A New Adventure in Venture Capital
After four amazing years as CEO of AppDynamics, I’m joining Greylock as a Venture Partner
I walked into the AppDynamics offices in San Francisco as an employee for the first time in September of 2015 and was ushered to the front of an all hands meeting. Jyoti Bansal, the visionary founder of AppDynamics, introduced me to the 500 AppD employees around the world as the new CEO and we spent an hour taking questions together — the core message was how blessed I was to join AppDynamics at such a formative stage. It goes without saying that I’m incredibly proud of what we accomplished as a team at AppD and, in particular, how far we’ve come in the four years I’ve had the opportunity to serve as its CEO. It has been a truly incredible ride, with its fair share of twists, turns, and surprises, but always both exhilarating and profoundly rewarding. And so, it is with mixed emotions that I share my plans to move on from AppDynamics and with great excitement that I begin my journey with Greylock Partners.
AppDynamics has been like a family to me and the opportunity ahead continues to be a thrilling prospect for the two thousand employees around the globe as we’ve expanded the surface area of what AppD monitors from application performance to database and infrastructure performance to end user behavior and business outcomes — in real time. We have become the hub of real-time intelligence across thousands of enterprises around the world. But there is so much more potential and I wish Danny Winokur, my successor and long-time friend, and the entire AppD team all the best as they pursue the audacious and worthy goal of becoming the Central Nervous System for enterprises in the years ahead. I also want to thank all the Cisco employees for their incredible support of the business since the acquisition.
As I think about my journey over the last 17 years (Macromedia, Adobe and AppDynamics) I’ve realized that I’m happiest when I’m surrounded by passionate leaders, who challenge each other, are willing to take real risks to achieve true greatness and persevere despite the ups and downs, despite the headwinds and despite their own self-doubts. It’s difficult to create an organization that fosters these kinds of leaders, it’s harder to maintain this mindset as a company grows and experiences success and it’s incredibly rare to transform an organization once the mindset is lost.
During my time at Adobe, I was lucky enough to be part of one such (very well documented) transformation. Shantanu Narayen (Adobe’s CEO) and every one of us on his staff had to rethink the fundamentals of product innovation, business model and company culture. I played my part transitioning the Digital Media business and culture, but could not have been successful were it not for the passion and leadership of every other member of Adobe’s senior leadership team. What we did together, was much more than transform a business — we somehow regained the “founder mindset” and took ownership of the vision even when it ran counter to what the market and competitors were saying. We manically believed in what we were doing before others could see the opportunity. And nothing — not even our own occasional self-doubt — was going to stop the collective conviction we felt.
As I think about how lucky I’ve been to spend the majority of my career surrounded by fiercely passionate people who are obsessed with an idea they believe can change the world, or at least an industry, I realize that I want to spend more time working with, advising, learning from and continuing to be one of them. As the CEO of a fast growing Silicon Valley company, I’ve had the distinct privilege of spending time speaking with and advising dozens of remarkable founders over the last few years — and I can think of nothing more fulfilling at the moment than doing more of that.
Which is why I’ve decided to join Greylock Partners as a Venture Partner. Greylock has partnered with entrepreneurs to help build market-leading businesses since 1965. They continue to focus on early stage investing (including seeds, As and Bs) while also selectively leading later stage rounds. Greylock has maintained a disciplined approach to investing and company building — remaining a focused partnership, where every partner is committed to the success of each and every Greylock-backed company. It’s a place where partners actively work together to ensure Greylock-backed founders have the edge they need to see trends before they form, the conviction and support to persevere through the inevitable twists and turns and the network to accelerate them throughout their entrepreneurship journey — from the proverbial garage, to first revenue, to future funding, to sustainable growth, to acquisition or IPO and beyond.
Greylock and Lightspeed were founding investors in AppDynamics and co-led the Series A in 2008. I’ve had the distinct pleasure of getting to know all the Greylock partners (starting with Asheem Chandna, who led Greylock’s investment) and several of the Greylock LPs over the last few years. Greylock’s steady approach to investing for the long game has been a privilege to observe and I couldn’t be more excited to be a part of such a smart, humble and dedicated team.
While I’ll be exclusively investing with Greylock, I’m also looking forward to maintaining my relationship with Lightspeed and Ravi Mhatre (who led Lightspeed’s investment in AppDynamics). I will be joining as an inaugural member of the Lightspeed CEO Advisory Council, along with John Thompson (Chairman of Microsoft), Bipul Sinha (Founder and CEO of Rubrik) and Gregg Schott (CEO of Mulesoft). Additionally, I look forward to continuing my role on the Digital Advisory Board for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Board of Advisors for Brown University’s Computer Science Department and the Board of Trustees for StoryCorps and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
We live in exciting times. The rise of cloud computing, the wide-spread adoption of distributed application models and the increasingly practical introduction of artificial intelligence is opening up completely new markets we couldn’t contemplate a decade ago, while making it faster and more cost effective to start companies that go after new opportunities and disrupt old ones. I couldn’t be more excited to join Greylock and engage with amazing founders as a venture capitalist. And, as an operator at heart, I can’t wait to stand by their side during the ups and downs, through the headwinds and, especially, during the inevitable periods of self-doubt. I want to help entrepreneurs persevere and realize their visions so they can reshape the world around us.
Feel free to reach out at dwadhwani [at] greylock.com.
