Behind the Scenes of our Investment in LaunchDarkly
DevOps was not created solely on the idea that developers and operations should play nice together. DevOps is the cultural transformation organizations go through on the road to modern application delivery. The end goal is the ability to release high-quality software more frequently. The new DevOps teams enhance collaborations between development, operations, and quality assurance teams to facilitate continuous integration, testing, and delivery of software.
At Velocity 2009, Flickr engineers John Allspaw and Paul Hammond presented a talk about how they deployed 10+ times per day. There was nearly a revolt at Yahoo! (Flickr’s parent at the time, today Flickr is part of SmugMug) over the idea that small, frequent changes could be deployed without impacting site reliability and customer experience. Today Etsy deploys to its production servers 50 times a day with fewer disruptions than when the company used a waterfall approach. A familiar name, John Allspaw, drove this behavioral and technical shift at the company.
The authors, John Allspaw and Paul Hammond, highlighted the importance of feature flags in web environments — unlike desktop software where the client chooses which version to launch — on the web, every user must use the same version of code.
Or do they?
Feature flags exist to power continuous delivery at any scale. Using feature flags in outcome driven development, developers can develop at the speed of ideation, ops can continuously deliver code safely, and business/application owners can independently experiment and get valuable feedback.
Feature management enables developers to ship more frequently and with higher confidence. Some of the virtues of a robust feature management service are:
- Code can be deployed at will and activated later aka “dark launching”
- Users can be organized into private betas aka “canary testing”
- Product owners can A/B or multivariate test new features
- Developers & operations teams have a built-in kill switch to disable erroneous code
I first experienced the power of feature flags when I joined Facebook’s infrastructure team in 2007. Early on, Facebook built a sophisticated system called GateKeeper that empowered developers to control who would see and interact with features, automatically control their availability and even turn them off should negative conditions occur. Beyond the day-to-day launches, the first large-scale trial of GateKeeper was during President Obama’s Inauguration Livestream with CNN, which went seamlessly thanks to weeks of “dark testing,” and again in 2009 when Facebook launched Usernames.
I first met Edith Harbaugh, founder/CEO of LaunchDarkly, at the Lobby Conference in 2016. She was passionate and working on a problem I knew all-too-well, feature flags. At Vertex US, we like to partner with people that experienced a problem first hand and got so frustrated they had to tackle it head-on. Months later and aided by a mutual friend and collaborator, I finally got in front of Edith and her cofounder, John Kodumal, to pitch myself as a mentor given my background scaling Facebook from 30 million to nearly 1 billion users. Unfortunately we didn’t win the right to invest in LaunchDarkly’s hotly contested Series A. Rather than giving up, I stayed in touch with Edith, John and their investors, introducing customers and recruits. Over the ensuing year I learned just how driven, fun and infectious they are as leaders.
When Edith invited me to invest and partner with the team a year later, I jumped at the opportunity. LaunchDarkly had grown from serving a few “cool kids” of the Internet to being the DevOps glue for major corporations and government organizations; growing from 26 to 270 customers and an equivalent leap in ARR in roughly 15 months. Better still, customer and reference calls were effusive about how LaunchDarkly enabled organizations to ship code with higher confidence and how Edith & her team are creating a new market category. Vertex US co-led the company’s Series B with Redpoint in 2017.
DevOps tools enable enterprises to automate software development and testing lifecycle by standardizing and automating the movement and deployment of code across different environments. Multiple research firms expect demand for DevOps tools to exceed $12B by 2025, Forester pegs the adoption of CI/CD tools in excess of $2B today, with 20% CAGR. This is an important correlation as we believe CI/CD to be a much smaller market than what LaunchDarkly is leading: a platform that brings agility to engineering, product management and growth teams as every business becomes a digital business.
We are excited to deepen our investment in LaunchDarkly as part of the $44 million Series C led by Bessemer that was just announced.
Today marks about 3 years since I first met Edith. She has developed into a vibrant, exceptionally operationally driven CEO, and has hired a team comprised of diverse abilities who share a big vision for a big market. As of December 2018, LaunchDarkly served more than 200 billion feature flags per day for over 700 customers including Atlassian, BMW, HashiCorp, IBM, NBC and RyanAir. At Facebook we had a mantra of “Move Fast and Break Things,” that evolved to “Move Fast with Stable Infra.” This is exactly the cultural shift Edith Harbaugh, John Kodumal, and Team LaunchDarkly are bringing to modern enterprises by democratizing the software development process.
