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What can a satirical HBO series teach you about building a scalable, high-impact B2B marketing engine? A lot—if you ask Manish Gupta.In this episode, 4-Time CMO Manish Gupta joins Caspian CEO Ian Faison to deconstruct the show Silicon Valley and extract lessons on marketing, storytelling, team dynamics, and startup chaos. Together, they explore how to translate complex technology to engage your audience, prioritizing content in your marketing, and including human moments to build brand trust.About our guest, Manish GuptaManish Gupta is a 4x CMO, having led marketing at companies like LaunchDarkly, Sonar and Redis. Manish brings deep experience scaling B2B technology businesses across public and private markets, including acquisitions and strategic transitions.His leadership spans category-defining companies such as Redis, Sonar, Liaison, Oracle, and Apple, where he has successfully driven both product-led and sales-led growth. With domain expertise in software infrastructure, AI, SaaS, cloud, and communications, Manish is known for navigating complex business models and delivering sustainable growth.He has also served as an advisor, board member, and investor in early-stage startups. Manish holds Master's and Bachelor's degrees in Engineering from Georgia Tech and an MBA from Santa Clara University.What B2B Companies Can Learn From Silicon Valley:Tech needs a translator. Technology is hard to understand—even for your audience. “Translating really complex technologies into simple-to-deliver messaging is an art form,” Manish says. “Great technology needs a great story, right? The narrative is so important, and how you deliver the narrative and how you package it is key to the success.”Content is the engine. Not the garnish. Manish makes it clear: “The whole marketing engine should be built around content.” That means investing in formats your audience truly wants—like hands-on guides and short-form videos—and making sure every asset is tailored to a specific persona and stage in the journey.Human moments build brand trust. Whether it's the "Not Hotdog" app or the team playing their bizarre “Always Blue” game, Silicon Valley nails the emotional truth of startup life. That same humanity should be visible in your marketing. Quotes*“ We as marketing leaders have to be very mindful that not everything and everybody in every marketing organization can evolve and move at an exponentially improved pace just because you have the tools. Yes, it has to move on that trajectory, but there has to be a level of reality put into the expectation. Otherwise there's gonna be burnout.”*”I think particularly in the B2B tech space, you've got almost a bifurcation of folks that use the technology but don't have any budget ownership, versus people that have the decision-making authority and the budget ownership but aren't necessarily very close to the technology. And I think marketing has to deal with that two-pronged approach in everything that it does and the channels that get activated. The messaging that has to align with the audience is certainly the content that has to be created, and that can be complicated. Balancing that is a nuanced execution for marketing teams.”*”A CMO should run the entire marketing engine around content. And this is not to invoke the old adage of ‘Content is king,' but, you know, what are you at the end of the day? Delivering or communicating to your target audience, whether it's an existing customer or a prospect you're trying to win over. It is content and how you package that content, how you position it, what story and narrative is wrapped around the technology to deliver is really, at the end of the day, what matters.”Time Stamps[00:55] Meet Manish Gupta, 4-Time CMO[01:05] Why Silicon Valley?[08:22] What is Silicon Valley?[16:01] B2B Marketing Takeaways from Silicon Valley[24:02] Balancing Predictability and Innovation[28:10] Targeting Practitioners vs. Decision Makers[30:26] Creating How-To Content[33:18] Importance of Content[39:33] Measuring ROI Around a Series of Content[42:13] Advice for CMOs on Content Strategy[43:25] Final Thoughts and TakeawaysLinksConnect with Manish on LinkedInAbout Remarkable!Remarkable! is created by the team at Caspian Studios, the premier B2B Podcast-as-a-Service company. Caspian creates both nonfiction and fiction series for B2B companies. If you want a fiction series check out our new offering - The Business Thriller - Hollywood style storytelling for B2B. Learn more at CaspianStudios.com. In today's episode, you heard from Ian Faison (CEO of Caspian Studios) and Meredith Gooderham (Head of Production). Remarkable was produced this week by Jess Avellino, mixed by Scott Goodrich, and our theme song is “Solomon” by FALAK. Create something remarkable. Rise above the noise.
Scaling a company requires more than just great ideas — it demands execution, urgency and adaptability. In this episode, Dan Rogers, CEO of LaunchDarkly, shares how he has built high-performance teams and driven sustained success, drawing from his experience leading growth at Microsoft, Amazon, Salesforce and ServiceNow.Specifically, Dan covers:(03:24) Dan's passion for technology led to an early start and a journey to Silicon Valley.(06:01) Why owning a number early in a career builds strong leadership skills.(11:28) Technical audiences want guidance, not marketing — stay product-focused.(25:25) Why customer insights should shape business decisions, not pre-set playbooks.(27:19) The role of execution in validating strategy and driving competitive advantage.(30:33) Competition is a sign of success — embrace it as part of growth.(37:45) AI application releases need control; rolling back and adjusting prompts is essential.(43:04) The importance of maintaining innovation speed while ensuring software reliability.(47:50) How feature flagging and controlled rollouts help companies move fast without breaking things.(51:49) Longevity in business requires discipline — prioritize fitness, diet and personal time with the same intensity as work.Resources Mentioned:Dan Rogershttps://www.linkedin.com/in/dan-rogers-a1717a/LaunchDarkly | LinkedInhttps://www.linkedin.com/company/launchdarkly/LaunchDarkly | Websitehttps://www.launchdarkly.comThis episode is brought to you by:Leverage community-led growth to skyrocket your business. “From Grassroots to Greatness” by author Lloyed Lobo will help you master 13 game-changing rules from some of the most iconic brands in the world — like Apple, Atlassian, CrossFit, Harley-Davidson, HubSpot, Red Bull and many more — to attract superfans of your own that will propel you to new heights. Grab your copy today at FromGrassrootsToGreatness.com.Each year the US and Canadian governments provide more than $20 billion in R&D tax credits and innovation incentives to fund businesses. But the application process is cumbersome, prone to costly audits and receiving the money can take as long as 16 months. Boast automates this process, enabling companies to get more money faster without the paperwork and audit risk. We don't get paid until you do! Find out if you qualify today at https://Boast.AI.Launch Academy is one of the top global tech hubs for international entrepreneurs and a designated organization for Canada's Startup Visa. Since 2012, Launch has worked with more than 6,000 entrepreneurs from over 100 countries, of which 300 have grown their startups to seed and Series A stage and raised over $2 billion in funding. To learn more about Launch's programs or the Canadian Startup Visa, visit https://LaunchAcademy.ca.Content Allies helps B2B companies build revenue-generating podcasts. We recommend them to any B2B company that is looking to launch or streamline its podcast production. Learn more at https://contentallies.com.#Leadership #StartupGrowth #SoftwareDevelopment #Product #Marketing #Innovation #StartUp #GenerativeAI #AI
This is the Engineering Culture Podcast, from the people behind InfoQ.com and the QCon conferences. In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods spoke to Claire Vo, Chief Product and Technology Officer at LaunchDarkly, about building high-performing, customer-centric teams, fostering a culture of experimentation, and preparing for the future of AI-driven software development. Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/4ih8MFY Subscribe to the Software Architects' Newsletter for your monthly guide to the essential news and experience from industry peers on emerging patterns and technologies: https://www.infoq.com/software-architects-newsletter Upcoming Events: QCon London (April 7-10, 2025) Discover new ideas and insights from senior practitioners driving change and innovation in software development. https://qconlondon.com/ InfoQ Dev Summit Boston (June 9-10, 2025) Actionable insights on today's critical dev priorities. devsummit.infoq.com/conference/boston2025 InfoQ Dev Summit Munich (October 15-16, 2025) Essential insights on critical software development priorities. https://devsummit.infoq.com/conference/munich2025 QCon San Francisco 2025 (17-21, 2025) Get practical inspiration and best practices on emerging software trends directly from senior software developers at early adopter companies. https://qconsf.com/ InfoQ Dev Summit New York (Save the date - December 2025) https://devsummit.infoq.com/ The InfoQ Podcasts: Weekly inspiration to drive innovation and build great teams from senior software leaders. Listen to all our podcasts and read interview transcripts: - The InfoQ Podcast https://www.infoq.com/podcasts/ - Engineering Culture Podcast by InfoQ https://www.infoq.com/podcasts/#engineering_culture - Generally AI: https://www.infoq.com/generally-ai-podcast/ Follow InfoQ: - Mastodon: https://techhub.social/@infoq - Twitter: twitter.com/InfoQ - LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/infoq - Facebook: bit.ly/2jmlyG8 - Instagram: @infoqdotcom - Youtube: www.youtube.com/infoq Write for InfoQ: Learn and share the changes and innovations in professional software development. - Join a community of experts. - Increase your visibility. - Grow your career. https://www.infoq.com/write-for-infoq
Our guest for Episode 72 is Karan Singh, VP GTM Strategy, Revenue Operations & Enablement, LaunchDarkly. Before joining LaunchDarkly, Karan held senior leadership positions at Sapphire Ventures, Procore Technologies, and SalesSource, where he spearheaded major product rollouts and guided organizational growth. In this episode, Ross and Karan discuss the importance of establishing consistent rituals and cadences, break down how to set and track SMART goals, and examine how technology can act as a force multiplier.
Executives from DataRobot, LaunchDarkly and ServiceNow share strategies, actions and recommendations to achieve profitable growth in today's competitive SaaS landscape.Topics Include:Introduction of panelists from DataRobot, LaunchDarkly & ServiceNowServiceNow's journey from service management to workflow orchestration platform.DataRobot's evolution as comprehensive AI platform before AI boom.LaunchDarkly's focus on helping teams decouple release from deploy.Rule of 40: balancing revenue growth and profit margin.ServiceNow exceeding standards with Rule of 50-60 approach.Vertical markets expansion as key strategy for sustainable growth.AWS Marketplace enabling largest-ever deal for ServiceNow.R&D investment effectiveness through experimentation and feature management.Developer efficiency as driver of profitable SaaS growth.Competition through data-driven decisions rather than guesswork.Speed and iteration frequency determining competitive advantage in SaaS.Balancing innovation with early customer adoption for AI products.Product managers should adopt revenue goals and variable compensation.Product-led growth versus sales-led motion: strategies and frictions.Sales-led growth optimized for enterprise; PLG for practitioners.Marketplace-led growth as complementary go-to-market strategy.Customer acquisition cost (CAC) as primary driver of margin erosion.Pricing and packaging philosophy: platform versus consumption models.Value realization must precede pricing and packaging discussions.Good-better-best pricing model used by LaunchDarkly.Security as foundation of trust in software delivery.LaunchDarkly's Guardian Edition for high-risk software release scenarios.Security for regulated industries through public cloud partnerships.GenAI security: benchmarks, tests, and governance to prevent issues.M&A strategy: ServiceNow's 33 acquisitions for features, not revenue.Replatforming acquisitions into core architecture for consistent experience.Balancing technology integration with people aspects during acquisitions.Trends in buying groups: AI budgets and tool consolidation.Implementing revenue goals in product teams for new initiatives.Participants:Prajakta Damle – Head of Product / SVP of Product, DataRobotClaire Vo – Chief Product & Technology Officer, LaunchDarklyAnshuman Didwania – VP/GM, Hyperscalers Business Group, ServiceNowAkshay Patel – Global SaaS Strategist, Amazon Web ServicesSee how Amazon Web Services gives you the freedom to migrate, innovate, and scale your software company at https://aws.amazon/isv/
Corey Quinn welcomes Adam Zimman back to Screaming in the Cloud for a sponsored episode featuring Heroku by Salesforce. As Head of Product Marketing, Adam discusses after years of stagnation following its Salesforce acquisition. Recent investments and a dedicated team signal a renewed focus on developer experience. The duo explores Heroku's impact on modern app development, its role in popularizing the 12-Factor App model, and the decision to retire its free tier. Adam highlights key updates, including Kubernetes replatforming, .NET support, and AI tools for managed inference and agents. He also teases his upcoming book, Progressive Delivery, set for release next year.Show Highlights(0:00) Intro(1:01) Heroku sponsor read(1:39) How Heroku became resurgent(5:46) Heroku's legacy(9:53) Adam's thoughts on people's response to the free tier going away(10:55) Heroku's target customer(s)(13:51) Heroku sponsor read(14:19) How Heroku saves organizations money and developed over time(20:08) Heroku's re:Invent announcements(24:53) How modern-day developers have reacted to Heroku's resurgence(27:47) Where people can learn more about Heroku About Adam ZimmanAdam Zimman is Technologist and Author currently serving as the Head of Product Marketing at Heroku by SalesForce. Previously, he was a Venture Capital Advisor providing guidance on leadership, platform architecture, product marketing, and GTM strategy. He has over 20 years of experience working in a variety of roles from software engineering to technical sales. He has worked in both enterprise and consumer companies such as VMware, EMC, GitHub, and LaunchDarkly.Adam is driven by a passion for inclusive leadership and solving problems with technology. He is a co-author of Progressive Delivery: Build the right thing, for the right people, at the right time. His perspective has been shaped by a degree (AB) from Bowdoin College with a dual-focus in Physics and Visual Art, an ongoing adventure as a husband and father, and a childhood career as a fire juggler.LinksHeroku's website: https://www.heroku.com/Adam's Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/azimman.bsky.socialAdam's Mastodon: https://hachyderm.io/@azAdam's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamzimman/Personal site: https://progressivedelivery.com/SponsorHeroku: http://heroku.com/
Venture Unlocked: The playbook for venture capital managers.
Follow me @samirkaji for my thoughts on the venture market, with a focus on the continued evolution of the VC landscape.Today I'm excited to speak with the founding team of Chemistry, a new venture firm led by Kristina Shen, Ethan Kurzweil, and Mark Goldberg, who recently spun-out of blue chip firms Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer, and Index Ventures, respectively. The firm just announced a significantly oversubscribed $350MM debut fund. As a new entrant to the market (in the toughest time to start a new firm in over a decade), I wanted to ask them about their blueprint for building a firm, including how they chose to partner up and the work they did beforehand, LP strategies and selection, and what they felt was their unique reason to exist in a highly competitive market. About Kristina ShenKristina Shen is Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Chemistry Ventures, overseeing a $350M fund focused on early-stage software investments. Formerly a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (2019-2024), she led significant investments in Mux, Pave, Wrapbook, and Rutter. Kristina specialized in high-growth startups.She began her venture career as a Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners (2013-2019), working with companies such as Gainsight, Instructure, and ServiceTitan. Previously, she worked in investment banking at Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse, focusing on technology sectors.About Mark GoldbergMark Goldberg is Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Chemistry Ventures since, investing in seed and Series A software startups. Previously, a Partner at Index Ventures (2015-2023), he worked with companies such as Plaid, Pilot, Intercom, and Motive, establishing a strong fintech and software portfolio.Prior to Index, Mark worked at Dropbox in Business Strategy & Operations and Strategic Finance (2013-2015), where he contributed to growth strategies during Dropbox's scaling phase.He started his career as an Analyst at Morgan Stanley (2007-2010) before joining Hudson Clean Energy as a Senior Associate. Mark holds an AB in International Relations from Brown University.About Ethan KurzweilEthan Kurzweil is Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Chemistry Ventures, leading investments at the seed stage for tech-driven startups. He also serves as a board member for companies like Intercom and LaunchDarkly.Previously, Ethan was a Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners (2008-2024), where he worked with companies such as HashiCorp, Twilio, and Twitch. His focus on software and digital platforms spanned roles as board member and investor, contributing to significant IPOs and acquisitions.Early in his career, Ethan worked in business development at Linden Lab (creators of Second Life) and served as a Senior Manager in the CEO's Office at Dow Jones. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and an AB in Economics from Stanford University.In this episode, we discuss:* (01:43): Importance of Team Chemistry and Partnership Formation* (03:27): Challenges of Building a Firm in the Current Environment* (08:00): Unique Value Proposition for Early-Stage Founders* (10:18): Early-Stage Focus and Differentiation from Large VC Firms* (16:12): Fundraising Insights and LP Relationship Building* (19:00): Choosing Aligned LPs and Targeting Long-Term Partnerships* (27:23): Single-Trigger Investment Decision-Making Model* (30:12): Balancing Conviction with Collaborative Feedback* (35:23): Independent Decision-Making for Follow-On Investments* (39:19): Personal Contrarian Beliefs about the Venture Industry* (42:18): Closing Remarks on Building a New Venture FranchiseI'd love to know what you took away from this conversation with Kristina, Mark, and Ethan. Follow me @SamirKaji and give me your insights and questions with the hashtag #ventureunlocked. If you'd like to be considered as a guest or have someone you'd like to hear from (GP or LP), drop me a direct message on Twitter.Podcast Production support provided by Agent Bee This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ventureunlocked.substack.com
Sales leadership is one of the hardest jobs in the company. Your success is black and white—you've either hit your number, or you haven't—and getting a group of sellers moving in the same direction isn't easy, as anyone in RevOps knows.Today we're joined by Kyle Asay to dig into what separates top-performing sales leaders from the rest. We talk about how to scale sales excellence, balance standardization with creativity, and build trust and rapport at every stage of the sales process. Kyle also shares his insights on navigating the transition from individual contributor to sales leader, the real role of AI in outbound, and how to build a side hustle while leading a team. Packed with practical frameworks and hard-won lessons, this conversation is a must-listen for sales leaders, individual sellers, and revenue operators supporting sales teams. Thanks to Our SponsorMany thanks to the sponsor of this episode - Knak. If you don't know them (you should), Knak is an amazing email and landing page builder that integrates directly with your marketing automation platform. You set the brand guidelines and then give your users a building experience that's slick, modern and beautiful. When they're done, everything goes to your MAP at the push of a button. What's more, it supports global teams, approval workflows, and it's got your integrations. Click the link below to get a special offer just for my listeners. Try Knak About Today's Guest Kyle Asay started his career in sales as an SDR at Qualtrics, where he qualified for five consecutive President's Clubs as an AE, front-line leader, and second-line leader. After an incredible 8.5 years at Qualtrics, he's gone on to serve as a sales leader for MongoDB and currently at LaunchDarkly. You can also find him sharing his frameworks with over 10,000 sellers at SalesIntroverts.comhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/kyleasay/Key Topics[00:00] - Introduction[01:52] - Current selling environment[04:46] - Scaling sales excellence[10:05] - Right-sizing discovery phase[12:39] - Building trust and rapport[17:53] - Transitioning from sales IC to sales leader[20:46] - The job of a sales leader[24:10] - Identifying the right people[27:47] - Standardized process vs. individual ingenuity[30:59] - Handling the pressure of sales leadership[34:55] - AEs and SDR alignment [42:47] - AI SDRs[44:59] - Sales and RevOps relationship[48:23] - Building a side hustle Thanks to Our SponsorThis November, MOps-Apalooza is back in sunny, Anaheim, California, and it's going to be the marketing ops event of the year, packed with hands-on learning from real practitioners. This is the only truly community-led tech-agnostic MOPS conference out there. It's got the best speakers, the best networking, the best social events, and maybe even a trip to Disneyland. This isn't your 50,000 person tech company conference. It's an intimate gathering of folks who are in the trenches every day. Registration is capped at 700 attendees, and tickets are going fast. MOps-Apalooza 2024 Resource LinksSales Introverts Learn MoreVisit the RevOps FM Substack for our weekly newsletter: Newsletter
On this episode, Carolyn Beaudoin joins us on the podcast. Carolyn is a seasoned copywriter and conversion rate optimizer. Working freelance, agency-side, and in-house, she's worked with some of the fastest-growing brands on the planet, including LaunchDarkly, Resident Home, Glowforge, Nextiva, and Shopify Plus. Now, Carolyn is the co-founder and Head of Creative Strategy at […] The post 365: Unconventional Email Design Approaches that Work Every Time first appeared on Persuasion by the Pint.
Episode SummaryIn this episode Bill Kenney shares his journey from an art school student to a business owner, and how he co-founded Focus Lab with a business partner. The discussion covers common reasons why companies need to rebrand, such as company maturity, M&A activity, and addressing trademark issues. Bill offers tips for successful branding projects, including setting expectations, keeping the core team small, and trusting the process even when faced with criticism. He emphasizes maintaining a company's core values and culture while adapting to changing market needs. The episode also explores potential pitfalls in B2B branding, such as over-relying on competitors and seeking too many subjective opinions. About the guest Bill Kenney is the Co-founder, Partner, and CEO of Focus Lab and Odi, two global B2B branding agencies. Past clients include Marketo, Salesloft, Zuora, Braze, Outreach, LaunchDarkly, Twilio, Adobe, ASAPP, Luminate, Netflix, Shopify, and many others. Bill is also the author of the Amazon best-seller "Conquer Your Rebrand." When he's not working you can find Bill in one of three places: his couch, the local Jiu-Jitsu gym, or his camper in Vermont. Connect with Bill Kenney Key takeaways- Common reasons for rebranding include company maturity, M&A activity, trademark issues, and the need to differentiate from competitors. - Tips for successful branding projects include setting expectations, keeping the core team small, and trusting the process even when faced with criticism. - Maintaining a company's core values and culture is crucial when rebranding, as it helps bring the brand's heart and soul forward. - Potential pitfalls in B2B branding include over-relying on competitors, seeking too many subjective opinions, and over-emphasizing measuring ROI. - AI can be a useful tool in enhancing visual storytelling, but it cannot replace the human interaction and strategic decision-making required for successful branding. Quotes"The brand is going to be so much larger and different in received through different meanings than what it is when you're creating it." -Bill Kenney Recommended Resource Books: - “Daring Greatly” by Brene Brown - “Can't Hurt Me” by David Goggins - “Traction” by Gino Wickman - “The Infinite Game” by Simon Sinek Podcasts:- A Bit of Optimism hosted by Simon Sinek Connect with Bill Kenney | Follow us on LinkedIn | Website
Claire Vo built ChatPRD—an on-demand chief product officer powered by AI. It's now used by over 10,000 product managers and is pulling in six figures in revenue. The best part? Claire has a demanding day job as the CPO at LaunchDarkly. So she built all of ChatPRD herself—over the weekend—with AI. I sat down with Claire to talk about how ChatPRD works, how she built it as a side hustle using AI, and all of the ways she's using AI tools to accelerate her work and life. We get into: How she used AI to build ChatPRD over Thanksgiving break The part of product management that Claire thinks AI will disrupt Why the PMs of tomorrow will be “proto-managers” who create prototypes rather than just specs How junior PMs can use AI to upskill faster The ways in which ChatPRD is baked into her own workflow How building ChatPRD is making Claire a better PM How Claire uses AI as a tech-forward parent This is a must-watch for anyone interested in turning their side hustle into a thriving business or who works in product. If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share! Want even more? Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here. It's usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free. To hear more from Dan Shipper: Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper Links to resources mentioned in the episode: Claire Vo: https://x.com/clairevo ChatPRD: https://www.chatprd.ai/; https://x.com/chatprd; https://www.linkedin.com/company/chatprd/; https://www.youtube.com/@ChatPRD Some of the AI tools that Claire used to build ChatPRD: http://Clerk.dev; https://tiptap.dev/ Greeking Out, the Greek mythology podcast that Claire's son enjoys: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/podcasts/greeking-out
Today we have Brian Rinaldi from LaunchDarkly on the show. This is the final episode of our in person coverage at the SHIFT Conference in Miami. And although Brian works at LaunchDarkly, we actually didn't talk at all about his employer and instead chatted about Jamstack. Brian has a long history with Jamstack, has written a lot about it. Jamstack was popularized and created by Netlify. And there's been a lot of history of controversy with the term. Some people think of it's merely a branding ploy or a marketing thing, and others find it simply confusing because we have terms like LAMP stack, MEAN stack and MERN stack. So Jamstack automatically gets lumped in with those, but it's not actually a technology stack. It's an architectural pattern. Recently, Jamstack has been giving away to what is known as composable frontends and we picked Brian's brain on this and what this means not only for Jamstack, but also the future web development.
Revolutionizing Productivity: Feedback on Loom, Linear, and Even LaunchDarkly w/ Claire Vo In part two of our "Unsolicited Feedback," host Fareed Mosavat and our esteemed guest, Claire Vo (CPO at LaunchDarkly, Founder of ChatPRD), explore significant advancements in AI and collaboration tools, with a spotlight on Loom and Linear's latest innovations. The episode delves into how these tools are not only enhancing productivity but also potentially reshaping communication norms in professional environments. Check out a full summary of the takeaways and lessons at ➡️ https://www.unsolicitedfeedback.co/ 00:00 Introduction 02:17 Exploring Loom's Innovations and Atlassian Integration 06:57 The Future of Collaboration: Video, Audio, and AI 14:42 Loom's Role in Atlassian's Ecosystem and Future Directions 17:33 Linear's Approach to Enhancing Product Development 20:55 The Challenge of Integrating Docs and Tasks 30:41 The Power of Being Your Own Customer 35:47 Embracing New User Experience and Onboarding Thank you for listening to Unsolicited Feedback! Don't forget to hit subscribe on the podcast network of your choice! And sign up for our mailing list at ➡️ https://www.unsolicitedfeedback.co/
Claire Vo is the chief product officer at LaunchDarkly and the founder of ChatPRD, likely the most popular PM-specific AI product out there. Before LaunchDarkly, she was a longtime chief product officer at Color and Optimizely. Claire has founded and managed two other companies, Pretty HQ and Experiment Engine, the latter of which Optimizely acquired in 2017. In our conversation, we discuss:• Knowing what you want in your career and being clear about it• Finding your zone of genius and how to operate within it• How to maintain a fast pace in larger companies• How to make it easy for your boss to help you achieve your goals• Advice for navigating the tech industry as a woman• The role of a CPTO and the benefits it brings to organizations• Why she built ChatPRD• Tips for building your own AI tools• The impact of AI on product management and what skills will continue to be important—Brought to you by:• Orb—The flexible billing engine for modern pricing• Dovetail—Bring your customer into every decision• Vanta—Automate compliance. Simplify security—Find the full transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/bending-the-universe-in-your-favor—Where to find Claire Vo:• X: https://twitter.com/clairevo• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairevo/• TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@chiefproductofficer—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Claire's background(04:50) How to achieve career progression(10:11) Avoiding promotion obsession(13:50) How Claire stepped into leadership roles(17:24) Operating in your zone of genius(23:03) How to maintain a fast pace(27:46) Setting a high bar for quality and talent(29:54) Normalizing feedback(33:09) Being a woman in tech(47:09) The role of a CPTO(54:19) Building ChatPRD(59:39) Tips for building a GPT(01:02:27) The impact of AI on product management(01:08:08) How AI is changing the product management role(01:14:36) Efficiency gains with ChatPRD(01:16:39) Contrarian corner: sales-led product organizations(01:20:11) Lightning round—Referenced:• LaunchDarkly: https://launchdarkly.com/• Define your zone of genius: Laura Garnett at TEDxMillRiver: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQ7_r2oWlrw• Energy Audit: https://beta.mocharymethod.com/blog-post/energy-audit• How to fire people with grace, work through fear, and nurture innovation | Matt Mochary: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/videos/how-to-fire-people-with-grace-work-through-fear-and-nurture-innovation-matt-mochary/• Radical Candor: From theory to practice with author Kim Scott: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/radical-candor-from-theory-to-practice-with-author-kim-scott/• Optimizely: https://www.optimizely.com/• GitLab: https://about.gitlab.com/• ChatPRD: https://www.chatprd.ai/• You should be playing with GPTs at work: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/you-should-be-playing-with-gpts-at• SpaceX's Starship: https://www.spacex.com/vehicles/starship/• GitHub Copilot: https://github.com/features/copilot• Product management theater | Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group): https://www.lennyspodcast.com/product-management-theater-marty-cagan-silicon-valley-product-group/• High Growth Handbook: Scaling Startups from 10 to 10,000 People: https://www.amazon.com/High-Growth-Handbook-Elad-Gil/dp/1732265100• Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building: https://www.amazon.com/Scaling-People-Tactics-Management-Building/dp/1953953212• Stripe Press: https://press.stripe.com/• Circe: https://www.amazon.com/Circe-Madeline-Miller/dp/0316556327• Poor Things: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14230458/• Mythic Quest on AppleTV+: https://tv.apple.com/us/show/mythic-quest/umc.cmc.1nfdfd5zlk05fo1bwwetzldy3• Silicon Valley on HBO: https://www.hbo.com/silicon-valley• Chrysler Pacifica: https://www.chrysler.com/pacifica.html• Waymo: https://waymo.com/—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. Get full access to Lenny's Newsletter at www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe
As the Chief Revenue Officer at Skyflow, Tammy Sexton is responsible for driving revenue growth and scaling the go-to-market team for the company's innovative data privacy platform. With more than 20 years of experience in enterprise sales,Tammy has a proven track record of leading and developing high-performing sales teams, building strategic partnerships, and delivering value to customers across various industries and regions. She has successfully managed and grown sales organizations at early and mid-stage startups, such as LaunchDarkly, LogicHub, and Sumo Logic, as well as established companies, such as PagerDuty, EMC, and PTC.In this episode of the Revenue Builders Podcast, Tammy discusses the importance of data privacy and how Skyflow's data vault as a service helps companies protect sensitive information. She shares insights on the impact of data breaches on brand reputation and revenue, as well as the role of data privacy in building customer trust. Tammy also reflects on her journey as a sales leader and provides valuable lessons on transitioning from an account executive to a manager, managing managers, and becoming a CRO.Tune in to this conversation with John McMahon and John Kaplan on the Revenue Builders podcast.HERE ARE SOME KEY SECTIONS TO CHECK OUT[00:01:19] Tammy Sexton's background and role at Skyflow[00:03:48] Examples of companies that use data vaults for privacy protection[00:05:18] Skyflow's certification program and compliance benefits[00:07:53] Tammy Sexton's experience and lessons learned in sales leadership[00:10:22] Avoiding the mistake of becoming a "super rep" as a manager[00:14:12] Coaching first line managers on recruitment and finding the right fit for the company[00:20:17] Focusing on the basics and fundamentals as a second line manager to make a big difference[00:27:48] Challenges of managing different groups as a CRO[00:40:48] Key things to learn as a new CRO in a company[01:06:44] Discovery and pain metrics drive urgencyADDITIONAL RESOURCESLearn more about Tammy Sexton and about their company.LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tammy-sexton/Company LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/skyflow/Email: Tammy Sexton tammy@skyflow.comDownload our Sales Transformation Guide for Leaders:https://forc.mx/3sdtEZJHIGHLIGHT QUOTES[00:50:55] "So it's not just about the data. It's not just about necessarily the numbers at the top, but the conversion numbers, the SC conversion from POV to win, the AE conversion at each stage. So if I can sit down with a manager that has six AEs and help that manager with data that says this AE always gets stuck at this part of the sales cycle. Why do they have a 20 percent POV win rate and technical win rate when all the other AEs have a 60 percent chance of moving to the next stage."[01:06:26] "Nothing better than good discovery and good pain and good influence on decision criteria. And at the end of the day, the metric will drive the urgency. If you did it right. If you did it right, go back to the basics."
Rachel Dines, Head of Product and Technical Marketing at Chronosphere, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss why creating a cloud-native observability strategy is so critical, and the challenges that come with both defining and accomplishing that strategy to fit your current and future observability needs. Rachel explains how Chronosphere is taking an open-source approach to observability, and why it's more important than ever to acknowledge that the stakes and costs are much higher when it comes to observability in the cloud. About RachelRachel leads product and technical marketing for Chronosphere. Previously, Rachel wore lots of marketing hats at CloudHealth (acquired by VMware), and before that, she led product marketing for cloud-integrated storage at NetApp. She also spent many years as an analyst at Forrester Research. Outside of work, Rachel tries to keep up with her young son and hyper-active dog, and when she has time, enjoys crafting and eating out at local restaurants in Boston where she's based.Links Referenced: Chronosphere: https://chronosphere.io/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rdines/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Today's featured guest episode is brought to us by our friends at Chronosphere, and they have also brought us Rachel Dines, their Head of Product and Solutions Marketing. Rachel, great to talk to you again.Rachel: Hi, Corey. Yeah, great to talk to you, too.Corey: Watching your trajectory has been really interesting, just because starting off, when we first started, I guess, learning who each other were, you were working at CloudHealth which has since become VMware. And I was trying to figure out, huh, the cloud runs on money. How about that? It feels like it was a thousand years ago, but neither one of us is quite that old.Rachel: It does feel like several lifetimes ago. You were just this snarky guy with a few followers on Twitter, and I was trying to figure out what you were doing mucking around with my customers [laugh]. Then [laugh] we kind of both figured out what we're doing, right?Corey: So, speaking of that iterative process, today, you are at Chronosphere, which is an observability company. We would have called it a monitoring company five years ago, but now that's become an insult after the observability war dust has settled. So, I want to talk to you about something that I've been kicking around for a while because I feel like there's a gap somewhere. Let's say that I build a crappy web app—because all of my web apps inherently are crappy—and it makes money through some mystical form of alchemy. And I have a bunch of users, and I eventually realize, huh, I should probably have a better observability story than waiting for the phone to ring and a customer telling me it's broken.So, I start instrumenting various aspects of it that seem to make sense. Maybe I go too low level, like looking at all the discs on every server to tell me if they're getting full or not, like their ancient servers. Maybe I just have a Pingdom equivalent of is the website up enough to respond to a packet? And as I wind up experiencing different failure modes and getting yelled at by different constituencies—in my own career trajectory, my own boss—you start instrumenting for all those different kinds of breakages, you start aggregating the logs somewhere and the volume gets bigger and bigger with time. But it feels like it's sort of a reactive process as you stumble through that entire environment.And I know it's not just me because I've seen this unfold in similar ways in a bunch of different companies. It feels to me, very strongly, like it is something that happens to you, rather than something you set about from day one with a strategy in mind. What's your take on an effective way to think about strategy when it comes to observability?Rachel: You just nailed it. That's exactly the kind of progression that we so often see. And that's what I really was excited to talk with you about today—Corey: Oh, thank God. I was worried for a minute there that you'd be like, “What the hell are you talking about? Are you just, like, some sort of crap engineer?” And, “Yes, but it's mean of you to say it.” But yeah, what I'm trying to figure out is there some magic that I just was never connecting? Because it always feels like you're in trouble because the site's always broken, and oh, like, if the disk fills up, yeah, oh, now we're going to start monitoring to make sure the disk doesn't fill up. Then you wind up getting barraged with alerts, and no one wins, and it's an uncomfortable period of time.Rachel: Uncomfortable period of time. That is one very polite way to put it. I mean, I will say, it is very rare to find a company that actually sits down and thinks, “This is our observability strategy. This is what we want to get out of observability.” Like, you can think about a strategy and, like, the old school sense, and you know, as an industry analyst, so I'm going to have to go back to, like, my roots at Forrester with thinking about, like, the people, and the process, and the technology.But really what the bigger component here is like, what's the business impact? What do you want to get out of your observability platform? What are you trying to achieve? And a lot of the time, people have thought, “Oh, observability strategy. Great, I'm just going to buy a tool. That's it. Like, that's my strategy.”And I hate to bring it to you, but buying tools is not a strategy. I'm not going to say, like, buy this tool. I'm not even going to say, “Buy Chronosphere.” That's not a strategy. Well, you should buy Chronosphere. But that's not a strategy.Corey: Of course. I'm going to throw the money by the wheelbarrow at various observability vendors, and hope it solves my problem. But if that solved the problem—I've got to be direct—I've never spoken to those customers.Rachel: Exactly. I mean, that's why this space is such a great one to come in and be very disruptive in. And I think, back in the days when we were running in data centers, maybe even before virtual machines, you could probably get away with not having a monitoring strategy—I'm not going to call it observability; it's not we call the back then—you could get away with not having a strategy because what was the worst that was going to happen, right? It wasn't like there was a finite amount that your monitoring bill could be, there was a finite amount that your customer impact could be. Like, you're paying the penny slots, right?We're not on the penny slots anymore. We're in the $50 craps table, and it's Las Vegas, and if you lose the game, you're going to have to run down the street without your shirt. Like, the game and the stakes have changed, and we're still pretending like we're playing penny slots, and we're not anymore.Corey: That's a good way of framing it. I mean, I still remember some of my biggest observability challenges were building highly available rsyslog clusters so that you could bounce a member and not lose any log data because some of that was transactionally important. And we've gone beyond that to a stupendous degree, but it still feels like you don't wind up building this into the application from day one. More's the pity because if you did, and did that intelligently, that opens up a whole world of possibilities. I dream of that changing where one day, whenever you start to build an app, oh, and we just push the button and automatically instrument with OTel, so you instrument the thing once everywhere it makes sense to do it, and then you can do your vendor selection and what you said were decisions later in time. But these days, we're not there.Rachel: Well, I mean, and there's also the question of just the legacy environment and the tech debt. Even if you wanted to, the—actually I was having a beer yesterday with a friend who's a VP of Engineering, and he's got his new environment that they're building with observability instrumented from the start. How beautiful. They've got OTel, they're going to have tracing. And then he's got his legacy environment, which is a hot mess.So, you know, there's always going to be this bridge of the old and the new. But this was where it comes back to no matter where you're at, you can stop and think, like, “What are we doing and why?” What is the cost of this? And not just cost in dollars, which I know you and I could talk about very deeply for a long period of time, but like, the opportunity costs. Developers are working on stuff that they could be working on something that's more valuable.Or like the cost of making people work round the clock, trying to troubleshoot issues when there could be an easier way. So, I think it's like stepping back and thinking about cost in terms of dollar sense, time, opportunity, and then also impact, and starting to make some decisions about what you're going to do in the future that's different. Once again, you might be stuck with some legacy stuff that you can't really change that much, but [laugh] you got to be realistic about where you're at.Corey: I think that that is a… it's a hard lesson to be very direct, in that, companies need to learn it the hard way, for better or worse. Honestly, this is one of the things that I always noticed in startup land, where you had a whole bunch of, frankly, relatively early-career engineers in their early-20s, if not younger. But then the ops person was always significantly older because the thing you actually want to hear from your ops person, regardless of how you slice it, is, “Oh, yeah, I've seen this kind of problem before. Here's how we fixed it.” Or even better, “Here's the thing we're doing, and I know how that's going to become a problem. Let's fix it before it does.” It's the, “What are you buying by bringing that person in?” “Experience, mostly.”Rachel: Yeah, that's an interesting point you make, and it kind of leads me down this little bit of a side note, but a really interesting antipattern that I've been seeing in a lot of companies is that more seasoned ops person, they're the one who everyone calls when something goes wrong. Like, they're the one who, like, “Oh, my God, I don't know how to fix it. This is a big hairy problem,” I call that one ops person, or I call that very experienced person. That experience person then becomes this huge bottleneck into solving problems that people don't really—they might even be the only one who knows how to use the observability tool. So, if we can't find a way to democratize our observability tooling a little bit more so, like, just day-to-day engineers, like, more junior engineers, newer ones, people who are still ramping, can actually use the tool and be successful, we're going to have a big problem when these ops people walk out the door, maybe they retire, maybe they just get sick of it. We have these massive bottlenecks in organizations, whether it's ops or DevOps or whatever, that I see often exacerbated by observability tools. Just a side note.Corey: Yeah. On some level, it feels like a lot of these things can be fixed with tooling. And I'm not going to say that tools aren't important. You ever tried to implement observability by hand? It doesn't work. There have to be computers somewhere in the loop, if nothing else.And then it just seems to devolve into a giant swamp of different companies, doing different things, taking different approaches. And, on some level, whenever you read the marketing or hear the stories any of these companies tell you also to normalize it from translating from whatever marketing language they've got into something that comports with the reality of your own environment and seeing if they align. And that feels like it is so much easier said than done.Rachel: This is a noisy space, that is for sure. And you know, I think we could go out to ten people right now and ask those ten people to define observability, and we would come back with ten different definitions. And then if you throw a marketing person in the mix, right—guilty as charged, and I know you're a marketing person, too, Corey, so you got to take some of the blame—it gets mucky, right? But like I said a minute ago, the answer is not tools. Tools can be part of the strategy, but if you're just thinking, “I'm going to buy a tool and that's going to solve my problem,” you're going to end up like this company I was talking to recently that has 25 different observability tools.And not only do they have 25 different observability tools, what's worse is they have 25 different definitions for their SLOs and 25 different names for the same metric. And to be honest, it's just a mess. I'm not saying, like, go be Draconian and, you know, tell all the engineers, like, “You can only use this tool [unintelligible 00:10:34] use that tool,” you got to figure out this kind of balance of, like, hands-on, hands-off, you know? How much do you centralize, how much do you push and standardize? Otherwise, you end up with just a huge mess.Corey: On some level, it feels like it was easier back in the days of building it yourself with Nagios because there's only one answer, and it sucks, unless you want to start going down the world of HP OpenView. Which step one: hire a 50-person team to manage OpenView. Okay, that's not going to solve my problem either. So, let's get a little more specific. How does Chronosphere approach this?Because historically, when I've spoken to folks at Chronosphere, there isn't that much of a day one story, in that, “I'm going to build a crappy web app. Let's instrument it for Chronosphere.” There's a certain, “You must be at least this tall to ride,” implicit expectation built into the product just based upon its origins. And I'm not saying that doesn't make sense, but it also means there's really no such thing as a greenfield build out for you either.Rachel: Well, yes and no. I mean, I think there's no green fields out there because everyone's doing something for observability, or monitoring, or whatever you want to call it, right? Whether they've got Nagios, whether they've got the Dog, whether they've got something else in there, they have some way of introspecting their systems, right? So, one of the things that Chronosphere is built on, that I actually think this is part of something—a way you might think about building out an observability strategy as well, is this concept of control and open-source compatibility. So, we only can collect data via open-source standards. You have to send this data via Prometheus, via Open Telemetry, it could be older standards, like, you know, statsd, Graphite, but we don't have any proprietary instrumentation.And if I was making a recommendation to somebody building out their observability strategy right now, I would say open, open, open, all day long because that gives you a huge amount of flexibility in the future. Because guess what? You know, you might put together an observability strategy that seems like it makes sense for right now—actually, I was talking to a B2B SaaS company that told me that they made a choice a couple of years ago on an observability tool. It seemed like the right choice at the time. They were growing so fast, they very quickly realized it was a terrible choice.But now, it's going to be really hard for them to migrate because it's all based on proprietary standards. Now, of course, a few years ago, they didn't have the luxury of Open Telemetry and all of these, but now that we have this, we can use these to kind of future-proof our mistakes. So, that's one big area that, once again, both my recommendation and happens to be our approach at Chronosphere.Corey: I think that that's a fair way of viewing it. It's a constant challenge, too, just because increasingly—you mentioned the Dog earlier, for example—I will say that for years, I have been asked whether or not at The Duckbill Group, we look at Azure bills or GCP bills. Nope, we are pure AWS. Recently, we started to hear that same inquiry specifically around Datadog, to the point where it has become a board-level concern at very large companies. And that is a challenge, on some level.I don't deviate from my typical path of I fix AWS bills, and that's enough impossible problems for one lifetime, but there is a strong sense of you want to record as much as possible for a variety of excellent reasons, but there's an implicit cost to doing that, and in many cases, the cost of observability becomes a massive contributor to the overall cost. Netflix has said in talks before that they're effectively an observability company that also happens to stream movies, just because it takes so much effort, engineering, and raw computing resources in order to get that data do something actionable with it. It's a hard problem.Rachel: It's a huge problem, and it's a big part of why I work at Chronosphere, to be honest. Because when I was—you know, towards the tail end at my previous company in cloud cost management, I had a lot of customers coming to me saying, “Hey, when are you going to tackle our Dog or our New Relic or whatever?” Similar to the experience you're having now, Corey, this was happening to me three, four years ago. And I noticed that there is definitely a correlation between people who are having these really big challenges with their observability bills and people that were adopting, like Kubernetes, and microservices and cloud-native. And it was around that time that I met the Chronosphere team, which is exactly what we do, right? We focus on observability for these cloud-native environments where observability data just goes, like, wild.We see 10X 20X as much observability data and that's what's driving up these costs. And yeah, it is becoming a board-level concern. I mean, and coming back to the concept of strategy, like if observability is the second or third most expensive item in your engineering bill—like, obviously, cloud infrastructure, number one—number two and number three is probably observability. How can you not have a strategy for that? How can this be something the board asks you about, and you're like, “What are we trying to get out of this? What's our purpose?” “Uhhhh… troubleshooting?”Corey: Right because it turns into business metrics as well. It's not just about is the site up or not. There's a—like, one of the things that always drove me nuts not just in the observability space, but even in cloud costing is where, okay, your costs have gone up this week so you get a frowny face, or it's in red, like traffic light coloring. Cool, but for a lot of architectures and a lot of customers, that's because you're doing a lot more volume. That translates directly into increased revenues, increased things you care about. You don't have the position or the context to say, “That's good,” or, “That's bad.” It simply is. And you can start deriving business insight from that. And I think that is the real observability story that I think has largely gone untold at tech conferences, at least.Rachel: It's so right. I mean, spending more on something is not inherently bad if you're getting more value out of it. And it definitely a challenge on the cloud cost management side. “My costs are going up, but my revenue is going up a lot faster, so I'm okay.” And I think some of the plays, like you know, we put observability in this box of, like, it's for low-level troubleshooting, but really, if you step back and think about it, there's a lot of larger, bigger picture initiatives that observability can contribute to in an org, like digital transformation. I know that's a buzzword, but, like that is a legit thing that a lot of CTOs are out there thinking about. Like, how do we, you know, get out of the tech debt world, and how do we get into cloud-native?Maybe it's developer efficiency. God, there's a lot of people talking about developer efficiency. Last week at KubeCon, that was one of the big, big topics. I mean, and yeah, what [laugh] what about cost savings? To me, we've put observability in a smaller box, and it needs to bust out.And I see this also in our customer base, you know? Customers like DoorDash use observability, not just to look at their infrastructure and their applications, but also look at their business. At any given minute, they know how many Dashers are on the road, how many orders are being placed, cut by geos, down to the—actually down to the second, and they can use that to make decisions.Corey: This is one of those things that I always found a little strange coming from the world of running systems in large [unintelligible 00:17:28] environments to fixing AWS bills. There's nothing that even resembles a fast, reactive response in the world of AWS billing. You wind up with a runaway bill, they're going to resolve that over a period of weeks, on Seattle business hours. If you wind up spinning something up that creates a whole bunch of very expensive drivers behind your bill, it's going to take three days, in most cases, before that starts showing up anywhere that you can reasonably expect to get at it. The idea of near real time is a lie unless you want to start instrumenting everything that you're doing to trap the calls and then run cost extrapolation from there. That's hard to do.Observability is a very different story, where latencies start to matter, where being able to get leading indicators of certain events—be a technical or business—start to be very important. But it seems like it's so hard to wind up getting there from where most people are. Because I know we like to talk dismissively about the past, but let's face it, conference-ware is the stuff we're the proudest of. The reality is the burning dumpster of regret in our data centers that still also drives giant piles of revenue, so you can't turn it off, nor would you want to, but you feel bad about it as a result. It just feels like it's such a big leap.Rachel: It is a big leap. And I think the very first step I would say is trying to get to this point of clarity and being honest with yourself about where you're at and where you want to be. And sometimes not making a choice is a choice, right, as well. So, sticking with the status quo is making a choice. And so, like, as we get into things like the holiday season right now, and I know there's going to be people that are on-call 24/7 during the holidays, potentially, to keep something that's just duct-taped together barely up and running, I'm making a choice; you're make a choice to do that. So, I think that's like the first step is the kind of… at least acknowledging where you're at, where you want to be, and if you're not going to make a change, just understanding the cost and being realistic about it.Corey: Yeah, being realistic, I think, is one of the hardest challenges because it's easy to wind up going for the aspirational story of, “In the future when everything's great.” Like, “Okay, cool. I appreciate the need to plant that flag on the hill somewhere. What's the next step? What can we get done by the end of this week that materially improves us from where we started the week?” And I think that with the aspirational conference-ware stories, it's hard to break that down into things that are actionable, that don't feel like they're going to be an interminable slog across your entire existing environment.Rachel: No, I get it. And for things like, you know, instrumenting and adding tracing and adding OTEL, a lot of the time, the return that you get on that investment is… it's not quite like, “I put a dollar in, I get a dollar out,” I mean, something like tracing, you can't get to 60% instrumentation and get 60% of the value. You need to be able to get to, like, 80, 90%, and then you'll get a huge amount of value. So, it's sort of like you're trudging up this hill, you're charging up this hill, and then finally you get to the plateau, and it's beautiful. But that hill is steep, and it's long, and it's not pretty. And I don't know what to say other than there's a plateau near the top. And those companies that do this well really get a ton of value out of it. And that's the dream, that we want to help customers get up that hill. But yeah, I'm not going to lie, the hill can be steep.Corey: One thing that I find interesting is there's almost a bimodal distribution in companies that I talk to. On the one side, you have companies like, I don't know, a Chronosphere is a good example of this. Presumably you have a cloud bill somewhere and the majority of your cloud spend will be on what amounts to a single application, probably in your case called, I don't know, Chronosphere. It shares the name of the company. The other side of that distribution is the large enterprise conglomerates where they're spending, I don't know, $400 million a year on cloud, but their largest workload is 3 million bucks, and it's just a very long tail of a whole bunch of different workloads, applications, teams, et cetera.So, what I'm curious about from the Chronosphere perspective—or the product you have, not the ‘you' in this metaphor, which gets confusing—is, it feels easier to instrument a Chronosphere-like company that has a primary workload that is the massive driver of most things and get that instrumented and start getting an observability story around that than it does to try and go to a giant company and, “Okay, 1500 teams need to all implement this thing that are all going in different directions.” How do you see it playing out among your customer base, if that bimodal distribution holds up in your world?Rachel: It does and it doesn't. So, first of all, for a lot of our customers, we often start with metrics. And starting with metrics means Prometheus. And Prometheus has hundreds of exporters. It is basically built into Kubernetes. So, if you're running Kubernetes, getting Prometheus metrics out, actually not a very big lift. So, we find that we start with Prometheus, we start with getting metrics in, and we can get a lot—I mean, customers—we have a lot of customers that use us just for metrics, and they get a massive amount of value.But then once they're ready, they can start instrumenting for OTEL and start getting traces in as well. And yeah, in large organizations, it does tend to be one team, one application, one service, one department that kind of goes at it and gets all that instrumented. But I've even seen very large organizations, when they get their act together and decide, like, “No, we're doing this,” they can get OTel instrumented fairly quickly. So, I guess it's, like, a lining up. It's more of a people issue than a technical issue a lot of the time.Like, getting everyone lined up and making sure that like, yes, we all agree. We're on board. We're going to do this. But it's usually, like, it's a start small, and it doesn't have to be all or nothing. We also just recently added the ability to ingest events, which is actually a really beautiful thing, and it's very, very straightforward.It basically just—we connect to your existing other DevOps tools, so whether it's, like, a Buildkite, or a GitHub, or, like, a LaunchDarkly, and then anytime something happens in one of those tools, that gets registered as an event in Chronosphere. And then we overlay those events over your alerts. So, when an alert fires, then first thing I do is I go look at the alert page, and it says, “Hey, someone did a deploy five minutes ago,” or, “There was a feature flag flipped three minutes ago,” I solved the problem right then. I don't think of this as—there's not an all or nothing nature to any of this stuff. Yes, tracing is a little bit of a—you know, like I said, it's one of those things where you have to make a lot of investment before you get a big reward, but that's not the case in all areas of observability.Corey: Yeah. I would agree. Do you find that there's a significant easy, early win when customers start adopting Chronosphere? Because one of the problems that I've found, especially with things that are holistic, and as you talk about tracing, well, you need to get to a certain point of coverage before you see value. But human psychology being what it is, you kind of want to be able to demonstrate, oh, see, the Meantime To Dopamine needs to come down, to borrow an old phrase. Do you find that some of there's some easy wins that start to help people to see the light? Because otherwise, it just feels like a whole bunch of work for no discernible benefit to them.Rachel: Yeah, at least for the Chronosphere customer base, one of the areas where we're seeing a lot of traction this year is in optimizing the costs, like, coming back to the cost story of their overall observability bill. So, we have this concept of the control plane in our product where all the data that we ingest hits the control plane. At that point, that customer can look at the data, analyze it, and decide this is useful, this is not useful. And actually, not just decide that, but we show them what's useful, what's not useful. What's being used, what's high cardinality, but—and high cost, but maybe no one's touched it.And then we can make decisions around aggregating it, dropping it, combining it, doing all sorts of fancy things, changing the—you know, downsampling it. We can do this, on the trace side, we can do it both head based and tail based. On the metrics side, it's as it hits the control plane and then streams out. And then they only pay for the data that we store. So typically, customers are—they come on board and immediately reduce their observability dataset by 60%. Like, that's just straight up, that's the average.And we've seen some customers get really aggressive, get up to, like, in the 90s, where they realize we're only using 10% of this data. Let's get rid of the rest of it. We're not going to pay for it. So, paying a lot less helps in a lot of ways. It also helps companies get more coverage of their observability. It also helps customers get more coverage of their overall stack. So, I was talking recently with an autonomous vehicle driving company that recently came to us from the Dog, and they had made some really tough choices and were no longer monitoring their pre-prod environments at all because they just couldn't afford to do it anymore. It's like, well, now they can, and we're still saving the money.Corey: I think that there's also the downstream effect of the money saving to that, for example, I don't fix observability bills directly. But, “Huh, why is your CloudWatch bill through the roof?” Or data egress charges in some cases? It's oh because your observability vendor is pounding the crap out of those endpoints and pulling all your log data across the internet, et cetera. And that tends to mean, oh, yeah, it's not just the first-order effect; it's the second and third and fourth-order effects this winds up having. It becomes almost a holistic challenge. I think that trying to put observability in its own bucket, on some level—when you're looking at it from a cost perspective—starts to be a, I guess, a structure that makes less and less sense in the fullness of time.Rachel: Yeah, I would agree with that. I think that just looking at the bill from your vendor is one very small piece of the overall cost you're incurring. I mean, all of the things you mentioned, the egress, the CloudWatch, the other services, it's impacting, what about the people?Corey: Yeah, it sure is great that your team works for free.Rachel: [laugh]. Exactly, right? I know, and it makes me think a little bit about that viral story about that particular company with a certain vendor that had a $65 million per year observability bill. And that impacted not just them, but, like, it showed up in both vendors' financial filings. Like, how did you get there? How did you get to that point? And I think this all comes back to the value in the ROI equation. Yes, we can all sit in our armchairs and be like, “Well, that was dumb,” but I know there are very smart people out there that just got into a bad situation by kicking the can down the road on not thinking about the strategy.Corey: Absolutely. I really want to thank you for taking the time to speak with me about, I guess, the bigger picture questions rather than the nuts and bolts of a product. I like understanding the overall view that drives a lot of these things. I don't feel I get to have enough of those conversations some weeks, so thank you for humoring me. If people want to learn more, where's the best place for them to go?Rachel: So, they should definitely check out the Chronosphere website. Brand new beautiful spankin' new website: chronosphere.io. And you can also find me on LinkedIn. I'm not really on the Twitters so much anymore, but I'd love to chat with you on LinkedIn and hear what you have to say.Corey: And we will, of course, put links to all of that in the [show notes 00:28:26]. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. It's appreciated.Rachel: Thank you, Corey. Always fun.Corey: Rachel Dines, Head of Product and Solutions Marketing at Chronosphere. This has been a featured guest episode brought to us by our friends at Chronosphere, and I'm Corey Quinn. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an angry and insulting comment that I will one day read once I finished building my highly available rsyslog system to consume it with.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business, and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.
Ransomware group reports a victim company to the SEC for failing to promptly disclose a breach. Shadowy hack-for-hire group behind sprawling web of global cyberattacks Electrical arc detection devices that can prevent dangerous home fires caused by faulty wiring. The worst passwords of 2023 The NIS2 Directive: The first piece of EU-wide legislation on cybersecurity Jenna Bilotta of LaunchDarkly joins to discuss transforming DevOps tools with better user experiences. Hosts: Louis Maresca, Brian Chee, and Curtis Franklin Guest: Jenna Bilotta Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-enterprise-tech. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit
Ransomware group reports a victim company to the SEC for failing to promptly disclose a breach. Shadowy hack-for-hire group behind sprawling web of global cyberattacks Electrical arc detection devices that can prevent dangerous home fires caused by faulty wiring. The worst passwords of 2023 The NIS2 Directive: The first piece of EU-wide legislation on cybersecurity Jenna Bilotta of LaunchDarkly joins to discuss transforming DevOps tools with better user experiences. Hosts: Louis Maresca, Brian Chee, and Curtis Franklin Guest: Jenna Bilotta Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-enterprise-tech. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit
Ransomware group reports a victim company to the SEC for failing to promptly disclose a breach. Shadowy hack-for-hire group behind sprawling web of global cyberattacks Electrical arc detection devices that can prevent dangerous home fires caused by faulty wiring. The worst passwords of 2023 The NIS2 Directive: The first piece of EU-wide legislation on cybersecurity Jenna Bilotta of LaunchDarkly joins to discuss transforming DevOps tools with better user experiences. Hosts: Louis Maresca, Brian Chee, and Curtis Franklin Guest: Jenna Bilotta Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-enterprise-tech. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit
Ransomware group reports a victim company to the SEC for failing to promptly disclose a breach. Shadowy hack-for-hire group behind sprawling web of global cyberattacks Electrical arc detection devices that can prevent dangerous home fires caused by faulty wiring. The worst passwords of 2023 The NIS2 Directive: The first piece of EU-wide legislation on cybersecurity Jenna Bilotta of LaunchDarkly joins to discuss transforming DevOps tools with better user experiences. Hosts: Louis Maresca, Brian Chee, and Curtis Franklin Guest: Jenna Bilotta Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-enterprise-tech. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit
Episode 506: Shaan Puri (https://twitter.com/ShaanVP) is coming at you with 10 AI-specific business ideas that he would invest in tomorrow if they existed. Want to see more MFM? Subscribe to our YouTube channel here. Want MFM Merch? Check out our store here. Want to see the best clips from MFM? Subscribe to our clips channel here. — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com/ Check Out Shaan's Stuff: • Try Shepherd Out - https://www.supportshepherd.com/ • Shaan's Personal Assistant System - http://shaanpuri.com/remoteassistant • Power Writing Course - https://maven.com/generalist/writing • Small Boy Newsletter - https://smallboy.co/ • Daily Newsletter - https://www.shaanpuri.com/ — Show Notes: (0:00) Intro (5:00) 10 - AI Sales Agent (10:00) 9 - Therapy for everyone, everywhere (13:00) 8 - Robots that automate warehousing (15:00) 7 - McKinsey for AI (19:00) 6 - Licensable deepfakes (22:00) 5 - Celebrity deepfake monitoring (24:00) 4 - AI Tutor (26:00) 3 - Call center accent customization (28:00) 2 - AI Porn (31:00) 1 - Self-doing to-do list — Links: • Episode 94 - Is GPT-3 the Next Big Thing - https://tinyurl.com/37wfyphx • Sameday - https://www.gosameday.com/ • Hims - https://www.hims.com/ • Amazon Robotics - https://tinyurl.com/5fu22r8x • LaunchDarkly - https://launchdarkly.com/ • Invideo AI - https://invideo.io/ • OpenAI - https://openai.com/ Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. — Other episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto • #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • #218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More
Welcome to Hunters and Unicorns: The Playbook Universe. We're here to showcase leaders within the Playbook Community and explore their formulas for success. We aim to uncover: Why the ICE formula is imperative. The criticality of the Economic Buyer. How to elevate your Execution whether that be selling consumer side or enterprise software. Today we are joined by Chris Mahoney, SVP for the Worldwide Sales Team at LaunchDarkly. In this Hunters and Unicorns podcast, Chris shares his professional journey with us including examples of his application of the Playbook. He also discusses how he's building the global sales team at LaunchDarkly with rapid scale. You don't want to miss this exciting episode with one the industry's titans! Chris has consistently operated within the elite playbook space, with experiences at prestigious companies including ServiceNow, BMC Software and Phase 1. Amongst his plethora of achievements, he was the most successful Solution Sales leader at ServiceNow, he lead the first product line from under $50M to more than $1B, scaled teams from less than 10 to over 650 and helped grow the market capital from £12B to a staggering $125B. Whilst at BMC, Chris built the number one performing sales team globally and at Phase 1, he went through 27 mergers and acquisitions in consumer software. Prior to enterprise software, Chris spent 10 years in consumer software working in operations and sales. Under strong leadership and immersing himself in absorbing as much knowledge as possible, Chris navigated the enterprise software space with cadence and agility. He thrived in learning not just the solutions but also the processes. Chris discusses with us the role of the Beginner's Mindset and how maintaining a strong degree of curiosity throughout your career will directly contribute to success. Chris also discusses times in his career where the focus was not on performance and numbers, but in fact on character and drive. Hunters and Unicorns loved hearing about Chris' formidable career, accented with pivotal conversations with the likes of A-players such as Tom Schmidt, John Donahoe, Frank Slootman, Andy Byron, Keith Butler and Bill McDermott. Make sure you tune in!
David York, a founder and managing director of Top Tier Capital Partners, provides invaluable insights into the intricacies of fund of funds (FOF). Delving into the dynamic nature of FOFs within the venture capital ecosystem, he sheds light on three distinct methods of investing in venture capital. Furthermore, David offers a comprehensive overview of his meticulous evaluation process for VC firms, highlighting the formidable challenges that investors encounter when selecting the most promising ventures.In this episode, you'll learn:[6:47] 3 ways of how to become ‘the money behind the money'.[11:05] Why is it difficult to evaluate VC firms?[20:35] What goes into starting a VC firm? What are the benefits of using FOFs in your VC journey?[26:00] Missing opportunities, how to handle NOs as a VC, and the importance of relationships in venture capital.[28:44] Future of venture capital: will venture capital become a more attractive asset class?The non-profit organization that David is passionate about: NESsTAbout David YorkDavid York is a founder & Managing director at Top Tier Capital Partners. He leads the Corporate Development team and is responsible for the management, development & growth of the firm's offerings, and is a member of the Investment and Management Committees at the firm. David has 30+ years of industry knowledge and networks, which uniquely equip him to be a liaison and international ambassador not only for Top Tier's brand, but also the broader venture community. Previously, he led the fund of funds business at Paul Capital Partners, before spinning it out and founding Top Tier. Prior to Paul Capital, he spent seventeen years on Wall Street running various trading desks.David is also a board member in various for-profit and nonprofit organizations. He's on the Board of Directors of NESsT, a 23-year-old Social Development Enterprise and Impact Investing non-profit investment firm focused on the development of social entrepreneurs in Central European and Latin American countries.About Top Tier Capital PartnersTop Tier Capital Partners is a venture capital specialist managing niche-focused funds of funds, secondaries, and co-investment strategies. The firm makes primary and secondary investments in venture capital funds and co-invests in select portfolio companies.Top Tier's history is marked with investments in renowned VC firms such as Kleiner Perkins, Andreessen Horowitz, Atlas Ventures, Abingworth, Initialized, Accel, and A.Capital Ventures, and its current portfolio companies include Paro, Prime Roots, Plus One Robotics, Komprise, Career Karma, Talkdesk, LaunchDarkly, among many others.Subscribe to our podcast and stay tuned for our next episode. Follow Us: Twitter | Linkedin | Instagram | Facebook
Edith Harbaugh, Co founder and Executive Chair at LaunchDarkly, joins the show to talk aboutThe process LaunchDarkly went through to validate PM fit and create the category for feature management.LaunchDarkly's target customer profile when finding PM fit and how their target customer profile has evolved as their category and company has scaled.At what stage in a company's growth should a founder invest in Dev Ops.The evolution of DevOps landscape over the next 3-5 years.
Join Nate Matherson as he sits down with John-Henry Scherck for the fourth episode of the Optimize podcast. JH is the founder of Growth Plays, an SEO consultancy focused on B2B content strategy. As a foremost expert in B2B content marketing and SEO, he frequently serves as a growth marketing consultant to high-performing SaaS companies. JH has worked with a number of incredible startups like LaunchDarkly, Hopin, Lattice, and Heap among many others. In episode #4, JH and Nate chat about mapping buyer journey's, building an SEO channel to will actually drive additional pipeline, technical SEO at scale, and how organic search is and isn't changing in 2023. For more information please visit www.positional.com, or email us at podcast@positional.com.Resources:Join Positional's Private Beta Here: www.positional.comCheck in with Nate on LinkedIn & TwitterCheck in with JH on LinkedIn & Twitter & https://growthplays.comWhat to Listen For:2:35 JH's Background4:51 JH on why he started an SEO and content marketing agency8:21 What makes content marketing and SEO channels so powerful for B2B or SaaS companies?13:00 How to measure SEO campaign success15:35 Conversion Rate Optimization19:10 How long does it take to build a meaningful organic search channel?23:19 How important are backlinks in 2023?30:52 JH's commentary on how to think about topical relevance and authority34:00 What does a piece of content cost in 2023?40:06 The Importance of Technical SEO and Internal Links43:09 Does Anchor Text Matter In 2023?45:17 Is SEO Dead? What are the impacts of Google's upcoming UX/UI changes and SGE?50:24 Lightning Question Round
Federal Tech Podcast: Listen and learn how successful companies get federal contracts
The good news is that today's digital technology allows for seemingly infinite variations on a code; the bad news is malicious actors know this and change their code constantly. One of today's responses to this constant attack is called “continuous” improvement. Quite a simple phrase to type, but difficult to accomplish. How do you continuously improve a complex software application that is used by a federal agency? How can anyone know what impact revised code will have on dependencies? We all know that large teams produce the application programs used by the federal government. That code may go through an iterative process and can be improved through testing. Although agile practices may be used in development, the release can be compared to the waterfall process, when the code is released – it is released in full. That means when a security patch is included, it is released in full – with only a partial knowledge of what implications it will have on today's hybrid cloud systems. Today's interview with Sara Mazer from LaunchDarkly suggests that a better approach is to release revisions in a “modular” manner. A federal agency can take 10% of the code, release it and see what kind of problems develop. Once developers and program managers are happy with the functionality, they can release it to an increasingly larger percentage. Sara goes into the way this works – with a “feature flag.” She describes this idea as a “wrapper” around the code that allows partial release. It also allows an easy rollback. The net effect is faster iteration by being able to test one version, correct it rapidly, and then move on to the next iteration. During the interview, Sara talks about LaunchDarkly being able to improve citizen experience with websites. She indicates that this test and rollback can allow federal leaders to try out different citizen-facing websites to determine which ones work best. Listen to learn ways to continuously update your federal systems. Follow John Gilroy on Twitter @RayGilray Follow John Gilroy on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-gilroy/ Listen to past episodes of Federal Tech Podcast www.federaltechpodcast.com
In this edition of Fragmented, we're thrilled to host Ishan Khanna, a software engineer at Tinder who possesses great enthusiasm for feature flags and A/B testing. Donn discusses why he invited Ishan on the show, highlighting Ishan's passion for feature flagging and A/B testing. The conversation kicks off with an insightful story from Ishan about feature flagging at Booking.com, leading to a discussion on the difference between A/B Testing and Feature Flags, when and why to introduce feature flagging, and how to measure its effectiveness. The show also focuses on the benefits and risks of feature flagging, along with ways to manage potential complexities in the codebase.We then delve deeper into the topic of feature flagging, covering how to get started, what to look for in a tool, and the role of testing. Discussion points include the best practices for rollout percentages, considerations for multi-platform implementation, and the specifics of targeting in feature flagging. The conversation wraps up with an exploration of available tools for those looking to introduce feature flagging or A/B testing frameworks into their operations, examining when it might be necessary to build a bespoke solution.The episode offers a wealth of resources for listeners, including links to an array of feature flagging and A/B testing tools, such as Firebase Remote Config, Optimizely, and LaunchDarkly. For more insight into the topics discussed, Ishan recommends his Droidcon Berlin talk on 'Customer Driven Development' and Stuart Frisby's talk on A/B Testing. To reach out to Ishan, listeners can contact him via Twitter, LinkedIn, or his website.LinksHere are the links mentioned in the document, in markdown format:Firebase Remote ConfigOptimizelyLaunchDarklyAWS AppConfig for Feature FlagsVWOUnleash - Open Source Feature FlagsPosthog Feature Flags and A/B TestingIshan's Droidcon Berlin TalkStuart Frisby's Talk on A/B TestingErindoesthingsContact IshanIshan on Twitter - @droidchefIshan on LinkedInIshan's WebsiteDonn's Git CourseNeed to learn Git? Donn has the course for you. In this FREE course you'll learn everything you need to know in order to start working with Git everyday. Watch it here.AndroidJobs.IOJob postings are FREE on AndroidJobs.IO
Learn directly from Edith Harbaugh, Co-founder and Executive Chair of LaunchDarkly, about the top 10 mistakes to avoid when scaling your SaaS company. Edith is an experienced startup executive and has firsthand insights into how to grow any SaaS business quickly and successfully. Don't miss this opportunity to get valuable guidance for scaling to 100 million in ARR! We'll cover how: *Everything is up & to the right if you zoom out Big changes every 6-18 months Revenue is it's own funding Hiring changes over time Value your time and get leverage A good Exec Recruiter is worth it Pricing - no right answer Creating category takes constant effort Refresh Values No playbook, just play pages Watch the video, including Q&A: https://youtu.be/5ccWUwinkJg ****** Shipping projects doesn't have to be a mess. Notion combines project management with your docs, knowledge base, and AI. So you can stop jumping between tools, and stop paying too much for them too. Get Notion Projects for free at Notion.com/SAASTR. Vention provides technology leaders with the top engineering talent they need to accelerate their roadmap, innovate faster and more efficiently, and ultimately catapult their operation to new heights. Vention developers sync with clients' in-house teams, helping them get to market 30 percent faster and saving them more than $600,000 on average. Looking for the edge to outpace your competition? Vention is your partner. Learn more at ventionteams.com. ***** Want to join the SaaStr community? We're the
This week, Beth and Dianne dive into the complex world of tech with Federal CTO Sara Mazer. They discuss her new company, LaunchDarkly, the first scalable feature management platform. They discuss the company, Dev Opps, Cyber Security and much more!Join the C-Sweet Community! CSweet.org
This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that helps product & growth teams build product-led experiences, experiment, and validate results, fast. And my guest is Jonathan Anderson, Co-founder and CEO of Candu. Jonathan Anderson is a tech entrepreneur on a mission. He loves tech but can't write a line of code. He's passionate about product-led selling and has launched services, strategy, operations, and analytics teams at venture-backed SaaS startups, including InsightSquared and LaunchDarkly. Prior to startups, Jonathan worked at Bain & Company and he has a B.S. and M.S.Eng from Stanford University. In September 2018, he co-founded Candu - a no-code tool that allows teams to collaboratively build the UI components needed to encourage the adoption of features, onboard users, and announce product news on a day-to-day basis. It's not just for the pure-play product-led companies, like Atlassian, Notion, and Loom — it's for the 'strivers' who are trying to figure out how to adjust their go-to-market motion for this new world order. And this inspired me, and hence I invited Jonathan to my podcast. We explore what's holding a lot of software vendors back from shipping products to market and achieving high adoption rates. Jonathan shares his vision of how he aims to change that for good. He elaborates on the challenges he had to overcome to build traction and what that took from a product investment perspective in terms of first principles, focus, and grid. Lastly, he shares a do and a don't for B2B SaaS CEOs based on his most powerful own learnings. Here's one of his quotes We're changing the way that a business thinks about building its product. A single person, a single growth PM, can actually define an experiment in their head, grab a template, customize it, inject it into an application, preview it, and QA it themselves. So it really collapses what is basically a growth team into a single person. That makes it radically less expensive and also much, much, much faster. During this interview, you will learn four things: His approach to convincing a user/ buyer Candu is exactly what they need How to approach getting users to start using your product and become addicted Their approach to turn their user base into their best sales force What Candu did differently by giving their ideal customers a 'name' that makes them instantly recognize if it's for them or not For more information about the guest from this week: Jonathan Anderson Website Candu Subscribe to the Daily SaaS Reflection Get my free, 1 min daily reflection on shaping a B2B SaaS business no one can ignore. Subscribe here Yes, it's actually daily. And yes, people actually stay subscribed (Just see what peer B2B SaaS CEOs say) My promise: It's short. To the point. Inspiring. And valuable. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Stronghold CEO and Co-founder Tammy Camp sit down with fellow CEO and Co-founder Edith Harbaugh of LaunchDarkly to talk about how to scale, fundraise, and reach unicorn status. Edith has more than 15 years of experience in engineering, product, and marketing with both consumer and enterprise startups, including TripIt and Concur.LaunchDarkly hit unicorn status after raising $200m with their series D, currently holding a valuation of $3 billion. LaunchDarkly serves 2,000+ global customers like IBM, Atlassian, and Intuit.Interested in learning more about LaunchDarkly? Find them on Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube.To learn more about Stronghold, find us on Youtube, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, or join our popular Discord!If you know someone who you think would be great on Speak Bold, don't hesitate to reach out at podcast@stronghold.coNew episodes of Speak Bold drop every two weeks.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
In this episode, we speak with Erica Brescia, Managing Director at Redpoint Ventures, and previously COO at GitHub. We discuss what's changed since she started her first DevTools company back in the mid-2000s, how to build tools developers love, whether open source is just a marketing strategy, and what she looks for in software investments. She also sheds light on how to get a new product in front of developers, whether or not more people should be bootstrapping their companies as she did, and how to scale your marketing team as you grow.Hosted by David Mytton (Console) and Jean Yang (Akita Software).Things mentioned:BitnamiRailwayZedHacker NewsDaggerXataY CombinatorReflectChatGPTMacBook ProYeti MicrophoneLG UltraWide MonitorsMicrosoft Ergonomic KeyboardABOUT ERICA BRESCIAErica Brescia is the managing director at Redpoint Ventures, an early-stage venture fund, investing in primarily, enterprise software with a focus on DevTools and open source. Notable developer-first companies that they have invested in include HashiCorp, Snowflake, Stripe, Twilio, and LaunchDarkly, among others. Prior to this, she spent close to 20 years as a founder and operator. She founded a company called Bitnami where she bootstrapped $1 million in funding. She was also the chief operating officer at GitHub.Highlights:[Erica Brescia]: If you look at the very early days of software development and open source in particular, we've gone from this real DIY kind of bespoke, “The cool thing to do is compile your own kernel,” to a focus on time optimization and “How can you build the best thing possible the fastest?” If I had to look at a theme, that's a theme that I think about a lot. It's no longer about doing everything yourself. Instead, it's about really open source and building on the work of others, right? Over 90% of software developed today is built on top of open source, and most things that you need, from a building blocks perspective, to build a new app already exist in many cases. So now it's about, “Hey, what tools are out there? How can I engage with the community? How can I learn from others? How can I participate in things whether it's Stack Overflow, or building and sharing code on GitHub, or discussing things and issues?” It's much more collaborative and intertwined. I think that allows people to build new things much more quickly.— [0:02:51 - 0:04:10][Erica Brescia]: I think a lot of companies underestimate the amount of effort that is required in building a true open-source community, where you're getting folks contributing to the core of that project. That's a material investment. A good way to think about it is you're actually taking a lot of what you might traditionally spend on marketing and instead investing that in your team that supports the growth and health and engagement of this community, which is no small feat. Then you can use that to build awareness and a bottoms-up adoption of your software in a way that just sheer traditional marketing would never allow you to do. Then you can layer a sales motion on top of that.— [0:16:23 - 0:17:12]Let us know what you think on Twitter:https://twitter.com/consoledotdevhttps://twitter.com/davidmyttonhttps://twitter.com/jeanqasaurOr by email: hello@console.devAbout ConsoleConsole is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don't have to. Sign up for free at: https://console.dev
The tools B2B marketers rely on may be ever-evolving — whether that's the channels they use, the data they collect or the technology they rely on — but the key to success in B2B is actually one overlooked element: Emotion.In this episode of Best Story Wins, we speak with master storyteller Keith Messick, CMO at LaunchDarkly, about how he combines his knack for storytelling with all the tools, tactics, and strategies in modern marketing to tailor the perfect message for his ICP. We discuss:What B2B marketers can learn from B2CWhen to use emotion and logic in your B2B marketingHow to stand out in your market
Legacy modernisation is one of the most difficult, and often misunderstood, elements of digital transformation. It can be expensive and very disruptive. It has more in common with business transformation than cloud migration and can lend itself to risky large scale implementations.Dave, Sjoukje & Rob are joined by John Kodumal, CTO and Co-Founder of LaunchDarkly, they talk about how greenfield development is increasingly rare, evolving a running system is much more common. New method and tools are now available to move this past a static or quarterly update, risk heavy process, such as feature management which allows legacy to be modernised with zero outage and switch over risk. In this weeks trend we talk about the emerging field of developer productivity, why it can be helpful, but its also very difficult to do effectively.TLDR:00:50 Intros01:30 Cloud conversation with John Kodumal21:30 Developer Productivity29:42 Scaling People by Claire Hughes Johnson (book recommendation)!Further Reading:Scaling People: https://amzn.eu/d/af6XVeN
Brian Rinaldi, Developer Experience Engineer at LaunchDarkly and long time friend of the show, recently wrote a blog post that was picked up in the TL;DR newsletter. His post, titled The State of Developer Conferences, shares a theory as to why both online and IRL (In Real Life) conferences are struggling to reach pre-pandemic attendance. Brian, who's been running conferences for 15-years, has a keen understanding of who attends events; and, why the demographics of attendees might be shifting. Conference organizers around the world are reading Brian's post and are nodding in strong agreement.Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.
Startup Field Guide by Unusual Ventures: The Product Market Fit Podcast
LaunchDarkly is a pioneer in the feature management space. Founded in 2014, while the agile and cloud movements were still relatively nascent, LaunchDarkly was ahead of its time. They have now scaled to a $3 billion company, serving over 4,000 customers. In this episode, LaunchDarkly Co-Founder and CEO Edith Harbaugh takes us back to her initial insight as an engineering manager and product leader at TripIt, deeply versed in the value of systematic feature flagging, and keenly aware of how underutilized it was by many other dev teams. She shares the conviction required to build a product that most buyers in Silicon Valley weren't yet looking for, and how she engaged her network to gain initial design partners for the product that would come to define the feature management space. Join us as we discuss: Honing a founder insight and being early vs late to an emerging sector Hypothesis testing and building with design partners Community-building and marketing a movement Fundraising when VCs are skeptical of a new sector About Unusual Ventures — Unusual Ventures is a seed-stage venture capital firm designed from the ground up to give a distinct advantage to founders building infrastructure software and application-level companies. Unusual was founded in 2018 with the mission to reinvent the venture capital engagement model by serving entrepreneurs with an unprecedented level of hands-on services. Described as a partner versus a top-down stakeholder by its portfolio companies, Unusual is laser-focused on serving exceptional founders and teams building innovative products. With offices in Menlo Park, San Francisco, and Boston, Unusual has invested in category-defining companies like Arctic Wolf Networks, Carta, Robinhood, Harness, and Vivun. About Sandhya Hegde — Sandhya is a General Partner at Unusual Ventures, leading investments in enterprise SaaS companies. Previously an early employee and executive at Amplitude, Sandhya is a product-led growth (PLG) coach and mentor. She can be reached at sandhya@unusual.vc and on Twitter (https://twitter.com/sandhya) and LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandhyahegde/). Further reading: Identifying initial customers — https://www.field-guide.unusual.vc/field-guide-enterprise/ideal-customer-profile-and-personas Early-stage pricing — https://www.field-guide.unusual.vc/field-guide-enterprise/pricing-your-product TOOL: Founder prioritization heatmap — https://www.field-guide.unusual.vc/field-guide-enterprise/ceo-founder-prioritization Building a self-serve motion — https://www.field-guide.unusual.vc/field-guide-enterprise/self-serve-user-buyer-journey
Links: Introducing concurrent account provisioning operations for AWS Control Tower AWS Cost Anomaly Detection now supports percentage-based thresholds AWS Trusted Advisor adds new fault tolerance checks Heads-Up: Amazon S3 Security Changes Are Coming in April of 2023 LaunchDarkly's journey from ingesting 1 TB to 100 TB per day with Amazon Kinesis Data Streams Visualizing the impact of AWS Lambda code updates New: AWS CLI v2 Docker images available on Amazon ECR Public
Better meetings are not a myth, but it starts with deconstructing how you got to where you are today. A hectic calendar and meetings showing up like popcorn.What can you do to improve this? Managers and individual contributors can start by focusing on what the goal of the meeting is. If the goal of the meeting is to solve a problem, that's a yellow flag.
Competency is not the only way you can grow your career.If that was the case, then every engineering manager would be technically more proficient than their reports, and I can guarantee (from many experiences) this is not only not the case - it's not even the norm.
Sometimes a small question can change the course of your career. It doesn't have to be complicated, and it doesn't have to be detailed. A well placed question might unearth information you didn't realize was in you.
Notifications North Star, sponsored by Courier!Guest: Vatasha White is a Senior Software Engineer at Courier. Previously, she built software at Lacework, LaunchDarkly and GE Digital. She is a graduate of Smith College in 2015.Questions:Having been a prior customer of Courier, what excited you about the solution?What is your favorite use case for the tool?So now that you work at Courier... what impact do they have that really motivates you?What are you working on now, that really excites you about the product?Linkshttps://www.courier.com/Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
When you find something that is counterintuitive, it's possible that it will create immense value to whatever problem you are trying to solve. Seek to interrogate your beliefs to build better explanations for what is true, and find those who disagree with you at an intuitive level.
Productivity is about working towards your goals, and optimization is about sharpening those efforts more directly.We talk about two forks in the road when you choose the types of optimization you'll deploy in your career and personal life.
If you feel like everything is spinning around you and it's difficult to remain productive, you aren't alone. In this episode we talk about core tools and activities, and why it's so important to spend the majority of your time working in your core.
The background noise in today's episode wasn't just a mistake, it was a choice. A tradeoff.Tradeoffs represent a decision of control and energy. You will make them every day, but towards what goal?When you make a tradeoff and decide where to put your energy, you are necessarily deciding not to put it elsewhere. So, do so with purpose and intention.
In this episode, we'll discuss the importance of breaking false ties in a negotiation scenario. This happens more often than we realize, and the best way to do this is by breaking down the problem of "what is important" to each side in a negotiation.
In this episode, Benji talks to Keith Messick, Chief Marketing Officer at LaunchDarkly. We've come to a time in B2B marketing where more and more we're taking ideas from B2C marketing. But it hasn't always been that way. Today we jump into a time machine to discuss the evolution and how that informs where we are now, in 2022.
In today's episode we talk about finding perspective and purpose through the lens of two principles and one bonus exercise.
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