The Vision and Execution that Led to the AppDynamics Acquisition.

Congratulations to the entire team at AppDynamics. The news of Cisco’s acquisition is a validation of an amazing journey to build an iconic company.

At Lightspeed Venture Partners we feel incredibly fortunate to have been a trusted partner since the first Series A investment in 2008.

Lightspeed first met AppDynamics and founder Jyoti Bansal in 2007 when the company was just starting off. We were extremely impressed with the early vision of how the IT landscape was in the midst of a historically significant transition. A core premise was that virtualization technology and a strong move toward service-oriented application architectures would create opportunities for new companies in the multibillion dollar IT operations sector.

We were completely aligned on this vision of applications becoming more componentized over time and therefore requiring an APM solution that looked across application tiers.

Today, the AppDynamics architecture has become the gold standard for cross-tier application monitoring which is only just now becoming even more important in a world embracing containers and cloud computing.

Another important early core tenet of AppDynamics was the the belief in innovating on the go-to-market motion in addition to the core product technology.

The early AppDynamics team was an incredibly bright and talented group, but what was particularly impressive was every single engineer’s willingness to sit in on customer calls in order to understand firsthand how to perfect the customer experience. It was an incredibly high bar for the 1.0 release, requiring that a customer receive value in “5 minutes or less” with the free product downloadable online. The goal was unprecedented visibility into even the most complex enterprise applications with just a few clicks of the mouse — a truly innovative experience and model for this product category.

AppDynamics was one of the pioneers in the “consumerization of IT” movement that continues to disrupt the enterprise software ecosystem and enables customers to use products that self-install and provide value almost instantly.

In the military there is an axiom — no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. In the journey of a successful startup the same idea holds true. AppDynamics evolved and went through several changes over the past several years. Some of the original hypotheses about how the market would evolve were spot on, and others developed over time. The definition of product market fit, what the highest priority strategic items were, and the sales playbook continued to evolve with the market. Every great company finds a way to succeed, and it is a true credit to the outstanding founders and executive leadership team at AppDynamics that the company has so successfully navigated its way to this point.

AppDynamics was started with a vision to become an iconic enterprise IT company. At Lightspeed we strive to back entrepreneurs who have a vision to build world changing companies, and the perseverance to deliver on the dream.

To all the customers who bet on AppDynamics over the years, and to the families of those who contributed countless hours and worked so tirelessly over the course of the journey, we salute you and thank you for trusting Lightspeed to be your partner.

A Sincere Thank You from Team Lightspeed