Founder’s Lessons: Jayanth Gummaraju, CEO of Banyan Security
Jayanth shares the inspiration behind Banyan, insights on remote work, tips for building culture, and his best advice
About
Welcome to the thirteenth installment of Tsingyuan Ventures’ Lessons from Founders series. Every week, we publish an in-depth founder interview, ranging from early-stage entrepreneurs to successful businesses. Our conversations cover their personal journeys, the lessons that shaped them, their visions for the future, and their failures. We also learn more about their companies and about the challenges they try to solve. These insights and lessons are applicable to any entrepreneur — current or future.
Read past interviews here.
Banyan Security
Banyan Security’s innovative secure remote access solution provides seamless and productive access to all hybrid and multi-cloud apps and resources while ensuring dynamic, real-time protection, using an application-centric approach eliminating reliance on network- based controls. The Banyan platform is based on zero-trust principles and the embodiment of BeyondCorp strategies, leveraging advanced trust scoring and continuous authorization to ensure the highest level of protection for corporate resources. Banyan’s highly scalable solution is currently used by enterprises across verticals, including finance, healthcare, manufacturing, and technology. To learn more, visit www.banyansecurity.io or follow us on Twitter at @BanyanSecurity.
Jayanth Gummaraju has over a dozen years of experience inventing, leading, and bringing disruptive technologies to market. Prior to Banyan, Jayanth was at VMware where he co-led Instant VMs and Secure Big Data initiatives that had a huge impact on multiple BUs including End-User Computing, ESX Platform, Storage, Networking & Security. Prior to that, he founded Streamware, a MapReduce-on-a-chip startup based on his Ph.D thesis, which was assimilated into AMD’s OpenCL product lines. He has over 30 patents and scholarly articles in areas of distributed systems, virtualization, and security. Jayanth received his Ph.D. from Computer Systems Lab. at Stanford working with Prof. Mendel Rosenblum.
Why we invested in Banyan Security: The architecture of enterprise networks has shifted. Google got it right in their “BeyondCorp” vision: it will continue to shift towards hybrid cloud and reliance upon containers and microservices. Most enterprises will want to make this move; they will not be able to accomplish this on their own. Banyan Security has a lead (and the right approach and team) in executing this vision on behalf of enterprises. There is tremendous value in owning this space — think of it like “service layer virtualization”, like what VMWare did for the compute layer. The near-term market (access control) is a $10B market.
Meet Jayanth Gummaraju
Interview edited for clarity and length.
“The future that I want to envision for Banyan is the future that I want to envision for the remote workforce.”
Jayanth introduces himself
I’m Jayanth Gummaraju, co-founder and CEO of Banyan Security. We’re building a company that enables people to work from home securely and productively. Working from home has become the new normal.
Why he started Banyan
I did my PhD at Stanford, working with Mendel Rosenblum, the founder of VMware. He’s been my advisor and mentor for a long time. It’s always been great bouncing ideas off of him to figure out: what is the right thing to build for this world? I was at VMware for a few years. There were some trends that were really obvious. One was applications moving to cloud, whether it’s public cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP, so on) or applications migrating to SaaS. The other trend was that people started getting more and more remote. VMware bought AirWatch around the same time to enable remote work with devices.
What is the right thing to build for this world?
Those were obvious trends to indicate that we have highly dynamic applications on one side, and highly distributed workforce on the other. How do you connect the two? What is the right way for people to work remotely? People used to just sit in one office, connect with a cable, and then work. That’s not the reality anymore.
We wanted to build a solution from the ground up, while keeping the end goal in mind: having completely distributed applications and a completely distributed workforce. It’s a very interesting and crazy problem to solve.
We don’t want to solve a problem for the heck of solving a problem. It has to be relevant. It has to be something that can be adopted quickly. The world is already a certain way, so you can’t just go throw the old out and put your new thing in. How do you build something that can take people from where they are today to the final end state that we are envisioning for the world? Creating that pathway is what we’re building. That is what we’re building.
How do you build something that can take people from where they are today to the final end state that we are envisioning for the world?
Banyan Security’s name
A banyan tree has all these branches. It has a very strong and concrete base, and at the same time it goes and connects a bunch of things. Banyan trees are very popular where I grew up in Bangalore, the southern part of India. The name Banyan is also easy to remember and talk about. We put all these factors together.
The problem Banyan Security is solving
The world is getting more remote. The COVID-19 pandemic has been just one accelerator. Last year, when we pitched the company to investors, we were already talking about how the world is becoming more remote. The statistics are amazing. Last year, even before COVID, about 40% of the world’s workforce worked remotely at least one day a week. During COVID, it’s probably closer to like 90%. It will go back, but not to 40%, probably to somewhere in between.
We think Banyan is the right way to build the future of remote access. People really want to be able to treat work as an extended version of their day-to-day life. They want to be able to use their cell phone, laptop, or tablet to access company resources when they want to do work. And then afterwards, they can get away from it. As opposed to: come to a specific office, sit at a specific workstation, and work there.
People really want to be able to treat work as an extended version of their day-to-day life.
A lot of tools built for remote access are very network-centric. People use VPNs, which are a 20–25 year old technology. They were built for a different world. Trying to create an environment that makes it possible for people to work remotely and securely at the same time is a very big deal. The world is changing, and we see this happening now.
Building culture
Building a company is a lot about building a culture. You spend a lot of time with the people who you work with. It’s the most important thing you can do. You want to work with people that you’re happy working with, rather than just being there and getting the job done.
The right kind of people are passionate about what they’re doing and excited about being part of the culture that we’re building. Even as a small company, we have a culture committee. We laid out a few things we were all really value.
- First and foremost: integrity, honesty, and openness. That’s an essential piece in building trust, and we need that to start off.
- The second aspect is around execution: we need to be focused on our customers and on making sure they’re happy.
- The third piece is diversity. Not just in race, religion, and gender, but also in diversity of opinions. Everyone we’ve hired comes from very different backgrounds around the world with very different opinions. Diversity really enriches the culture. We can all come together for a common mission to make remote work or working from home more practical. That becomes a very energizing experience as opposed to treating culture separate from the company.
Biggest challenge
The biggest challenge is staying focused and delivering. We’ve built something that can do a lot of things, since it’s a general platform. That gives us a double-edged sword. It’s great that we can do many things, but as a startup, we have to be very focused. How can we keep being extremely focused? For many problems, even if it looks like we can solve them, we should have the discipline to say no.
Impact of COVID-19
COVID-19 threw everyone off. Initially, Software deals took longer to close, people were very uncertain about the economy and what was going on. But on the other side, COVID forced more people to work from home and accelerated the shift to remote work.
Before, no company wanted to experiment with remote work. But now that they’ve been forced to see the alternative, they see people are actually being very productive. Many companies are now thinking about remote work as a “first-class citizen” in their company infrastructure. They are thinking about new ways to do it. Banyan fits in right there as a new way to allow companies to secure remote access to their applications and servers — hosted in the data centers, public cloud, SaaS, or anywhere else. That’s top of mind for a lot of people. They know it’s an important problem that needs to be solved.
On growth and scaling
Growth and scaling for a company typically has two dimensions. How are we growing and scaling, in terms of recruiting and getting the right kind of people? And then, how are we growing and scaling in terms of customers?
For the employee front, it’s critical to hire people who have similar views on culture. They should have diversity of opinion, but they should align on values of integrity and honesty. We want to bring in people that have the same mentality to be open and be collaborative. That’s critical in scaling the company.
For growing customers, it’s about focus and trying to figure out what are the problems that we can solve today. We need to answer questions like: why buy anything, why buy Banyan, and why buy now.
On recruiting
As you bring in and hire more people, you get more people who are sort of linked. If you bring in an A-player, they’ll bring other A-players into the team.
Many times in a start-up, you think: “I need to get this work done. I need to get somebody.” So you go find a person that can handle that one piece and bring them in. But that’s not going to help you much. It will only help you for the time duration that you need that for, but it will come back to bite you. So keep the picture in mind. Bring people in that can not just do the job, but are a culture fit and help in recruiting and building more people like them into the team. That enables growth and is a very important part of company building.
Bring people in that can not just do the job, but are a culture fit and help in recruiting and building more people like them into the team.
His vision for the future
We are solving an important problem that enables people to work from anywhere they want and be highly productive and secure. The future that I want to envision for Banyan is the future that I want to envision for the remote workforce. I hope they can truly embrace remote work and rely on Banyan as the solution to make it a reality.
The future that I want to envision for Banyan is the future that I want to envision for the remote workforce.
His best advice
Go in with your eyes open. It’s a long haul. It’s not something you dream up one day, go do, and then you’re done. You want to truly believe in the company. You’ll be spending a lot of hours on it for a long period of time. Be passionate about it. There will be a lot of ups and downs. But your motivation and your vision for the future should keep you going. Be sure that you want to do it before doing it.
It’s not something you dream up one day, go do, and then you’re done.
Book recommendation
One book I would recommend, especially for enterprise companies, is Survival to Thrival by Bob Tinker and Tae Hea Nahm. That book represents very well how an enterprise company progresses. Everybody talks about “crossing the chasm” for startups. But this book is much more centered around enterprise companies specifically, which are very different from consumer companies.
Favorite online tool
The online tool I’m using the most right now, for good reason, is Zoom. How do you keep a culture alive when you’re remote? You need to see each other, not just talk on the phone which is very different from seeing a person, interacting with a person, and interacting with a team of people. We have virtual happy hours, we have virtual coffee breaks, we have weird contests. Zoom is the tool that makes it happen.
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