From Zero to $3.7 Billion: Jyoti Bansal’s Textbook Case Study of Building AppDynamics (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You worked for a couple of more startups after this?

Jyoti Bansal: I came here because I wanted to start my own company. The challenge was that I was on an H1B visa. You’re not really allowed to quit your job and start your own company. I worked in a company for a couple of years and learned something and maybe start something of my own later. That’s the reason I came straight from school to Silicon Valley.

It took me almost seven or eight years. I worked in three different startups. My first one was this company that I described that was sold as an aqui-hire. The second startup was slightly more successful. It was also sold for $30 million. That company had a good start. It grew to about $10 million to $15 million in revenue and then just stalled. The founding team couldn’t take it to the next phase. In a startup, you always have to keep evolving. You can’t stop on a very early success. That company got acquired.

Then I joined a third company which was a bit more successful. It was a company called Wiley Technology. They were acquired by Computer Associates for about $400 million. I was there for a few years as an engineer. You’ll learn a lot working in these startups. This company was doing the first generation of application monitoring for the applications that were built there. I really wanted to build the next-generation of application monitoring and instrumentation as the whole world was moving to software.

It was becoming obvious that everything was going to be software. If there’s a glitch in the software, it’s going to have a massive impact. At that time when I was pitching that, I was like, “Everything is software. It’s not a small niche problem.” It’s a problem that everyone will need to address. That became the genesis of AppDynamics.

Sramana Mitra: What was the competitive landscape? Obviously, you were coming out of Wiley which was in that business. Were there other competitors?

Jyoti Bansal: There were the first-generation monitoring products. They were not designed to monitor complex software systems. They were designed to monitor your datacenter and IT infrastructure. Wiley was acquired by Computer Associates. There was IBM. There was HP. There were these larger companies with this older way of thinking around how to understand your IT system.

Sramana Mitra: But you had something in mind from an architecture point of view that was going to give you an edge. What was that?

Jyoti Bansal: My primary point of view was, if the software architecture gets more dynamic and more distributed, you don’t care about the health of the server in your data center. What you care about is the experience of your end user. All of the monitoring and troubleshooting has to be designed around understanding the experience of a user.

If a user clicks to book a flight, what’s their experience? Every time you do that one click, there are around 20 to 30 systems involved. Then you follow the user click across the systems and figure out what’s going on. Everything in the past has been done around understanding what’s happening in a server. My approach was start to understand what happens when a user clicks and then use that as a starting point. It was flipping the model.

This segment is part 2 in the series : From Zero to $3.7 Billion: Jyoti Bansal’s Textbook Case Study of Building AppDynamics
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