Opinion
Harbaugh: Active founders managing venture funds is weird
“I think it's weird, to be honest. Like, I have a full-time job. Like, I'm CEO and founder of LaunchDarkly. That's a full-time job.”
Insight
Harbaugh: Raising solely from operators increases follow-on financing and pro rata risks
“I think the risk with that is that the pro rata and a lot of risks and subsequent rounds just gets bigger and bigger and bigger.”
Insight
Harbaugh: Informal 'no-deck' VC chats are evaluated as high-stakes pitches
“And they said, you know, come in, you don't have to have a deck, just come in and talk to the partners. And I was like, okay, sure. And this was a huge mistake. I went into this, what turned out to be a partner meeting, and I was completely unprepared. I had l…”
Disclosure
Harbaugh: LaunchDarkly's 'work is not life' value was weaponized against deadlines
“What happened with this work is not life value was that people started weaponizing it of, we don't have deadlines. I don't owe my other teams anything. Or, I don't really have to work very hard at all.”
Opinion
Harbaugh: Taking VC funding does not inevitably ruin company culture
“I think it's a false dichotomy though to say that if you take VC money, you're going to have a terrible culture.”
Insight
Harbaugh: Do not hire sales leaders on pedigree without customer persona fit
“The mistake I made was a little bit, I think, just being blinded by this guy with a great pedigree, without really digging into whether he really cared about our customers.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Harbaugh: VCs track startup turnover by analyzing LinkedIn departures
“So what VCs do is they'll have some poor associate look at your LinkedIn and look at people who have titles for companies who are going in and out.”
Insight
Harbaugh: Unmonitored startup culture quickly runs away from founders
“If you don't pay attention to culture, culture will run away from you.”
Insight
Harbaugh: $1M ARR hires build systems while $50M ARR hires operate them
“Every single one of these phases of one, five, 10, 20, and fifty million, you're probably going to be hiring completely different people. The people you're hiring at one million are the people that want to build the machine. The people you're going to hire at …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Harbaugh: LaunchDarkly had no full-time finance hire until Series B
“We did not have a full-time finance person until our B round. So up until our B round, I was still running all the models and the spreadsheets.”
Insight
Harbaugh: Enterprise software must price high because procurement expects 10% discounts
“If you're in an enterprise sales cycle, people expect you to ask for money. People are paying for a premium service. They're paying for a premium ELA. They expect it to be higher. Ah, and the insidious thing is that they also expect it to go to procurement and…”
Insight
Harbaugh: Low initial SaaS pricing anchors customers for life against upgrading
“What happens if you have a customer that is paying you 29, 79 dollars a month, is that you have anchored them for life, that this is a product that is worth 79 dollars a month. So, no matter how much you have other customers who are now paying a lot more and g…”
Insight
Harbaugh: 500+ person companies need outside consultants to refresh company values
“When you're eight people, you can do a survey of your company very quickly. Ah, when you're 500 plus worldwide, you actually want a consultant who can come in and interview people, run focus groups, and get real input.”
Insight
Harbaugh: Early startups should hire number-twos before they become the perfect person
“So what you can do is you can look for somebody who's maybe the number two at a role or an adjacent industry. The adjacent industry doesn't always work out. But you could get kind of somebody who's just that one step below. But it is hard because people have t…”
Disclosure
Harbaugh: LaunchDarkly required engineers to write an article every sprint
“Our engineers, at one point, we assigned them an article in every sprint, Ah, it was literally like, you know, part of your sprint is not just checking in code, but also writing about it. And one of those articles about data database migration is still a reall…”
Insight
Harbaugh: High ACV SaaS cannot rely purely on product-led growth
“The belief that SaaS is cheap and cheerful and something that's 29 dollars a credit card is being challenged, that now, like, SaaS can go for hundreds of thousands of dollars. And at that point, a CFO does want to get involved, and that's not something that co…”
Insight
Harbaugh: Meet one VC monthly to avoid cold fundraising starts
“To build the actual relationship, I do really like it sounds stereotypical, but like a coffee or a lunch, and just slotting that into your schedule every month. So that way you can be 12 different VCs in a year. And so that when it is time to actually run a fu…”
Assertion Supported
LaunchDarkly has scaled to over $100M ARR since its 2014 founding
“Ah, so the company started in 2014 and is now over a hundred million in ARR.”
Disclosure
Harbaugh: Early LaunchDarkly customers completely rejected self-serve credit card signups
“Our first attempt at pricing was we tried to go cheap and cheerful. We had a click through where you could go and sign up with a credit card. Easy peasy. Don't need salespeople. What happened for us is that absolutely nobody wanted to use our click through agr…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Harbaugh: Early Head-to-Head Sales Cycles Against Optimizely Totally Flopped
“Whenever we started trying to compete head to head with Optimizely, it just totally flopped. They had a nice WYSIWYG interface, and they sold to marketers. We sold to developers. But if we got in a sales cycle against them, it just completely disintegrated.”
Disclosure
Harbaugh: LaunchDarkly raised $200M Series D at $3B valuation
“Yeah, so we announced our Series D of two hundred million at a three billion valuation, which is pretty fun to say, by the way.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
LaunchDarkly took two years to grow from $0 to $1M ARR
“So, 2014 to 20 16 was this very slow grind from zero to a million in ARR.”
Insight
Harbaugh: Constantly repeating company values reveals what is clunky and failing
“So, when you repeat your values over and over and over again, you learn what's clunky, what, what's not working.”
