Bhaskar Sunkara, Bicycle Founder & CEO on Building Enterprise Software

**Grace Gong** (0:03)
We are live. Hi Bhaskar, welcome to Venture with Grace.

**Bhaskar Sunkara** (0:07)
Hi Grace, thanks for having me.

**Grace Gong** (0:09)
I'm so excited to dive into our conversation. Likewise.
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Bhaskar, you are such an iconic tech leader because you are the founding CTO of AppDynamics, which is a huge success. It's acquired by Cisco for billions of dollars. Maybe we could start with, what were some core lessons that you've learned early on in your career, kind of shape you into who you are today?

**Bhaskar Sunkara** (1:12)
Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, it's really sort of getting into building enterprise software, right?
And also like how you kind of really think about how people use products, how their behavior changes when you start finding product market fit, you know, just thinks about leadership. So there's a lot we can kind of dig into. So I can either talk about, maybe start with, like the delta of, you know, what has been the evolution in terms of what I've kind of learned or things like that, or we can get into any of the specific topics like the leadership part or what I think is more important now versus what I used to, right? But if I were to really summarize it, it's a bunch of things, right? Like it's how you really improve your decision making. It's how you work with teams and what your leadership is like. What is your product instinct? How do you really separate out what the customer is asking for and what's the pattern and what you need to build? So it's a bunch of those things.

**Grace Gong** (2:22)
For sure. I definitely, I have so many questions on that. Maybe we will start with since you're the founding CTO, what kind of problems did you guys sell and then compare to today? Because you're the founder of Bicycle and maybe we could talk about how do you use the same philosophy on identifying the problem to maybe building up a team.

**Bhaskar Sunkara** (2:44)
Yeah. No, great. Actually, there's some really good parallels in it, so I'd love to dig into that. So I think the core problem in AppDynamics we were solving was that this was when we started in 2008 This was when applications running software, applications running the business or software running the business or software defined businesses were starting to get more and more popular. So more and more software was basically responsible for the business. Then the monitoring aspect of it was just making sure that your application is working well. It has good availability, it has the right latency, it has good user experience and things like that. At that point, what people were still doing monitoring with was infrastructure constructs or code constructs or CPU, code and hard disk and all of that type of stuff.
What was happening at that point though was the things were getting really distributed. You'd have instead of 10 server application, now you have 100 different servers, multiple different services running in it. Things were getting more loose decoupled, the rate of change was just getting super high.
At that point, if you're choosing a metric that's really infrastructure specific and that does have no link back to business impact, etc., then it starts getting really, really hard. The other thing that also happens is that you are using code as a proxy to measure, how's this code working, how's this piece of code working, and it's rapidly changing. When you're chasing a metric that's rapidly changing, that also becomes a problem. That's the initial problem we solved. We came up with a thesis saying, hey, let's pick a construct that's common, that's stable throughout the life cycle of the application. Usually, what that has to do with is with user experience.
You can change all the code you want, but if you're an e-commerce app, people are still logging in, people are still searching, people are still adding to cart, and people are still checking out. Even if you look at something like Amazon over 15 years, they would have re-architected it 10 different times in super different architectures. But what matters is, how much time does it take for you to log in? Log in is the core user experience, or checkout is the core user experience construct. That's what we introduced, and that's really what became AppDynamics, using that unit of measurement, unit of monitoring to really define the category for performance monitoring. That's the reason why we got off to a really solid start.