A tech giant boss has revealed the way he made his 400 employees millionaires and maintains that his plan was for their future.
Before Jyoti Bansal sold his software startup, AppDynamics in 2017, he couldn’t have known the ripple effect it would have had on those who worked for him.
It was days before his company was due to go public that Cisco, a communication tech company made him an offer he decided was the best deal for everyone involved.
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The offer price was $3.7 billion, and the chairman was going to make big bucks regardless of whether he took the sale or not.
But what would happen to his employees if he chose either way?
He explained that one option would guarantee the wealth of his employees and decided that this would be the best thing for him and his company.
Bansal quickly accepted the offer and suddenly, around 400 of his employees became millionaires.
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Bansal told CNBC Make It: “We had dozens of employees with $5 million-plus outcomes. These are life-changing outcomes.”
The decision to sell came down to whether AppDynamic’s software products could fit within Cisco and how the sale would impact his 1,200 employees.
This included cultural and financial implications.
He went on to estimate his own post-IPO projections and compared them to Cisco’s valuation of the startup, to figure out which was most beneficial.
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He estimated that to reach a $3.7 billion market capitalization, the company would have had to have been running ‘three [to] four years of great execution’ and said: “That means three [to] four years of risk that we ... reduced for all of the employees there. [That’s] a significant impact.”
Had Bansal decided to refuse the selling offer, his employees probably would have continued making their usual salaries and working for the company.
But because a lot of employees bought shares, they saw an amazing rise in the value to at least $1 million, a spokesperson for Bansal confirmed.
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After the sale, Bansal felt like he needed something new in his life, and started the Traceable and Harness companies to fill his time, with Harness actually valuing $3.7 billion in 2022.
However, it wasn’t just his employees who felt the weight of money in their pockets. It was him too.
He said: “As the founder, it was much more than life-changing money for me, personally.
“I would be in a good place. So that was a factor for me, but not the biggest factor. The biggest for me was our employees.”
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Bansal made a significant impact on his employees’ lives, just but considering their lives and needs during the offer of a sale.
This is a rarity, but it’s also happened before when SecureIT got acquired by VeriSign for $70 million in 1998.
The founder and CEO Jay Chaudhry didn’t know how impactful the sale was until he left a company party.
He told Make It that around 70 of his 80 employees became millionaires when VeriSign’s stock increased two years later.
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He said: “People were going crazy in the company, because they had never thought of so much money.
“A lot of them were buying new houses. They were buying new cars. I know one guy, he took six months off, rented a [mobile home] and went around the country. They could do what they wanted to do.”
With so much money, they could afford to spend on the things they truly wanted to have.
Topics: Money, Business, Technology, US News
Britt Jones