Personal blog of Yzmir Ramirez

There was a time when brick-and-mortar mom and pops framed their first $1 on the wall, but in the SaaS startup the equivalent milestone is $1 billion revenue run-rate.

Salesforce is the SaaS revenue king reporting $4 billion in revenue for its most recent quarterly report, and there are many other relatively new SaaS companies, such as WorkDay, ServiceNow and Atlassian, that have broken the $1 billion barrier.

This year at TechCrunch Disrupt (tickets here!), we welcome three people to the Extra Crunch stage who know first hand what it takes to join the billion dollar club.

Neeraj Agrawal, a partner at Battery Ventures and seasoned enterprise investor, presented his growth thesis in a widely read article for TechCrunch where he outlined the key milestones for a SaaS company to reach a billion dollars.

Whitney Bouck is COO at HelloSign, a startup that was sold to Dropbox in 2018 for $230 million. Bouck was also an executive at Box, guiding their enterprise business from 2011-2015. Prior to that she was at Documentum, which exited in 2003 to EMC for $1.7 billion.

Jyoti Bansal is currently co-founder & CEO of Harness. Previously, he was founder & CEO of AppDynamics, which Cisco acquired in 2017 for $3.7 billion. Bansal is also an investor as co-founder of venture capital firm Unusual Ventures.

The goal of this panel is to help you understand the tools and strategies that go into ramping to a billion in revenue and beyond. It requires a rare combination of good idea, product-market fit, culture and commitment. It also requires figuring out how to evolve the core idea and recover from inevitable mistakes — all while selling investors on your vision.

We’re amped for this conversation, and we can’t wait to see you there! Buy tickets to Disrupt SF here at an early-bird rate!

Did you know Extra Crunch annual members get 20% off all TechCrunch event tickets? Head over here to get your annual pass, and then email extracrunch@techcrunch.com to get your 20% discount. Please note that it can take up to 24 hours to issue the discount code.

Series B rounds used to be about establishing a product-market fit, but for some startups the whole process seems to be accelerating. Harness, the startup founded by AppDynamics co-founder and CEO Jyoti Bansal is one of those companies that is putting the pedal the metal with his second startup, taking his learnings and a $60 million round to build the company much more quickly.

Harness already has an eye-popping half billion dollar valuation. It’s not terribly often I hear valuations in a Series B discussion. More typically CEOs want to talk growth rates, but Bansal volunteered the information, excited by the startup’s rapid development.

The round was led by IVP, GV (formerly Google Ventures) and ServiceNow Ventures. Existing investors Big Labs, Menlo Ventures and Unusual Ventures also participated. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $80 million, according to Crunchbase data.

Bansal obviously made a fair bit of money when he sold AppDynamics to Cisco in 2017 for $3.7 billion and he could have rested after his great success. Instead he turned his attention almost immediately to a new challenge, helping companies move to a new continuous delivery model more rapidly by offering Continuous Delivery as a Service.

As companies move to containers and the cloud, they face challenges implementing new software delivery models. As is often the case, large web scale companies like Facebook, Google and Netflix have the resources to deliver these kinds of solutions quickly, but it’s much more difficult for most other companies.

Bansal saw an opportunity here to package continuous delivery approaches as a service. “Our approach in the market is Continuous Delivery as a Service, and instead of you trying to engineer this, you get this platform that can solve this problem and bring you the best tooling that a Google or Facebook or Netflix would have,” Basal explained.

The approach has gained traction quickly. The company has grown from 25 employees at launch in 2017 to 100 today. It boasts 50 enterprise customers including Home Depot, Santander Bank and McAfee.

He says that the continuous delivery piece could just be a starting point, and the money from the round will be plowed back into engineering efforts to expand the platform and solve other problems DevOps teams face with a modern software delivery approach.

Bansal admits that it’s unusual to have this kind of traction this early, and he says that his growth is much faster than it was at AppDynamics at the same stage, but he believes the opportunity here is huge as companies look for more efficient ways to deliver software. “I’m a little bit surprised. I thought this was a big problem when I started, but it’s an even bigger problem than I thought and how much pain was out there and how ready the market was to look at a very different way of solving this problem,” he said.

As companies shift to CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous delivery), they face a problem around monitoring and fixing problems in builds that have been deployed. How do you deal with an issue after moving onto the next delivery milestone? Harness, the startup launched last year by AppDynamics founder Jyoti Bansal, wants to fix that with a new tool called 24×7 Service Guard.

The new tool is designed to help companies working with a continuous delivery process by monitoring all of the builds, regardless of when they were launched. What’s more, the company claims that using AI and machine learning, it can dial back a problematic build to one that worked in an automated fashion, freeing developers and operations to keep working without worry.

The company launched last year with a tool called Continuous Verification to verify that a continuous delivery build got deployed. With today’s announcement, Bansal says the company is taking this to another level to help understand what happens after you deploy.

The tool watches every build, even days after deployment, taking advantage of data from tools like AppDynamics, New Relic, Elastic and Splunk, then using AI and machine learning to identify problems and bring them back to a working state without human intervention. What’s more, your team can get a unified view of performance and the quality of every build across all of your monitoring and logging tools.

“People are doing Continuous Delivery and struggling with it. They are also using these AI Ops kinds of products, which are watching things in production, and trying to figure out what’s wrong. What we are doing is we’re bringing the two together and ensuring nothing goes wrong,” Bansal explained.

24×7 Service Guard Console. Screenshot: Harness

He says that he brought this product to market because he saw enterprise companies struggling with CI/CD. He said the early messaging that you should move fast and break things really doesn’t work in enterprise settings. They need tooling that ensures that critical applications will keep running even with continuous builds (however you define that). “How do you enable developers so that they can move fast and make sure the business doesn’t get impacted. I feel that industry was underserved by this [earlier] message,” he said.

While it’s hard for any product to absolutely guarantee up-time, this one is providing tooling for companies who see the value of CI/CD, but are looking for a way to keep their applications up and running, so they aren’t constantly on this deploy/repair treadmill. If it works as described, it could help advance CI/CD, especially for large companies that need to learn to move faster and want assurances that when things break, they can be fixed in an automated fashion.

 What does it take to build a billion-dollar SaaS enterprise-software company? We gave a 30,000-foot answer to this complex — and fascinating — question in a recent TechCrunch post, The SaaS Adventure. To recap: We’ve observed seven key phases in most SaaS companies’ go-to-market success. We dubbed this journey the “SaaS Adventure,” which is broadly how we… Read More