🧩 Issue #82: Finding Product-Market Fit
Edith Harbaugh shares LaunchDarkly's product-market fit story, how they overcame rejections in the early stages of the company, and her best advice for growing entrepreneurs.
💬 Welcome to issue #82 of Between the Lines
Good morning & happy Thursday. The ageless problem of product-market fit (PMF) continuously challenges startups, and most research suggests that a lack of PMF is a leading cause of a startup’s failure.
This week, tech entrepreneur and Claremont grad Edith Harbaugh (HMC) talks more about how to find PMF and avoid common pitfalls when scaling up your business...it’s a Claremont world out there. 👇
~ Josh & Miles & Pat
📢 👥 Community Voices: How LaunchDarkly Found Product-Market Fit
Author: Edith Harbaugh & Sandhya Hegde
Claremont entrepreneur and CEO Edith Harbaugh (HMC) has over 10 years of experience in product, engineering, and marketing with both consumer and enterprise startups. In 2014, Edith and fellow Claremont grad John Kodumal (HMC) founded LaunchDarkly - the first scalable feature management platform for developers. She was also recently celebrated as one of Inc.’s most inspiring women of 2022 and one of Entrepreneur’s most influential women for leading LaunchDarkly to a $3B valuation.
Edith sat down with Unusual Ventures to share more details on the founding story of LaunchDarkly, how they overcame rejection in the early stages of the company, and her best advice for other entrepreneurs who are on the same journey of finding product-market fit.
A very popular question we as investors ask founders is “Why now?” Clearly, this problem has been around for a long time. Why has no one else solved it? Why would you be the team to solve it “right now?” Was there a clear, “Why now?” for LaunchDarkly?
Oh, we got absolutely hammered in fundraising. YC turned us down. I think I did 30 seed pitches and got multiple nos. I have a spreadsheet somewhere of everybody who said no, like nobody got it. Like nobody.
And the funny thing about being in the Valley a long time, because we started in 2014, is now I'm still friends with the same seed investors, and they're like, "Well, Edith, you were right. I just didn't see it." I'm like, "Well, thanks." And they're like, "You were right. I didn't see it, and shame on me."
So the "Why now?" to answer directly, is we were super early. I think we were perhaps two or three years too early. It seemed extremely obvious to my co-founder and I that this was a good idea. What we didn't realize was that there were two things that had to get fixed before it could be successful—that had nothing to do with us. It was, one, we were both in Silicon Valley. We worked about five blocks apart in the Mission. I was at TripIt, he was at Atlassian. And to us, it was very obvious that everybody was doing agile sprints and wanting to release at least once a month if not once a week. For the rest of the universe that was not in the Bay Area, this was still an extremely new idea. People were still preaching Waterfall. Gartner actually had come out even after we started with the bimodal approach of, "Let's do yearly releases for important things."
The second thing that was a huge headwind that we didn't realize was people were still moving to the Cloud. Again, this is in 2014, I'd been at TripIt, which was the number one mobile travel app. And I thought, "Of course, everything is in the Cloud." For a lot of customers, it was still this brand new idea that, hey, you don't have to have on-prem software. You could move to the Cloud and have a lot more agility and release more frequently. So if your question is, "Why us? Why now?" — in hindsight, we were way early, and we just had dogged determination that this was a better way to make software, but it took quite a while for the market to catch up with us.
🤝 Pardon the Introduction: Shayna Lyandvert & Outshine
Shayna Lyandvert (CMC) is a Claremont alumna and Co-Founder of Outshine Ventures, a global investor syndicate that invests in seed-stage Web3 startups on a deal-by-deal basis. She has 8+ years of experience investing in FinTech and has been investing in Crypto since 2018. Before Outshine Ventures, Shayna was the co-founder of liquid token fund Neolution, a growth-stage startup investor at VC firm PeakSpan Capital, and an Investment Banker at Moelis & Company, where she focused on technology M&A and capital raise transactions.
If you’re interested in learning more, check out the Outshine website or reach out to Shayna directly.
🚨Claremonster Call-Out: Jennifer Holmgren
Claremont graduate Jennifer Holmgren (HMC ‘81) is the CEO of LanzaTech – a Carbon capture and transformation company that harnesses the power of biology and big data to create climate-safe materials and fuels. Their scalable technology helps users replace materials made from virgin fossil resources with recycled carbon, enabling a profitable reduction in carbon footprint and overall environmental impact.
Before LanzaTech, Jennifer was VP and General Manager of the Renewable Energy and Chemicals business unit at UOP LLC, a Honeywell Company. Under her management, UOP technology became instrumental in producing nearly all of the initial fuels used by commercial airlines and the military for testing and certification of alternative aviation fuel. Jennifer is also a National Academy of Engineering member and has authored/co-authored over 30 scientific publications and 50 U.S. patents.
After Jennifer’s ~13 years of leadership as a private company, LanzaTech has just announced the completion of their business combination with AMCI Acquisition Corp. II. LanzaTech is now trading on Nasdaq!
💼 Who’s Hiring?: Precise TV & Mahmee
Precise TV is a video advertising platform offering advanced ML optimization and contextual targeting to help clients reach the right audience and align their brand message with relevant targeting on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Connected TV. Last year, the company partnered with IRIS.TV, another Claremont-founded startup, to bring its contextual targeting capabilities to television. Precise TV was also shortlisted in the Sunday Times Tech Track "Ones to Watch" category in 2019.
Claremont grad Jack Oliphant (CMC ‘13) is Precise TV’s Senior Sales Director, and he’s looking for a Business Development Representative to join his team:
Mahmee, co-founded by Claremont graduate and CEO Melissa Hanna (PO’ 09 & CGU ‘15), is an integrated care delivery platform for maternal and infant health. Their team is building digital infrastructure to connect patients, independent health professionals, and enterprise healthcare organizations to ensure that moms and babies don’t fall through the cracks of the U.S. healthcare system. The maternal healthcare startup is backed by Serena Williams and Mark Cuban, and they raised a $9.2M Series A last year, led by Goldman Sachs Asset Management. They’re currently hiring for several positions:
Check out the other ~5,000 open jobs at 400+ Claremont-affiliated companies here on our Storyboard. Plus, create a profile and enter your preferences to get alerted to new job postings relevant to you, be they the 1,000+ remote jobs, 100+ internships, or 40+ part-time positions available. We’ve published research that shows that Claremont-founded companies that disproportionately hire Claremont talent outperform — so pay attention, Claremonsters!
If any of these roles catch your eye 👀 , apply and mention Between the Lines. Or, if you are an employer looking to hire tip-top Claremont talent, fill out this form to have your jobs featured.
🗣️ Conversations on the Interwebz:
This week’s Claremont financings 💸
Congratulations to LA-based video game studio FuzzyBot on their Seed round with investments from Dreamhaven, Loaded, and Gaingels. The funding came on top of their earlier $3.5M Seed round led by Bitkraft Ventures. Claremont grad Max Spielberg (PO ‘07) is the co-founder and Creative Director of FuzzyBot.
Congratulations to Claremont grad Julian Mason (HMC ‘06) on his company's recent $15M funding round led by Qualcomm Ventures and Zebra Technologies. Julian is the co-founder of Third Wave Automation – a provider of cloud robotics and machine learning technology to material handling automation.
This week’s top listens 🎧
Claremont alumnus and Speakeasy CEO Sagar Batchu (HMC ‘15) was on the Engineering Founders podcast, where he talked about his transition from engineering leader to startup founder, his journey of finding a co-founder, and more. Speakeasy is a developer-first API Ops platform that enables developers to offer best-in-class API DevEx to API consumers.
Claremont entrepreneur Daniel Black (CMC ‘11) was on the Remarkable Retail podcast in a fascinating panel recorded live on the floor at last month's NRF "Big Show." Daniel is the Founder and CEO of Glass-Media, the industry change leader advancing projection-based, end-to-end digital storefronts for brands/retailers with a physical footprint.
Claremont entrepreneur and serial founder Tom Preston-Werner (HMC) joined Marc Campbell and Benjie DeGroot on The Kubelist Podcast to share insights gleaned from his open-source journey, including the founding story of his previous company, GitHub, and his many side projects along the way.
Can’t get enough of Between the Lines? Follow and connect with us on Twitter!
🍽️ BTL Snacks:
💻 Technology In The New Workforce Ecosystem….. Technology has been playing an increasingly important role in the modern workforce, from helping to automate mundane tasks to enabling new ways of working. Ray Grainger (HMC) explores how technology has been changing the workforce and how it can be used to improve efficiency and productivity. Ray is the Founder and Executive Chairman of Kantata – a transformative vertical SaaS platform that improves professional services automation for modern organizations.
🌳 Let The Planting Begin….. With their recent $21M Series A completed, Living Carbon has started planting their modified poplar trees with the hopes of being a large-scale solution to climate change. The NYT recently featured the biotech company with their poplars being the first genetically modified trees planted in the States. Claremont grad Maddie Hall (CMC ‘14) is the co-founder and CEO of Living Carbon – a public benefit company on a mission to fight climate change by genetically enhancing CO2 capture and storage in trees.
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