Jyoti Bansal: Life After Selling a $3.7B Company

Jyoti Bansal was the founder and CEO of AppDynamics which sold in 2017 to Cisco for $3.7 billion right before it went public. We talk about that sale as well as Jody now running two separate businesses: Traceable.ai and Harness, which not coincidentally was also most recently valued at $3.7B.
In this conversation, Jyoti and I talk about a bunch of different things related to operating and his different frameworks for making decisions for finding product market fit, hiring executives, firing executives, as well as the saddest day he had running AppDynamics, which was the day he actually sold the business to Cisco. A really interesting conversation, one of the more thoughtful and tactical leaders that exist in the world of startups.
(0:00) Intro
(1:40) Welcome Jyoti Bansal
(2:51) How do you have 3 Jobs
(8:43) Framework for finding product market fit
(15:05) The best way to get real feedback
(19:05) Framework for the product development cycle
(23:12) Launching a second product
(29:14) Finding religion in sales
(34:14) Lessons for young founders
(43:16) Hiring for experience vs hunger
(51:02) Getting good at fundraising
(56:04) Picking a VC
(59:45) The most important factor in choosing a VC
(1:07:20) Jyoti's upbringing
(1:13:47) Ending up a solo founder
(1:20:42) Knowing when to sell
(1:27:33) Current state of the markets
(1:31:09) Jyoti's thoughts on AI
Mixed and edited: Justin Hrabovsky
Produced: Rashad Assir
Executive Producer: Josh Machiz
Music: Griff Lawson
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About the Show
Logan Bartlett is a Software Investor at Redpoint Ventures - a Silicon Valley-based VC with $6B AUM and investments in Snowflake, DraftKings, Twilio, and Netflix. In each episode, Logan goes behind the scenes with world-class entrepreneurs and investors. If you're interested in the real inside baseball of tech, entrepreneurship, and start-up investing, tune in every Friday for new episodes.

[@mohsinhaider3830]

On customer development: Go cold -- not warm, go wide, and keep refining your messaging. You need 40+ conversations until you'll probably start hearing the same things.
On v0 of the product: if you're answering "what's missing", you can enter with something less than fully complete. If you have direct competitors in incumbents, find the parity that matters, even if it's a lot, and add your differentiation on top.
On the market: it should be 2 years away where customers beyond the early majority wake up to realizing they need what you're building.

[@rishiocity]

Here from LinkedIn, loving this ace conversation! Thank you!

[@user-tf3yq1gj5k]

Excellent insights and frameworks

[@pritambios]

Excellent interview. Thanks!

[@aminrahimi6390]

Very excellent!!😍😍😍

[@MrDnakano]

This was awesome.

[@loganbartlett4307]

Thank you!!

[@suleimanpeshawari1032]

No BS, this guy says is like is

[@loganbartlett4307]

for real - one of the greats