'Work is not life': Tech entrepreneur works to improve code — including her own

Edith Harbaugh, Executive chair and co-founder, LaunchDarkly

Some founders feel a need to maintain control of their companies for decades. Edith Harbaugh decided to pass the baton after nine years.

She co-founded LaunchDarkly with John Kodumal in 2014 to help software developers build applications more quickly, more transparently and with fewer bugs.

They met as students at Harvey Mudd College in Southern California, and Kodumal was LaunchDarkly’s founding chief technology officer. Harbaugh transitioned to executive chair last year and was succeeded as chief executive by Dan Rogers.

The problems they observed in software development over a decade ago have only accelerated, especially with the rise of artificial intelligence. Faster development cycles may create more opportunities, but it also creates more potential for bugs..

Why did you name the company LaunchDarkly? I had used a platform at TripIt for feature flagging. We had an internal platform where you could roll out launch features, push them to different users, measure their impact. John had something similar at Atlassian. We wanted to bring that to the market. We thought “feature flags” sounded a little too trivial. So, trying to think of a name that described what we’re doing and also could SEO well, we came up with LaunchDarkly.

What were some of the biggest challenges in the early days? The idea seemed very obvious, that this was just a better way to build software. But when we went out to market with the early product, we discovered that people thought it might be too risky or too hard. So we had to do category creation in terms of telling people this was a safe, easy, riskless way to release software. And we renamed the category from feature flagging to feature management.

LaunchDarkly now surpasses $100 million in annual recurring revenue. What have been its strengths? Our customers. One of my big joys as founder is I get to see somebody who’s used LaunchDarkly at one company and then maybe they move on to another company and we call them double or three-peat or four-peat. People moving up in their career and using LaunchDarkly.

How has software development evolved over the past decade? There’s been a huge shift towards the cloud and more agility. We’ve always been based in the cloud and it used to be more of an issue with customers. They would want to install it on premises. Now everybody is on some cloud. The other thing is agility and velocity. 10 years ago, I would ask customers, how often do you release? And how often do you want to release? I would get answers like twice a year. Now, just the constant demand of their own customers has made almost all of our customers shift to releasing multiple times a month. Vodafone, which is a customer, now releases over 300 times a month.

Are you worried that Generative AI tools will replace software engineering jobs? There will always be a need for software engineers. There’s always a need for somebody to figure out what the right thing is to do and how to do it. With a lot of these generative AI tools, I see it as helping people move up the stack in terms of the things that they could produce that they can do less low-level, basic rote work and concentrate on delivering value.

You stepped back from the C-suite last year. Why did you decide it was the right time? We hit $100 million in annual run rate and we were about nine years in. I realized that it was time to think about the next decade. It was a good point to hand off to somebody else to take us to $500 million revenue, and from thousands of customers to tens of thousands of customers.

How would others describe your leadership style? I’m laughing because I’ve been described asvery kind and very driven. We were one of the fastest growing companies to get to $100 million in under seven years. And I am relentless about results. In the early days, when we were tryingto go to market, it was very difficult. Every month, I wanted to get another customer. My co-founder and I would go to folks’ offices and watch them install the software. We’d go back and make sure that they were using the software, and then we’d go back again to make sure that they were really using it.

With that, also a culture where we really wanted people to feel empowered, involved. Our first two engineers are still at the company, and they have stayed so long because they felt like it was a place where they could have a family, where they could contribute, where it was a sustainable place to work.

You’ve previously said “work is not life” — what do you mean by that, and do you still hold that principle? We first came out with our official values after our Series A in 2016. We thought about moving from eight people to 30 people and decided to write down our values because we didn’t want people to assume what they were. One of our values that came out of that was “work is not life.”  

What I was trying to say was, it’s OK if you want to have another kid. It’s OK if you have a third kid. It’s OK if you want to tutor kids in coding. It’s not only OK but encouraged to have more than just work in your life. At the time, I was doing a lot of (bike) races — 100-mile races.

People started misapplying it as: “I don’t have to work.” I was like “oh no, no, no, no”. You do have to work. You do have deadlines. We do have responsibilities to our customers. We do have responsibilities to other people on our team. So we actually changed the value to “work impactfully, work sustainably,” which I thought better encapsulated what we were trying to get from that.

What are your thoughts on six-day workweeks, work-life balance and grinding, particularly within startup culture and tech culture? It’s something I’ve thought a lot about. It’s really about results. If you’re checking the code, you’re making the user interface more useful, you’re engaging with the customers. It’s not really about the hours. There is some minimum that you need to be doing, but we try to be results oriented.

Some founders feel a need to maintain control of their companies for decades. Edith Harbaugh decided to pass the baton after nine years.

About Harbaugh

About LaunchDarkly