John Laban

John Laban is co-founder and CEO of OpsLevel, a company in Toronto, Canada, that 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 in 2019 with Kenneth Rose, a former Shopify engineer who became chief technology officer.

PagerDuty's first employee

“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. He had worked at Amazon before that, and over the following years at PagerDuty he moved from engineer into management and then to VP of engineering. When PagerDuty opened an office in Canada, he interviewed Rose for a job; Rose turned it down because he wanted to start a company.

Laban said those early days prepared him for the volatility of a startup. “At a larger company, you can really focus on your domain,” he said. “But as a founder, the buck stops with you, and you need to be the one who deals with things when there isn’t someone else already responsible for it.”

From fifty ideas to a service catalog

The two brainstormed a long list before settling on OpsLevel. Rose remembered “a list of something like 50 bad ideas” before they found the problem that kept coming up: software organizations running large microservice architectures could not easily tell what services existed or who owned them. Inside the company, Laban pushes a rule against perfectionism. “Done is better than perfect,” he said. “It’s about getting something complete and shipped and out the door.”