Bhaskar S.
Founder & CEO, Bicycle AI. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveengineerLinkedIn ↗bicycle.ai ↗
Bhaskar Sunkara was employee #1 and founding CTO of AppDynamics, scaling the company through its $3.7B acquisition by Cisco. He now serves as the founder and CEO of Bicycle AI, which builds agentic AI analysts for enterprise root-cause analysis.
1shows
1appearances
14statements
3resolved
3supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
Everything Bhaskar S. said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Offering proof-of-concept trials in production grabbed enterprise buyers' attention.
“And the third thing we said, which was, I think, surprising to a lot of people is that why don't we do a POC in production, right? That was the biggest thing that I would say got people to take notice because they're like, they're this sure of what they built.”
Monitoring must anchor on constant business transactions, not changing technical architectures.
“You need a unit of monitoring. You need to approach monitoring in a little bit of a different way where it represents something that is constant. So take Amazon, right? Like, let's just say take Amazon to a 15 year journey. And, you know, when they started off…”
AppDynamics brought deep-dive transaction profiling into production environments safely.
“And typically something like that would only happen in dev or test scenarios. We brought that into production saying, if you do it safely, if you do it with the right heuristics, you can actually go down to that type of level. And that's really what gave us th…”
AppDynamics launched exclusively for Java to win early enterprise customers.
“Second, we only wanted to build this for Java. Right. So there's obviously multiple languages, things like Ruby on Rails and all of that type of stuff was also very popular back then. But we saw that the core of the enterprise, you know, we wanted to really go…”
AppDynamics sold exclusively for production environments at a single price point.
“What we said was, let's only do production. Let's not even bother to have a dev version. Let's not even bother to have like a test version, et cetera. Let's only do production, and there's only one cost. So if you want to run it in development, we can give you…”
AppDynamics grew revenue from $2M to $12M in its second year.
“I think in the first year we started in oh eight, as you know, and it's been a while, but like just from my memory, the first year we did about a couple million, and then in the second year we did about 12. And the following year we doubled, the following year…”
A free product launch drove over 60% of AppDynamics' inbound leads.
“So that sort of really gave us that momentum because 60% plus of our leads you know, from then on started coming in from that.”
AppDynamics took Cisco's buyout offer over a projected $2B IPO valuation.
“And as we were getting closer to the IPO, then that's when we had the offer a little bit of back and forth here and there, and then eventually we're like, okay, let's, let's take this one, because we weren't going to float at probably around, around two bill, …”
A scary high-overhead bug during early Netflix testing was IBM's fault.
“Where we were coming up with, like, pretty high overhead, and this was actually at Netflix, and it took us about, you know, maybe a couple of weeks to resolve it, and it actually turned out to be a JVM bug because they were using IBM's JVM versus Sun's JVM, an…”
Targeting mission-critical software helped AppDynamics survive the 2008 recession.
“Wherever the application or software is more critical to running the business, that's what we wanted to focus on. Cause you can't really afford to mess with it. And that was a good sentiment during that time. In hindsight, that helped us really, really well.”
Netflix, Priceline, and Williams-Sonoma were early customers of AppDynamics.
“Netflix actually was one of the, you know, early ones. Priceline actually was one of the early ones. You know, Williams-Sonoma was one of the early ones.”
AppDynamics' monitoring agent added only 1% to 2% performance overhead.
“And second, it was the overhead part of it on, look, I mean, you barely add one to two percent and you can try this out.”
AppDynamics sold over $1 billion in TCV before the Cisco acquisition.
“We just basically, by then, sold a billion in TCP. You know, I don't remember the exact sort of, like, Revenue number, but we had sold a billion in DCV.”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Bhaskar's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 PRODUCT MARKET FITLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Bicycle AI | 1 | 14 | 100% 3/3 | full record on A Product Market Fit Show → |