Jyoti Bansal: Indian American entrepreneur & founder of AppDynamics

Bansal was rejected by more than 20 Silicon Valley VC firms before he raised his first $5 million

Jyoti Bansal, Indian-American entrepreneur, has been in news for a $3.7 billion worth acquisition. His company AppDynamics, a US-based firm that solves problems on an organisation's website and improves customer engagement, has been bought over by Cisco.

Bansal has a greater reason to cheer. The start-up honcho of Silicon Valley managed to sell his company at the top networking giant Cisco at almost twice the estimated value just a day before it was scheduled to be listed on the stock exchanges.

Bansal, who will now be the Chairman on the Board of AppDynamics with 14 per cent, has diluted his stake among venture capital funds like Greylock Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners, both hold per cent. Institutional Venture Partners and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers hold 8.3 per cent and 7.1 per cent, respectively.

He built AppDynamics, a company that helps organisations monitor applications and find meaning in data, nearly a decade ago. "In the nine years since AppDynamics grew from that initial dream to a successful technology company that today is a strategic software vendor for the world’s largest enterprises," he wrote in a blog after the company scrapped plans to raise funds from the public markets to sell it to Cisco.

Bansal has always wanted to be an entrepreneur.  Growing up helping his dad to run his business in Ajmer in Rajasthan before he migrated to Silicon Valley soon after he completed his computer science degree at the IIT Delhi.

“As a software engineer, I’ve always felt like software was like “magic clay” and I could use that magic clay to sculpt solutions to so many different problems. I wanted to build companies that would leverage the power of software to make a difference in the world. I brought that dream to Silicon Valley as a 21-year-old fresh out of college and AppDynamics for me was the beginning of fulfilling that personal dream,” he wrote of his shift to the US in 2000. Today, he has over 30 patents to his credit.

AppDynamics makes software that manages and analyses applications and it has about 2,000 paying customers, including NASDAQ Inc, Nike Inc and its new owner, Cisco.

Bansal, who was rejected by more than 20 Silicon Valley venture capital firms before he raised his first $5 million, wrote code at nights and during the weekends for the firm he started when he was 21. Later his friend Bhaskar Sunkara joined him as a team member. Sunkara is the company’s chief technology officer. A year later, the company got its first paid customer in Yap, now part of Amazon.

The Indian-born software product expert always believed in creating applications that would be an integral part of different businesses. "In the nine years since AppDynamics grew from that initial dream to a successful technology company that today is a strategic software vendor for the world’s largest enterprises,” Bansal wrote in a blog.

Before founding AppDynamics in 2008, Jyoti held engineering roles at various Silicon Valley startups, including Wily Technology, which was later acquired by CA Technologies, Datasweep, acquired by Rockwell Automation, and netLens.

Bansal is confident of the Indian technology start-up scene with the growing number of software makers for businesses in the country. “I think the next wave of successful startups in India will be seen among B2B players. I am looking forward to mentoring and helping a diverse range of Indian startups,” he told Economic Times.

He says the startup within a startup model helped him stand apart in a crowded business. “Most startups are challenged when trying to expand the product portfolio. Many times the core product teams find it tough to master the necessary adjacent technology areas. And often the sales teams find it harder to sell follow-on products,” Bansal wrote. “But once we adopted a "Startups within a Startup" model — bringing the same very small startup mindset to new products as we brought to our first product — we were successful,” he wrote in a blog that summed up the AppDynamics story."