Scaling Past $100 Million With Speed and Precision with Dan Rogers of LaunchDarkly

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Execution eats strategy for Breakfast Every time execution beat strategy, it's only when you execute you can actually tell if the strategy would have worked or not anyway. And so a beautiful strategy on a PowerPoint slide is nothing. How one walks that through and actually starts executing that against and learn and iterate is everything. So less time strategizing, more time executing is the mix. And so again, let's imagine you have an annual planning process and it's a three week process. Is there a two day version of that that would get you close enough for you to now actually be able to execute and iterate and see if the strategy actually works and then you can optimize and improve it. So that's really the mindset is allow yourself the time to execute the strategy in a a plus way. Then you'll know if the strategy worked. As opposed to spend a long time doing strategy, never quite executing it to the right level, you'll never know if the strategy actually was the right one. I think you can spend way too much time on strategy and never know if it was the right one, is my conclusion. I need some traction. You need some traction.

Hey, what's up innovators, entrepreneurs, visionaries and disruptors. This is your Traction podcast host Lloyd Lobo.

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I need some traction. You need some traction.

Hey Traction fam. Super excited to sit with Dan Rogers, CEO of LaunchDarkly. We're going to talk all about tactical leadership principles that drive startup growth at every stage. From leading high growth teams at iconic brands like Microsoft, Amazon, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Rubrik to scaling LaunchDarkly. Dan is a powerhouse who has helped companies go from startup to IPO level success. So we're going to talk about how to transition from 01 to scalable execution without breaking momentum, balancing strategy with execution. When scaling a SaaS company, how do you lead from the edge and leverage frontline teams to drive decisions? And lastly building a culture of experimentation to drive innovation. Dan has led more importantly GTM teams at ServiceNow at AWS launchDarkly Rubrik. He's been on the front line of GTM which is rare for not rare. It's probably one of the best traits for a CEO of a scaling company to have. And a lot of companies as they look for a scaling CEO, their mindset is that they want to find a CEO who's management kind of person. But I think coming from a sales and marketing and GTM and a customer first background is so, so essential. So that's why I'm super stoked to speak with you. I finished engineering, but I deliberately took my first job cold calling for a founder and my mom lost it. My parents are from India. She's like, your friends are working at Microsoft and Johnson and Johnson. What are you doing cold calling for minimum wage? And I'm like, I've been told this is the best skill to have, so let's start there. Like you've got this dream career, right? Like iconic brands, leading growth for them. Microsoft, Amazon, ServiceNow. Rubrik, how did you get started on this path?

Actually, you know, I'll wind the clock all the way back and it's great pleasure to be with you as well. I started my life in the north of England, a small fishing town called Grimsby. Sometimes I say it's a bit like the Detroit of the uk. It had one industry which was fishing and then the North Sea ran out of fish. So pretty much everyone from my town got out, got somewhere else, moved as there was a structural decline of that town and that created a wave of folks that were interested in technology, innovation, in high tech, in what's next, because the core industry run out. My journey really started pretty early with the notion that I want to be at the heart of technology. And the gravitational pull of Silicon Valley happened and it pulled me actually across an ocean and with a, with a small stop at business school in between. And that was it. I got going in technology the age of 21 and stuck with it. And fast forward to today.

Fantastic. Now, how did I think you first worked at Dell? Was it? How did the first breakthrough come? What was your first job like? You went to university and you had to find the first job. What did you pick and why?

Yeah, so I finished business school on the east coast and then I said, look, I want to be right in the mix, right where all the decisions are being made. So I actually joined a corporate strategy group. These are kind of small six, eight person groups that are respond to the CEO, report to the CEO. And the promise of those corporate strategy teams is if you work on something cool and interesting, you might get to run that interesting thing that you've worked on. And that happened with me. And so I worked on the data storage business for Dell, which actually allowed me and that was a new business for them. So I actually allowed me to do a startup within Dell and together we started to grow this data storage business and it went like this for them. So that was my first foray, my first kind of tiptoeing using my strategy background. I'd started as a strategy consultant actually to land in a tech company, then use that to get a line job in the line job, which I think is very important. I owned a number. So I was the GM of a business. I had a business unit and its success was tied to my will and my input. And so did that business do well or did that business not do well was really on my shoulders. So having that experience, maybe it's a bit like your cold calling experience where you own a number and having that early business responsibility, or P and L responsibility in my case was super helpful.

What's really interesting is I hadn't thought of it that way, but it makes so much sense. One of the key things you own as an entrepreneur, as an executive, as you scale a company, as the CEO, is you need to own a number. And if you start life on that journey of I own a number, I think that's so crucial because we get put in this meandering paths along our journey to be cogs in the wheel and we really don't know how we're contributing to the number. I think the best lesson to come out of that is own a number. See if you can find a job where you actually own a number.

I love that. Nice thing about owning a number, just to piggyback on that concept is when you do that, you suddenly care about all of the constituent parts that drive that. You actually really care about the marketing message, you really care about the pricing, you really care about packaging, you really care about the post customer support, you really care about is the product meeting the promise or not, is it actually ready? So all those pieces are your purview when you own the number.

And then you landed at aws, the head of product marketing and demand gen, then head of marketing at Salesforce Emea and then CMO at Symantec, like you, you just went on this tear of the GTM side of things and owning the marketing and gtm. Org. How did that come about? How did that shift come about?

Yeah, I did a brief stint, seven years at Microsoft where I was a product manager. So I actually did a good deal of building software products too. A small product called Windows I think at the time, you know, I say today, biggest software product of all time, biggest software franchise of all time and got to work in the belly of the beast as a product manager on that and actually ship software products. So that was really foundational for me because then I got to see how products are made as well. I parlayed that at AWS into, as you say, a product marketing type role. And I forget who gave this, this quote, but it's like if you see a rocket ship, you don't ask which seat, you just get on the rocket ship and go. That was the same with aws. Aws, it was clear that thing was going to go like this. And so I didn't bother too much about what my title was. I just wanted to be part of it, part of the action. And I didn't, you know, really care about who reported to me how many reports, what my job title, one promotion path was. I just wanted to be on that rocket ship as we were going up. And so when you have that mindset, good things happen. And so I ended up having responsibility of lots of different functional areas that would come my way. And I got to design and invent a bunch of really cool concepts that AWS were really inventing or reinventing as it goes from first principles, which is kind of the AWS mindset.

Now one thing is really interesting in your career, right? You started in product, which I think is phenomenal, owning the number. And I think product is like one of the best skills any entrepreneur can learn. But then you switch to GTM and it kind of similar to what I did. Started in product, went to GTM side of things. But then you became a cmo. Not now. These organizations were sales heavy organizations. So you could very well these CROs. What I've seen very common in the enterprise is the CROs or the heads of sales end up becoming the CEO. So I've not seen as much like the cm somebody going from product to then owning GTM and then going the CMO route multiple times and then becoming the CEO. I would love to get some insight on that tag.

I was always interested in the why would customers use this product why would they buy this product? Why is this different from other things that they could be doing? How will they go about using it? And so that inquiry and that curiosity about the interaction between customers and the product experience is really where I'd say I built a good part of my career. And so because I'd built products before I knew what one could or could not do from an engineering perspective. And then I combined that with a so what? Why is this important for the customer? What are they really going to use it with? That naturally took me from product management to product marketing. When I was in product marketing, that really became a great path to the kind of CMO role. And the CMO role, I really never forgot that beginning of it's all about products. At the end of the day, it's all about how do the customers use the product. So, yeah, I think the common dot across it all is that synthesis of how the customers are trying to use the product, what solutions they're actually really looking for, what problems they actually really have. And I kept that clear and present.

As a cmo, you've outlined a unique path that most people don't follow en route to becoming CEO is understand by spending time in product and owning a number, you understand the entire customer experience and the journey and you get to shape that and then you influence that buying decision. From the marketing perspective, a lot of marketers or CMOs, they don't understand the product experience and then it's like silo, like marketing is. You're not building this. I don't have. I need to create the material, but I don't understand the product. They do not. Most marketers I've known and Traction has a huge community of marketers, they do not spend as much time in products. I would question if you ask like probably 7 out of 10 marketers to demo the product, they probably won't be able to.

Yeah, and that's just the rub because certainly in the companies I've been fortunate enough to be part of, our audiences are very technical. Our audiences know what they want and why they want it. And they don't want to be marketed to, they do want to be helped, they want to be educated, they want to be guided, they want to understand differences, they want to know how to get started. They want to know how, but they don't want to be quote, unquote, marketed to. So again, if you're not connected to the word which is really the product and how they're. How they actually need to use it. Yeah, you can become untethered from the reality of that organization.

Yeah, certainly now along the way you've probably, you've seen a lot of success and everyone talks about the success, but there's a lot of controversial things that happen, bad things that happen, controversial decisions. What are a few memorable controversial things? Maybe one or two things that shaped your journey along the way. They're like, you know what? I'm going to tell my grandkids this.

I'd say like one of the less controversial, more beautiful memories I have was from my time at Salesforce. We had this massive user conference called Dreamforce. At the time I think it was the biggest user conference in tech and certainly became a real mecca for folks traveling across the world to see what the future vision of software would be. And that you put an indelible print on my mind how we use Dreamforce to line up the rest of the company to actually ship products for the user conference itself. So at user conference we would declare to the world that X was happening. Now, six months prior to that we'd worked really hard to build products to make sure that we manifested the X that was happening at the user conference. So the user conference became the driving focal point for our innovation and our messaging. And that as a concept really stuck in my mind that actually if you think about a user conference every 12 months as a renovation or redefinition of your entire company and everything is going to march up to those, those user conferences that sticks with you. And so that sense of pace, that sense of the company we were 12 months ago isn't going to be the company we are in. 12 months time is really powerful and that really stuck with me. And Marc Benioff of course was the master at pre imagining how the world will look in 12 months time and then building towards that future.

You know, Salesforce is a masterclass on community led growth. I actually wrote a book on community led growth and it became a Wall Street Journal bestseller the same week as Elon Musk book and I covered Salesforce and a lot of companies like that. And the power of when you just have a product, you have an audience. If people buy your product, you have an audience. But when they come together without you being on the room, then you have a community. And when they solve a greater purpose, then it's a movement. And when they keep coming together around rituals over time it becomes a cult or a religion. It's audience, community, movement, religion. And Salesforce is a cult like brand and you've had the opportunity to work for many cult like brands. Now as you look at as, as a cmo, that's where that CMO hat for some of these brands, what are some of the things you think you did or that were done in those companies to shape their journey to iconic brand like status?

Yeah. And as you look at some of those great companies, I don't know that I get a full book like, like you have. I don't know if I even get a chapter, but maybe I get a little paragraph of some of the things that I was certainly involved with. Paragraph that I'm very fond of in my book on ServiceNow was about how we became a multi product platform. So ServiceNow, as you probably remember 10 years maybe ago, we were an IT help desk company and it was really focused on a singular notion of helping what they call a requester and a fulfiller. And the little fabric between the requester and fulfiller, which they called service management, that was ServiceNow writ small kind of 10 years ago. But what ServiceNow figured out, and me along with it, was actually that connection between someone requesting something and someone fulfilling something. Why don't we call that workflow and other workflows other than IT help desk that are going to be interesting for the modern enterprise? Yes. Actually there's a whole bunch of workflows that happen across many departments and if we could make each of those more efficient then actually we're transforming the modern enterprise. Now that's an important set of problems that we could solve. Fast forward. ServiceNow obviously moved from a single product company to a true multi product platform where many of those products solve unique problems for different buyers in an enterprise. What that then allows you to do is have a discussion with the CEO about true transformation of the enterprise department by department. And So I think ServiceNow and I would put Salesforce in the same breath, probably Datadog as well. Figured out how to go from doing one thing amazingly well to doing 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 things amazingly well, all in a system. And maybe I get a little small part of how we did that and how we navigated that journey.

Fantastic. Moving on to leadership, Yesterday I commented on Jason Lemkin. I don't know Jason Lemkin. Saster. He made a post about corporate people, right. Like how corporates struggle in startups.

And.

And I went on a red because I've had some, what do you call it, scar tissue from this. And my comment on his post went somewhat viral in that lots of people commented on it and liked it. And my general theme is working with corporate people in startups, they lack the sense of urgency, it's always hire people to do the job versus roll up your sleeves. There's more social engineering, there's more compliance coma with like NDAs and endless policies. How do you view that? Like how do you advise people like when you come to a company, how do you maintain the velocity given all these dynamics at play in larger companies?

Yeah, it's funny, I'm not sure I agree with the premise that there's corporate people and startup people. Yeah, I think there's people have a sense of urgency and people that don't. Yes, that's a good one. A corporation could potentially harness or dampen that sense of urgency depending on its culture. And look at. So it's now that we're just talking about great sense of urgency across the entire community of 20,000 employees plus employees by this stage. So I'm not sure it's easy to as easy to wash the brush with that. But I would say certainly when I hire and look for people that fire in the belly, that sense of urgency that hey, if you're talking about it taking three weeks, why can't it take two weeks? If you're talking about taking 10 weeks, why can't it take take n weeks? So I met someone last week and they said, oh, I, I knew someone that used to work for you. I was like oh yeah, yeah, who's that? I said the person's name. I said, oh, what did they say about me? They said whenever they'd come with a timeline, I'd always try and halve it. It was my response back. And I was like, yeah, that sounds like me. And that notion of look, what could take four weeks? Let me see the two week version of it and oh, it's going to take me three days. Okay, great. But is there a different version that would take one day that we could see that would actually solve 80% of it. And so it's not about trying to do more in less time, it's actually about doing less in less time, but doing the right things in that less time. And so I think that where does that profound sense of urgency come from that we're in a battle that actually someone is out to steal your lunch and that actually there's, if we don't get it, someone else is going to get it. I don't know where that comes from, but I don't think it's to do with corporate, non corporate. I think it's something to do with all the pieces that go into your values as you're building up Your career and you're growing up. And yeah, some people have that and some people don't. And for me that's reasonably easy to, to see within half an hour with somebody if they've really got that fire and intensity and actually almost like a paranoia and slight panic, that life's not easy, that you have to really graft each inch by inch and that kind of energy.

I love what you said. Right. I think we label a lot corporate people versus startup people. I like that there's people with urgency and there's not. And maybe that is like a stability minded person versus a high agency minded person. And it's all about values. And oftentimes I think corporations, given the structure and the size, they need to have certain processes that slow things down. Now you said in a 30 minute to one hour conversation you can spot who has urgency or not. I want to understand what, how do you do that? That's magic. Firstly, I think 99% of the people can't do that. So that is a skill. We need to hear that.

Actually, funny enough, you and I were having some banter right at the beginning of this conversation before you turn the camera on and I thought if you don't mind sharing a little bit. We were talking about working out, we were talking about your life in Dubai and I could even sense your internal angst about everything that your achievement and what you needed to do next. And you've done this. It screams off the camera that you're not a satisfied person, that you have so much more to achieve, that you have not yet achieved your potential, that the sky's the limit and you're gonna keep on hustling until you get there. It just screams that took 30 seconds. I'm honest. I would say I think underdogs recognize other underdogs, maybe something like that.

And I think that's a good way you put it. I'm glad. I have deeply flattered because my wife doesn't want me at home because of how I drive everyone crazy. The other thing you said though is like urgency is not enough. Cutting the timeline is not enough. It's not about doing more things in less time. It's focusing on the right things. It's prioritization and its values around that. How do you guys prioritize? What is your framework for focus and prioritization?

I was smiling because at launchdarkly we have what we call our operating principles. And one of our operating principles, I think it's principle number two is get your 8020 rolling today. And it Sounds like a very small, easy to understand sentence, but it's actually packed with quite a lot of meaning. The first is 80, 20. Very obvious concept that is it possible that by doing 20% of the work that you could cover 80% of the outcome? Is there such a thing that's high enough leverage for you that actually would solve most of it? If so, what is that thing? And if that's the thing, why don't we get started with that thing, get that moving. Because then we know we've got the middle of the bellcraft taken care of. We can deal with the edges of the bell curve later. But if we could get the middle of the bell curve done in a really short amount of time, then we can learn, we can experiment, we can iterate, we can move around to the edges and fill out the bell curve of all the potential needs so that get your 8020 rolling is a constant assessment of yes, there are many things that one could do. In fact, there are many things that one could do today. But of all the things that I could do, is there something I could do today that's higher leverage than the others? I should probably do that. That kind of mindset with really every second of the day is what is the highest leverage thing that's going to have the biggest impact? And imagine you were presenting, I'll do a few different scenarios around this. Imagine you're presenting to a customer. You could present all 10 slides that you'd been busily preparing or you could hear the attunement to the things they care about most and just present the one slide that's actually going to solve 80% of the thing the person was asking for. Do that. So that's the kind of mindset and.

You save a lot of time, right? There's a lot of filler. And I think one of the cool things, I think Amazon did this. Twilio, Jeff Lawson also does this is shrink it down to one page.

Can you.

If you cannot communicate it in a few bullet points or maybe a scroll on a phone, if you have to send somebody a text message, what you. What would you convey? And if you can't, then everything else is filler.

So I like that the Mark Bain quote on this one. I would have written you a shorter letter if I'd only had the time.

I love that now. Scaling from early traction to a high growth company requires a mindset shift, right? What are some big mistakes executives make when transitioning from the scrappy execution to scalable operations? Let's call it pirates. The Navy. Like when you're a startup, you're sticking elbows, hooking fingers and then you got to transition to the Navy and maybe you missed a bunch of processes, maybe you don't have a bunch of systems at the same time. You want to maintain velocity.

Well, you know, I'll take your first cue on the question which is really around common pitfalls. One of the people I think is just an incredible business leader is Frank Slootman. Wonderful reputation. And people kept asking him why you were so successful in so many different environments, what was your playbook? And he would continually say he has no playbook. And I think that is the beauty of maybe the answer to this question, which is when you're transitioning from any one place to any other place, do not assume the patterns that you have seen will apply. How will you know what problems that you actually need to confront? There's only one way. It's by spending time with the customers of the new environment. So in the new environment the failure mode would be apply a bunch of patterns that worked at your old environment. Son's actually realizing what customers really need. And so I'd say failure mode number one in any transition is not getting the lay of land, not getting the zeitgeist, what the milliard, what the environment is, what is required, what the most urgent thing is, what the 8020 thing actually is. Because imagine you're bringing the wrong set of tools to the party. That would be the worst. So a bunch of processes, a bunch of things. But that's not the attunement to what's really going on, the real context. So I think, honestly I think Frank was onto something. I think it's actually an aversion to a playbook is what is going to be help you be most successful. And that aversion is let's confront the problems that we actually have right now, not the problems that we had in my last company three years ago is.

In common with Mike Tyson's famous quote, everyone has a plan until you're punched in the face, right? Move fast and iterate along the way. I think the process of planning is good, but the plan and the plan may be useless. But I think a lot of what you do in a hypergrowth company is dealing with ambiguity and being able to interact. So frameworks are more important than rigid plans. I love that. Now going back off the previous theme and these high growth companies there's tension typically, right? Big picture strategy versus getting things done fast. You talked about ruthless prioritization and focus and cutting the timeline but also cutting the prioritization list. Is there anything else that you do to manage this balance between big picture strategy and getting things done?

Yeah. You know, one of the things I like to say, and I'm, I'm sure I've borrowed this from somewhere else, is execution. Eat strategy for breakfast every time. And so this is kind of this rock, paper, scissors, like, oh, execution beat strategy. Why does execution beat strategy every time? It's only when you execute you can actually tell if the strategy would have worked or not anyway. And so a beautiful strategy on a PowerPoint slide is nothing. How one walks that through and actually starts executing that against and learn and iterate is everything. So less time strategizing, more time executing is the mix. And so again, let's imagine you have an annual planning process and it's a three week process. Is there a two day version of that that would get you close enough for you to now actually be able to execute and iterate and see if the strategy actually works and then you can optimize and improve it? So that's really the mindset, is allow yourself the time to execute the strategy in a plus way, then you'll know if the strategy worked as opposed to spend a long time doing strategy, never quite executing it to the right level. And you'll never know if this strategy actually was the right one. I think you can spend way too much time on strategy and never know if it was the right one, is my conclusion.

What does A plus execution look like for you? Like how do you measure A.

I think is where you come into the team and the people on the team, which is against our available resources, against our available skill set. Did we maximize our potential together as a team? If we did, then that is a plus execution. And so it's really about an understanding of the capabilities that we have, the capacity that we have. As an example, let's say you have a new project and you really only have four people that can go onto the project, then you can't have an expectation of it being 20 person project. It's a plus if those four people were able to achieve something amazing and heroic. For the fact that we had four people on it. That's a plus. So A plus I think is to do with maximum potential. And that maximum potential is a little bit beyond where you imagined that you could be. If you're all working together at your maximum possibility.

Fantastic. Moving to growth. Right. That's the bulk of your background has been product and GTM scaling from 10 million to 100 million ARR what are the most critical levers a company should focus on in going through those? And I think it's like you go from 10 to maybe 25 or 50, and then the next big milestone is a hundred. What are the most critical levers there?

I'm more familiar with the 100 million plus scaling challenges or opportunities. And typically what happens if you rip through to 100 million is that your core product has been so successful that you invite competition. You don't. The beautiful thing about a capitalist world is that we invite competition and we have a free market. And so if you are successful, other people will come after your lunch. By definition. That's how. That's this beautiful system that we live in. This is the invisible hand of the market at work. Nobody gets to have a infinite run forever. And the highest compliment that you can have is that you've invited a bunch of nimble competitors that want to take your lunch. That's the highest, literally. And so around the kind of hundred million mark, people have noticed what you're doing and they want to do what you're doing. They want a piece of it because you're. And you've been growing fast. You're important, you're obviously onto something. It's proven, there's proven spend there. So now you have to iterate and move once again. The thing that got you from 0 to 100, you have to reinvent yourself again for the 100 to 500, because now you're operating in a competitive context, or maybe you weren't. You were maybe a category creator before. So that's very typical. Which means, again, a renovation of the product mindset. Also, as you scale to past $100 million, a lot of the processes do start to creak. The way that we, Sheila and Bob and Mary solve the problem doesn't actually work so well. When you've got 40 people, you're trying to move instead of three. And so you tend to need a little bit more organization. Not in a way that slows you down, but actually speeds you up. You've found you've grown into a point where you can actually slow yourself down because of lack of process, lack of coordination, lack of collaboration. New muscles needed are called east, west. Across the organization, those are some typical things that start to creep in. Decision making starts to slow down. But we used to be so fast. Yeah, but now with 500, 600, 700 people, it's a little bit harder. We need to actually decide how we want to decide on things. The freeform way doesn't work. Anymore. Yeah, those are some of the things that jump to mind. Yeah.

In terms of customer, like we talk about massive customer orientation from your salesforce journey. Right. Doing the annual Dreamforce and manifesting your products towards that. How did you bring that lesson forward to your recent companies?

Yeah, I mean if I let's take launchdarkly and this would be a nice transition. When I started LaunchDarkly, I practiced what I preach. I decided to visit 100 customers in 100 days and ended up, I think doing 120 in 100 days actually. So I started on the road because I actually didn't want to pollute my mind with how we'd done things, why we were doing things the way we'd done. Didn't want to pollute my mind with how I'd done things in the past. Actually, the only thing I wanted to have clarity on was how are customers using our product today? What do they want us to do next? What are they loving? What do they wish they could have that they don't have today? Who exactly is using the product? How are they using it? Which stakeholders use so that you get extreme clarity. If you're kind of out on the road and there's no, I believe you have to press Flash and say hello to people and there's no substitute for it. So that's what we did. And that helped you help real. Create real clarity, organizational clarity on. We are a customer centric organization. And coming out of that at LaunchDarkly, we figured out that we really are a very important company. Why do I say the word important? We're important because, well, 25% of the Fortune 500 use us. We are essential to how they release software. And so if you think about that's a pretty big statement that says, wow, we are germane or essential to how software is being released across many of the biggest companies in the world. And you remember software is eating the world. And so if we are core part of all of these applications and these applications are growing like crazy necessarily, then we are a core part of the world's innovation. In fact, if you extend that a little bit further, LaunchDarkly is innovating to help innovators innovate. And so this is what we do. We're powering the innovation of the world by helping create the right conditions for releasing software. So what are the right conditions for releasing software? It turns out that last year in 2024 we saw some anti patterns of how software should be released. We saw a bunch of global software outages we saw application outages in lot core services that we use, we saw hang ups on things that we were relying upon, blue screens of death, et cetera. Why does that usually happen? That actually usually happens. Not because one of the hyperscalers is down, not because there's been a large cyber attack. It usually happens because the company themselves has pushed out a software change that has a bug in it. It's self induced. It's like shooting yourself in the foot. So all these companies are racing to innovate and push out applications, but many of them do not have the control in place to control that release. So this is what LaunchDarkly does. LaunchDarkly ensures that every release is a guarded release. We make sure that you progressively roll your software out. So instead of rolling the Software out to 100% of users and going, I hope this works in production, you roll it out to 1% of users and say, is this working with the 1% of our users? Are they having a great experience? I know, why don't we monitor and Observe at the 1% level how this release is actually going and if it's not meeting our requirements, if a threshold on performance has been breached, let's just roll it back for that 1% of users so that by the time the 100% of users get it, it's always perfect. Imagine you could systemically do that so that every release that you do as a company is a guarded release. It actually means the number one cause of application outage has been eradicated. So now you're very confident that you can push forward even more progressively with innovation because every app you're going to push out is going to be solid and stable and reliable. So this is the main discovery of LaunchDarkly. And we're a very important company for many banks, healthcare, fast growing innovative companies, AI companies, because they know they need to control their releases. I'll kind of just segue quickly to AI companies. As you know, more and more code is being generated, it's being generated by AI now. In fact, more and more applications have AI like capabilities, whether that's agentic or whether that's a generative AI capability. Those AI applications are pretty unique. In fact, they're also pretty gnarly. The gnarliness comes in because you're never quite sure what that experience is going to look like from one day to the next. It's non deterministic, it's probabilistic. So imagine you're trying to run a business, you're pushing a new application and you're not quite sure what the chatbot is going to answer. That's a pretty gnarly place to be in, which is why you sure as heck to control those AI application releases, because you're going to want to be able to roll those back. You're actually going to want to be able to configure prompts on the go. I saw an amazing chart this morning actually. It was about prompts and AI models and about how you get the most out of AI models. And because Claude's just had a new model today, ChatGPT had a new model last week. Each new model has a performance gain and it's incredible from the prior model. This is the performance gain. Oh, a new model, performance gain, new model. And by the way, you get about 30, 40% increase in the performance of the model over time with improving the prompts that you use as a user or that you use as a developer. So there's a model change which drives efficiency and then there's a prompt change on top of the model change which drives even more efficiency. And if you're a developer, you need to be able to change models and change prompts very quickly for your AI applications like monthly, weekly and launchdarkly helps you be the control gate for doing that so you can do it without creating crazy experiences for your end users. Quickly change, evaluate whether it worked, experiment, push forward with the new model. This is how applications are going to be built in the future. Most applications will have AI functionality, AI capability. So under the hood there's a huge movement, moving target of stuff in your core application. So you sure as heck need the ability to see whether you've breached some threshold and roll back very quickly.

Fantastic. I love it. What's interesting is you probably were exposed to AI agents specifically from your service nowadays, right? I think they were early to market helping enterprises launch these agents workflow wise. Where do you see the industry is going? I think the compute costs are going higher and higher. AI costs are going higher and higher. I think maybe AI plus tooling will become one in role replacement. So the human cost may go down, compute cost may go higher. I'm curious on your take because a lot of what everyone is bullish on is not that like software is eating the world, but like agentic AI more specifically is eating SaaS and service as software is driving the buzz more than software as a service.

I saw a really and I wish I would love to credit it if you can figure out how to give the right attribution on this that would be great. I saw a lovely quote on LinkedIn and someone was talking about the evolution of AI and they basically said, look, at first it was magical because we could say, what's the weather going to be tomorrow? And we could use some natural language interface and we'd figure out what the weather is going to be tomorrow with natural language processing gravy. Then as we got a little bit more advanced, we'd say, should I, should I wear a rain jacket tomorrow? Okay, now I really need to understand what time of day you're going out, this kind of stuff. And actually we're going to use a bit of Gen AI on this kind of question. Do people normally wear rain jackets when it's misty doing. But then the next step is, hey, I'm going to go on a vacation for two weeks and based on what I usually pack and the weather conditions, what should I pack for my trip? Now we're having to look across many different contextual databases about you. Let's have a look at your calendar. Let's also have a look at what people do in this thing. Let's have a look at the weather. Let's have a look at what you've worn in the past, given that was the weather. And this beautiful progression that we see is so logical. And ultimately, for this agentic AI to be successful, we're going to have to cut across all these silos of data that we have. Data stores as individuals, data stores as companies. And I think the companies that can do that the best will win in this agentic AI world. It's all going to be great for LaunchDarkly, because LaunchDarkly is going to ensure that however your applications are built, whether they're just simple natural NLP processing, whether they are generative AI, whether they're agentic, we're going to make sure that as you deliver that new application, you can control how you release that. You can experiment with different variations of it, different configurations, different prompts very easily in production. In some sense, we're a platform for AI developers. So we're at the right, the right part of this kind of huge, I think, transition that's happening in industry. But yeah, those are the thoughts. What do you think of that weather analogy?

Yeah, yeah, I love it. What's really interesting is this all ties to how we started the conversation on velocity is the currency for high growth. This industry is moving forward faster than ever before.

Right.

And I've been in the space for a very long time and you've gone from like, LLMs to small language models, to AI agents, to now large action models. And it's just progressing in the models and models. Models are getting cheaper and cheaper. Reasoning is getting better. How do you balance rapid innovation while maintaining software reliability in this fast moving pace here, Right? Like in this fast moving space. Because earlier you said shrink the timeline, reduce the priorities and focus on the things that matter. And in a space that's moving really fast, you might lose the boat sometimes.

And this is honestly, this is really why LaunchDarkly is going to be so successful. Because LaunchDarkly says, yes, turn up the volume and innovation, you should feel confident in turn up the volume of innovation. Why? Because we've got your back. We've got you back because we know you're going to roll those services out in a progressive way. You're not going to roll out your new AI agentic experience to 100% of your users. Please don't roll it out to 100 users first. And when you roll it out to 100 users, what are you going to look for? Are you going to look for deficiency of your outcome? Are you going to look for were they able to get done the tasks that they wanted to get done? Are you going to look for user reviews? You can look on social pull in social thing, you're going to look at those before you progress to the next step. If you do that in a systemic way, and by the way, you can progress through those steps in seconds or minutes, doesn't actually need to be days or weeks, then you're confident that by the time your general population is using your product, you've actually done things the right way. You've really suffered in the right way. So this is the promise of launch starkly. It's move fast and don't break things.

You know, there was a time where you could move fast and break things. I think we're heading in an era, at least for some industries, there is a right and wrong answer. Right? When AI touches it, that's legal, that's healthcare, that's finance. Like that matters. If you do my taxes wrong, then that's a problem. My previous company was in the already tax credit space. We had automated billions in already tax credits. It doesn't matter if AI is running it. If the customer gets audited, it is a big problem. We're losing that customer if that doesn't work out. So I think this is key here. You can move fast and not break things. I love it. Now, breaking things though is inevitable, right? Like companies face failed product launches Marketing flops all kinds of things. How do you coach teams to fail fast and recover effectively?

This is going a little bit back to why execution beats strategy. Because it's in executing that you will see the flaws of your strategy. And so the reality is you have to encourage rapid iteration, rapid prototyping, put it out in the world to get the reactions to actually improve it. In that sense, it's not a failure, because if you're getting feedback, it's not a failure. And so I think the almost like the language needs to change along with this, which is we want things to get out into the world with real users so that we can improve them for those real users. If that's your mentality, then there is no such thing as failure. There's just how quickly can you learn from the feedback that you get it? Do you have the right feedback mechanisms in place to rapidly iterate and get closer to perfection? So that I think is almost like a change of vocabulary, of this monolithic idea of, it's ready, let's push it out. Oh, it's terrible. I think that's maybe an old mindset. The newer mindset is, look, we've got this thing here. Wouldn't it be great if we could push this out to 30 design partners? Oh, wow. Our design partners really much preferred this thing. They're not clicking here at all. They're not doing this at all. Okay, for the next 30 design partners, let's do this. So was it a failure that the 30 design partners wanted you to visualize the data in this other way? Was that a failure? Yeah, I guess by some definition. But it's not really a failure if actually the next 30 are going to have that perfect. And they love that. So I think there's maybe some new vocabulary needs to be invented around how one moves fast in this era that we're in.

I love your thinking. And it's very rare, especially at corporations, companies your size that are like in the billions in revenue. And one of it, the consistent theme has been urgency. And the other thing that is very consistent is growth mindset and rapid iterations. I think growth mindset is core here because if you're afraid to fail, then you won't iterate. And perfection is the enemy of done. And you'll fail many more times than you'll succeed. And the only way is to assume that it's not failure, it's learning, and you get better and better. I'm curious, in the companies you've worked at, specifically launchdarkly, how do you Structure these feedback loops between the customers and the in house teams. What does that look like? What is the cadence?

Again, this might feel like a bit of a plug, but. But the Beautiful thing about LaunchDalkery ourselves is because we can control those releases, we can actually control how many people get a new experience. So we're constantly creating cohorts to deliver new experiences to. And so that fictitious number I gave you of 2530 Design Partners is our mindset that most of the things that we do will go to a cohort of 30 or 40 users and that we can actually fork the code to those 40 users in a unique way. It's not just for our code, it's our mindset for how we do marketing too, which is let's do small batch testing of things so that we can actually get the formula for how we want to scale it. So I think it's some kind of notion of cohorts and then failures. Not in the vocabulary. Because if you're doing it to a small cohort and the co op know that you're doing that with them, that you're early and you want to get feedback and you want to improve it, then failure is just not there. Now, failure would be if you don't ask for that feedback, you don't have those small cohorts and you just say, surprise everyone. One million users. We have a brand new application experience and I have a wry smile at that. But unfortunately, in 2024, we saw that. We saw major consumer brands push out new application experiences to 100% of their users, and users hated it. And then, then the CEOs scrambling, CTO, scrambling. Why did we push this out, Leonard? Did all the knives come out at that point? Who did that? Why do we push that? Who's doing the testing? Oh, we've got the testing. I could show you the research paper that we did on this thing. I can show you the PowerPoint slides that we did on this thing. We thought customers would love this thing. That's obviously not how to do it.

Yeah, I love it. Feature flagging. Being able to test on a small batch of people, maybe your early evangelists, your innovators, goes a long way. And iterating fast is key. It's crucial. And I think if you bring that urgency mindset, the growth mindset and rapid iterations as a part of your culture and scale, that you can even have that at a billion in revenue or 10 billion in revenue. Right. You just need more leaders like Dan Rogers.

Thank you. Yeah, thank you very much for Your last comment, it goes back to what was said, though, which is you can't label it as corporate people, starter people. It's really. I think it's a mindset. It's a mindset of urgency. It's a mindset of experimentation, a mindset of iteration. And I do believe that is a critical success factor for the modern enterprise.

Awesome. As we close out, I want to ask you this question here. I'm fascinated, like, by your energy, right? I mean, like, iconic brand after iconic brand after iconic brand. And you keep going. You got a jawline like a supermodel. How do you stay this way?

Again, you and I played around with this before we turned the camera on. And I do think that that kind of chip on your shoulder, that mentality that you're not done, you've got to keep growing, that it's almost like this force that's within you is just within some people, and those people have it conceived in others. And I keep saying, I'm just getting started. And when anyone tries to give me a compliment, it kind of just flows straight off my back where I'm like, oh, no, you haven't seen nothing yet. This is just the beginning. This is day one. Wait till you see where we get to. And then when we get to the place, it's day one again. You've not seen it. We. We've got to keep going. So I just think might be the. Might be the reason that you. You said your wife kicked you out of the house for some of that same energy. That. That's the energy.

But you know what? It's hard, right, to keep that energy going. Hence my jawline comment is there is some regime behind you that keeps you going, because life in business is a marathon. It's not a sprint. Right. Like, the urgency and the growth mindset works. But if you're not taking care of yourself personally, then you mentally burn out. And you don't have a great jawline.

Yeah. No.

What does your regime look like?

I agree with you on this kind of wellness and mindfulness, which is. It is a. It's a marathon, not a sprint. And given that it's a marathon, you need to have your faculties about you for what's about to come. Given that you can need your faculties about you, then to be at peak performance, you are going to need to take care of yourself. And taking care of yourself includes the time with your family. It includes the time to look after your kind of diet and time to look after your fitness, because there's no point in Doing spike for one year. If your mindset is this thing's going for a hundred years. And so that's definitely my idea that leave a little bit in the tank because this thing's going, this thing's going long and yeah. Creating some discipline and routine around that and making sure that those times don't get knocked off your calendar and that you calendar your time. It's all about time at the end of the day, isn't it? Put as much intensity into calendar in your social time as you do to your work time. And maybe some ideas there.

Yeah. Being very deliberate. But I won't let you off the hook so easily. I want to know specifically what does your diet and training program look like? Maybe a few tips.

Yeah, I will say obviously cholesterol is real and it turns out a plant based diet is great for your cholesterol. And so I think more plants seems to work for a lot of folks. And certainly what I try and do, probably 15 years ago I couldn't have imagined how much salad I was going to be eating and. But now I have a largely plant based diet, honestly. And then from an exercise standpoint, if I'm not doing something every day, then it's not been a good day for me and I actually try and do it as a transition between work life and home life. So I try and dedicate. Work is finished. Now I do a stint hour, hour and a half. Now I'm at home life. And so that little transition zone is very helpful for me mentally and physically because I know basically when I finish for the day I'm going to go and sweat, work up a sweat either playing sport, going to the gym and then I can transition into husband, father and all of the above.

I love it. You play a lot of tennis. I think there's some science behind racket sports because it improves your conditioning of your legs and thereby longevity.

The other reason I do it is back to what I was saying is because it occupies my mind and that you actually can't play tennis very well unless you're thinking just about the court and the ball. You're. You get. It's very punishing in that sense. And so it's the perfect transition for me from work where I literally can't be thinking about work and hit a ball successfully. So you know, that's kind of one of the. One of the. Maybe there's a little mentality same about the yoga as well. It's pretty hard to do your yoga positions if you're thinking about something else. You're just not committed to it. So it forces a commitment to presence and then I think that carries forward to in the evenings.

Definitely. We're huge tennis fans here. I don't play but my wife does. My nephew, he's 12 or 13 and he's one of the best in the country and we get him in camp at Stanford. So maybe one day we'll hit you up to play tennis with you.

That sounds great.

As we close out, any parting words of wisdom? Anything that you wanted to share that you you didn't?

I've really enjoyed the discussion as we talked about. I believe in this time of transition, this time of huge renovation in the technology space around AI that launched arcly super well placed to help companies. So I hope some of your listeners thinking about that, listeners that want to have huge pace of innovation but want to control risk. I'd say think about launchdarkly have a look at what we're doing because I'm pretty sure we can be helpful for you.

Awesome Dan, wishing you great success. I think people like you can write many books, but you don't have the time and you're constantly executing. So you leave it to knowledge that you impart in podcasts and other folks to write about it. Thank you so much for spending the time. I've taken a bunch of notes I rarely do, but this was very informative for me. Thank you Dan and stay in touch.

Really enjoyed it. Yeah, definitely same this episode is brought.

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Thinking it was brilliant. Now I know that it's no way for you to build a unicorn. You need distribution to get growth.