Jyoti Bansal: Life After Selling a $3.7B Company
Ep 73 of The Logan Bartlett Show: Untold stories from tech's inner circle
Welcome the first edition of The Logan Bartlett Show Newsletter! This weekly newsletter will be sent after the episode is published and include a quick summary of the biggest take-aways.
This week we had on Jyoti Bonsal. Since selling AppDynamics to Cisco for $3.7B in 2017, Jyoti has founded three more businesses: Harness (valued at $3.7B), Traceable ($450M) and Unusual Ventures ($1B+ in AUM). This episode is stacked with content for anyone looking for tactical guidance in approaching some of the most critical junctions of building a great company: finding product market fit, getting feedback to lead product development cycle, hiring, fundraising, knowing when to sell and more.
Watch on Youtube | Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts
✉️ Episode Memo
A quick summary of Jyoti’s best operating frameworks:
On Finding PMF
Without doing cold outreach you may not be getting the right feedback. VC intros and other forms of warm intros are great, but oftentimes people will spare you from hearing how it really is out of a desire to “be nice”.
The best way to get real feedback is cold - if you’re not getting any response then that might tell you something about your product.
Do a lot of cold outreach (40-50 calls) and iterate your pitch as you accumulate feedback.
On Hiring for Culture
Don’t hire for “culture fit”.
When conducting behavioral interviews with candidates, their behaviors are often a reflection of the culture at the company they are at, not necessarily something that’s innate to them.
Rather than trying to assess candidates for “culture fit”, be deliberate of what your company culture is and use the interview to assess if they can assimilate and be taught your culture.
On Fundraising
There are three questions you need to know how to answer when it comes to getting venture funding:
Why is this a big opportunity?
Is there evidence to support that this is a big opportunity? Paint the story of evidence - either through traction with your product, customer interviews, industry experts or some combination.
Why you?
If you nail those three, your company is more likely to be fundable.
Click here to view the episode transcript
⭐ Highlight: How To Assess Startup Ideas
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