Jyoti Bonsal 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. He's the CEO of Harness. Which not coincidentally, was most recently valued at $3.7 billion, as well as the CEO of Traceable ai, which was recently valued at $450 million.
In this conversation, Jody 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) Time management
(8:43) Finding product market fit
(19:05) Product development cycle
(23:12) Startups within startups
(29:14) AppDynamics
(34:14) Lessons for young founders
(43:16) Hiring someone who's "been there, done that"
(51:02) Process of fundraising
(56:04) Reach the highest tier of VC firm
(59:45) Finding investors that believe in you and your company
(1:07:20) Founding AppD
(1:13:47) Ending up a solo founder
(1:20:42) Selling to Cisco
(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.