Edith Harbaugh (LaunchDarkly) - Software is Hard Work

Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders (ETL)

Stanford eCorner

Journey, Startups, Education, Stanford, Culture, Strategy, Stanford University, Entrepreneurship, Business, Life Lessons, Thought Leadership, Creativity, Etl, Challenges, Leadership, Innovation, Founders

4.4 • 739 Ratings

🗓️ 30 October 2019

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

LaunchDarkly now helps over 1,000 customers — including major companies like Atlassian and BMW — release code, monitor and manage features, and make data-driven decisions about software functionality. But growth didn’t come overnight, explains CEO and co-founder Edith Harbaugh. She describes the multi-year slog of scaling up a B2B company, and demonstrates how she made the most of a number of less-than-ideal jobs, building a diverse toolkit of skills that ultimately contributed to her success as a founder and CEO. She urges entrepreneurs to draw encouragement from small wins, especially in the early stages, when customers are few and far between.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Who you are defines how you build.
0:05.0	This is the Entrepreneurals Thought Leaders series.
0:09.0	Brought to you by Stanford E-Corner.
0:13.0	On this episode, we're joined by Edith Harbaugh, CEO of Launch Darkly,
0:19.0	a platform that helps software teams make data-driven decisions about software
0:23.6	functionality. In March 2018, Edith led the company on a $44 million Series C funding round.
0:31.6	Here's Edith.
0:32.6	Hey, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me. I am Edith Harba. I am CEO and co-founder of LaunchDarkly.
0:40.3	We are a feature management platform and we actually have a thousand customers now. Stuff moves rapidly.
0:47.0	And we have names, even if you haven't heard of LaunchDarkly, I hope you will have heard of Atlassian, Intuit, and BMW, who are some of our customers worldwide.
0:57.0	We're a new category. What we say is that software powers the world. We power all teams
1:04.4	to deliver and control their software. One of the things I'm most proud of as an engineer
1:10.5	is that I get to visit customers all over the world
1:13.6	and I go and talk to their software developers and they talk about how Launch Darkly has made their life better.
1:20.6	Like made a material difference in their happiness.
1:23.6	They say with Launch Sharkley that they have less stressful releases.
1:28.3	We save their weekend because when something broke, they could just turn it off instead of having to scramble and do a half fix.
1:37.3	And they say that they can get the right feature to the right person at the right time.
1:41.3	This is an engineer, it's pretty much all you want to feel
1:46.3	like you built something great and that people appreciate it and love it. The other thing I get
1:51.6	more and more proud about as time goes about is every time we hire new hires, we have, I call it,
1:58.0	culture and values, which is if you're a new hire, you spend an hour with me.
	...

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