John Laban

John Laban is co-founder and CEO of OpsLevel, which builds an internal developer portal: a catalog of every service an engineering org runs, who owns it, and how each one measures up against the org's standards. He started it with Kenneth Rose, a former senior developer at Shopify who became chief technology officer.

PagerDuty's First Employee

Laban worked at Amazon, which built much of its own tooling for running services because nothing existed outside. Around the start of 2011 he joined PagerDuty, a very small company started by friends of his from Amazon, as its first employee, he said on Software Engineering Daily. PagerDuty grew quickly along with the DevOps movement, as engineers began going on call for the software they owned.

“I started as PagerDuty’s first employee in San Francisco because that’s where the company started,” Laban said in a founder Q&A for Threshold Ventures. When PagerDuty opened an office in Canada, he interviewed Rose for a job, and Rose turned it down because he wanted to do a startup.

Choosing OpsLevel

When the two started looking for a problem, they kept seeing organizations build the same internal tool to catalog their services. Rose had used one at Shopify, and Spotify and LinkedIn had built their own. OpsLevel set out to sell that catalog to companies of every size, so they would not have to build it themselves.