We're thrilled to announce that Giles Goodwin, Flite CEO, is now officially an advisor of LaunchDarkly. Giles has been a “friend of LaunchDarkly” since the very beginning. Giles Goodwin's company, Flite, has been our partner in customer development - sharing their use cases for feature flags as a service with us as we developed LaunchDarkly from concept to alpha to private beta. In Giles words, “Edith and John are great people with a great idea. I'm excited to work with them as they grow LaunchDarkly and gain many more happy customers.” Read more about how Flite uses LaunchDarkly here. Giles Goodwin is the CEO and co-founder of Flite, current CEO, and has grown Flite to millions of revenue with happy SaaS customers worldwide.
Giles and I were co-workers on the groundbreaking Epicentric Portal Server and Builder. Giles was the engineering director, and I was engineering and then product manager. Back then, Epicentric was considered “fast” as we released every six months, when our competitors SAP and Oracle released every two years. Releasing more often gave us a competitive advantage. Also, we are both avid athletes who love the Marin trails, which led to an important moment at the very beginning of LaunchDarkly.
On July 4th, 2014 I was slogging through a 27 mile trail run while training for a fall 100 mile race. It was a miserably soggy and foggy day, typical Bay Area summer weather. Do you want to know the secret to success is in long distance running? There's no secret, there's just long distance running. and running. I was crossing Highway 1 above Muir Beach on Miwok Trail when a passing biker yelled “hey Edith”. When the biker took his sunglasses and helmet off, I realized it was Giles! We caught up for about 15 minutes, as I was happy to take a break from my hours of running. I said I'd just started a company for feature flags as a service, Giles said “cool! Come by Flite and tell us more”. Not only did I get my training miles, I got our first pilot customer, Flite. We're glad that Giles is now part of the LaunchDarkly advisory team to guide us on our journey forward.
