LaunchDarkly gets $8.7M to put the right features in front of right users

100% agree. I can't recount how many times I've worked with people who wanted to build their own tools or only rely on their own information. I once worked with a dev who refused to talk to people better at systems engineering when we started reaching scaling issues. His claim - this is too specialized. Having gotten into infrastructure engineering recently and spent time working on microservices based architectures I realize that this was more of a "I built a shitty system and I don't want to show it to people".

I think this may be generalizing a bit too much. Certainly I would use Twilio instead of building my own telephony system, or use AWS instead of setting up my own servers. But in this case I think the reason many developers here (myself included) have an episode of build-it-myself syndrome is the many millions in funding and exorbitant pricing for something that seems (but may not necessarily be) trivial to implement.

Obviously there is the benefit of having a team of people who are constantly making the system better and more robust. I think with ML there would be a serious value proposition here, e.g. allow a learning system to automatically roll out a new feature for you, and reverse the rollout if things appear to be going poorly. Even the worst case of built-it-myself syndrome would not engineer a custom feature flag system that far.

I think it's an issue of industry maturity, too.

Let's say you want to open a restaurant. Now sure, you could go out, start a farm, open a steel mill and a mine to make all your knives and cutlery yourself, cut down timber and construct the entire building yourself, make your own furniture, etc.

Really, you could do all of those things. And I think that's the state of the software world, about 10 years ago. Hell, maybe even today, compared to 10 years from now.

These days, we're rapidly moving to a world where probably 95% of what a typical company needs -- code hosting, scaled relational storage, execution grids a la Docker on ECS, load balancers, A/B testing, SMS infrastructure, feature flags, etc. can be bought off the shelf, for a fraction of what it would cost to do yourself, and at much higher quality than a single individual could do.

It's a natural outgrowth of the increase in developer salaries, in fact, the two go hand-in-hand: labor productivity is up a lot because of these tools, and the incentive to buy cheap off-the-shelf stuff is higher than ever, vs. paying for expensive, scarce, flighty developer labor.

I do wonder what this means about starting companies, though. I think software will increasingly move toward an industry where, like owning a Burger King, you have to raise capital (rather than just doing everything yourself) because so much of what you need has to be bought, and peoples' standards are so high. And yet, it is more optimal to have to raise capital, because anyone can get money; not everyone has the skills/talent/know-how to build complicated software. Buying is less risky than building.

No longer is it enough to home-roll a webserver: now you need to launch from day 1 with a native mobile app on multiple platforms, everything has to work on any size of display, it all has to be bug-free, high-design, autocomplete-text-boxed, perfection, from day 1.

This whole "it's getting so cheap to ship a v1" is malarkey, IMO.

I can't help but to think that Amazon will eat their lunch in an instant if this proves to be a viable business. This has AWS written all over it.

As a product owner who uses LaunchDarkly, my preference is to always abstract complexity if its not core to my product. I am always an advocate for tools and services that allow me to get to market quicker, while reducing long-term overhead. An internal service like LD would need to be built and also maintained. I think many people overestimate the complexity of services like this; it seems simple but execution is always more difficult (scale, bugs, features, etc). Cheers to LD for providing this service so my team can concentrate on our core.