Long before she started LaunchDarkly, Edith Harbaugh was experiencing firsthand the challenge of building and delivering software. The self-described “product person with an engineering background” had worked at several tech companies in a variety of roles, and found it frustrating that no matter how hard she and others tried to get new products into customers’ hands, they didn’t always use them. Getting the right features to customers—and quickly—led to the founding of LaunchDarkly, a “feature management platform” (code for software used by tech companies to manage their feature development and deployment cycles). Harbaugh, the founding CEO, recently stepped down to assume an executive chair role. But her mission remains the same: to help customers build better software.
What was your “aha moment” for founding LaunchDarkly?
I cofounded LaunchDarkly to address problems I’d had in engineering and product management at TripIt, Concur, and Vignette—challenges with migration, rollouts to different users, experimentation to see business value, and long-term segmentation. I thought providing a feature-management platform could help others who build software have more stable, reliable, and innovative features themselves.
What’s been your biggest challenge?
[We have] more than 4,000 global customers like Intuit, IBM, and Atlassian. I think we should have 40,000-plus. Our big challenge is continuing to show folks that there’s a better way to build and run software.
What is one fun fact about you that people may not know?
Googleable: I have multiple patents in deployment patterns, I’ve biked across the United States, and I’ve run multiple races at distances from 5K to 100 miles. Ungoogleable: I know how to tap
dance, including the Time Step.
The Fortune Founders Forum is a community of entrepreneurs chosen by Fortune’s editorial team to participate at the annual Brainstorm Tech conference, which took place in Deer Valley, Utah, in July. Our inaugural cohort was selected based on a variety of factors, including the potential impact of their companies, and reflected a diversity of geographies, sectors, and demographics.
