Insight
Bansal: Investors treat second-time founders as instant experts despite unchanged abilities
“You know, you have an exit and the next day, you know, you start a company, you're second time CEO now. And just psychologically now everyone thinks you're an expert on everything because now you're second time CEO. So even though you are really the same perso…”
Insight
Bansal: Pure top-down sales fail without developer bottom-up adoption
“That doesn't work anymore, because if you just go to go to the someone who's a decision maker, And unless you have bought buy-in and already ground up adoption from developers and the practitioners, no decision maker wants to give a tool or a product to their …”
Opinion
Bansal: Only about ten companies globally excel at software delivery and CI/CD
“There are only, like, maybe 10 companies in the world who are very good in software delivery, where, like, you know, CI, CD, software delivery, their shipping code very fast, and these are, like, your Googles, and Facebooks, and Amazons, and Netflix, and they …”
Insight
Bansal: Second-time founders cannot just rehire former stars for early startups
“Most of those people, you know, it's great that they've been now, you know, significantly you know, grown in their careers and where they are in their journeys and work. So for them to come into a very early startup, you know, many times doesn't make sense. Li…”
Insight
Bansal: Sales transitions from 80% hustle at $1M ARR to 90% machine at $25M+
“Getting to the first million of revenue, I would say is about 80% hustle and maybe 20% machine and process in there. Getting from a, you know, let's say a million to ten million dollars of revenue will be part maybe, you know 60% hustle and 40% machine. When y…”
Insight
Bansal: $0-$1M ARR is product-market fit; $1M-$10M ARR is product-market-sales fit
“Your zero to one is a product market fit phase and you know, one to ten million dollars is product market sales fit phase.”
Insight
Bansal: Startups must replace sales staff unable to shift from hustle to machine
“During all of those phases, you know, if you don't have the right people who can transition from that, you know, 90% hustle to 90% machine, then you may have to change people as well, right?”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Bansal: Board management dropped from 20-30% of time to 1-2% at Harness
“I spent a lot of time managing our board and industries. Like maybe about 20 to 30% of my time would go in there. We had, you know, All sorts of investors who needed just a lot of management. Doing it second time at Harness, it's much easier. I spend maybe one…”
Insight
Bansal: Finding product-market fit is just as hard for second-time founders
“The finding the product market fit is still the same iterative process. Like, you know, we had to pivot at harness as well. We have to do like, you know, some of the assumptions were wrong and you have to pivot and correct goals and, you know, iterate through …”
Insight
Bansal: B2B startups take 12 to 18 months to find product-market fit
“If you have to go through a journey, like, you know, like a startup journey, like in the B to B kind of space, like, you know, you start
You start with an idea. It takes like, you know, somewhere in the 12 to 18 months to find your initial product market fit,…”
Insight
Bansal: The decacorn is the new unicorn benchmark
“The Decacorn is the new unicorn now, like, you know, right now billion dollar was a special part. And now it's like, you know, it's, you gotta be ten billion dollars to be really special over the company these days.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Bansal: 90% of Harness's competition is companies building internal tools
“The interesting thing is like, you know, the, our competition about 90% of the time is people building it themselves, right? So we are, you know, so it's because they were not really good products to do this.”
Disclosure
Bansal: Harness gets 40% of revenue from SMB/mid-market vs AppDynamics's 5%
“So at Harness, we do it differently that, you know, we look at like, you know, 40% of our business comes from SMB mid-market and 60% comes from large enterprise. You know, at AppDynamics, it was 95% coming from large enterprise and, you know, very small part w…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Bansal: 20 VCs rejected AppDynamics before its initial funding
“I pitched about 20 VCs, you know, who rejected me before I got any funding for Abdanos.”
Assertion Supported
Bansal: AppDynamics was a year behind the market in mobile APM
“So the mobile APM, we were at least a year behind in market at Appdynamics because we were, you know you know, we were just not paying attention enough to it, right? And then we had to catch up and like build a good mobile APM you know, for mobile apps a year …”
Jyoti Bansal