San Francisco :
Silicon Valley-based entrepreneur Jyoti Bansal, an IIT-Delhi graduate who sold his company AppDynamics to Cisco for $3.7 billion earlier this year has floated a startup incubator BIG Labs which will research ideas and spin off a select few into full fledged companies. Bansal is committing $50 million to his new venture and is also setting up an R&D centre for BIG Labs in Bengaluru, he told TOI in an exclusive interaction.
The first company to come out of BIG Labs is Harness, a delivery-as-a-service platform leveraging artificial intelligence which has received $20 million in Series A funding led by Menlo Ventures and BIG Labs. Bansal, will head the company as its CEO along with co-founder Rishi Singh, a former DevOps platform architect at Apple, who is the CTO.
“After selling AppDynamics I could have opted to be a passive investor in companies but that didn’t appeal to me. I like to build companies. With BIG Labs, the aim is to build multiple billion dollar companies along with co-founders, what you call parallel entrepreneurship,” Bansal, 38, told TOI at the BIG Labs office situated in San Francisco’s Financial District.
While Bansal himself pocketed about $500 million from the sale of AppDynamics, he said as many as 350 employees (out of the 1100 workforce) at his nine-year-old firm scooped up $1 million and more emphasizing the role played by ESOPs in distributing wealth. Building startups is very hard, you have to let employees reap the rewards when liquidity events happen. If you want to build a successful and sustainable company, as founders one has to make all of the employees, shareholders and draw up a mission together, he said.
Having already invested in two Indian startups Leadsquared and Funds Tiger, Bansal said he will look to back more local founders in his personal capacity going forward, along with holding mentoring sessions with the local community there on his forthcoming India trip. As for Indian startups, Bansal said he wants to get more involved with them but has found it difficult to get the real picture of the ecosystem being in the Valley.
“There is still a lot of noise in India. Some companies don’t seem like they are real businesses and may not have a path to getting there,” he said.
Bansal wants to help bring about the natural convergence between India and Silicon Valley especially in B2B businesses where his expertise lie. “I would love to share my experiences on how to build a sales force. Selling products globally is a hard skill but as important, if not more, than just building a product,” Bansal said. Because of companies like Flipkart, Indian talent has been able to gain experience around product development but that’s not the case when it comes to selling products in global markets. This is where I can help along with talking about how to build your startup’s culture, which is another important issue.
AppDynamics, which develops application performance management solutions, had raised $250 million from the likes of Lightspeed Venture Partners, Goldman Sachs, Kleiner Perkins, among others, and was slated to go public before the last minute decision to sell to Cisco was finalised. “I’m a big believer in IPOs as it brings transparency and the right business rigour despite having to produce quarterly results and targets publicly. We decided to accept Cisco’s acquisition call as it was better for all shareholders coming at a higher price compared to what the company was being valued in its IPO. This was a far better outcome for everyone including the employees,” he said.
source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / News> Startups> People / by Samidha Sharma / TNN / October 25th, 2017