Jyoti Bansal was part of the founding team of AppDynamics, a company that Cisco bought in 2017 for $ 3.7 billion. He may be happy to lean on that big win, but instead he has continued to launch Harness and a venture capital arm, Unusual Ventures. Today he announced his new company called Traceable, which attacks code-level security.
Bansal says that security has traditionally considered network and hardware protection, but the attack surface is more software today, which is why he decided to start another company. "Software is becoming the main attack vector for many things. If you observe most of the sophisticated data breaches [...], they are happening in the code, no longer in the network or infrastructure, "he explained.
Traceable uses software agents to monitor code for abnormal behavior such as someone moving data through an API in an unusual way. The solution uses machine learning to learn over time what normal behavior looks like. As it develops this understanding, it can identify abnormal activity and mark it or turn it off.
It integrates into other tools like Slack and sends automatic alerts that something may not work. This could involve an action such as letting the team know that it is closing the API access for five or 10 minutes to allow someone to explore the problem. If it is a mistake, the software learns something, but if there is something wrong, the team can continue to block access and resolve it.
The company also announced $ 20 million in Unusual Ventures Series A funding and Big Labs. It is worth noting that Bansal manages both of these companies. He admits to being a busy guy, but says management companies are what he loves to do. Although he could have retired after selling AppDynamics, it's just not how it's wired.
"Some people work in some roles and once they retire they will do what they like. What I understand is that construction companies are what I enjoy, "he said.
As someone who created three startups, Bansal sees diversity and inclusion as a key success factor, something you really need to work on. "You have to be proactive about it from your hiring practices to how you try to bring different types of diversity into your team," he said. One of the mistakes he says is that people tend to hire people like them, and he quickly learned that the search for "cultural adaptation" would encourage more homogenized teams. He deleted it as an intake filter at the beginning of AppDynamics.
"What I understand is that the idea of suitable culture is a bad thing because it's about things like" I'm going to have a beer with this person "and are they similar to me or someone I can relate to? But it's not a thing positive, because it reduces diversity in the hiring and interview process, "he said.
He is not intimidated by the launch of a third company in the midst of the pandemic and a weakened economy. In fact, it launched AppDynamics in 2008 just two months before the accident. "In hindsight, it seemed to me that it was one of the best things that happened to me because it gave shape to who we were as a company: very obsessed with customers, strongly focused on building the best product on the market and very culture strong within the company. This has made us very successful, "he said.
He says he's trying to build a Harness-like mentality and traceable. For him, a recession tends to force a company to concentrate and eliminate companies that cannot. Traceable is his latest effort to solve a big problem, and the pandemic or not is going on.
