content management system didn't work, that meant that this newspaper couldn't publish.

Absolutely. Thank you for sharing that, Edith. I think as two former product managers, Madison McIlwain and myself, that resonates incredibly deeply and how important it is to get customer feedback. And often hearing that customer feedback then leads you to the actual aha moment of where there might even be a bigger opportunity. In 2014, fast forwarding a little bit, you were director of product at TripIt. Tell us, what was the aha moment that launched LaunchDarkly?

I'd worked in enterprise software for a long time, and I decided that I wanted to go work at a fun consumer company. So I joined TripIt, which at the time was the number one travel app, and it was a blast. The basic idea of TripIt was that we would scrape a bunch of emails that people would forward us, and from that extract travel information and build people a beautiful formatted itinerary. This was really popular because at the time it was just hard. Like, we would literally have people who would spend half a day trying to type up their travel itinerary. So my first project when I joined TripIt was to do auto import, which was to connect people's Gmail directly with TripIt, which at the time in 2010 was pretty unique. You know, just the idea that you would let an external provider connect to your Gmail at all was scary. And then we also had the challenge of looking through people's emails and satisfying their privacy concerns. Along with that, we also had our own fears about scalability in terms of how many people were going to do this and could we scale with that. So the way we broke down the project, as always, the product manager was, I got a really early beta group of 10 people who were really passionate about travel. And I did this by asking our analytics person to give me a poll of who was the most active users, as well as just people who were friends of TripIt, basically, who said we want to do this. When we built the first pass at this, we had a beta group that only included these 10 people, and I gave them very direct feedback to me of TripIt would be scanning their email and it would pull up anything that said ticket. Turns out there's a lot of stuff that is called ticket in people's inboxes that is absolutely nothing to do with travel. So for example, somebody would have a repair ticket at their auto shop. So we had to build logic around making sure that the tickets and travel itineraries were valid for them. And then another funny bug was just, uh, we had it too broad. It would pull in also promotions. I can remember Turkish Airlines sent out a big promotion that somehow got read by us as that you're taking a trip to Istanbul. It showed up in people's itineraries and they started freaking out. And then we're getting ready to launch it further and we were gonna do it where we were going to allow people to opt in if they wanted. And there is this big moment of how many people are gonna opt in? Is this gonna work? So we said, okay, we're just gonna show the UI to even opt in to only a certain percentage of people. That way we could throttle it based on the response. And I still remember the night before we were about to go to the bigger release, we still had not been able to solve this one problem. The problem was we did not have a good way to differentiate between your itinerary versus somebody else's. So for example, if your mother was coming to visit and she forwarded an itinerary to you, of, hey, I'm coming to San Francisco on such and such date, we didn't know it was your mom. We would just put in your own itinerary. And sometimes people love this, 'cause they're like, yes, I have an itinerary for mom. Sometimes it was extremely confusing, 'cause they're like, why do I have this jumble itinerary? And I still remember the night before release, I wrote a document about how I didn't think we could ship with this issue. And the founder, Greg Brockway, talked me through it. He's like, are you really sure that this is a showstopper? Or is this something we can fix post-release? Is the good of what we're doing about allowing people to connect directly their email outweigh the risk? And I said, you're right, we'll deal with this post-release. So we went live, we started allowing people to connect their emails, and it was a huge hit. Some people did have privacy concerns and never turned it on. A lot of other people said, this is extremely helpful. I get to skip this step of forwarding. And now my life is just better. And at the time, we were one of the biggest users of Gmail OAuth, according to the folks I knew at Gmail. And the funny thing is Gmail itself has still never figured out the same issue that I ran into. If somebody forwards you an email to your Gmail, it'll go into your calendar automatically.

I have noticed that with my family, and I actually one time was like, Oh my God, did I accidentally book my flight home for the wrong day because of this?

Yeah, it's hysterical to me 'cause I built this feature in 2010 and now 12 years later, Google with all their resources has not figured out how to deal with it. I'm glad we went ahead and shipped 'cause there's always that moment where I'm like, maybe we shouldn't have. I'm like, nope, we made so many people happy. Even though I do curse when we have to delete other people's, I call it other people's itineraries. Off my own calendar. That was the genesis of what became LaunchDarkly, is that it gave me as a product manager so much power that I could put something out to only some people, that I could hand-select a group, that I could launch, that I could do percentage rollouts. And I was like, this is actually a really useful product to a product manager. And it was something that we just built in-house at TripIt.

Thank you for sharing that story of how important it is to maybe not launch a global feature all at once, especially alongside other important releases. You painted a really in-depth picture of what one example of a feature release really looked like prior to LaunchDarkly. How across the board did engineering and product teams manage feature flags prior to LaunchDarkly?

This goes back to the 2010, 2014 timeframe. So TripIt had its own internal framework. The other reason why we had to have our own internal framework is just our pace of releases was pretty fast. The travel vendors were constantly changing the format of their emails, sometimes just because some marketing person had a bright idea, sometimes deliberately 'cause they didn't like TripIt scraping them and they would deliberately try to change 'em up so that our algorithms didn't work. So we got into this really fast pace where we had to have a platform like that internally. I was in San Francisco and I knew that the big companies like Dropbox, Facebook also had their own internal platforms. Tripit was at a size where I'd say we had an okay platform, but it wasn't like the deluxe platform that I wanted. I would have a request I wanted for the team, can we really geofence based on if somebody's at an airport or not? And they're like, actually, that's super hard. We're not equipped to do that. So everybody around me was struggling with their own homebrew to various degrees of success, which was frustrating. I knew that my friends at bigger companies had much more robust platforms.

Walk us through the moment where you have this sort of realization and frustration that there are more robust feature flag platforms available for these massive household names, but it's not really a luxury that's available to every startup, let alone every mid-size growth stage company. What sort of compelled you to say, hey, I think my time at TripIt's over. I'm really passionate about the space. Let's democratize robust feature flagging for the rest of startups and tech businesses in the world.

I remember we really, so my old boss at TripIt was this guy named Will Eldridge, and he's at YouTube now, but he left TripIt to go work at SurveyMonkey. And I remember talking to him and one of his coworkers, and SurveyMonkey at the time was a pretty decently successful company, But they were frustrated that they still didn't have the same platform that they had at Amazon. Amazon had a really good feature flag management system and SurveyMonkey just didn't have it. And that was a real aha moment to me because I was like, this is a universal problem. Even a company the size of SurveyMonkey doesn't have the resources to do this effectively. And if we built this, there's an actual market here. And I still remember, like, I went home and I started Googling because I just couldn't believe that this did not exist in the world. I was like Googling like feature flag as a service, feature toggles, feature flag system, because I was just convinced that somebody else should have a solution in the market and there wasn't one.

And so today, no surprise, LaunchDarkly provides fast, scalable feature flag and toggle management for the modern enterprise. Tell us, from that initial Google search and early build of your product, how has the product and vision evolved since then? That aha moment?

It's funny. So I went back and I talked to my co-founder, John Kodumal, who had gone to Harvey Med with us— me— and I asked him, hey, are you interested in doing this? He said, absolutely. I work at Atlassian. We have the same challenges. It'll take me a weekend or so to build a product. It turned out to take a lot longer than a weekend, and that was part of the evolution of the vision. Our very first product was just a very simple on-off toggle. And what we realized over time from talking to a lot of potential customers was that one feature flag is actually pretty easy. You could put in your database, you can manage it, it's easy. What is hard is doing that at scale. That's how we evolved from feature flagging to feature management. If you have 100 feature flags, who has access to them, what's their lifecycle, is there an audit log of who's turned them on and off, and then how do you really get into making them flexible in terms of not just perhaps an email list, but even the example I gave before at TripIt of geofencing different segments, working with other people's BI systems, and also making it integrate with observability platforms so that you can quickly react to the world around you. From a simple toggle became a feature management platform.

Thank you for sharing how managing a single feature evolved into an entire platform that any modern tech company can leverage. It's no surprise that LaunchDarkly is being used pretty extensively these days. And as a part of that growth journey, you've raised multiple rounds of venture financing. Most recently a Series D with a $3 billion valuation, certainly unicorn status. A huge congratulations. First of all, that's a massive milestone, but we're really curious, who was the first person to say yes in investing in LaunchDarkly?

It sounds kind of cliché, but the first people are always the founders. My co-founder John and I put in $10,000 each, and that was to buy our laptops, to get DNS certificates, to get the company off the ground. And that was perhaps the biggest hurdle of convincing ourselves that this was worth doing. The second person was, we got into an accelerator called Alchemist Accelerator, and I still remember it because they took us in. We were literally two people with an idea, no customers, and the money they put in was, in hindsight, pretty small, but just that somebody believed in our idea was immense to us as co-founders. The first actual person, I still remember, it was Will, my old boss from TripIt. I told him what we were doing and he's like, "Can I put some money in?" I'm like, "Yes, absolutely." And he said, "Please don't close the round without me." And what I didn't say out loud was there was no round at the time. We were getting waffles at this place in the Mission near our house. I still remember he's like, Don't close the round until I could get in. And I'm like, no problem.

Don't worry, the round will definitely stay open.

He was my old boss and my mentor, and I still thank him, you know, that he put in $25K and it meant so much to me.

Thank you for sharing that. The early yeses are always most memorable, even if the check size pales in comparison to your most recent venture financing. At the same time, they're some of the most kind of impactful checks as a part of that journey. It's no surprise that there's been many rounds, a lot of success, um, a pretty monumental few years for LaunchDarkly. But I think one thing that's super interesting that we talk about on the podcast are moments where things are not always up and to the right. I think, you know, the founder journey is often a very lonely one and full of a bunch of challenges, and those challenges change as you hit different stages and milestones. Could you share with us a moment in your entrepreneurial journey when things didn't go as planned?

Yeah, absolutely. So the idea seemed extremely obvious to my co-founder and me that feature management was the way that software should get built. It was something that we'd used at prior jobs. It was something that just seemed very intrinsically good that by separating out deployment, pushing code to release about who could see it, you could have a lot more safety in your releases in that you didn't have to worry about a launch going bad. You could control it tightly, as well as the ability to innovate more quickly because you could control who saw it and do things like a beta, limited rollout. What we discovered was that we were alone in that thinking. We thought feature flagging was this accepted best practice, and it absolutely was not at the time. Again, this is in 2014 when we started, and we'd both been at, in hindsight, kind of hot Silicon Valley companies, TripIt and Atlassian, and most of the industry was still releasing once a year to their own data center. So we would go out to try to pitch customers and they just absolutely did not care. They'd say things like, "We release once a year and that's fine," or, "We care about this, but we already built our own in-house system." And the system that my co-founder and, at the time we'd hired 2 engineers, were building was honestly not as good as a lot of homegrown out there at the time. So every conversation was, why should we care at all? And then if we do care, why would we buy from you? And this definitely goaded us into action. Whenever I went to a potential customer and they said our own homegrown is better, I would always ask, because I'd been a product manager, great, can you show me your system? I didn't try to get into an argument about whether or not ours was better or not. I was just genuinely curious about what they liked about their homegrown. And this was actually really good because I figured out a lot of things that people wanted. So I remember somebody showed me the way they managed users and user groups, and I went back and I talked to the engineers. I'm like, hey, we need to build in some user group management. So every opportunity when somebody turned us down, I tried to use as a learning experience. If they turned us down because they just weren't interested at all, that was different. That if they turned us down because they thought their own system was better, that was something that we could iterate on. I always compared it to— there's a scene from Monty Python and the Search for the Holy Grail where they're looking for the Holy Grail and they come to some castle and are like, "We already got a grail." And my response would be not to argue about whether the grail was actually holy or not, but just to say, "Great, can I see your grail?" And this really changed the conversation. But This was basically 2 years of us building, trying to convince folks, trying to create a category before we really got any sort of traction at all.

That takes a lot of tenacity to understand a landscape that doesn't even know it needs what you're trying to build because you were already so on the cutting edge of what was even possible at the time in software development. To have this vision. It's incredible to reframe because I think now looking back, it's been 8 years since that initial moment for you and your co-founder, and just the thought of only deploying once a year just feels almost inconceivable today.

It's really interesting because I talk to folks now and they say, of course, this is so obvious.

What I'm hearing you say a little bit is there was a massive trust component that had to come into play on the developer and product side. Like, why am I gonna trust this external tool to manage my feature releases? This is like the most important moment of the year in our whole team. Why can I trust you? How did you curry trust with the stakeholders on the customer side in this early stage?

That's a great question. We originally planned to be a self-serve solution. So we'd built the self-serve to sign up with a credit card, and I made all my spreadsheet models about this many people land on the landing page, this many people sign up for trial, this many people convert, we make this much money. We put the self-serve flow in and absolutely nobody signed up. It was devastating because that moment when all the engineers are looking at you as the founder thinking, okay, we did this and it's not working. So we went back to basics. My co-founder and I were based in Oakland, but we knew a lot of folks in the industry and we went the old-fashioned route, which is begging all of our friends to use it. We would say, hey, could you use it? And then we would literally show up at their office to watch them install and just help them. That level of trust was, if you're vaguely interested, we'll show up whether you like it or not sometimes. And then if something goes wrong, we'll stay with you while you fix it. I would always say, you're gonna like this, and if you don't, let me know, but I'm gonna be here for the journey. So is my co-founder. At the time, John, my co-founder, would give people his direct Slack or HipChat. So literally they had a channel with the co-founder.

It's interesting. Self-serve is very sexy. A lot of people care about self-serve products today on the investment side. We kind of have a belief that it'll help you hit scale faster. But what I'm hearing you say is at the stage you were in, without trust, self-serve is not sexy. It's actually prohibitive to scale. And you had to rethink the go-to-market strategy early on, given the amount of trust that was required to get LaunchDarkly off the ground.

We were in an incubator called HeavyBit, which had an office at 9th and Folsom back then. And I was friends with Paul Bigger, who was the founder of CircleCI, and I did a podcast with him and The joke every time we did the podcast was, thank you CircleCI for using LaunchDarkly, because they did not use LaunchDarkly at the time. Finally, Paul, as a founder, was like, hey, we are interested. Do you wanna come in and give the pitch to the rest of the team? And I said, absolutely. When can we come in? So John, my co-founder, and I went over and gave the pitch to the engineering team at CircleCI, and we convinced them. And after that, the joke was true. So I did get to tell Paul every time we did pod, thank you Paul for being a customer. But my question was, all the questions that we answered in that in-person meeting were on the website. Like, they didn't ask us anything that wasn't already in our market materials. And I said, are we not conveying them clearly in the marketing materials? And another friend, PVH from Heroku, said, no, Edith, they wanna look you in the eye and know that you're gonna be there for them. It's nothing to do with your marketing materials. It's that they wanna have that level of trust. And that really stuck with me.

Gosh. Yeah.

No, that even sticks out today, especially in a post-COVID world where there's more distribution of teams and collaboration than ever. It was harder there for a minute to really look someone in the eye and give them that promise. But you've been able to do it. You've built trust across the entire ecosystem and have some pretty astounding numbers that I pulled from your current marketing website. That says you are boasting 20 trillion feature flags served to users a day. Trillion. And 3 million servers are reached worldwide daily. That is just really, truly incredible, almost incomprehensible scale. So at some point you had to go from this trust-based go-to-market strategy with your friends to a scaled go-to-market strategy. Could you walk us through how you made that transition at likely, you know, a post-Series A, post-Series B, milestone for you and the team?

Do you mean in terms of go-to-market or technology? Because they're both pretty interesting.

Let's start with go-to-market, but would love to circle back to the technology. Absolutely.

I did all the first sales. I called myself the reluctant salesperson because I would always strongly try to push people towards the self-serve funnel. I would say stuff like, just put down your credit card. You don't need to talk to me. Really, you don't need to talk to me. Oh, like this. And people would insist on a salesperson, so I would do it. And in hindsight, I was actually a much better salesperson than I gave myself credit for because I was incredibly passionate. I was very good about qualifying leads because I didn't wanna sell unless I thought somebody was gonna buy. So if somebody said, we're not really sure how often we're gonna release, I'd say, great, talk to me in a year. And I also really cared about their feedback. So if somebody said they weren't buying for a reason that I thought was something we could fix, I would pay a lot of attention to that. So I still remember like a, a prospect sending me their New Year's manifesto, and I think this was in 2016, about how they wanted to move to feature flags. And I shared it with the entire engineering team, which at the time was 4 people, of this is what our customers want, can we deliver that? That was the first motion. It was just, I'd say, founder passion. The second motion was I became the bottleneck of people would want a quote and I was busy. I was also the CEO who's doing everything else at the time. So we hired our first salesperson and that really unlocked like a next level in terms of he could just concentrate on selling. A lot of our go-to-market was also just evangelism. We are very open with what we were doing. I gave talks all over the world, Oslo, Australia, London, about feature management. We were in no way in stealth or trying to hide what we were doing, and people just started to brand us as, if you want to do something with feature management, you gotta use LaunchDarkly. What also started to happen is that success begets success. We got some early customers like Atlassian who were happy to talk about us, and then we also did a really important early partnership with Microsoft, which lent us a lot of legitimacy. At the time when both of those happened, we were an 8-person startup, but these made us look much larger. The reason why I was in Australia is because somebody saw me speak at a Microsoft event in San Francisco. And they said, "If you come give that same talk in Sydney, we'll pay for your flight and hotel." And I said, "Absolutely." I don't, and sure. And I came, I went and did that same talk in Sydney and we got a major airline and a major multinational just from that one talk.

Today, we can't help but notice your billboards all around San Francisco with the catchphrase, Let Your Feature Flag Fly. So you've come a long way from those early partnerships and distribution models to really now getting to evangelize through the developer ecosystem. And we touched earlier on what the status quo was 8 years ago in feature flags and highlighted that frankly, there wasn't a status quo. People either were building it at home or didn't even know why they needed them. Today you are an industry defining category leader really here for this vertical. But we're curious how the competitive landscape has evolved and how you view that today.

So we still consider our competition to be build your own. We still think there are many companies that are still moving from their own data centers to the cloud, from waterfall to agile, and that they need a partner for that. And what we've always tried to position is we can help you in that journey. I think where people in the DevTools landscape get into trouble is when they start to fight with internal software developers and view them as the competitive. So a real example is every internal system that has been built has somebody who cared about it, who put some time into it. What we always try to say is it's wonderful that you built this. Wouldn't it be great if you could free up some of your time from maintenance if you used a vendor? That's a very different positioning statement than your internal system is not scalable and unmanageable, which, by the way, is probably true, but it just puts people's hackles in a different way.

This really resonates. When I was at Gap 4 years ago doing product, 50-year-old retailer, our entire tech stack was legacy. Digital transformation was the words on everyone's breath and At the time, we were still using on-prem, so we were actually migrating to Azure while I was there, and it was a huge culture shift and a massive technology undertaking. And so lots of people who had been at the company 20+ years, really built the first website for Gap Inc., were a part of the transformation that was happening 20 years later. And so I do have a lot of empathy for the stakeholder on the side who is like, you're asking me to do what with my workflow and changing how I have shipped product for how many years?

Yeah, that's so interesting what you said about empathy, because I remember from my time at Vignette, which was a very early web content management system, now it just seems hideously dated, but at the time it was state of the art.

It's hard to be told you're state of the art one day and then you're passé the next.

Yeah, you just have to have empathy of like, you're still trying to solve the same needs. For Gap, you're trying to show people, hey, you could get new clothes that make you feel better. And there's different technology to accomplish that.

Absolutely. Kind of speaking honestly about people more than anything else, it's a challenging macroeconomic time and we all somewhat live in the bubble of Silicon Valley, but even our bubble has been impacted with mass layoffs and just uncertainty and what the next few months, if not years, are going to bring for technology scale. Curious how you as a leader are empowering your team to continue growing in success amidst this macro backdrop.

For me, what I always tell the team is that we're solving real challenges for real customers. We have fast food chains that want to deliver food within minutes. Somebody puts in a mobile order. We have banks that want to make sure that people are seeing their money. We have healthcare that's delivering one of the most impactful things that you could do for a person, which is personal health. These are real problems, and LaunchDarkly is helping with that. I always think about that when I go visit our customers, that the— these are real things that matter to their own customers, and that is always going to be something that's valued in the market.

Totally. LaunchDarkly is like at the platform layer so that all of these essential businesses are able to continue operating, especially in digital-first world. So that's a really powerful framing for what you're able to unlock and help continue to move forward for a lot of other businesses in the economy. I'd love to shift gears a little bit and chat a bit more about yourself, Edith. You are on the NASDAQ Female Leaders Council alongside other former Ruum Podcast guests, Liz Meyerdirk, Shuo Wang, and Heidi Zak. What conversations are happening amongst you and those incredible women in the room?

The first rule of the— no, I was going to make a Fight Club joke. I think for me, I get very busy with my own day-to-day of being CEO. And what was really powerful to me was to spend time with other people who had the same goals of trying to move their own businesses forward. And some of the commonalities of things we've shared about trying to hire early employees, trying to get early customers that were across all of us.

Claudia and I were just speaking about that yesterday. Honestly, she was just sharing some of her challenges in being an early first-time CEO and the scale. So just hearing it secondhand, I can only imagine the amount of empowerment you might feel, or just comfort, honestly, talking across the aisle to someone who's building a completely different business, but tangentially related learnings.

It was just really fun. And the thing that surprised me was I've been at it for 8 years and I didn't realize until some folks told me that, like, they had looked towards me as an example, which surprised me. I think I forget sometimes that we've been at it for 8 years and that there are people who've gotten funding since us who can look at us as an example.

That's an incredibly powerful position to be in, and I'm excited for this episode to come out because I think there's probably a lot more out there than you've even personally encountered. As we wrap up today's podcast, I want to just thank you for taking the time to share your story. I think it's really important that aspiring founders, earlier stage founders are able to, to hear from others that have made it as far as you have. I'd love to ask two kind of final questions looking into the future. We chatted a lot about your history, getting started with Blanche Darkly and how you've solved meaningful challenges for your customers. As we peek forward into 2023 and beyond, what's next for LaunchDarkly?

It's a good question. So LaunchDarkly, we're serving trillions of features every day. We have over 3,000 customers worldwide.

I think we're just getting started.

I look at the fact that there's 30 million developers, and I think that all of them should be using LaunchDarkly. I think about our original vision, which was launch, measure, and control. And I think we've executed well on the launch. I think there's more features and functionality around the measure and control that you'll see from us. You'll also see us continue to go more and more global. Developers aren't just in the US, they're everywhere.

Very much looking forward to the expansion of LaunchDarkly, both geographically, but also in terms of where LaunchDarkly sits in the development process. We have our final question for the podcast, and that is our hero question that we ask every single guest. and we ask that the answer be someone that you've encountered in the professional world. But that question is, who's a woman that has had a profound impact on your life and your career as you've grown and scaled LaunchDarkly?

My mom is on the board of IEEE, of the board of governors, and her job is to make software standards. Literally, she makes software standards about how people can understand developers. A standard that she works on that I think is particularly interesting is about looking at old terms and making sure that they're not gendered or discriminatory. Terms like radioman, which don't really fit anymore. And so whenever somebody says, "You explain software in words that your mom can understand," I'm like, "My mom wrote that vocabulary." And she'll tell me if I'm doing it wrong too. Another woman that really influenced me is, I worked at military.com, as a product manager, and I worked directly for the founder, Anne Duane. And Anne Duane had gotten an MBA from Harvard Business School and then started Military.com, and I felt like I got a free MBA just from working for her. She taught me what management by objectives were. She always pushed me, she always encouraged me too, but she, for me, was an example of, yes, you could be a woman and be a founder, and I only worked for her for around a year, but I learned, I think, 3 years in that year. And she went on to be the COO of Chegg and is now a VC. Amazing inspiration.

Thank you for sharing that, Edith. It was a pleasure having you on today's podcast, and thank you so much for sharing your story.

Yeah, thank you for having me.

Thank you so much for joining us at The Room Podcast. If you want more from The Room every week, subscribe to our newsletter. At theroompodcast.com/newsletter. See you in the room.

All opinions expressed by Claudia Madison and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of DefiVC. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.