Technical founders build the future and they deserve a partner obsessed with helping them get there.
They understand the power of a new technology inflection and have the insight to imagine a different future. But insight alone doesn’t build a company. The hardest part of the early years isn’t building the product — it’s everything that comes after.
Finding the right beachhead segment. Identifying the desperate customer and right design partners. Building a go-to-market from scratch. Navigating a process full of ambiguity and risk where every wrong turn burns time
and capital.
They understand the power of a new technology inflection and have the insight to imagine a different future. But insight alone doesn’t build a company. The hardest part of the early years isn’t building the product — it’s everything that comes after.
Jyoti Bansal & John Vrionis. First met in 2007. Went through the PMF journey firsthand at AppDynamics. Built Unusual to give every technical founder the same shot.
Jyoti and John first met in 2007 when Jyoti was thinking of starting AppDynamics — a strong technologist with a dream of becoming an entrepreneur. John was an associate fresh out of business school.
From day one, they shared an obsession: how do you maximize the odds of taking a technical insight and turning it into an iconic, enduring business? They worked side by side — John as Jyoti’s first investor, Jyoti as the founder — and went through the process of finding product-market fit together.
AppDynamics became a category-defining company, acquired by Cisco for $3.7 billion. That journey forged a bond and a shared love for the PMF process that has only deepened since.
Today, Jyoti is one of just 16 people in history to build two companies that each surpassed $100M in revenue — AppDynamics and Harness. John has invested in over 30 startups that reached billion-dollar-plus outcomes and teaches the course on product-market fit at Stanford GSB.
In 2017, after nearly 10 years of working together, they decided to create a firm that put everything they had learned into a new kind of engagement model — one built to radically improve the odds for technical founders. Because the industry’s odds are terrible for founders. And they shouldn’t be.
We make a small number of investments each year. Our team is a group of full-time operators who work day in and day out alongside our founders — starting with crafting the value hypothesis, generating customer conversations relentlessly, searching for the right beachhead segment, recruiting design partners, forging the go-to-market motion, and doing whatever it takes to help founders through the hardest phase of building a startup. Every founder stumbles and struggles through this process. We built a firm for founders who want a partner with the patience, the experience, and the commitment to lift them up when it
gets hard.
Our team is not built to do a high volume of investments — it’s a dedicated group deployed full-time on our portfolio. They all understand the Unusual Method for PMF and work in service of our founders every day. Our content, our educational programs, our events — everything we do exists to radically improve the odds for founders searching for product-market fit.
More focused. More specialized. More committed. The venture capital industry’s volume-based model doubles down on the investments that work and moves on from the rest. But what about the founders who could have made it — if only they had a partner willing to do the work alongside them?
That’s the question that led us to build Unusual.
Our LPs are primarily non-profits — hospitals, foundations, and HBCUs — we call them forces for good.
Our team is small but mighty. Our track record speaks for itself. And we wouldn’t trade this for anything — a committed team, the hardest years, and the chance to help build something that supports the entrepreneurs who shape the world.