EP 73: Jyoti Bansal (Founder, AppDynamics): Life After Selling a $3.7B Company

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 🎙 Listen to the show Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/three-cartoon-avatars/id1606770839 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5WqBqDb4br3LlyVrdqOYYb?si=3076e6c1b5c94d63&nd=1 Google Podcasts: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5zaW1wbGVjYXN0LmNvbS9zb0hJZkhWbg 🎥 Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCugS0jD5IAdoqzjaNYzns7w?sub_confirmation=1 Follow on Socials 📸 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/theloganbartlettshow 🐦 Twitter - https://twitter.com/loganbartshow 🎬 Clips on TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@theloganbartlettshow 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. Executive Producer: Rashad Assir Producer: Leah Clapper Mixing and editing: Justin Hrabovsky Check out Unsupervised Learning, Redpoint's AI Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@UCUl-s_Vp-Kkk_XVyDylNwLA 🎥 Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCugS0jD5IAdoqzjaNYzns7w?sub_confirmation=1 Follow on Socials 📸 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/theloganbartlettshow 📱 X - https://twitter.com/loganbartshow 🎬 Clips on TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@theloganbartlettshow 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 of The Logan Bartlett Show, we sit down with the people behind today’s most important startups and extract the tactics, lessons, and frameworks they’ve learned the hard way. Conversations span hiring to GTM, product, growth, fundraising and everything in between - collectively forming the ultimate playbook to make you a better CEO, investor or board member. Tap follow and enable notifications to stay ahead of the game.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Logan Bartlett?

  Welcome to the Logan Bartlett Show. I am your host, Logan Bartlett, and what you're going to hear on this episode is a conversation I had with Jody Bonsell. Jody 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 is 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,

• 0:45Logan Bartlett?

  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, and so I hope you enjoy that conversation with Jody here now. And if you're enjoying this show, please do like, share, and subscribe on whatever platform that you're listening to us on. It really does go a long way to helping us continue to grow and have other people find our shows. So without further ado, here's Jody. Jody, thanks for doing this. So I want to get this right. So you're the founder of AppDynamics, sold to Cisco for $3.7 billion in 2017. But today, you have three separate jobs-ish. So I want

• 1:30Logan Bartlett?

  to get this right. Harness, Traceable, and Unusual. So Harness has about 800 people, most recently valued at $3.7 billion. Was that? That couldn't have been an accident.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  Yes, that was the goal I was shooting for. The valuations don't mean anything, but still, you have a good number. It's a good number.

• 1:49Logan Bartlett?

  You sold FD for 3.7.

• 1:51Speaker 01

  And it was kind of the five-year mark of selling FD, and I wanted to get, that was the goal five years. Let's try to get to the number.

• 1:59Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, that's great. Traceable has about, how many people?

• 2:03Speaker 01

  What 175?

• 2:04Logan Bartlett?

  175 and most recently valued at?

• 2:07Speaker 01

  450.

• 2:08Logan Bartlett?

  450 million and then unusual ventures has a billion under management roughly?

• 2:12Speaker 01

  About like 1.2 billion.

• 2:14Logan Bartlett?

  And you so you're the you're the CEO of the first two and you're a partner on the third. So you have you have way more jobs than than most people. How do you actually spend your days like how do you allocate your time across those different things?

• 2:28Speaker 01

  First of all, I don't think of like, you know, a lot of people ask me this thing. That's probably the number one question. How do you do all this?

• 2:34Logan Bartlett?

  It's unusual. I mean, yeah.

• 2:36Speaker 01

  And I really don't think in terms of time management. I really think of like, you know, where do I have to make impact? And I even call it like impact management now. It's like if I'm not making impact, you know, it's not worth spending time on those things. And if you tune for that, like, you know, where impact could be like, you know, if you're spending time, can you move the needle? If you're not spending time, can you move the needle negatively as well? Right? So that's both impact on both sides. And I like to maximize most of my time on those. And that can change, like, you know, that can change because you end up spending a lot of time on things that, you know, it's not going to move the needle one way or the other. If I reduce that, then creates a lot of time, free up a lot of time. Like you're not doing just unnecessary things for the sake of it.

• 3:15Speaker 01

  But, you know, obviously you have some patterns that you have to follow. You know, I follow some like, you know, that's the like the regularly scheduled meetings for harness happens on one day. And, you know, for traceable happens on one day and rest are kind of free flowing. So I kind of try to keep like no more than one third of my calendar, which is like just locked up on things. You know, so it's like free flowing and I can figure out what to do.

• 3:36Logan Bartlett?

  And so there's a time end up balancing, I guess, over the course of the year. At any point in time, it might oscillate up or down on the companies itself. But does it end up being 50 50 over the course of a year? Or some years is it 30% here, 70% there?

• 3:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't.

• 3:53Logan Bartlett?

  You don't even know.

• 3:54Speaker 01

  I don't even know. I don't like to interact like that.

• 3:56Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 3:56Speaker 01

  It's I look like, you know, the company's doing well, you know, which are the areas? If some area needs a lot of work, like, you know, requires like you have to really, really drill down and spend like, you know, 50 hours a week on something, you know, you find time to make that happen. You know, if you don't have to do that, that's great. Like, you know, but if you just you have to find time to make forward progress. That's how I look at it. I don't I don't look back at a year and say, where did I spend my time? It's like, you know, I look back at the year and say, what did we do in the last year?

• 4:22Logan Bartlett?

  Do you have overlapping investors between the two companies?

• 4:25Speaker 01

  Uh, yes, um, unusual ventures is.

• 4:28Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. So your venture firm invested in both.

• 4:30Speaker 01

  Yes. And, um, uh, one of the firms, IVP is invested in both.

• 4:34Logan Bartlett?

  Got it.

• 4:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's it.

• 4:35Logan Bartlett?

  Did it? Did the other venture investors ask this question? Or is it like, hey, you sold a company for $3.7 billion. So we're sort of just in the Jody Botts all business.

• 4:43Speaker 01

  It's a, it's a very natural question.

• 4:45Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, totally.

• 4:45Speaker 01

  Everyone asks me and they should ask me like, how do you, how do you do? You know, three different things. And, you know, I tell them like, and I would, I do it. As long as I think I'm doing a great job at it, you know? Or if I think my time is becoming a constraint in doing, doing it right, then I will. You know, see that maybe I should not do it. And your time doesn't become constrained if you, you know, look in more in terms of impact. And how do you are making the, uh, doing the right things that will change the trajectory of the company in the right way. Second, one is that. Second is you still have to set the tone of the, as CEOs of the, of the, of the business. So as you are doing that, are you building the right, you know, bringing the right vision, the right, uh, you know, the alignment across the different leaders that's there.

• 5:26Speaker 01

  But I also like to work long hours, you know, it's not, uh, for me like 60, 65, maybe 70 hours is, is not, you know, abnormal. If I'm not, if not doing that, I feel like I'm slacking that week.

• 5:37Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 5:37Speaker 01

  And, but it's my choice. Like it's not that I'm, I'm some, anyone is asking me to do it. You know, it's, uh, you know, I don't have too much interest in playing golf or like, you know, doing things that, uh, you know, this is what I enjoy.

• 5:48Logan Bartlett?

  When people give me shit about having a podcast as well, I'm going to point at you and say like, if this guy can do all of that, then I can do, I can get behind a mic, uh, once a week to talk to people.

• 5:56Speaker 01

  Why not? Like, you know, it's, uh, if you are enjoying it, you know, and you can balance it. It's like, I look at like, we are all smart enough, mature enough at this point and all these, you know, where we are in our, our careers and lives. But we learn how to manage, you know, different priorities. It's not like, you know, and you have to really, really tightly track your time and figure out the priorities like, you know, it's, but it's, it's all about prioritization.

• 6:20Logan Bartlett?

  You're, you're assuming a lot, uh, in the, that, that I am mature, but I appreciate that sentiment there. Uh, so, so do you keep, um, I, I'll let this topic go in a second, but you said you keep about a third of your schedule on. Booked and that's for things as it comes up and kind of variable things. Are there, is there anything else that you do interesting with your calendar?

• 6:39Speaker 01

  Well, I like to see like, you know, you have like almost like recurring meetings, like, you know, weekly,

• 6:43Logan Bartlett?

  Sure.

• 6:44Speaker 01

  You know, executive staff meeting, you know, every two weeks, you know, and both my companies, we have all hands meetings. You have like, you know, one on ones, things like that, like, so which are like just on the calendar, either once a week, once every two weeks, once a month, once a quarter, whatever it is, right? I like to keep them to fill no more than thirty five percent of my calendar is my normally my rule. So then the rest of the time, you can plan and you can, you can adjust on, you know, what's, what you need to do, where to make the most impact. You know, you obviously need the recurring things to have the cadence in your business. But what I've seen in many times, like your whole hundred percent of the calendar is filled with just recurring things, but you don't have time to do anything else. So that's, that's like, I like to keep, keep simple. And kind of make sure like, you know, have flexibility.

• 7:26Logan Bartlett?

  Does that time, the, the two thirds, does that tend to get filled with other meetings that are sensitive, time sensitive in some way, or does it tend to get filled with deep thought and stuff for you to, where you can make the biggest impact? Or is it, am I looking for?

• 7:40Speaker 01

  No, it's really depends on what's going on. I say, you know, I like to spend time with customers. So that's like, that's there. Like, and I want to go and meet customers. I like to spend time like recruiting and like, so sometimes you're recruiting for some key hire. And maybe your whole two weeks are filled, you know, majority of the time you are spending in, in trying to recruit the right person there, right? So, you know, sometimes it's like, it might be just deep in the product with the product teams. The deep thought of like, and I'm sitting in a cave somewhere and doing deep thought, I don't think so.

• 8:09Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, that's a venture person.

• 8:10Speaker 01

  But that happens also sometimes, like, you know, you just want to, you know, put your headphones and, you know, and maybe research something and think about something, but that's, that's to me is happening, you know, all the time.

• 8:20Logan Bartlett?

  Now, I talked to one of your investors, Matt Murphy from Menlo, who worked with you as well at AppDynamics. And he said, he said that you have a number of really interesting frameworks. He was very complimentary about how you have been able to go about finding product market fit. So I want to ask about that. But one of the things that you did have a structured framework that I, that I heard you talk about. Was evaluating opportunities for entrepreneurs. And so I think you said there are three different components and how you thought about it, evaluating the market size, the actual need for the product in the market, and then the passion for the opportunity. Can you talk about like that framework and how that how you give that advice to founders?

• 9:01Speaker 01

  You know, that's the number one question like, you know, people think of a lot of time like, I have this idea, should I quit my job and start a company? Or should I start a company about it? And people ask for this thing all the time, right? As an engineer, I like to create frameworks for most things, at least some basic mental frameworks.

• 9:15Logan Bartlett?

  You have a lot of good ones, by the way. I'm gonna ask you about a bunch of them. Yeah.

• 9:18Speaker 01

  So my framework on this is like, I look at like, you know, first of all, you have to look at, you know, do people care about solving this problem? You know, that's like, is this a real pain that people, the world cares about? You know, second is, does the world, many people in the world care about it, or just a small number of people?

• 9:33Logan Bartlett?

  So that's the market size one. How big is this market?

• 9:35Speaker 01

  You know, and I look at like, if someone has an idea that, you know, I want to build a tempoleen for dogs to jump on. You know, do people care about it? Like, you know, maybe some people do, like, if like a hundred people in the world care about it, do you really want to start a company on that? The third is then, you know, so you have to really validate that. And I look at like, you know, you have to talk to a lot of people to figure out, like, you know, is it a big problem that a lot of people care about? Is it real, real problem that people will pay for solving, solving? And then if you figure those two out, then you look at like, are you really, really passionate about this problem yourself? And I also, you know, ask people to look at like, are you, do you have some kind of a unique insight, expertise, something about this?

• 10:12Logan Bartlett?

  The why you?

• 10:13Speaker 01

  You know, why are you part of it? Because if it's a real problem that the world cares about solving, like, can you really win in solving this? Right? So then that, you know, say, if you, if you want to, like, if I have to start a company in fashion, something, you know, even though there's some real problems there that identify, there's very unlikely that I'm gonna win. I don't really have any unique insight, unique expertise, unique something. So that's maybe you should not start a company there. So I look at the, the simple test if you can do. You know, that you pretty convinced that the market is large, pretty convinced that the problem is what is like people gonna spend money on solving this problem in some some way. And, you know, that you are willing to, you know, spend a lot of time because you're passionate about this this problem and you have some unique expertise or insight. That's a good, good thing.

• 10:57Speaker 01

  Then you jump and start, start, start.

• 10:59Logan Bartlett?

  Do you think about if the market is large today? Or do you pick a point in the future and say, hey, can this be large if X, Y, Z happens?

• 11:07Speaker 01

  It's a, it's a combination of things. I think, I do think, you know, and I, I've tried to create a framework around it, but didn't really work well on that, that topic. But still, I feel roughly about like, I feel like two years is about a good, you know, future reference. Like, where you think like, you know, Kate's, or if the market is not today, if it's, it's fine if it's there two years from now. It's gonna be five years from now, your startup may not survive that five years. Like, you know, you have to have a very, very unique spot to have so much capital to survive through that. So I feel like two years is the right, if, if, if the, if the market is right now very, very ripe, there's high chance you're late, you're a bit late. You know, and so I feel like two years is about the right time, like, you know, where the puck is going two years from now, because you can find early adopters now. If something is going to be like, you know, ripe and mainstream like two years from now, there will be good number of early adopters today.

• 11:52Speaker 01

  That is, so you go after the early adopters now. Two years from now, it starts getting more mainstream, you know, that's where most people are getting, getting to. So you're ready to go and capture the mainstream at that point. You know, that's kind of roughly, I, I like to, to follow the, the, as a rule.

• 12:06Logan Bartlett?

  Now, you've, you've had to find product market fit a few different times, starting a, a few different companies, as well as investing and having seen it. How do you think about what framework you apply to making sure the component outside of the market size? The second one was, will the dogs actually eat the dog food, right? Or will the dogs jump on the trampoline, to use your example? What's the methodology and process that you go about evaluating this?

• 12:27Speaker 01

  Product market fit is such a, such a vague process, like, you know, you ask 10 people, they'll return definitions to begin with. How do you go to product market fit is really, people, most of people think it's a, it's just a, just a dark art. You know, so we have tried to create a framework around that and, you know, I, I've brought in my experiences from MapDynamics and Harnes and Trisible and, you know, everything that I've seen. And you know, at unusual what we we we write a lot about it, we have the unusual field guide to talk about it, which and to create share the experiences, kind of can bring it down into a few areas like which is one is that focus on on real cold outreach to get to the to have real conversations. What happens many times is like, you know, you start as a as a founder, you find some friends and family, some investors will introduce you, you are if you are in place

• 13:11Speaker 01

  like Silicon Valley, there will be the Silicon Valley echo chamber, you'll talk to like, you know, people you know in Silicon Valley, and you just not hear the right feedback. Like, so if you can find people cold who will be your likely target buyers at some point, and they will even take a meeting with you and you can validate something with them, you know, that's a that's that's a that's a good sign. So that's what we, I would say, first part of the framework, like, you know, don't just go in those warm meetings at all. I remember, you know, Abdynamix, I first started there, one of our investors said, let me introduce you to some banks in New York, and, you know, the investor had a few connections there. And, you know, I did a trip trip to Wall Street, you know, and this was like company was four people, and I did a trip to Wall Street, you know, I didn't have any, I didn't want

• 13:55Speaker 01

  to spend any money, so, you know, took up, you know, changed my shirt and, you know, washed my face in a Starbucks too, so that I don't have to pay a hotel room. But then I did the whole, like, I met like seven different banks in in in in in one one day, like, back to back, came back, like, oh, great set of meetings, you know, high fives to to our team, like, you know, we have found the product market fit, like, I have great meetings. And then I started following up with those seven people, like, you know, hey, we had a great meeting in New York, and, you know, following up on being a beta customer or something, no one even responded. You know, and that that clicked to me, it's like, you know, that those people took the meeting because, you know, it was a warm intro, they wanted to be nice to the the person making the intro. And the meeting was good because they wanted to be nice to me, because, you know, they just, if you're a founder who are passionate about your thing, they don't want to be like,

• 14:38Speaker 01

  you know, telling your face that, you know, your thing is not good, or they don't care about your thing, or they don't need your thing. And since then, I realized, like, you know, the best way to get real good feedback is cold, like, you know, you reach out to people cold on LinkedIn, if you're not even getting a response from anyone, there's a good chance that, like, you know, no one cares about your problem, or like, in audio message, or what, how you said, talking about it. If people take the cold meeting with you, there's a good sign that that means there is an interest in this thing. You know, if the meetings go well after that, where they don't really have an obligation of any kind to be nice to you, you know, that's a that's a good sign as well, right? So that's that's really the first part of it. Second is, you know, do a lot of it. You know, people, a lot of people do like, you know, I talk to three people or five people and, you know, this one customer we talked to here, you know, they said this thing and they're excited and ready to go.

• 15:24Speaker 01

  And, you know, I'd like to tell everyone is like, you know, you gotta look at at least thirty to fifty conversations. You know, and the conversations to the point where the test is when you're hearing the same things. You know, it's the, if you start hearing the same thing, that means you have found the, you've done enough conversations, that you're not really learning anything new, it's the same things again and again. And the third is being iterative about this, like whenever the first thing you start with, like you say, this is the problem you're solving, this is why our differentiated technology solution to solve this problem is, you know, your message and story would not be right the first time, like, so you do five conversations, you trade and do another five and you trade, another five you trade. By the time you're at forty conversations, you kind of figure out the, the solution of how you sell it and how you talk about it and do you have the right product market fit or not.

• 16:09Speaker 01

  So I like to promote that and that's what, you know, we talk a lot about that on Usual as well, which is the, this kind of framework of go cold, you know, in outreach, do a high volume, so you're not like biased by a few. And it trade quickly on that. And then you have like a sort of a good definition of your forty, fifty people who are saying the same things. You figure out how to like, you know, talk about this, the differentiation, the product, the, you know, the pain. That's the basis of a good product market fit.

• 16:33Logan Bartlett?

  So you've gone cold to these people, you've heard validation of product market fit being there, at least commonalities that they're using the same words. Now you start building the product. And there's a balance between speed and product quality, and there's a tension between those two. How do you think about that now that you've heard this feedback? Going back to those customers and saying, hey, we have it. What's your framework for making that?

• 17:00Speaker 01

  I think this one, a lot comes down to what is the, the market, right? And if you're going in a market that is no existing incumbent. Speed is important, like, you know, because the quality bar could be low, the quality as in like, you know, the completeness of features, etc. Like, you know, because it's uh, it's something better than nothing.

• 17:17Logan Bartlett?

  The MVP is low.

• 17:19Speaker 01

  It's MVP is low. You know, you used to have this whole lean startup thing. And people got too crazy on the lean startup thing, like, you know, people look, I mean, I build this thing very lean and then this, this thing. Now, look, if you're going in a market with a lot of incumbent players, or like, strong incumbent players, the lean startup thing doesn't work. Like, no one is gonna buy your lean MVP. And so it's like, you know, you have to find something that's uh, you know, many times it's like you have to get to at least the, you know, there's some kind of parity with the incumbent if you want to go and replace the incumbent. And if incumbent has a lot of, you know, important features, you have to go and get parity and then you build a differentiation on top of that, right? So your MVP definition is very different, depends on how strong the incumbents are. And so, to me, it's like, you know, how, what you build out, it depends on that, like, you know, it's like, if you look at, say,

• 18:05Speaker 01

  you know, great example was Workday, you know, when uh, Workday was starting to, like, we're gonna be the SaaS version of PeopleSoft, people will replace PeopleSoft with Workday. Now, if you apply the, like, you know, let's start with a very small subset of the PeopleSoft features. And now, no one is gonna replace PeopleSoft with Workday. So even your MVP, one has to have everything that PeopleSoft will do. And that's the, and that's your, your differentiation is that you're SaaS, PeopleSoft was not SaaS. So that's, you know, but your MVP bar is high, so you have to finish that to go and build that market. If you're going into a completely new market where there's no one there, then, yeah, you start fast. So that's how I would balance it.

• 18:42Logan Bartlett?

  What about i- in the uh, product development lifecycle? So now there actually is a product that's out there in the wild and you've, you've either gotten it quickly or you've built for a while and, and you're trying to take feedback. And there's a bunch of different constituents that can give you feedback, right? There's your own intuition, which uh, then there's salespeople out there talking the field, there's what your engineering team thinks, there's what their product team thinks, all of them are probably, ideally, they'd be singing the same tune, but probably all have different competing priorities.

• 19:09Speaker 01

  They, they are not, and they're competing priorities. And I would say the, the, the product leadership team in a, in a startup has to, or any company, really. Um, a startup normally, the, the founders and CEOs will be the product leaders. You have to manage that, you know. Actually, I've written about this framework in a, in a, in a post called the, like, the four lists that someone has to manage. The one list is, you know, what your What your customers are asking for. You know, and customers are asking for, hey, I don't have this feature, I don't have this feature, I can't adopt. And with their unhappy about something, they can, you know, and uh so you have to to build that list. The second list would be what your salespeople are saying that, you know, we don't have this feature, we're losing this deal. Or, you know, our competitors are are, you know, are really, uh, you know, putting things uh in the market that we can't compete with, you know, unless we have these things, etc.

• 19:53Speaker 01

  So the third list, uh uh after that is your your kind of like technical debt that builds up over time, like, you know, architectural debt, quality debt. You know, different kind of things which the engineers are asking for, hey, we need to stop building features and do this, otherwise everything will crash or we will have performance issues or we'll have like, you know, security issues or whatnot, right? And the fourth list, you know, which is I call like the the the kind of your vision list, which is like what the what, where do you need to grow the the the the your TAM, your market, your opportunity, like the new. You know, many times when you start to start something, anything like you have a big vision and you start with maybe fifty percent of that in initially and now you have to build the rest and, you know, maybe your vision is growing over time as well. So that's the fourth list. So anytime you almost have to balance the four, like, you know, it's like, you know, your four list, you any, let's say you're doing a like a

• 20:38Speaker 01

  planning for one quarter of engineering work or one sprint of engineering work. You pick some things from each of the list and say, okay, what's the, that's your, that's, that's your, your, your plan for this quarter or this sprint. And things can change, like, you know, you're losing a lot of customers, you know, on churn, you may have to fill most of your work with that. And if you're losing a lot of deals to customers, to competitors, because you don't have like one feature that's like your competitor is kicking your ass on that one feature. You have to, you know, prioritize that, you know, but it's normally want a balance of balance of things around those four.

• 21:08Logan Bartlett?

  Do you, do you actually have those lists written out, uh, and you're, you're checking them off and I assume some of them double overlap and you're?

• 21:15Speaker 01

  They, they, yes, they do, like, and, you know, normally we'll have like, you know, let's say the feature requests are coming from customers. You know, we'll make them like, you know, as a, as a list and these are like, you know. Mechanisms will use like, you know, maybe tags or something like will, will, you can filter in, in Jira and you say, okay, these are the list of all the feature requests coming from customers. You're prioritizing it, the product managers are managing that backlog. You know, you have another list that's coming from like, you know, sales people, not, most likely sales engineers, who are like, you know, maintaining a list of the feature gaps you have compared, you know, where you, why you're losing a deal, et cetera. And then the engineers maintaining their tech. And so these are all like, you know, uh, the lists are, are there very openly for us, you know, and then we kind of manage, but in the, the, when we plan, we, we, uh, you know, we balance them out. The framework works very well, like, you know, I've been doing it for, for, you know, this kind of thing for a, for a long time.

• 22:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Now, it's, it's, it's a simple framework, but I do think like, you know, having that mindset of like, you know, that it's always a balance of those four. And you make a conscious decision on what you're taking from those. And, you know, and also like, you know, sometimes you're also making conscious decision on where do you spend your, your dollars on, right? You know, let's say, you know, the fourth bucket, I call the fourth bucket is like the, the, with your vision kind of bucket, is you're also expanding your addressable market, like, because if you keep doing what you're doing in the first three buckets, maybe like, you know, you're fine for this year. But like, you know, I, that's, that's how you look at, like, say you're doing five million revenue in this year and your plan is to 20 million next year. That you have to start building towards, like, do you have enough addressable market and do you have enough, like, you know, you have to expand into adjacent areas for that going from five to 20.

• 22:43Speaker 01

  You know, so you have to invest into, into that, that far ahead, right? So it's a, it's a, it's, it's, it's key as well.

• 22:49Logan Bartlett?

  I've heard you say that you structure your teams as startups within startups and you, there's, there's some way of operating in which you, you assume, uh, or that you encourage the team to assume that the other departments aren't actually good at their job and that they need to be the best at what they're doing. Can, can you talk about like what a startup within a startup actually means for these different departments?

• 23:07Speaker 01

  Sure. Two different things, though. The startup within startup, when I set it up, it's more around the product areas. Like, you know, it's like, say, and I look at like, you know, most companies will start with like one product or one, call it like one product, one major use case that you are focused on.

• 23:23Speaker 01

  You know, and you will start slowing down on your growth if you only do that one. So at some point you have to go from one to two, so your second product to third product to fourth product. And like in most of the markets, you have to keep growing into a platform at some point. Like, you know, if you want to be billion dollar revenue, it's hard to do it without becoming a platform. But it's very hard to innovate, you know, in the, and building a second product successfully or a third product successfully for the companies. And that's where I, I, you know, like this kind of a model of, you know, when you're building a second product, almost start there is a startup inside the company. You know, and what that means is like, you know, when you start your first product, whether it's a startup, it's a real startup. You normally have a small team, maybe like, you know, five, six engineers working on it, you know,

• 24:03Speaker 01

  who are very driven about, you know, making, finding the product market fit, building, moving things, moving fast. You know, they're not slowed down by processes and the, you know, the burden that comes with, with, with it. So when you're building a second product, you want to do the same thing, you know, which is not normally, what normally happens. Like, you know, if your first product is mature and selling and, you know, you, at that time, you have to mature your processes on quality and how you do engineering and how you talk to customers. And you have like, you know, how you sell it, all of those are like, you know, were designed for that mature scale. And now you try to build the same things on your product number two, it just fails. Like, so I like to do like, you know, product number two, build exactly, go back to exactly how you build your product number one successfully. And it should not be any different.

• 24:47Speaker 01

  You know, and you build your product number three, it's the same, same kind of thing, right? So I, I like to structure these, when you build new products into like a sort of a small startup inside the company. And even the funding model is very similar to a startup. Like, you know, when we look at like, you know, let's say, when you're building the, you're, you're starting building the product, you normally need like five, six engineers. And once you start getting to, let's say, you know, call it the, the seed stage startup, right? And when you start getting to like, say, half a million, a million of kind of revenue, then you kind of grow that to, you know, ten, fifteen engineers, you know, when you start getting to, you know, maybe three to five million of revenue in that, then you start growing it to like, you know, twenty, twenty-five people, you know, and in that, that product kind of startup, when you start growing it from like, you know, maybe ten, fifteen million revenue, then you put it to like thirty, forty engineers and some point it starts like you don't need it.

• 25:31Speaker 01

  So but you, you can even tie your investment, not too different than like how the, the, the venture kind of investment work. And to me, that's model has worked so well, like Abdownomics, we started with one product. And we grew for two like, you know, by the time we were, you know, we are going IPO and all that, we were, we were about nine products at that time. And you know, that was why we were going so fast. We were growing like almost business was almost doubling at that time because the nine products we were able to build. At Harness, I kind of brought in the same model and tried to to kind of do a even more mature version of that startup within startup model. Or like how we go from one product to to much more, like you know, Harness, we, we are in the DevOps platform space and we started with one product, continuous delivery.

• 26:11Speaker 01

  And just in a few years, we have expanded into like, you know, we have eight products in the market who are really strong and competitive to the best in class players there. And people really ask like, how do you build all these things? Like, you know, you have CD and you have, you know, CI and feature flags and cloud cost management and so many, where that there are separate startups that compete in all of these markets. Because of the startup within startup model that that kind of that we have been able able to do. So that's the, that's the startup within startup concept, which I really like that, you know, it allows to scale. And to me, the inspiration always been Amazon on this. Like, Amazon has done, like, how Amazon became Amazon is this fundamentally a model like this. Like, that's how they have, you know, gone from like, you know, one product to second to third to like, you know, what they've gone into into all these different markets and build

• 26:54Speaker 01

  build amazing, you know, products in these markets. So it's kind of a similar-ish concept in the B two B kind of world that that we bring in. Your second question was about like, you know, I think I talked about this at some point where I want every department to be, you know, excellent on its own. You know, it's like, I call it like the what's a competitive advantage? Like, you know, some companies have that your competitive advantage is your, how you do engineering. That you do engineering so well that, you know, it's hard for, that becomes your competitive advantage. Some companies have like, you know, sales is your competitive advantage, like they do, you know, the sales execution is so strong and that's your competitive advantage. And people will say that, like, you know, the, the, the companies with engineering has a competitive advantage, like our product is so good, it sells, why it sell? We don't need sales and marketing people.

• 27:39Speaker 01

  And the sales, sometimes the salespeople comes from really good sales environments, right? They will say, you know, we had the fourth best product in our, in our space, but our sales were so good, we still beat everyone because, you know, we are so good sellers, we can sell even a, like a comb to a bald guy kind of thing, right? So I start to like, you know, like, why not just have that as a mindset then, right? You know, which is not a mindset. So to engineers, I like to say like, let's build a product that, you know, we can, you know, that is so good that we don't need the best sellers. And to the sales guys, I tell them like, you know, let's bring the best sales execution like that. You don't need the best product, you know, so we have both as a competitive advantage. And the other one I also look at is like the customer success, like, you know, can you make customer success as a competitive advantage that your customers are saying,

• 28:22Speaker 01

  hey, these guys are so good in supporting the customer that we want to buy from, you know, that. And then I've seen that's a competitive, like, you know, becomes a competitive advantage as well. You can have your marketing brand as a competitive advantage as well. So I like to say like, if you, if you have one competitive advantage that your product is great, that other threes are not, that's still fine. But you get two or three as competitive advantage that buy on it on their own, they are, they are a big competitive strength and advantage, why not? And then you combine them, then it becomes like, you know, real, really powerful.

• 28:51Logan Bartlett?

  Before founding AppDynamics, you were a engineer at Wiley, which was kind of a V1 to AppDynamics's cloud version of the product. And you went from that to CEO of a, how many people did AppDynamics have?

• 29:09Speaker 01

  About fifteen hundred.

• 29:11Logan Bartlett?

  Fifteen hundred. So you scaled along the way. I'd be interested in that path and going from figuring out how to manage all these people and all that. But one of the things on the journey that I thought was particularly unusual that you've alluded to is you really found religion on sales and enterprise sales. And even at the beginning, when I asked you how you spend your time, you talked about meeting customers and recruiting, which are both sales. Was there a mentor or someone that sort of taught you that path? Or did you just figure out this was something you needed to become best in breed? Because especially at the time you were doing this, two thousand and eight, nine, ten, there was all the no salespeople, optimizely mindset of let the product sell itself. We'll never need salespeople again.

• 29:51Speaker 01

  First of all, let me, you know, let me correct on the where I spend my time. The core of it, I'm a product guy. So the way I like to spend the most of my time is product. You know, it's like, so customers recruiting, you know, can take a lot of time, which is great. But I Where I run most of my time is product and actually in most of my companies, I am the chief product officer as well. Like, you know, I've done things, I was the chief product officer. I don't hire chief product officer because that's my, I consider that's my job and that's my strength. And same in harness, like, you know, I'm the chief product officer, I run the the product myself, like the product teams, you know, uh. I don't have a senior level uh product leader because of that. And that's where a majority of my time goes. So that's, you know, this one to to to to correct that. But you can't build build, you know, great products without talking to customers, especially in our kind of space where the

• 30:36Speaker 01

  the B two B kind of enterprise kind of space. So that's why you have to spend a lot of time with with with customers there. But being a product guy, you know, that's where the challenge is like, and how do you find religion in sales as well, right? So I I I'll tell you, like at Abdomics, you are about, um, our product was very strong. You know, we had the best product in the market, you know, we are, so we are, we are, we are growing rapidly, you know, we are about like, you know, grew from the the just launched the company, we were in uh maybe seven, eight million of A R R uh uh growing, growing fast there. And I met with Dave, David Ticheria, who's the, you know, uh, CEO at MongoDB now, he was, he was uh uh less trying to figure out what to do at that point, uh, you know, uh, uh, he was just, he just left BMC at that time.

• 31:19Speaker 01

  And I met him for breakfast and we were talking about this, like, you know, that our product is doing so well. And I was also in this thing of like, you know, the product is all about the the the great product, which I, you know, that's my strength, my, that's my superpower is. And that we had all these advantages in our product. And Dave was like, you know, that's, this all great, but you know what, imagine like, you know, what you, if you have the similar kind of advantages on the sales execution as well. And then if you can combine the two, and you know, that's, that's really what started me, uh, you know, getting, uh, started me on that kind of journey on like, you know, can you combine a great product with a great sales execution? You know, that what happens at that point, that was his his his challenge to me, like, you know, can you combine the two, like, you know, your great product, combine with great sales execution.

• 32:00Speaker 01

  Then I met with John McMahon, uh, right after John McMahon is, and you've, you're the, you know, listeners and all will know is, it's kind of a legend in the enterprise selling world. Uh, um, you know, it it came from this company P T C, which Became a legendary company on how the sales, you know, sales was done in a very scientific way. Um, and so, you know, he became an advisor to to AppDynamics. And I learned a lot from him, you know, on what does, you know, selling means, you know. When I started as an engineer, I thought selling was like, you know, slick guys with like slick hair, whining and dining and playing golf, and that's the only way you do sales. You know, it was kind of this kind of a, almost like a black art.

• 32:42Speaker 01

  And which, by the way, most people still think that's how it is, which really is not the case. You know, so that's what, you know, spending time with the likes of, like, likes of John McMahon. You know, you start learning the, there's a science behind enterprise sales, like, you know, the science of, like, you know, the, how it's all works, like, how can you do it in a repeatable, scalable kind of way? And that really fascinated me, like, you know, that's, that you, then you don't have this, like, you know, uh, you know, product I know how to, how to build the great products. You know, but I almost felt like, you know, this is black art of selling, you know, after that. And the only way you do that is this product like growth, et cetera, which is what, you know, what we're doing at AppDynamics early on.

• 33:20Speaker 01

  And then we tried, then once I learned that, you know, sales could also be more predictable and manageable and have a, there could be a science behind sales. The, you know, I just got very fascinated about it, like that if you combine the two, then you get the best, uh, you know, best, uh, best opportunity there. That's what we ended up building at AppDynamics and, you know, that's how I look at, you know, harness that we have ended up, we have built it, built. That's why we are starting to build a traceable too.

• 33:43Logan Bartlett?

  It's, it's amazing, the McMahon tree that permeates Silicon Valley at this point. The number of great companies that have sort of grown up under his tutelage. What, um, if, if, if you were a first time founder or a young founder that comes out of technical background, product oriented and that, were there any, any lessons in particular that you have about?

• 34:05Logan Bartlett?

  Thinking and even approaching, understanding sales. You mentioned the architecture point and that there's actually methodology behind it. But any interesting things that you learned along the way that that might be helpful to someone that's kind of first broaching this topic?

• 34:20Speaker 01

  I think the number one, if like someone is new to understanding this, is sales is a numbers game. That really is the foundation of everything scientific about sales, that it's really a numbers game that you want to manage in the right way, which is like, you know, if you want to have a million dollars of business, how many, you know, you know, sales opportunities you need to have, you need to have maybe three to four million dollars of sales opportunity. What does an opportunity mean that, you know, that it will convert like from three to four million dollars to a million dollar, what's the definition of it? You know, so that becomes a qualification and all that criteria, right? So you have a predictable rate of conversion from a numbers game from stage one to, you know, some stage to the final stage, you know, to get to a sales opportunity, how many

• 35:04Speaker 01

  meetings you need to do, you know, and it's eye opening for many first time, you know, engineer turned founder CEOs. And it was eye opening for me, like, you know, like to get one customer, when I, when you realize, okay, to get one customer, we need to have about, about, you know, somewhere around 15 to 20 meetings. And then you realize like, you know, that we are like obsessing with every meeting, which is good, which is good, but really is the numbers game of like, you know, that I need to build a machine that I need 15 to 20 meetings, you know, the 15 to 20 meetings will convert to like, you know, maybe five to, you know, five, five, six, you know, qualified sales opportunities that will get me like, you know, two or three, you know, close deals there, something like that, right? But that just realization that it's, it's, it's, it's a funnel with a, with a numbers

• 35:49Speaker 01

  game. And what you need to do is to manage the size of the funnel right, like at every place, but also the, the conversion rates at every place right and tune them in the right place. That's, that's the, you know, I would say the, the primary first time learning on the, from an engineer to, you know, to have around sales.

• 36:08Logan Bartlett?

  What about scaling as a leader? So you, you, you grew from just yourself as a solo founder, which I want to ask about, but then leading a very big team.

• 36:20Logan Bartlett?

  What were some of the lessons about hiring people along the way? Like different executives you brought in, different team members that you had from the apte journey and then that you brought over to harness?

• 36:30Speaker 01

  You learn as you as you go, right? You know, a lot of times people think like, you know, the answers are all figured out. Like first time founders, I tell them all the time, like it's the it's it's there's no point trying to learn everything, you know, upfront, you know, focus on what you need to do for the next 12 to 18 months and just try to learn that like this just Silicon Valley and the whole tech world is so bombarded by so much advice, by the way. And that advice

• 36:53Logan Bartlett?

  Some guys even have podcasts for it.

• 36:54Speaker 01

  Yes, you know, or like some guys who come and talk on podcasts and give advice, which like, you know, and like, sometimes that advice could be overwhelming and too much like, so you really focus on what the way I like to think of is like, you know, what you need to achieve in the next 12 to 18 months. That's the next major milestone. What you need to learn in that for that, right? So you learn in that and then as you go, you achieve that and you don't think about the what beyond that too much. And then you go to the next one and you learn there. So same when growing as an engineer turned first time founder to like managing the business, that's kind of how I look at it like when I just first starting, like what was the the the success criteria for me for the very beginning was like raise capital and, you

• 37:35Speaker 01

  know, hire an initial team of maybe five, seven people and build a good product market fit. So when I look at like, you know, hiring team and learning skills for myself as well, it really came down to those three, like, you know, I never raised capital before. Can I learn how to raise capital to get the company going? You know, I actually never recruited before. So can I convince like five, seven engineers, good engineers to come and join me as they are? And then can I find product market fit and do I need people to help me through the through either of those three? And so that's your your journey to building the team. Now you achieve that milestone, let's say, right? You know, which is like, say, a year, 18 months later. Now your next milestone is in early sales, like, you know, that you need to find people to do, you know, you have as a company, you have to get to the first million or two of

• 38:19Speaker 01

  sales and get the, you know, the close your first deals, maybe launch a company out of stealth. So you need some marketing expertise you do to launch the company, get the messaging and positioning right. You need to have like the sales expertise to get that early sales going to, you know, so you need to find the people with those skills and you have to learn some of those skills, so you know, into some level as well. Then you start getting the next stage, like, you know, can now you are, you know, you have to start scaling your sales where like, you know, you can't just have the founders with a few salespeople, you know, selling. You know, to have us, it's now you need to find people who are good in those skills. Like, you know, how do you build a scalable sales organization? How do you do demand generation in a scalable way? And how do you do customer support in a scalable way? Your engineering team is growing, so how can you do like, you know,

• 39:02Speaker 01

  more structured engineering, you know, at a, you know, at a scale? So now you start bringing those leaders and learn how to manage them, like. And then you go to the next level and now it's like, you know, about scaling even more and like you're running it like where it's not just one level of management, you have like two, three levels of management, what you need to learn on that. Keep, start getting closer to an IPO, it becomes a lot about financial management and financial tuning and, you know, the, the, the, you know, uh, so it's all different skills. And I look at like, you know, it's best is to just go as you, you know, uh, and, and go deep into that particular skill area and bring the right people on hiring, you know, who are very good on those, like, you know, so at any stage, you want to partner and bring the right people, you know, who some you can learn from also and, you know, you who can,

• 39:47Speaker 01

  who have done some of those things before, so you are, you know, as a founder, you, you're, it becomes easier for you. Uh, I always look at like, you know, the areas where I don't know too much, I need to hire someone who's, who's extremely experienced and who has done that, that kind of job before. In areas where I know a lot, maybe I can hire someone who's not done that job before and is still fine, like I'll still feel comfortable. So that's how I, that's a framework I kind of done it, what I did at AppDynamics, like, and I never did sales before. So the first time I wanted to, like, many people are like, just hire a sales rep or two, or three sales reps, right? And I was like, if I can, the, I don't even know how to interview the sales reps and I don't even know how to manage them, like, you know. So can I hire someone who has done that before? And like, you know, so I can learn and they know how to hire sales reps and they have more experience, I don't need to teach them,

• 40:32Speaker 01

  you know, or I don't need to manage them in, in a, in, in high amount of detail because I don't even know how to manage them. Right, so then I bring a VP of Sales who knows how to do that and then it becomes easier. And then you learn from them as you go, right? So then you can improve at some point, you know, maybe now you can do sales better, right?

• 40:50Logan Bartlett?

  In the interview process as well, you had said that you you'll use that as a learning opportunity. And so maybe use VP of Sales as an example or VP of Marketing or something. How do you go about using, if that role exists, using that as an opportunity to really learn and get better yourself at it?

• 41:07Speaker 01

  You know, interviews are great, you know, it's almost like a like a hack to learn about something. Yeah, so let's say you want to figure out like if you want to hire a, I'll make up, VP of Demand Generation on for for your company. And you have no idea like what what really to to to have it to look for, right? You know, we are, so let's say you start interviewing people, you know, people will come in and you ask them, hey, how would you? This is where we are, like, you know, right now we are at five million of revenue and you want to grow to, you know, fifty million of revenue over the next these years. These are our constraints, we are not getting enough demand from here. Our product like is this, our competitors are like this, you know, how would you build a demand generation program for for for for for our business to solve these problems?

• 41:52Speaker 01

  And what's your experience of like, you know, success or failure of similar situations before that you know of, right? And someone who's who's done that before, they will tell you like, you know, okay, this is what, you know, your plan, you know, if I was in this this role, this is the plan I would I would build, this is what I would do. And they will can also tell you like, you know, we tried these things in my last job here, this worked well and this job didn't work well. And I've done this before where what the learnings are. And now you have that conversation for like, you know, with someone and you do with like, you know, if you do with like five to ten people. It's you will learn a lot, like you know, like, okay, what is the right, you know, plan for you, your company probably like, and it's almost like the, you know, the what I was talking about, the product market fit. Like, you know, at some point, the conversation start become sounding the same.

• 42:35Speaker 01

  Same thing on this as well, like, you know, because you will start learning in the interview process and then you can start asking the next level of questions, you know, and then, you know, you know, like, what your plan should be and who is the right kind of person for your company as well. Right, so I find interview process quite, quite a good, you know, it's a good hack to learn about, about something.

• 42:53Logan Bartlett?

  It sounds like it depends on the functional role that you would do this, but how do you think about hiring someone that's been there, done that? Because inevitably, if they're willing to join your company and they've been there, done that, there, there needs to be a reason that they would go to theoretically an earlier stage business to go do it versus taking a chance on someone that can be in their ascendancy of their career, who is very high potential. And so which one of those did you orient more towards?

• 43:22Speaker 01

  You know, it's, it's, it's, it's, normally my teams have been a balance of the two. Like, half the teams would be on the, you know, young upcomers, you know, you take a chance on them and you kind of build on that, and half the team is very experienced people. And so it really depends on the person and, you know, I normally would say I really like to take chance on, on, on people who are, who are, who are earlier. But at the same time, I do think like, you know, if every function in your company is that this is kind of like the same, you're taking some risk of lack of experience in the organization. So you have to kind of balance the team out, you know, it's the, on how your executive team is, like, you know, in some function, that's a good, you know, good seniority and being there, done there.

• 44:05Speaker 01

  And yes, it's hard to recruit, like, you know, being there, done there people if you're earlier, you know, but that's the beauty of the, the startup economics and the startup world, like, you know, and the startup people, like, and people who do want to come in earlier stages, you know, they, who want to build, you know, they like the, they like the building, like, you know, and you want those people you want, like, you know, that someone who has, and maybe they've not gone, like, you know, let's say you're bringing someone, someone who has gone from a, you know, three million to 25 million journey of a startup. And, you know, now, maybe they want to go from, you know, 10 million to 75 million journey of, you know, this time, but they like that buildup, the journey, the hyperscale, those are the people you want to bring ideally, right? And but it's good that they have seen some of that, you know, what happens as you grow.

• 44:47Speaker 01

  And maybe they've not gone to the stage that we want to go this time, but it's, it's still, those learnings are pretty powerful.

• 44:52Logan Bartlett?

  I heard you say that culture fit wasn't something that you hire for. Why, why is that the case?

• 44:57Speaker 01

  I find the concept of culture fit very strange, like, it's the... The way I look at this, like, you know, so you're hiring someone from Google, a very different culture. Hiring someone from Apple is a strong culture. You're hiring someone from Amazon is a different culture. Now, if you ask them, like, you know, to assess the culture fit by, you know, tell me how you did X, Y, Z in your current job. And if they're working at Amazon, they will tell you, you know, this is how you do things. They're working at, you know, Apple, they will tell you in a different way what they, because that's how the company cultures are. So it's really a judgment on the person, on the culture, on like how they operate. You know, it's not really, so I, the way I look at them is like, you know, you know, my company has a culture, harness has a culture, traceable has a culture, I've done makes a culture, can this person fit in our culture?

• 45:37Speaker 01

  Which is very different than like, you know, a lot of the culture fit is all about, like, you know, so I look at like, you know, can we teach them our, you know, you know, so we focus a lot on like teaching our culture. Instead of like, you know, uh, instead of trying to figure out the fit, et cetera, like, you know, if someone joins Apple, they will learn how to operate in Apple culture. Are they fit there at the time they joined? Probably not, but if they're not willing to change how they operate, that's probably the bigger problem. You know, if someone joins, joins Amazon, they will operate in a very different way than they join Apple. So I look at like, can we teach people to operate in our, in, in our culture? Can we be deliberate about defining what our culture is? You know, and can we create a deliberate framework around, around that?

• 46:17Speaker 01

  And so to me, it's more about like, can people go and learn our culture, less about like, you know, what culture, how they operate. And most of the culture fit then ends up about like, you know, is this a, you know, you know, uh, is this a person you want to grab a beer with? Which is an important thing, but the problem with that is like, you know, that creates a lot of the, the, the kind of the lack of diversity, you know, you know, everyone starts, you know, uh, looking and feeling and talking the same. And that's why I don't really think too much about, you know, it's like testing for culture fit. Now, I look for like, you know, hire the right people, you know, who are coachable, you know, who are, you know, who are, you know, smart and coachable is, is, is what we look for. And then we coach them our culture, you know, but that's, you know, and that's, that's it.

• 47:01Logan Bartlett?

  Can you assess that in an interview process, or do you need to do reference calls to figure that type of thing out?

• 47:06Speaker 01

  Most of the times you can do interview process. You know, if you have an interview process done with multiple people in the interview panel, the right kind of ways. Uh, you can like smart part is like, you know, a lot of it is like, you know, what they have done before. Uh, is will, but how you, how you ask like multiple levels of questions in an, in an, in an interview on, you know, do they really have the depth in what they're talking about? You know, they have to really, you know, push the boundaries of something to solve like some harder pro- hard problems. So that's you, you look for in that, you know, like, yeah, like, you know, if you have four smart people interviewing someone and they all say, okay, this guy is pretty smart, there's a reasonable chance that that guy is pretty smart, the guy or, or, or, or, or, or, or, you know.

• 47:50Speaker 01

  And you have like, you know, now it's the same thing applies to the, the coachable part. Coachable part, I like to look at like, you know, throw them different things and, you know, see are they flexible? Like the intellectually flexible on, on new things and learning and, you know, how fast learner they are and how they like to learn new things, et cetera. So you can make that as part of your, your, you know, interview process, et cetera. Uh, references are important for some roles, references are pretty important. But, you know, it's hard to do references for every role.

• 48:18Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 48:19Speaker 01

  Second is I feel like most of the references are kind of bullshit, you know, it's like people don't say bad things. You know, you have to find the right references. Uh, you know, I feel like, you know, many times instead of doing the reference call, you can, you can achieve everything from the reference by just having a list of references. If someone can't give you a good list of references from their prior bosses, et cetera. That's like, you know, that's a problem. If they give you a good list of references, you probably don't need to do the call because you kind of know like, you know, if these people are willing to be this person's reference, they, you know, that's all, all good, all good there.

• 48:52Logan Bartlett?

  The flip side of hiring, which you've done a lot of is firing. Um, what have you learned about letting people go, um, that you might want to impart on founders or operators?

• 49:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, that's always the hardest thing to learn for any, any, um, any CEO or any leader.

• 49:11Speaker 01

  But that's that's that's probably the single most important decision you have to make in most of the times. First of all, like, you know, hiring is not accurate all the time, like, in whatever you do in the hiring process. You know, you're not gonna get, like, let's say, eight out of ten right. So now you have your two out of ten that are not right, you know, and now how long you stay with them? That's a that becomes a important question, you know, I I like the the simple rule of like, you know, if you if you are, again, going to a framework, and my framework is if I'm defending someone fourth time, there's a problem. Like, when someone comes to me and say, okay, you know, this this person is not working out, and, you know, we have we made a mistake, you know, especially if your culture, which is of openness, transparency, etc., right?

• 49:53Speaker 01

  Then, you know, and someone comes and like tells you, like, you know, we have a we made a mistake on hiring, like, this person is not doing a good job here, whatever it is, right? And I'm defending them, and, you know, that's that's that is fine, but if I'm defending second time, third time, by the time it's fourth time, I know it's it's a it's it's it's a hiring mistake there that I have to defend, whatever that that is, and, you know, obviously, I'm taking those first three as a feedback and, you know, and as a as a coaching opportunity for the, you know, for for that person, so that they have the opportunity. But if they can't get there, that's a that's a that's a that's a sign that, you know, you have to make make a change. But you can figure that out, you know. I think the harder ones are when you have to when someone has worked well in the past, and you have to remove, you know, them, that's those are even harder, because then

• 50:37Speaker 01

  those require even more thoughtful thinking.

• 50:39Logan Bartlett?

  In the early days of AppD, I I had heard you say you weren't great at fundraising. But now, if you look, you've you've done a fantastic job of fundraising with Traceable and Harness. And what what have you learned about the process of fundraising and maybe even sitting on the venture side of the table sometimes about selling a compelling vision and getting investors excited about the story?

• 51:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, it's it's kind of funny like, you know, at Abdnomics, I had to pitch pitch almost like, you know, thirty thirty five uh uh investors and got a lot of like thirty plus rejections before I got the first term sheet. When I starting was was was starting harness, you know, I had like thirty thirty five investors pitching me and like, you know, giving me offers, right? So that's, yes, that definitely advantage of the of being a second time founder. So it's not just like, you know, that I've become so much good at fundraising. Yeah. But. You were smarter, you were funnier, all the above, there's throwing money at you. When I was doing the thirty thirty five rejections at at FD, you know, what I learned was a lot of it comes on to like, you know, the right right story on fundraising.

• 51:47Speaker 01

  And the right story is is storytelling that you have to do as a founder. And the three things about the storytelling that you have to do right. One is the, why is this a big opportunity? Because the the whole VC model and, you know, works in big bets, like, you know, and you have, you need the big hits. And so if a if a company is going to be successful, the chances are pretty low that most companies are going to be successful. But if company is successful, that it's going to be pretty big, that it's going to be, you know, used to be billion was a big deal and now it's like maybe more more than that. That might be back to a billion. Yeah, might be back to a billion now. So let's say like, you know, would this be a billion dollar, you know, company or not? So you have to paint that that story well, you know, if you're not painting that bigger story and, you know, that's that that makes it hard.

• 52:32Speaker 01

  Second is you have to paint the story of evidence. You know, a lot of it's like, you know, you can paint the story of this is going to be big, but if you know evidence, that's a that's a that going to be hard to sell. And the evidence comes from, you know, either you have a product in the market already and you're showing traction, you know, or you have like, you know, you have a lot of customer interviews and you can talk talk from that, you know, or you have the, you know, um, you know, you have like some cases like a report and analysts and industry experts, you know, uh, creating that evidence. Most of the times you have some product with some traction is the best evidence, right? And the third is the. Now it's about you, right? You have to sell you, like, why you, right? Because any, any company you start, you know, you have to compete and you have to make the point like, you know,

• 53:17Speaker 01

  why you are the right founder or founders or the team to bet on, why you would be the winners in, in, in, in that particular, particular space. If you get those three, the, your business does become, become pretty, pretty fundable. So when, you know, you know, I, when I was getting all these rejections at AppDynamics, right? I was asking people, okay, what's, uh, why? I think, why are you rejecting? And, you know, most of the times VCs won't tell you why. Yeah, but, but let's say some, some were good and they will tell you like in an honest way, why? And then you start learning from that, you know, some was like, market is not large enough. I will hear that story quite a lot where like, you know, at this time, this was like, you know, application monitoring. It's application monitoring, that's such a small niche market. Like this is not like now you have AppDynamics and Neuralink and Dynatrace and Datadog and like, you know, observability monitoring, like, you know,

• 54:02Speaker 01

  multiple, you know, companies with like billions and billions of valuation. Uh, so market, market was small wasn't the number one objection I would get. And, you know, at some point I had to start, you know, and I was, I realized that I'm not doing a good job in telling like the monitoring does seem like a small niche market. But you have like, you know, everyone building so much code in the world. And it's so painful to, to monitor and troubleshoot and fix when the problems happen in the code. And, you know, to, to tell the story, you have to tell like, you know, how many developers are there? You know, and how many like, you know, uh, application servers or, you know, are being installed and, you know, how much money being spent when something is slows down and why is could be a very large opportunity? But it was not very evident that application monitoring was a large opportunity at that time. You know, so that's something you had to, I had to become good at selling.

• 54:47Speaker 01

  Second was like, you know, uh, was not evident was the, you know, the, the, the evidence around it. Like, you know, how do you prove it like that it's going to be a large opportunity? How do you prove a differentiating kind of things? So I ended up then like, you know, doing a lot of the cold calling, uh, kind of the customer conversations to create that, you know, that, that compelling, uh, evidence around it. Because I didn't have a product to show, you know, and an attraction to show it was like, you know, in those days it was hard to, you know, build the product without any, especially products like that without any revenue. The third was the, the, I have to sell my story, which was pretty hard for me to sell because I was like a first time engineer and founder, I didn't have too much experience, but still had that experience in the domain.

• 55:27Speaker 01

  I had like a lot of patents in that area, you know, uh, you know, so, but that's, I had to paint the right, right story, like craft the right story. Obviously, when you become like, you know, more successful in one thing, then you maybe you can go, you know, easy on the other, other two areas.

• 55:42Logan Bartlett?

  You wrote a blog post in 2017 that we can link in the show notes, but it's about pitching the venture capitalist to work with. And I'm going to read back the points to you, and I would love to get you to elaborate on this framework. So the first one was, reach the highest tier of VC firm you can, but don't go overboard comparing firms. Can you talk about what you were thinking in that and in the perspective there?

• 56:06Speaker 01

  That's a blog from, from back in the past, before I became a VC, huh?

• 56:10Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Now, now, did it call me first? And then, yeah, yeah.

• 56:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, the right VC me and, yeah. I would say what I meant was like, you know, a lot of times people are like, you know, I'm getting, like founders are figuring out, I have offers on three firms and I want to, you know, figure out whom. And many times it's like, you know, this firm is higher in the ranking than this firm, so I need to go there. Like, it's, and I would like, I try to tell founders, it doesn't really matter. Like, you just, you definitely want to get into the like these that you are, you have investors from tier one firms, that's a good validation, that's like, you know, obviously they're, those firms are tier one for a reason. But they're all kind of the same at some level, like, you know, it's the, and once you are in that, that tier. And like, you know, if you look at like the, and people go very overboard on like, you know, this ranking said this, and this, this firm is, is higher there, and this firm is

• 57:01Speaker 01

  this, and this is the number one firm, and this is number two, and this is number three. And so my guidance is like, you know, look for just that you are in that, you know, you can attract the, the highest tier possible, and then after that, that becomes a material, like what, which firm it is.

• 57:13Logan Bartlett?

  And then the second point was, what really matters is the partner.

• 57:15Speaker 01

  Yes. That's the second point, like what matters is the partner. The partner is where you will spend so much time, like if you're building a company, probably the partner will be deeply involved in your company for five years, 10 years, you know, could be longer even these days.

• 57:28Logan Bartlett?

  And it's hard to unwind.

• 57:29Speaker 01

  Yes, it's like, you know, it's pretty much impossible to unwind, right? You know?

• 57:34Logan Bartlett?

  Divorces happen all the time. Divorces from partners are really hard.

• 57:37Speaker 01

  Yes. You know, divorces are, are much easier compared to divorcing your VC partner in your board. And VC partner in the board, if it's, it's not the right person, then it will create so much, so much friction down the line. And many times people are like, and I see founders are like, you know, I'm picking this firm over this firm. But it's okay, who's the partner that used to be like, once the, it doesn't really matter which firm at some point, the partner will be more important in, in, in your journey.

• 58:01Logan Bartlett?

  Look for believers.

• 58:03Speaker 01

  That's an important point, you know, you know, the, the, the nature of VC business. I think like about probably eighty to ninety percent investors just invest because of the formal. Like they don't really believe in the opportunity. They're like, you know, all chasing, oh, for Max and partner X is doing, doing a term sheet, so I need to do that. And that's how most of the investing world unfortunately works. I find them like the, the wrong investors in any company. I look at like, and if you have an option as a founder, look for people who are not investing in your company because other people are investing in your company, which is the majority of them, by the way. Uh, you know, that they want to invest in a company because they sincerely believe in your opportunity, irrespective of other, other, you know, other investors chasing you, et cetera.

• 58:47Speaker 01

  And because the, the nature of the startup is that things will invariably go bad at some point, or some, like some hard times will happen. And people are not really believers in you or your company, you know, they will, it will become, you know, much, much harder in hard times because of that. Because they didn't fundamentally believe in it. They just chased you because this was the hot thing. You know, your company was hot or your category was hot or your market was hot at that point, but they didn't really fundamentally believe in it. And that's what I look at, like, you know, the one major criteria for most people to follow is like, find those, those investors who sincerely will believe in you, your company, your opportunity, your market, et cetera.

• 59:22Logan Bartlett?

  How do you assess that? Is it, i- is it just in the conversations and getting a feel for how deep of a knowledge base they have in the category? Or how, how long they've been thinking about it?

• 59:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, like how much research they've done in the category, how much knowledge they have, you know, can they tell you about something like, you know, than, than others? Uh, like, you know, um, uh, my partner at Unusual Ventures, uh, you know, when we started, uh, John Veriyonis. Uh, I remember like when I was raising capital for Abdownomics, you know, I was talking to a whole bunch of folks. And, you know, John came into, into the meeting with me, you know, and he, before I presented, he, he knew high level, you know, and he presented to me like, you know, their thesis on that particular, on that market. You know, a lot of investors I was talking about, like, you know, why monitoring market large enough, et cetera. And he came with a thesis on why monitoring market is large and why the first generation of monitoring kind of companies like Wiley and all are not

• 1:00:14Speaker 01

  the right kind of companies for this next world. And, you know, there is a gap here that someone needs to, and that was a presentation and thing that he had built on just for me. Actually, he had it built before. He had it like built. And I was kind of sold on that, like, you know, okay, this person already believes in this market and this opportunity and kind of what we're doing. So it becomes easier alignment going forward because it's, he already believes in that. So that's like, you know, that's a, that's a good test in many cases. I had another investor, you know, I was talking to who was like much before, talking to much before. And they were like really hard to like, they said like, they will not say no, but they were like just dragging me forever. And, you know, one, then one had like, you know, uh, two or three term sheets and offers. And the guy was like, oh, you know, now you have the, once they knew

• 1:00:58Speaker 01

  that they have another offer, now suddenly the interest was like so high and they just wanted to, you know, make an offer then. And where, where they had an opportunity to be the first for a long time, when they didn't, you know, so that to me is like also a sign that you're reading, like, you know, are they really a believer in, in your opportunity? Are they only doing it because now they, now others are interested? Like, so that, so if you find people who believe in your opportunity, your company and you, that's the best because it's, it becomes easy.

• 1:01:22Logan Bartlett?

  You said, understand what kind of advisor they are going to be. What did you mean by that?

• 1:01:27Speaker 01

  You know, that's the hardest, hardest one, you know, and that comes from some, uh, let's say, uh, experience over time. And the, the, the learning side comes with it. What I like to, you know, again, I have, I like to create frameworks that we've talked about. It, I think of like, you know, when VCs, investors are in your board, right? You know, you, you want their advice and help, and they do want to give advice and help. But I, I like to call them, they're like two dimension, two dimensions to it. One is the how qualified they are. And second is how strong their opinions are, you know, and so, you know, one, so like say, if you have like highly, highly qualified and you're very strong opinions, still, you know, still, still great.

• 1:02:10Speaker 01

  If you have like, you know, hi, if you're not as qualified and you're very strong opinions, that's really bad situation to be, because now it's like, you know, the investor has a lot of control in the company normally. You know, they have the, you know, board seats and voting rights and all kind of controls, right? And, you know, now as a founder, you are almost like, you know, that's you, someone who's not really that qualified and they've hold very strong opinions. You are in a very, you know, strange place with that, right? So I look at like, you know, the, you have the other category where like, you know, someone who's, you know, uh, strong, very qualified, but like still like, you know, softer opinions, they're, they are great as well. You know, those are probably the best ones. And, you know, you have the, you have the other category, which is like, you know, you're not very qualified and you have soft opinions.

• 1:02:51Speaker 01

  And that's all fine too, because, you know, you're not at least being disruptive, because you can bring other board members and other advisors around you. To me, the worst are the people who are not very qualified and very strong opinions, which is common in the VC world, primarily because, you know, the venture world is, the dynamic of the venture world is like, you know, few successes and people grow a lot of egos. You know, so the egos get very high, you know, the egos where you get, the higher your egos get, your, your opinions get stronger. And if you're not very qualified and your opinions get stronger, then you become a sort of a bad advisor in the board, right? So that's, that's what I was trying to make the point in that case, like, you know, if you can figure out, like, you know, what is their advice style? Like, is it like, you know, that they, this is my point of view and opinion and I'm in the board and, you know, if you, you have to listen to me as a,

• 1:03:33Speaker 01

  uh, and in a very strong opinion, then you better find someone who's like very, very, very qualified for it. You know, otherwise you want people who have like, you know, softer style of giving opinion.

• 1:03:43Logan Bartlett?

  I want to pull out a nuance in there is that, um, qualification as you're defining it doesn't necessarily just mean successes or experience there. That oftentimes you can be fooled by just because they were associated with a successful company early on. And they saw that journey doesn't mean that they're qualified to weigh in on the inputs into your company.

• 1:04:04Speaker 01

  I think that's a, that's a, that's a great question. Yeah, how do you, how do you judge someone is qualified to, to give you an advice or not? And I convert down to a very simple question now, like, would I have this person in my board if they were not investing? You know, if, if you have like, you know, if the answer is yes, like, and this for variety of reasons, like, you know, this person was maybe a former founder who I respect, or maybe a very seasoned investor that I respect, you know, in, involved in great companies, or thought leadership in the market that I respect, or like, you know, or, or like, you know, uh, that would you take this person as a, to be in your board, or in some way involved in your company if they were not investor?

• 1:04:45Speaker 01

  If you meet that criteria, then you are in the, then you know, then you are in the, that, that, that bucket. And that's to me is very important, like, you know, uh, if you want to give someone so much control in your company as an investor, you, you, you know, uh, and you want to find the people who would be there, or you find people who their style is not like, you know, dictating their opinions on you, right? So that's, that's, that's, um, that's important, you know, it's kind of nuanced to it, but when I look at like, you know, the investor founder conflicts and dramas and all that happen on, happen later on, the root of that comes on to, uh, to, to, to this particular area.

• 1:05:21Logan Bartlett?

  Anything you would add to that now, besides call you first, uh, uh, six years after you wrote the post?

• 1:05:26Speaker 01

  You know, it's a good question, like, after six years, I wrote this framework twenty seventeen, right? I would say, yes, there is one thing I would add to it, which is the stage appropriateness. And that's very, very important in the, when you pick the right investor, like what stage your company is, because the help you need in different stages is very different. It's almost like, you know, kind of like a, like having a doctor, a doctor for babies is different than a doctor for, you know, when you're, for a grown up versus when you're like, you know, you're, if you're trying to, you know, uh, get help with cancer. So I do think that stage appropriateness element is important, like, you know, if you're starting a company, you need help on the very early stages of company building, like going from the zero to a million dollars, you know, and if someone is very, very experienced

• 1:06:09Speaker 01

  on the later stages, and they are very, very good on the later stages, are they the right investor for you in that stage? Right? So that, you know, that, that part is important, but otherwise what happens is like, you know, you get investors, you know, who are not really the right fit, you know, there may be, they will be, would have been great fit for when you're early, or would be great fit when you are late in the, in your, in your, in a few years down the line, when you need the help and the advice now, right? So I think that's, that part is important, you know, we, uh, you know, I'll, I'll, I'll, we talk a lot about that on User Ventures as well, like, which is the, the, you know, when you have to build of the, that kind of mindset, like, you know, then we. If where are you focused on? You know, what is the help we can provide at what particular stage?

• 1:06:53Speaker 01

  Right? So, you know, and founders have to pick that because that's when they get the most specialized help that they will need.

• 1:06:58Logan Bartlett?

  I want to shift gears a little bit and go to the to the apti story. But can you give me the background of you all the way up? Not your whole life story, but just leading to the founding of apti. So you were born in India and then moved over to the States when?

• 1:07:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was born in India, did my, you know, went to study computer science in IIT Indian Institute of Technology, the top engineering schools in India. And I was like fascinated by Silicon Valley. I was like, you know, at that time, the Indian startup ecosystem was almost non-existent or very, very, very early.

• 1:07:29Logan Bartlett?

  What year is this?

• 1:07:31Speaker 01

  This was year 2000.

• 1:07:32Logan Bartlett?

  Got it.

• 1:07:33Speaker 01

  So I was, you know, Silicon Valley is the place to come. Let's let's go here. And I started, you know, where I learned my numbers game kind of thing. Let's apply to a whole bunch of startups and someone will will, you know, will hire me. And I started applying to a lot of startups in India. And I got into a got in Silicon Valley as a as a startup because that's what I wanted to work in. And I wanted to work in a in a Silicon Valley startup and learn the startup startup.

• 1:07:56Logan Bartlett?

  Did you have any exposure to it as a kid? Like, how'd you even know? Was it just?

• 1:07:59Speaker 01

  I had a lot of exposure to, I would call it like a mom and pop startup concept. And almost I grew up in a small town in India. And my dad had a had a like a business selling like, you know,

• 1:08:14Speaker 01

  ladies' bags, you know? He had another business selling irrigation machinery. Like, these are like small startups, like, you know, small businesses. And almost all my family members, like, you know, uncles and, you know, cousins and all were kind of in these small businesses because there were not too much other things to do. So there's a lot of so I had a lot of exposure on the small businesses. And I was when I was a kid, you know, starting when I was like maybe six, seven years old. After school or weekends, you will go to the shop and help your dad. So I kind of learned a lot of the small business thing there. So, you know, it wasn't a startup in the tech startup sense, but they were like these small businesses that I was exposed pretty much as a as a kid. And then I went then done engineering and I almost like, you know, just. You know, I feel like, you know, I just, that's what I always wanted to do.

• 1:09:00Speaker 01

  Like, can I bring the, uh, bring the, the business and the engineering side together? And that's where, like, the tech startups and Silicon Valley and all of that just fascinated me so much. So I was like, let's pack the bags and, and come here, you know, and I started applying for jobs and, you know, one of the companies was like, you know, if you can, we can sponsor your visa if you, you can come here. And I went to my dad and was like, can you find where to pay for my flight? And, you know, you pay for the flight and I got here.

• 1:09:27Logan Bartlett?

  And so that was at the dot com, like, right in the bubble?

• 1:09:31Speaker 01

  It was right before the bubble was bursting, like, you know, I came here and the bubble was just right about bursting. You know, so that was the, and so that was a pretty hard time, like, you know. It was almost like, I think, along those months it was bursting, you know, almost then. And, um, you know, and a lot of those startups, the startups didn't survive. They are, but you learn a lot, you know, and like you work in startups and they don't survive and they go through that kind of bubble burst hard time. You know, it's kind of a lot of learning that happens through that.

• 1:09:56Logan Bartlett?

  And so did you bounce around? Uh, how'd you end up at Wiley?

• 1:10:01Speaker 01

  Uh, Wiley was at that time my third startup, you know, I worked at two startups before as, as an engineer. Um, and actually it was interesting that my, I was in the startup, you know, company called Data Sweep, like, uh, manufacturing data intelligence kind of thing. Uh, Excel was one of the investors and they were also invested in Wiley at that time. And, uh, and, you know, I was, as an engineer, I was like struggling with like performance troubleshooting for our software. That it was like hard to debug problems and fix things and all. And Wiley was doing their job and I was like, oh, this is a great product, you know? And, you know, this is something I, this is the area that I, you know, I find interesting. So I, you know, I, I got rid of Wiley and then one of the investors made the connect at that time.

• 1:10:47Speaker 01

  Uh, and then the, Wiley was a, was a, was a great story at that time. It's a great company, you know, we had a lot of good innovation, innovative technology. It was acquired by CA, which is Computer Associates for many people who don't know from back, back in the day. It used to be one of the biggest tech companies at that time in the enterprise software space.

• 1:11:04Logan Bartlett?

  Four hundred and fifty million or so?

• 1:11:06Speaker 01

  About, yeah, three seventy-five million.

• 1:11:08Logan Bartlett?

  Three seventy-five.

• 1:11:08Speaker 01

  Seven five million, uh, which used to be a big amount.

• 1:11:11Logan Bartlett?

  Sure.

• 1:11:11Speaker 01

  At some point.

• 1:11:12Logan Bartlett?

  That was two thousand, what year?

• 1:11:13Speaker 01

  It's two thousand, uh, seven, two thousand six, two thousand six.

• 1:11:17Logan Bartlett?

  Two thousand six.

• 1:11:18Speaker 01

  Two thousand six. Uh, so that's, um.

• 1:11:24Speaker 01

  You know, it was pretty clear to me like, you know, the world is changing. And this was when, you know, the AWS just came out. And so it was like, everything will move into the cloud at some point. You know, the people are building this very distributed software systems. And the products like Wiley and the all the previous generation stuff was not really designed for the next generation. Also clear, like, you know, C A computer, so it's not where any new innovation is going to happen around this. So new starters have to solve this this problem in a in a in a in a big way. And that's where I was like, you know, you know, it's kind of it met my, even though I didn't have a framework like that at that point. Kind of met my three criteria, at least that I was convinced that the market is large. And it turned out to be large, you know, it's like even if some people didn't believe that time, it was large market.

• 1:12:07Speaker 01

  You know, everyone has to to monitor and troubleshoot and fix problems in the code. Um, that, you know, that people were struggling with it. I knew it firsthand because I I saw the struggle, how people were. The pain was real, you know, it wasn't like a fake pain. Uh, like, that was one of the big pain points for almost every software engineer. And then I also, you know, knew that I could build a great, you know, that I was very passionate about it. Like, I I went from my previous startup to Wiley because I was passionate about the domain. You know, I I was working on that for for quite some time and I knew that I could spend, you know, time and energy. I knew also had expertise on it, you know, maybe I didn't have business expertise, but I had a lot of tech expertise on that particular area. And, you know, that I could I could solve that. So that was kind of my my conviction.

• 1:12:49Speaker 01

  I I still remember that I was still at Wiley and I was pitching to V C's at that time. And one of the V C's was like, you know, hey, do you really believe in this thing? Uh, I said, yeah, I do, uh, you know, so why are you still in a job? And, you know, that was, I was, I don't have an answer. And I slept over it and next day I quit the job. It's like, yeah, that's a good, like, I do believe in it. So why I'm still doing my job? And, um, you know, because you have to like put yourself in that. And I think it's a very valid question at that point, like, you know, that. The this founder is asking us to put a lot of money and, you know, they're still like, you know, not willing to quit the job on this.

• 1:13:24Logan Bartlett?

  How'd you end up a solo founder?

• 1:13:26Speaker 01

  Not by design.

• 1:13:26Logan Bartlett?

  It wasn't intentional.

• 1:13:27Speaker 01

  It wasn't intentional, you know, it's just happened like, you know, I couldn't find the right founder, co-founder fast enough, you know, and things moved, you know, even though like, you know, I had thirty, uh, thirty-five rejections and all that, but still like things moved in the, you know, in the next, in a few, in few months, like I quit my job, I was already kind of pitching to folks. And like, you know, after I quit my job, maybe like, uh, like, uh, a couple of months, uh, things were moving and like I'm getting offers and term sheets and the company has to get going and couldn't find, you know, the, the right co-founder, you know, and there were some attempts where like, you know, almost like the, calling the shotgun marriage kind of attempts that were, actually, the first offer I got from a, from a VC,

• 1:14:08Speaker 01

  was the, that I had to get a co-founder who was a E I R at the firm, was a very qualified, you know, very qualified person, but I had to decide to have that person as co-founder, you know, uh, as part of the term sheet in like two days. And, you know, I couldn't get comfortable with that, you know, it's like, I just like, it's, it's a, it to, to get, get there and, you know, that person was very qualified, became successful in his own ways, in a very major way. Uh, but I just got to place where I didn't have co-founder, but then the first person I hired, was one of the, you know, uh, one of the best engineers I know at Wiley. And, you know, said, come in and, you know, join me here.

• 1:14:48Speaker 01

  And over time, he kind of like, you know, even though he wasn't co-founder, but like, you know, he played a lot of the role a co-founder will play, which is like, you know, you're, you know, you're someone you can, you can trust and you can go through the, the hard times together, kind of, you know, uh, that, that kind of role. I don't advise, you know, people to, to go solo if, you know, if you can find, find a good co-founder. But at the same time, like, and I won't find co-founder just for the sake of it, because it's very important, like, it's, uh, it's, it's as important decision or even, uh, as like, you know, picking the right VC, uh, you know, a VC partner to be in a board is even more important, I would say. So, if you can, if you know the right person who, like, you know, who you trust, you know, the right person who, uh, you, you respect and admire.

• 1:15:29Speaker 01

  You know, that's what you and and you know, like the role they can bring, right? You know, and you can have your good amount of clarity on it. That's the way to go.

• 1:15:36Logan Bartlett?

  APTI seemed to have a pretty charmed existence from the outside in. I'm sure there was a bunch of chaos in the inside as there always are in startups. Any particular things that you wish, I mean, we've talked about a bunch of different frameworks and lessons learned along the way and all that stuff. But any particular thing that that along the way you wish you knew when you were starting the business?

• 1:16:01Speaker 01

  So for charm existence, that's a that's a pretty fancy word, but you know, I don't I don't think anyone has that like there's no startup I can guarantee you has charm existence. From outside, yes, inside, no one does like it inside is always hard like, you know, you always have like, you know, from outside in the long term, it looks like a big big straight line going like that, like, you know, it's like you have like the day to day is is crazy. But yes, it, you know, we, I think the the core of what we had at right at a dynamics was the market was large. And we were the early

• 1:16:32Speaker 01

  can only believe us that the market was large, like, you know, that people, you know, it was kind of we were in the the earlier stages of that application, observability kind of space. Second was our product was very, very, very strong, like we always were the the best product in the market. We're, you know, we're it was hard for people to catch up on the the product innovation that we were doing. And then we started building the very strong sales, you know, execution tied to it. So and you know, and then I always had the fundamental belief on customers of success, you know, which many people find very odd that how much I talk about customer success, but that's something I was always obsessed with, that the every customer has to be value, get value and be successful. And so it, those are the things that made it kind of easy in some ways, like if you get those, the flywheel works with that, right? You know, that the

• 1:17:16Speaker 01

  your market is large, so that's kind of a, you know, tailwind to begin with. You know, now you have the, you know, your product is strong and your sales executing well and you have the, your customers are happy. The flywheel starts moving, right? You know, and then you can you can keep going from there.

• 1:17:31Logan Bartlett?

  Your major competitor ended up being your old boss from Wiley. Any funny stories about about that? Like, because for people that don't know, Lucern started New Relic. And New Relic was kind of the mid-market version. And Appti was the enterprise version. Any funny stories?

• 1:17:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was a strong, healthy competition. Like, you know, so Lu, I have a lot of respect for him. He was the founder at Wiley and he was my boss at Wiley. And he, you know, so after, you know, we, you know, a lot of people at Wiley had the same realization that this market is just starting. You know, there's, there's a lot of people building these modern distributed apps and things moving in the cloud. And, you know, in the next generation solutions to it. And so Lu started New Relic about a year before I started AppDynamics. And he, he had a different thesis on a few things, you know. First of all, the programming languages, you know, his thesis was the, the modern programming languages like Ruby, etc., will become more dominant.

• 1:18:34Speaker 01

  And, and they were growing very fast and they become pretty, pretty popular there. And that you could, you know, you don't need salespeople. He had a strong thesis on that as well initially on. And, you know, he was a great mentor and advisor to me as well. So when I started AppDynamics, actually, we didn't think it would be competitive because I had a very different, you know, thesis on like, you know, that the, yes, the, the new languages like Ruby, etc., are getting in popularity, but a lot of large enterprises still go to Java. And there's a lot of pain points in Java, so I wanted to focus on Java. So we actually initially, you know, he was, you know, it's kind of most, a lot of people don't know. He was for the very, you know, for the first, when I was just quitting my job and starting,

• 1:19:14Speaker 01

  he was advisor to AppDynamics, you know, because we didn't think it was, you know, that we'll compete. People were like, okay, his was building for Ruby, you know, and I was building for Java. And, you know, I knew that Java was, was more a large enterprise, so I need to build more, to sell into enterprise and figure that out. And he knew like Ruby was more this kind of younger tech company. So he wanted to build a go-to-market model around that as well, which actually didn't really need salespeople. So we actually started, started like that, but you know, a few years down the line, you know, they, you know. You know, if you are if you are good companies, you figure out where the the opportunities are and they start to converge, right? The market started to converge invariably. So we it did start to converge and we we are a very strong, healthy competition for a for a long time.

• 1:19:56Speaker 01

  You know, and we we we became very good at what our strength was, which is like, you know, selling for very complex, you know, applications in in larger companies, larger environments, you know, Java, .NET, those kind of programming languages. Neuralink became very good at like, you know, selling into SMB, high velocity languages like, you know, Ruby and PHP, etc. So, you know, it's it's and both became successful in in in in in in a major way.

• 1:20:20Logan Bartlett?

  There's this now legendary story about selling the business to Cisco while employees were already in New York for the IPO stock listing. So can you tell that story, but then also, how do you come to the decision to sell? I'm sure it's an emotional and financial decision. So what were the inputs into that?

• 1:20:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'll start with the story. I think many people might have heard that before. It's it's, you know, we were about to go public. A lot of people asked me, what are you doing a dual track for your IPO versus acquisition? And I tell them, there's no dual track. We were just doing IPO. And we had IPO plan for, you know, this was February of 2017 and Thursday of that week of one of the weeks there. And Cisco came in a few days before before and, you know, they made an offer. And I'll go back to the decision process. They made our the the first offer. You know, we said no to, and then they made the second offer. We said no to, and then they made a third offer and we said, you know, yes, we should have to do it.

• 1:21:20Speaker 01

  But we had like, you know, the for IPO, we planned on that we'll take our like, you know, mostly our first 20, 30 employees. And some of the people who played a big role in the in the over the time as well. So like, you know, about 40 employees or so will go to to to Nestack and we'll ring the bell and do an IPO. And most of these people, you know, they're very obviously very it's a very proud moment, exciting moment. And, you know, most of them were engineers, you know, and most engineers don't have a suit, you know, as you know. And they're like, you know, people were, oh, I'm gonna, they got a suit made for the IPO and everything was planned there. And they were in Wall Street, in in New York for that. And we announced our that we are getting acquired like like less than 24 hours before that IPO moment.

• 1:22:01Speaker 01

  And all these people were were like in New York for the IPO and again, we are selling the company for like pretty good amount, 3.7 billion dollars. And everyone was sad that, you know, what about my suit like, you know, I just got it for the IPO.

• 1:22:12Logan Bartlett?

  I think Nasdaq had like cupcakes and stuff with their logos on it and all that, yeah.

• 1:22:16Speaker 01

  You know, so actually the good thing was, um, we were able to make a deal with Cisco. So Cisco has a big cloud on on Nasdaq. So we made a deal with them on like, you know, hey, can you, if we close the deal with you, can you still go and ring the bell on on Nasdaq? And, you know, they did their work and like, and once the deal was closed, like two, three months later, we actually did go back and did ring the bell and did the same kind of thing. But so it was, you know, which was, which was a good moment.

• 1:22:43Logan Bartlett?

  And so the decision, the inputs into the decision, I mean, obviously you said no twice and.

• 1:22:48Speaker 01

  I think a big, if you think about like, and who are the stakeholders in a, in deciding to sell the company or not? You obviously have the founders, you know, in in Abdali's case, I was the only founder. You know, you have the, uh, the board and with mostly investors, let's say, like, you know, your majority, uh, who who own majority of the company. And then your employees who have like, you know, put in the all the hard work in building the company and they all shareholders and they all have a lot of, lot of, lot of input. So at certain price, uh, you know, it makes sense for all stakeholders, it's a ten price citizen, right? You know, the for for some stakeholders, so as, you know, when I look at as founder for me didn't, you know, so if we went IPO, we would have went, uh, gone IPO around. Our initial pricing was like one point four, one point five, uh, one point four billion dollars.

• 1:23:33Speaker 01

  And we would have gone through like, you know, kind of the normal that, you know, the interest was very high. So, you know, uh, you know, repriced it higher to go to go, you know, around one point six or so.

• 1:23:45Speaker 01

  And, you know, the Cisco offer initially was kind of like, you know, not too far off off from there. And it makes sense like, you know, why won't we go public and, uh, and, uh, you know, if we go public and one point six billion, you know, it's, uh, we will, we will, we'll take the chance. And you know, the final offer was three point seven billion dollars, right? So which was more than, you know, uh, which was about two and a half X of what we would have gone IPO with. And would have taken us, you know, a couple of years, you know, at least to build towards, towards that, like, you know, all the market valuations to change and all, but let's assuming the, the, the multiples and all stayed the same. So you start looking at like, what's a risk, you know, and going forward from here, like, you know, three years from now. Uh, you know, do you take that or not? What is the right thing for the, for the stakeholders involved?

• 1:24:28Speaker 01

  You know, personally for me as a founder, at some point, it doesn't make really a difference from the, from a financial perspective, like it's still, you know, in both outcomes are, are financially.

• 1:24:37Logan Bartlett?

  Only so many beach houses you can have, right?

• 1:24:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, yes.

• 1:24:40Logan Bartlett?

  It seems like you're still working anyway, which, uh.

• 1:24:42Speaker 01

  Yes, beach houses can get boring after some time, if you're too much on there. But then, you know, you have the investors, you know, and investors have different opinions on that. And then you have the, you know, the employees. And, you know, we, it was, it was pretty hard, the, it was like a three days of process, like in back and forth, just in making, we were all hold up, like, you know, three days. People probably had like two hours of sleep in three days, you know, in, in getting all this done. And, um, it's, it's a hard decision. It's a very bittersweet decision also, like, you know, it's like, do you end the journey? Do you continue? Do you sell the company or not? You know, no one is, uh, at the same time, it is like very, like it's a great outcome financially for everyone. You know, we had four hundred plus employees who made more than a million dollars.

• 1:25:23Speaker 01

  That's it's a, it's a financially very life-changing outcome for a lot of people. People made like, you know, tens of millions of dollars as well.

• 1:25:30Speaker 01

  But it's, it's, it's, there's no easy answer to it. Like, you know, I was really, really sad when it closed. Like, I can edit that. You know, you're celebrating, we had a big celebration party. And you come home from the celebration party and you're kind of depressed, you know, because it's like kind of the end of a, you know, uh, end of, end of the journey in some, in, in many ways. No easy way to do it, but I would say like, you know, you have to look at like, what's our risk profile? What's the, what happens for the next few years? Also, like, how do you, you know your business well, you know where the, the gaps and challenges were. We had some gaps and challenges that, that, you know, that we knew, you know, that would made it, would have made it harder. But at the same time, in hindsight, the market actually explored it after that.

• 1:26:11Speaker 01

  You know, and the, and, um, business, you know, Sisco did a good job with the, with, with, with, with the acquisition for the first few years. And after that, it becomes like, you know, becomes a bit different.

• 1:26:24Speaker 01

  Would have been valued much more actually over time. So like it's now if you look back like, you know, five, six years later, was it the right thing to do or not? But I do think at that time it was the right thing for all shareholders.

• 1:26:34Logan Bartlett?

  Was there a specific conversation you had along the way? Or like an input, you you referenced the 400 plus people making a million dollars that that really swayed you? Or was it just?

• 1:26:43Speaker 01

  That was the biggest point for me. Like, you know, it's like I have 400 employees who can make a million plus here. You know, we're getting a value that's like, you know, it will take a three to four years to grow into that valuation. And so, you know, do we take a chance with like, you know, all this financial impact that all the employees are going to get now or not? Right? And like, yes, we could have gone public and, you know, and taken the chance in the public market for the next three, four years. And that was really, to me, the biggest factor on on on deciding that.

• 1:27:11Logan Bartlett?

  I want to get your quick takes on the current state of the markets and where we are today. So you you've you're operating two companies, as we referenced, Traceable and Harness. You've had to raise a bunch of money throughout the cycles for both. What's your perspective on the current state of the technology market, the venture landscape, all that stuff?

• 1:27:31Speaker 01

  You know, I I have a point of view, which is a little bit different than many people. I feel it's it's it's a it's a great opportunity and actually a pretty good thing, the current state of the the markets. You know, we all got the in the tech world, we all got, let's say, a bit too sloppy because there was so much money easily available. The valuations were too high, money was so cheap, interest rate was low, became all of that stuff. And companies were not really executing well. And I will start with like even my own companies, like, you know, you know, Abdomics, as I mentioned, like, you know, was was kind of gone through that fire test in the 2008 recession. I started Abdomics in March of 2008 and we raised around et cetera at that time, like, you know, about five million dollars.

• 1:28:15Speaker 01

  In September 2008, the big crisis happened and, you know, it was like almost like 2009 and 10 were like just really, really bad for any kind of fundraising. So it was really clear like at that time, like, you know, we need to like operate in a very, very strong discipline. You know, focus on the core areas, you know, focus on like, you know, that your product has to be very strong. So you can reduce the cost of sales, you know, you have to, you know, don't do things that like, you know, don't matter. You know, do things that, you know, create good amount of efficiency. And that became the core foundation of how Abdomics was built. But the money was so easy and cheap in like the, you know, in the, the, the, for many years after that, like, you know, in the, the last four, five years before the, or this correction. That it creates a company's culture in a, in not the best way.

• 1:28:57Speaker 01

  And including, I've seen that even in my own companies as well, like, you know, you just don't have any pressure to, to operate in the most optimal, efficient way. So I think this is a great opportunity that this is happening and this correction is happening and, you know, it's so strange, like, you know. You can pretty much, you know, operate the same, deliver the same outcome with significant lower cost and, you know, much highly efficient kind of model if you pay attention to it. And the money was so cheap, no one was paying attention to it. You know, so which is kind of unhealthy to me, like, you know, as a, as a company, like, most companies are not doing any profits and cash flows and, you know, even as a public company, you'll be like five years, seven years, you're not cash flow positive. And so it's, it's a great opportunity in that sense.

• 1:29:41Speaker 01

  Obviously, there's a lot of bad outcomes that come with it, like, there's a lot of pressure with the, in the, you know, with the, to the employees, you know, layoffs and job cuts and you know, the, the startups not being able to raise capital, all of that, those, those things are there. I really think those are also not necessarily bad, like, we need to get to a right balance. Because we got into, as an industry, we got into a two, two craziness there. Uh, you know, the, in a lot of startups that were getting funded and getting started and going, probably didn't need, didn't need it to be. So we have a more, uh, kind of the more, let's say, the real capitalism of tech.

• 1:30:21Speaker 01

  We see Silicon Valley kind of model that, that how it's all started, like, you know, you, you fight and compete and the, the good ideas and the good execution and the good, good companies, uh, uh, you know, make it into it and they generate a lot of profits and value and all that. And we were starting to kind of dilute down on that too much. So I, I, you know, I, I personally, I feel like, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's a good thing in the long term. Short term, we go through obviously a lot of pain.

• 1:30:46Logan Bartlett?

  You have a dot AI on one of your companies, uh, traceable dot AI, and then Harness, I think, is leveraging artificial intelligence as well. What do you think about the, that market and that opportunity?

• 1:30:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, AI is massive, you can't, can't deny it in any ways. Now, one thing I like to, you know, so at Harness, we launched a lot of generative AI capabilities for, for, you know, software development lifecycle. And how do you do deployments and testing and everything? And people will say, oh, now you're on the AI bandwagon as well. It's okay, you should look at when we launched Harness in the market, you know, five years ago. Five years ago, when we launched in the market, we were the first one to bring AI into DevOps at that time. You know, it's like the, you know, I was, you know, um, like there was an article about in TechCrunch about us generating, uh, launching our AI now. So okay, look at the article five years ago in TechCrunch, when we launched the company, it was also all about AI. So we have been doing AI from five years ago, not just now. And same with Tresable, like, you know, Tresable is out there for like, you know, um, uh, three years.

• 1:31:40Speaker 01

  It has AI in its name and its fundamental technology from then, then. I'm a strong believer in AI. I do think it's a, it's, it's, it's really the next frontier of, of, you know, how you, of kind of a technology that can apply to almost any discipline. So any discipline, whether it's like, you know, developer tools or cybersecurity or marketing tools or sales management, customer support management, I do think, you know, AI has a strong, strong potential there to make that whatever the workflow is, you know, anywhere from two X to five X better. You know, maybe even more, you know, um, so we, everyone has to leverage that. Yeah, I, I'm not a, this is a huge believer in like, you know,

• 1:32:23Speaker 01

  generic AI, as at least for the startup, but I feel like, you know, AI for, for a purpose. For like, for the, whatever the workflow you want to, the problem you want to solve. That's massive and you, every company should do it.

• 1:32:35Logan Bartlett?

  One of the things that I think you'll agree with is, uh, given especially that you're working still despite, uh, uh, not needing to after the success of AppDynamics is not living your life, uh, or not, not spending your time to then go live your life and working towards some end and not enjoying the, the journey along the way. How, how has that impacted you? How do you sort of think about, uh, following your passions or, or your work on a day-to-day basis? And advice for anyone that's kind of thinking through their career?

• 1:33:09Speaker 01

  It's always a very interesting question on, on why you do what you do, right? Uh, so after AppDynamics was sold and, you know, I, I didn't have to stay there at Cisco at all. Uh, because I was, um, the, the day-to-day responsibilities were already handed off. I, the first instinct was that I can retire now, that I don't need to do anything, I can like, I should just retire, and I did retire.

• 1:33:30Logan Bartlett?

  You were how old at the time?

• 1:33:32Speaker 01

  I was like, uh, early thirties.

• 1:33:34Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:34Speaker 01

  Retire as in like, you know, let's do things that, you know, actually I was putting things on hold when I was doing AppDynamics. Right, so I had like, you know, a big bucket list of things that I need to do, safari in Africa, and I need to hike in the Himalayas and Bhutan, and I need to hike Machu Picchu, and I want to, you know, see the fjords in Norway, and I had a whole list. And it's okay, let's just do it. And like, six months, the whole list was done, you know, it was, but it was great, six months, you know, six months of my bucket list was done at that time, and I was like, okay, what next? Like, am I really gonna be like this? And this is what really put away, and I, I, what I realized that I enjoyed the, the AppDynamics journey. It wasn't the means to an end to just do the, that what I'm doing, like, I actually really enjoyed that, that's what I want to do, like, that's what I, I like the,

• 1:34:19Speaker 01

  the, you know, kind of the, that the, the tension of, of operating, you know, uh, competing in the market and, building good products and, uh, it's like, it's, that's what I enjoy. And that's when I started looking at like, you know, I need to not think about like, you know, what's that, this is a, this is an outcome to something, but I still, I need to do it because this is what I enjoy. But I like to build frameworks, right? So obviously, I, you know, I have to have a framework for something like this. I, I put a very simple, okay, let, like, let me list down, like, you know, let's say, you know, ten, fifteen years from now, what would, I look back, what would I look at, like, you know, I did all the things I wanted to do.

• 1:35:02Speaker 01

  Right, you know, and you know, the, obviously, I, I want, because one thing I, I decided that I cannot do, that let's do things, and once you achieve those things, then you do something else. Let's try to do a balance of everything, like, so which includes like, you know, fun, family, you know, friends, you know, your, intellectual challenge of work, you know, what you, what, what you like to do, you know, uh, anything that you want to do, like, you know, can I get a, healthy balance of doing it? And that's what I look at. People say you're running three things and, you know, or two companies full time, and you know, venture capital and everything. Do you have, do, how do you balance anything, your time for everything? I, I said, I do actually, because that's how I like to manage it. And, uh, because I, I, if I'm committing to this for the long term, this is what I would like to do, and I might be,

• 1:35:46Speaker 01

  doing this job that I do for, who knows, like, my whole life.

• 1:35:52Speaker 01

  I can't put things on hold on other, other parts of the life, right? You know, a few things you can, like, you know, actually I put a list and I said, okay, there may be one or two things I can put on hold, but not, not, not, not and nothing else, like, you know, uh, I, I was very interested in philanthropy, but, you know, I decided that for me to need really go deep into it, I need to put on hold that one, like, you know, that I will deal with 10 years later. Uh, but everything else I was able to, to balance. But I do think that's very important at some point, like, you have to do what you, you know, to be

• 1:36:21Speaker 01

  nothing wrong with, like, you know, working for the end, like, you know, let's say you, you have a passion that doesn't produce too much money. Uh, and so you want to work in a job that will produce money, so you have to do a passion. That's, that's also fine. But if you can find something where, like, you know, what you're passionate about and what you enjoy can give you the lifestyle and the, you know, things that you need, that's, uh, you know, then it's, then it's great. And if you have already the, the lifestyle and the, the money and all that you need, then it's great also because you can continue to do what you're, you're passionate about, so. I'll, I, for me, the driver on always is being good at what you do. I like the, you know, that kind of just that mindset of like, you know, if I want to be an entrepreneur in this space, I want to be very good at my craft, that's my craft, like, that's, you know.

• 1:37:03Speaker 01

  Okay, like, you know, if I want to be investor fully, I want to be good at my, that craft, like, whatever the craft is, you want to be good at your craft and kind of the view to be good at a craft, you have to enjoy it. You know, there's no way, like, you know, if you want to be really good pianist, you have to enjoy playing piano, if you can't doing it just to to an end means to an end, you're not gonna be, never be, you know, if you want to be great at, you know, uh, playing basketball, you have to enjoy playing basketball, you can't just be doing it for the, you know, the, you know, that it's a uh, it means to some kind of end, right? So, eh, I'm, I'm, I feel, I feel happy, I feel fortunate that I found that this is what I like, you know, sometimes it, I, there are times when I feel I made a mistake, you know, that's the, it's crazy and that

• 1:37:45Speaker 01

  and I really enjoy it, you know, but, you know, those, those are bad days, as you know, in, in the world of startups and things, you know, impossible to not have bad days. But in general, I, I think like, you know, it's, it's good to find something you enjoy.

• 1:37:58Logan Bartlett?

  Well, Jyoti, thank you for doing this, this was great. I, uh, amazing frameworks and, uh, yeah, inspirational to see you execute on this job that you're, you're done being an outside observer on the app dynamic, dynamics path and then now harness and traceable and, and unusual, so, thank you for doing this.

• 1:38:17Speaker 01

  Great to be here and catching up also.

• 1:38:36Speaker 01

  You.