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Jyoti Bansal

CEO & Co-Founder

Harness

Harness’ CEO Jyoti Bansal on scaling startups and winning in the market

Finding the right product-market fit remains the holy grail for aspiring tech entrepreneurs.When it comes to enterprise success, age is not important. However, a mindset for disruption is key, according to Jyoti Bansal (pictured), co-founder and chief executive officer of Harness Inc.“If you can’t figure out the distribution channel — and that aligns with the product that you’ve built, and that aligns with the market demands and the market needs — you’re not going to succeed,” he said. “If products can be built faster, the innovation velocity is higher. You’re seeing companies that are growing really fast and building products with very small teams

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Jyoti Bansal, Harness (Most Innovative Tech Startup Leaders)

Jyoti Bansal

CEO & Co-Founder Harness

John Furrier of theCUBE Research sat down with Jyoti Bansal, CEO and Founder of Harness, to talk about what earned him the title of “Most Innovative Tech Startup Leader” at the 2025 Tech Innovation CUBEd Awards. Learn more about our other 2025 Tech Innovation CUBEd Awards winners: https://www.thecube.net/awards Bansal has been transforming the way engineering teams build, test and deploy software, using AI and automation to make DevOps smarter and more efficient. In this conversation, he shares insights on scaling innovation, the future of software deliver... Read more

Jyoti Bansal, Harness (Most Innovative Tech Startup Leaders)

>> Hello, welcome to the Cube Studios here in our Palo Alto Studios in the middle of Silicon Valley, and welcome to the Cubes Tech Innovation Cubed Awards, where we celebrate the winners of our inaugural program. The competition was fierce. We got a lot of great entries, high caliber entries, showcasing all the innovation across the industry. And today we're joined by Joti, who's been on the queue many times, founder and C of Harness, just acquired his other project, traceable all under one Roof. Recently had on earlier award-winning entry around the innovation around harness and his variety of other projects. But he took the category top honors and most innovative tech startup leader. Joti, congratulations on the award. Well deserved. Great, great career you've had and keep on having in entrepreneurship and building companies. Investing in companies. Thanks for coming on the, and congratulations.

>> Yeah, I, I thank, thank you, John, and great to be here back again.

>> So, innovation obviously was essential to our themes, and it's an inaugural event. You never know if we're gonna have another one. It's the first. Looks like we're gonna have another one. We had 43 judges. We thought we were gonna be me, Dave, and a handful of us here at Silicon Angle in the Cube. Huge community response to the Cube and what we do. And again, again, real big community award. You've been an innovator. You've had a great career, you had great success in the past. Continue to have success with harness. You've incubated a lot of projects, given your hands dirty. You're building companies. Traceable was just announced recently. We had you on the cube with your CTO and, and again, more success. What approach are you taking these days? Give us a, give us a taste of your mindset, one in the market we're in, and two, the lessons in entrepreneurship and leadership that you've brought along the way in the impact it's had.

>> Yeah. You know, I don't think anything changes in the world of innovation except like, you know, the rate of innovation is increasing. So I'm very honored and, you know, in many ways, like, you know, thrilled that there is so much innovation opportunity right now for, for anyone. You know, we have, AI is such a big disruptor in the market that creates the room for innovation in, in so many significant ways. So, you know, for anyone who's want to drive businesses, build businesses based on innovation, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's a great time. You

>> Know, you and

>> I look at my approach, you know, to entrepreneurship and innovation, to me, it's all starts with a, you know, a problem that you're passionate about. And I look at like, you know, if you, if you are pro passionate about a problem, you've experienced some pain somewhere, and you really, really are convinced that there has to be a better way of doing something, that's where the innovation starts. That's the spark of the innovation there. And now you take from there and you really focus on like, how do you, how do you solve the pain better than anyone else in the, in the, in the market, you know, maybe three x, five x, 10 x better than, you know, how people have done it before. You really focus on delivering that to, to, to your, to your consumers, to your customers. And that becomes the, the, the, the centerpiece of everything that, that you do. Now, you know, innovation on the tech is not enough, right? You have to convert it to a business. And, you know, that's for me as an engineer turned entrepreneur, like, you know, like many entrepreneurs, you have to learn the business part of it, which is like, you know, go to market, you know, how to build a scalable business. How do we innovate at scale? And things that I had to learn over time,

>> You know, you've, in, in entrepreneurship, there's always the books written. People go to school for it. I mean, I went to school in, in the nineties when I got my business degree. You know, coming from a computer science background, oh, business is easy. Oh, man, it's not that hard. It's not that easy. You gotta get customers. You gotta build out a team. So you've, there's been always that product market fit conversation, and you've written some seminal posts. One of them I liked the most on was, it's hard to sell, talk to your customers, right? Because you have to build the business. Talk about that dynamic around, you know, building a great product, going to a great market, and it's the classic VC thing. Hey, big markets are great. I'll take an A market B team any day, or no, a b market and an A team, however the expression goes. But it's not just solving the problem. You actually gotta go execute. Talk about some of those lessons and then how does that compare to now? Because we're seeing a lot of acceleration.

>> Yeah, it's, there's a lot of acceleration right now. Like, you know, how you build products could be much, much faster. You know, you need less number of people, less engineers. AI is a big, big driver in, in the productivity around how good products could be built and very, very fast. But once the products are built, you gotta get it out in front of people. And depends on like, you know, what kind of product it is. You are selling to consumers, you're selling to SMB, you're selling to large enterprise. You have to figure out the right distribution. So as I, as you know, I talk about it like, you know, as the, the product market fit starts with the, not just like, you know, you a product that solves a problem in the large market, but also how do you distribute it in the right way? I call it product market sales fit. If you don't get you, if you can't figure out the distribution channel, and that aligns with the product that you're built, and that aligns with the, the, you know, the market demands and the market needs, you're not gonna succeed. So I do think right now it's like if products can be built faster, the innovation velocity is higher. You know, you're seeing companies that are growing really fast, you know, and building products with very small teams. So that's, that's, and that's, that's very key. You combine with, with, with the right go-to market philosophy, the right go-to market execution and, and it trade over that as well. That's, you know, that becomes core of it. When, when the businesses grow, you know, quickly, you also have to, to all be ahead of what's next. You know, it's because things are moving so fast. And if you're behind on what's next, even by like a few months or six months a year, you'll, you'll be, you'll be, you'll be left behind.

>> You know, one of the things I love about your journey is you've been in the enterprise, right? And the enterprise go back 15 years, and we started the cube. It wasn't that sexy. No one was really covering it. It was a gr a greenfield for us, as we say. And even the decade before you had the classic B2B enterprise sales, you hire a sales team, hope for the best scale up, get that round. Now you're seeing entrepreneurs. I was just in New York interviewing a bunch of young entrepreneurs under 30. I was expecting to hear about some consumers, some great models. Yeah, those are out there. But these young guns, they're, they're calling on financial services. They, they're selling to the enterprise. So enterprise has become a big market, and a lot of these companies have one year a RR contracts, and because they're in these POC purgatory, right? So talk about how you see this enterprise sales motion, because you gotta get the distribution, but getting a POC isn't enough. You have to kind of cross over. It's like gonna the airport and going through TSA, right? You want to just sail through, but you get stopped. All these kind of like trigger points. Talk about that dynamic because the enterprise has changed. Talk about that dynamic, how startups focusing on the enterprise, what it takes to be successful.

>> Yeah. If you look at enterprise, what has changed in enterprise is the, they're more open to innovation. They're more open to newer technologies than they used to be. Like, you know, you used to be like, you know, 15, 20 years ago, people will say, no one gets fired for buying from IBM. And that was kind of the mindset in a large enterprise, like, you have to go after the, the safe choice. That has changed a bit. You know, enterprises are, you know, you could even argue, like, and you could be fired for buying from IBM these days. If you are, if you are a enterprise that you're not innovating or you're not, not thinking ahead, you are very old school about, about some things. But it's, so that's, that's a great thing about enterprise. But a lot of things haven't changed as well. Like, you know, it's enterprises are complex organizations, the multiple stakeholders, multiple decision makers, you know, so you go to market is not just about the product. And solving the problem is also about making the business case of how an enterprise, you know, what's impact it's gonna be for them. So a lot of the enterprise selling is about, you know, justifying the business value, justifying the business case get, and, and making it a durable business case for them. So that's where like, you know, you go out of the POC to a, to a, to a real implementation in a large enterprise. If you've proven out the business value, not just a technical implementation, the business value, the business outcome of what impact are your product is going to make and can it make in a sustainable way. You know, as the companies that I've built, you know, AppDynamics, harness traceable, we focus on large enterprises significantly. And you know, we, we understand like, you know, to sell to large enterprises, you have to build a product that's flexible. You need to build a platform that you know, it's, and take a platform kind of approach to it. You have to, you know, start small in many companies and kind of grow from there to a pilot. You have to show your, approve your value. You have to combine with like, you know, you know, coexistence with their existing tools and processes. You know, the enterprises don't have a luxury to replace everything, you know, in, in, and in one day. So those are some principles if you, if you have to succeed in large enterprise.

>> Talk about the role of the founder. You know, I've always been a big believer, the founder led approach. However, you need to have real professional sales teams, you know, gone on the days of, you know, the VCs taking over, bringing in the sales team, kind of a hybrid model, going mostly successful. Today we see that classic playbook has kind of been recognized as a little bit too slow. And sometimes it's to name domain expertise. Yeah. You still gotta scale up. Yeah. You need an army. And salespeople, once you kind of get there, how should founders and other business leaders that wanna build and penetrate the enterprise, think about one team construction, team makeup, and two, the go to market specifically around how AI spec is, is being looked at. Some of the AI is the hurdle on securities high, but some of the POCs are plentiful. So is there an approach you, you see today that's viable, that gets you a nice beachhead for an entrepreneur and a founder? And not, when should the founder not take their eye off the ball or ever,

>> You know, fi a founder can never take the eye off the eye, off the ball. But it really depends on the defense stages, like, you know, of, of any startup. So when you're just starting, it's all about product market fit. Getting your first, you know, a first million of revenue, getting, making sure like, you know, your product is solving the problem, you're finding your, your, your go-to market kind approach, et cetera. And the founder has to do all, all of it. At that point, you really cannot fully delegate out at that point. You know, you, you won't be able, able to even recruit like good sales leaders, good marketing leaders at that stage because you're still proving things out. But once you start getting from like that initial product market fit and product market distribution, you know, fit, then you can start bringing in leaders. And that's the only way to scale. Like, you know, you need, like, you know, sales leaders, marketing leaders, and I do, I encourage all founders, like, you know, bring in the best people you can. Like if you're a product oriented founder, which most founders are like, you know, like, like, like I am, I, I always look at, I need to lean on my superpower. My superpower is building great products and, but I need to bring in my team people whose superpowers are, you know, very good at being very good in selling, very good in marketing, very good in, you know, so in, in operating engineering, you know, all kind of functions that we need to scale. Yeah. And you know, sales is very important. Like if you're selling into large enterprise sales is a, there's, there's a lot of work that happens, you know, having a structured sales process on how do you generate demand, how do you run the sales process, how do you do negotiations? You know, how do you do create a, a momentum in any, any large company? You know, you have, you know, from marketing perspective, you have to do a lot of things around, you know, creating your brand, your awareness, your visibility, and over time you have to become a machine around it. But as a founder, you want to make sure, like, you know, you have the right people you can lean on, and these people can, you know, know what to do. Professionals and selling and professionals and marketing, et cetera.

>> I have to ask you, because, you know, I'm old enough to remember when proprietary software ran the day and open source was just starting now, it's like what it was wasn't always free. You're seeing a renaissance of, I call older entrepreneurs that came from that systems generation and the young guns are rising up in the same time. AI and you know, these, this AI infrastructure, whether it's security or you know, just raw infrastructure and now the software layer on top, you're seeing kind of like a, a confluence of of age experience, relevant experience coming in. What's your thoughts on that? What's your reaction? Do you see the same thing? I'm seeing founders in their late forties starting companies.

>> You know, you know, I, I don't believe in the, there is a right age for any founder to be a, you could be a great founder at 22, you can be a great founder at 62. It's, it doesn't really matter. Like as long as you're willing to learn, as long as you, entrepreneurship is all about constant learning. Yes, there are some prior experiences that really help, but prior experiences cannot help sometimes as well. Like they, you know, the, the, the freshness of thinking because you, you, you have a new lens to something is very powerful as well. So to me, it's like a successful entrepreneur has to, has to constantly learn. Yeah. And there is no age to it. Like, you know, it's, it doesn't mean that, you know, if you, you can't learn when you're younger. You can't learn when you're older. I've seen, you know, companies and founders who are very successful, you know, at any, any, any age. I do think the, the opportunity of disruption is very key. And the mindset for disruption is very key, that you want to go after the status quo of how things are done. And you're very passionate about doing, solving that. So it's, you know, I, it's great to see like, you know, people of all kind of ages are coming together and see the opportunity that is out there in front of us with the AI changing things and opportunity to build new products and new companies.

>> Yeah. I love that. Great, great pro tip there. Yeah. Opportunity recognition is key. And seeing opportunity go after it. Don't be afraid. Run into the fire, disrupt, go after that market. 'cause you can get it.

>> Opportunity is the, is, you know, it's only the opportunity Recognition is the first 2% of the job, right? It, the 98% is the, is the execution on the opportunity after that? Yeah. 'cause you know, if, if there's a good opportunity that you recognize there's a high chance that there's another 10 to 15 good entrepreneurs that recognize that opportunity as well. Yeah. If no one else has recognized opportunity, most likely is not a very big one. And so now it all comes down to the execution. Who executes better. And like, you know, execution is all about like, you know, speed to market, you know, how far value do, how you scale, you know, the execution on product, execution on distribution. All of those things would really decide who the, who the winner and the loser is.

>> Yeah, I exactly go that last and then grind it too. It's a grind sometimes. Sometimes good days, bad days. I have to ask you, looking back at your journey, you've had very successful exit, okay, went back to the, back to the ranch, kind of settle in, start again, get back in the, get it back in the arena. Looking back at, at, at the time in your, in your journey here, certainly with Harness and the work you've done, what's been some of the key turning points or points or decisions that helped you go through this to get recognized today? Obviously you got a great, great track record, but what was, in your current journey, what was those key turning points and decisions that helped you get to where you're at today?

>> Definitely the, you know, the lessons that I've learned is the first part, like a lot of times the conversation is about how do you start a company? How do you build, get a product market fit? How do you get a, get a successful startup going? But that's really the step one. The step two is how do you scale innovation? You know, when, and when I look at like, you know, when I was now doing this as a, as as, as a repeat entrepreneur, that's the problem that I was very passionate about. Like, how do we scale innovation beyond our first product? First product market fit to a product number two, to product number 3, 4, 5, 7, 10. You know, maybe like, you know, that we can build dozens of products, successful products, and scale innovation. So the, the turning point for, for Harness, you know, and harness our mission is that there are about 40 million software developers in the world and software developers. You know, that's the, the cost of software engineering for 40 million developers is about $4 trillion. And out of that 25, 30% could be tuned if we can and, and, and optimized if we can bring the right tool chain for DevOps, for quality, for application security, for, you know, cost management, finops, all kind of the work that's not really the creative work of software engineering, but really the plumbing and the mechanics that we go go, you know, in software engineering, we can create a massive productivity again. So we have a big mission, big bold vision, right? But the, the, the challenge is like, you know, you can't go and address it all, right? So you start with like one part, find product, market fit, succeed, and then you have to scale innovation across the board. So we at Harness, we, we, we, you know, we came up with this approach called startups within a startup, you know, so Harness is one startup with, you know, about a thousand employees in, in the company and growing very, very fast. One of the fastest growing at our size, et cetera. But it's internally structured as 15 different startups like you. So we have different 15 different startup leaders, startup CEOs who are working on different, you know, different products or we call them different modules in our platform. And these, and they have their ownership, their accountability almost operate as a independent startup will operate in Silicon Valley. You know, with the, and how we, we we, how we build the products, how we compete in each of those different areas, how we go to market, how we package. And that's been a turning point and kind of like, I would say the, the, the, the center of how we were able to innovate at that kind of scale.

>> Yeah. That's awesome. Great, great tips there. I have to ask you to kind of wrap things up. And first of all, congratulations on the award. Well deserved. Again, the track record's been phenomenal, continuing to innovate, love the approach. Every successful entrepreneur has that. DNA, you're born to be an entrepreneur, you've been product oriented. You got, you got the experience in the enterprise. Continuing it off, continuing going on, what's your secret sauce? What would you say is the most distinctive aspect of your approach that has enabled you to push the boundaries of your success?

>> Well, my secret sauce is it's really simple. Build great products. I, I look at like, you know, if you, if you have a large, you know, I, I simplify it down to a few things. One is like, you know, go after a large problem space, build great products. And that's really the, you know, becomes the, the core strength. Combine it with very strong go-to market sales, execution, you know, the, and then make sure you really take care of your customers and not just say it, you really, really take care of your customers. And then you create a culture of, you know, organizationally that's very inclusive of like, you know, and it creates like we are all in the boat together and solving these problems together and innovating together instead of like a very top down micromanaged kind of culture. I look at like, you know, if I do these five things, eventually success happens. And, you know, and, and we'll, we'll we'll go after large problem space and build good products and, and sell more

>> Love the agile approach of the multiple startups within the startups. Great innovation there. Speaking of startups, within the startups, you actually had another startup traceable that you merged in with harness talk about that. 'cause that wasn't a startup within the startup, that was another startup. Yeah. So again, mindset there was get a separate team, take more territory, look downstream. Was that intentional? Was that, yeah, that

>> Start of like, you know, we, I started that as a separate company because the, the buyer and user personas were very different. Like, you know, and harness we are going after the engineering personas and you know, I wanted to really solve the problems on next generation of application security, code security. And those personas were more around, around the security teams, the cybersecurity CISO teams. So that's why I started them as two separate companies and, you know, but yes, it was back of the mind, you know, at, at some point those two personas may converge. And we started to see that convergence happening that like, you know, the engineering teams and the security teams are coming together and, and co-owning, you know, how do, do secure software delivery, how do we build software that is secure? How do you, you know, how do you work, you know, in one, one function as DevSecOps. And that's the reason like, you know, we decided to combine, you know, a few weeks ago announced that the, the two companies come together and they become startups within startup in one single company. Yeah.

>> And that's really a good example of the long game, right? You had the vision kind of, you want to create some cohesiveness, but you don't want to integrate too early, right? So Harness had its cohesiveness starts within startups, traceable different persona. Again, a little bit of a long game there sounds like.

>> Yeah. You know, it's, it's, and you need the flexibility, right? You know, if the, if the market, if those personas and markets were not converging for another few years, you know, I would've kept them in separate companies for many, for a few years. But the personas are even converge much faster. And it made sense. You know, we harness, we have the startups within startup going and traceable. We had startups within startup going as well, just starting to but start, but that same thing we are doing and now, now they can both be together and, and bring this more value to the market.

>> Yeah. Okay. Better together. Bring 'em together. Timing was great. Congratulations. We covered that on Silicon Angle. Ge, thanks so much for coming on. Appreciate your time and again, congratulations. Love your approach to one building companies, great entrepreneur. Again, continuing to knock it outta the park. And again, we, we love covering all the action again as it unfolds.

>> Yeah, right. Hey, thank you and always great to be here with you. Alright,

>> Great. Great job. Thanks so much. Alright. That's the cubed. He's been cubed as the innovating leader in building out companies. Of course, tech innovation is part of our cubed awards in our inaugural first class of, of winners. We're gonna be doing another one in the second half of the year. We're getting more coverage coming. I'm John Furry, you're your host of the Cube. Thanks for watching.