 Hey everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's continuous live coverage of AWS re-invent 2021. Lisa Martin here with David Nicholson. We have two live sets going on. We've got two remote sets, over 100 guests working with AWS and its massive ecosystem of partners. Really digging into the next decade of cloud innovation. We're pleased to welcome back one of our CUBE alumni, Edith Harbaugh, the CEO and co-founder of LaunchDarkly. We're going to be talking about a blueprint for continuous modernization. Edith, it's great to have you. Thanks for coming. Thanks for having me. So I was doing some research. You guys raised 200 million in Series D in August, just a few months ago. That new funding tripled your valuation to three billion, up more than three X from the previous funding run. So rocket ship, yeah. I also noticed you guys are on the Forbes Cloud 100. Second year on the list, you jumped dramatically from 120 to 47 this year. Talk to us about all the innovation and acceleration that's going on at LaunchDarkly. It's great to be here. I'm the CEO and co-founder and we started seven years ago in 2014. And what we were doing back then was a really new field. Like I actually came up with the name feature management just to describe what we were doing. And it was this idea that you could release features to different people at different times, which sounds really simple, but it really allows you to have valves to different populations. That you can then turn something on, turn something off, run a beta, do personalization, and then if something is going wrong out of the field, quickly and easily turn it off. So as an engineer, as a long-standing engineer, what were the things that really frustrated you that you thought, this is missing, we've got to focus on this? Oh my gosh, so I was an engineering manager. I actually do a podcast called To Be Continuous. Just about all the bad things I saw happen. The worst thing you could do is build something that nobody wants, which is really frustrating. So I think a lot of continuous delivery came out of the urge to just get stuff out quicker. The flip side of that is that if you move too fast, a release can be catastrophic. We used to call them the push and pray release because you push stuff out and then you're just crossing your fingers that nothing breaks, because if something breaks, it's extremely stressful. Your mind starts flooding with endorphins and hormones. Your heart rate increases and you sometimes make even worse decisions. So what launch sharkling and feature management allow you to do is push it out to who you want and if something is going wrong, you can turn it off without a redeploy. If things are going right, you can continue to push it out. And when you say feature management, you're talking about a level of granularity that is finer than a release version. How do you do that? Our customers do it. So we provide a platform where our customers, and we have 2,500 worldwide, everything from IBM and Atlassian down to like three person startups, they decide how to encapsulate a feature. So they could push it to who they want. So there's a lot of really neat use cases. So knowing that you're providing them with the valves, then they can think differently about how they're actually developing in anticipation of delivering encapsulated features as opposed to here's your new release. Exactly, exactly. So we have some customers who've used launch sharkly to actually move to the cloud. So like TrueCar was running their own data centers, and they wanted a way to start moving all of that data center traffic into AWS. So they could use launch sharkly to manage that traffic flow and do it in a controlled way instead of just one quick switch. I was looking at that case study of TrueCar. They migrated 500 websites to AWS without downtime and deploying 20X per day, which is up from one X a week. That's a massive change. Yeah, I think really what we give our customers is confidence that if you know that you can always have control over stuff with feature management, you actually move much quicker. You can move 20 times a day. If you know that if something goes wrong, you can always turn it off. You have much more confidence. Where are you having customer conversations? I know you coined the term feature management. I'd love to know a bit more contextually about the evolution from feature flags to feature management. And where are those customer conversations happening? Are they kind of down in the technical weeds? Are they more at higher level, given the fact that we're in such a state of flux with COVID? Yeah, so we didn't invent feature flagging. Like the smart companies like Amazon, Facebook, Netflix have been doing feature flagging for decades now. It was always a secret sauce of this is how they could manage their own functionality. What LaunchDarkly did was kind of changed it to feature management about doing it where any other customer also had the same set of tools and platforms. And also on top of that, things like a workflow, scheduling, integrations. So that for example, a developer could develop something and then give the keys to the product manager. Say product manager, you get to run the beta now. The putting more control back in the hands of the folks that really are touching and feeling and smelling the product. Yeah, or customer support, if something is going wrong in the field, instead of having to wait for an engineer to fix a bug, customer support can just turn it off. So I'm curious about, when we talk about, it's this sort of dovetails with something that was discussed in the keynote today. Out of the gate, Adam comes out and is talking about microprocessor technology. Now in the era of cloud, generally people would say, that stuff doesn't matter, right? It's all about the feeling of being in the cloud and the field of wheat blowing in the wind and it's a feeling that you get. It's really interesting what you're doing under the covers, but who is the audience, who buys this? Because I can imagine some in the engineering, on the engineering side of things, feeling like maybe they're giving up some control, but really you're giving them more tools. But is it business people who are demanding this? How do you go to market? Yeah, so it's really interesting because our core audience is developers and VP of engineering. Like they love the platform. Like our net promoter score is extremely high. Engineers say like, this gave me my weekends back because if a bug happens, I don't have to come in. Okay, so they get it. They get it. This isn't being pushed down from executives that don't understand the technology. No, I mean, a typical thing as a developer is like, I need this to do my job. And then the business people say, well, if the developers are happy, we're happy. You know, it's a developer's world now. You know, they're hard to hire, you have to have them. And if you have anything that will make their job easier and them happier, why wouldn't you buy it? That's a big facilitator. So you mentioned the high NPS, high net promoter score. We talk with Amazon folks about their focus on the customer and their customer obsession, if you will, that everything starts backwards. We start from the customer. 2,500 customers in such a short time period. We talked about the funding. I imagine culturally there's similarities there. If one of the things that you're able to confidently give your customers is that confidence and launch darkly. Yeah, you know, one of the happiest parts of my job is visiting customers. You know, I am, my co-founder and I personally visited, I think the first 10 or 20 customers. And if they had a bug, if they wanted something, we built it. And I love going on customer sites. Cause they- When they're telling you that you gave them their weekend back. Yeah. That's not an insignificant thing when you think about what people do with their weekends. You know, it feels really good to have customers say like this literally has changed the way they built software for the better. I can't imagine this, you know, with everything that's happened in the last 22 months with the acceleration to cloud, but all these massive pivots by businesses in every industry, just to survive in the beginning with an advantage, something like launch darkly is for those organizations who have to move really, really quickly and keep changing direction to kind of figure out how do we stay afloat? And now how do we thrive in that? That this has probably been a real lifesaver for a lot of organizations. Yeah, I mean, we've seen like a 10 year roadmap that our customers compressed into a month. Like we had a retail chain in the Midwest that was thinking about doing in-store pickup. And then when COVID hit, they're like, okay, this changed from a maybe to a, we need to have this to stay afloat. And now they can help people pick up, same with restaurants, having a mobile app to do delivery or pickup. It used to be maybe we'll get to that next year. Now it's something that you have to have. Oh yeah, because if you're going to go get coffee in one place has a mile long line and their place hasn't had, which one are you going to pick? So what do people do that don't have this capability? I mean, this might sound like a completely naive question. I know a lot about a lot of things. So I'm okay looking dumb sometimes. That's how I learn. But seriously, if you don't have these valves, then aren't you doomed to releases that are going to be panic inducing? It's really painful. Like, I mean, that's the way I used to release. You know, I remember it like you released and you would have tried to have caught all the bugs, but it would go out and if something happened, you had to fix it on the fly. And even if you have a really good deployment process, that's 20 minutes, maybe two hours. Sure. Which if you're a mobile app, it could be a business killer. Yeah. Well, we're here at AWS re-invent. I mean, how does this dovetail with the AWS mission to migrate and modernize into the cloud native world? We're talking about cloud native development and operations that you're involved with. So there's obviously a synergy there, but why specifically AWS? Oh, I mean, I think one of the biggest tailwinds we've had as a business is if you're releasing twice a year, you don't really need a tool like this or a platform like this. Your business process is completely different, but you're going to die as a company because you can't survive on two releases a year. If you're moving to the cloud, we help you get there. And once you're in the cloud, if you want to move at the speed of business, but safely, we give you that platform. Like, so I think continuous delivery got this bad rap because people thought that meant that you push out stuff every second and break everything. Right. What we do is we allow you to innovate as fast as you want, but release in a controlled way. I got to ask you a question. You talked about the customers and your love of being with customers. One of the things I can't help thinking is that what you're helping facilitate is brand reputation. If we have an expectation we want to go on an app and order coffee and it's down, we're going to go to the next competitor. So from a brand reputation perspective, I'm just wondering if any of your customer conversations kind of go in addition to the VP of engineering and focus on the folks that are leading these companies going, our reputation is on the line. People are, let's face it, during COVID, far less patients than we've seen a lot of really impatient people, but is that something that you also facilitate as the brand reputation? Oh, not just a brand reputation, that an outage can be costly of millions of dollars. Like $5,600 a minute I think is what you're underestimates. Yeah, but depending on what business you're in, like if you're at a bank, you absolutely need to be reliable. If you're a streaming service, like streaming one of the biggest horse races in Australia, you need to have uptime. Everybody needs uptime. Let's just be clear. If I can't get DoorDash or whatever, it's a disaster. From my perspective as a consumer, and yes, we have far less patients than we've ever had. Yeah, I mean, we have a really interesting, we have both B2C, it's like streaming apps, delivery apps, as well as B2B, and they both have problems that we solve, but honestly, the business problems with a B2B are much more challenging sometimes. Well, Ida, thank you so much for joining David and me on the program talking about LaunchDarkly, what you're enabling organizations to achieve in every industry. It sounds like you're riding a rocket ship. It's been really fun. You know, I love seeing a customer that's been using us for three, five years. Wow. And how much their life has gotten better. And as you said, that's no small statement. Thank you so much for joining us on the program. We appreciate your insights and look forward to hearing more news from LaunchDarkly coming out. Thanks. All right, for David Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of AWS Reinvent 2021, theCUBE, the global leader in live tech coverage.