Bhaskar Sunkara grew up in Delhi, India, and moved to the states when he started working. He has lived in San Fransisco for several decades now, and has spent a lot of his professional life building systems (infrastructure, observability and now, analytics). His prior startup, AppDynamics, was eventually acquired by Cisco. In general, he stays curious about how things work, and likes to deconstruct systems to figure out how they work. Outside of tech, he is a big sports fan, enjoying football, baseball, cricket and basketball. In fact, he grew up watching Michael Jordan and the bulls.

Bhaskar noticed that business teams were drowning in dashboards, and as such, were not sure how to take the next steps in the business. He and his team realized that what people needed was not a retroactive view, but a proactive one - something more akin to a 24x7 analyst.

This is the creation story of Bicycle AI.

Sponsors

• Unblocked
• TECH Domains
• Mezmo
• Braingrid.ai

Links

• https://bicycle.ai/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/bhaskarsunkara/

Timestamps

0:00 Intro and episode teaser on the limits of manual KPI monitoring

1:49 Guest introduction: Bhaskar Sunkara's background and AppDynamics experience

2:50 The core problem: Why revenue teams are drowning in dashboards

3:53 Origin story: Shifting from reactive dashboards to proactive AI analysts

4:36 Identifying target transactional verticals in retail, travel, and payments

6:02 Building the MVP: The 1-year journey and defining core capabilities

7:06 The three MVP pillars: Data connection, KPI definition, and dimensional search

8:33 Strategic trade-offs: Choosing vertical focus over generic horizontal BI

10:00 Harnessing LLMs and agentic AI for root-cause context

15:00 Establishing single-source-of-truth KPI definitions across departments

20:00 How AI agents integrate into existing enterprise data stacks

25:00 The future of autonomous analytics and proactive decision-making

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