Execution > Ideas: What Engineers Need to Know Before Becoming Founders

Aug 18, 2025

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Jyoti Bansal sold his first company, AppDynamics, to Cisco for $3.7 billion.

Harness, his next company, reached a similar valuation a few years later.

As an entrepreneur — and as a VC at Unusual Ventures — Jyoti has built and backed multiple billion-dollar startups. But despite his track record, he says technical founders often overlook the same hard truth: good ideas don’t build great companies. It’s all about execution.

In this conversation, Jyoti explains how he helps engineers become CEOs, the leadership frameworks he uses to scale fast without breaking culture, and why each business unit inside Harness runs like a startup of its own. He also talks about what he had to unlearn as he made the leap from founder to investor, and debunks the myth that every entrepreneur needs a mentor.

If you’re aiming for breakout scale, this episode will give you some useful tactics — and maybe a few reality checks.

RUNTIME 44:24 EPISODE BREAKDOWN

(3:23) “ I started Big Labs and I call it a startup studio: it's really my lab, a research lab for me to experiment with ideas and projects that I'm excited about.”

(6:15) Why Jyoti still carves out time for customer discovery and sales calls.
(7:27) “ Harness is designed for kind of this next-generation, AI-based approach for DevOps.”
(9:42) “ Our entire philosophy is built with this concept called ‘startups within a startup.’”
(11:22) How Harness maintains cohesion and alignment across 16 different modules.
(14:00) The specific traits and abilities Jyoti looks for when hiring leaders at Harness.
(17:35) Why some engineers are poorly suited to make the leap into entrepreneurship.
(20:55) A mental framework that helped Jyoti become a better manager and communicator.
(23:59) “ I always leaned on topic-based mentorship, not generic mentorship, which is a particular problem.”
(25:53) Why working with a CEO coach “didn’t work very well for me.”
(27:36) The sectors and types of startups that interest him the most right now.
(30:10) How he prefers to be pitched — and how to apply to Unusual Academy’s next cohort.
(32:24) “ 30, 40% growth rates are where most startups should be looking, at least — ideally much more.”
(33:53) “ If we can't see a path to $100M of revenue — or a billion of revenue — we don't invest.”
(37:15) The biggest attachment he had to let go of when transitioning from founder to VC.
(42:41) The one question he’d ask the CEO if he were interviewing for a job with an early-stage startup.

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Thanks for listening!

– Walter.