Hey Simon, thanks for joining the CEO's podcast. Appreciate you joining us here on a Thursday afternoon.
Ben, it's great to be here, man. How are you today?
Good, man, great. It's just been another fun week of being a CEO, like we were talking about the chief of everything job, chief of all meetings today sounds like for you. So yeah, it'd be great to discuss your background, kind of how you became the CEO. I think that's always a great discussion. And tell our audience a little bit about what you learned about the CEO role before you joined and what you kind of got exposed to once you joined to be the CEO. I know you've worn a lot of hats, so we'll start there and then we'll get into what you guys do at Haiku and what we're seeing in the industry. So why don't we start with your background, Simon? Tell us a little bit about how you got to be the CEO over here.
I love it. Thanks Ben, and thanks again for having me on the show. So yes, Simon Taylor, CEO and founder of HYCU. HYCU stands for Hybrid Cloud Uptime. I'm a serial entrepreneur. When I was about 24, I started my first company while working at Forrester Research. I moved to Prague, Czech Republic, with almost nothing, wrote a business plan, and built an algorithmic matching engine for software engineers and buyers. I traveled around Eastern Europe, building a database, and sold that company to Comrade Group. I then worked for them, started their US operations, went to business school in Spain, and then started another company called Comrade Software, a monitoring tools company for Citrix, which grew to 4,000 customers and was acquired by Citrix in 2014. After that, I met an architect named Goran Gjevik in Las Vegas, and we discussed disrupting backup and recovery. He used the analogy of Uber for data protection. We started HYCU in April 2017, grew 450% during COVID, raised $140 million total, have a 9 NPS score, 4,000 customers in 78 countries, and we're one of the fastest growing data protection companies.
I notice you said 4,000. Sounds like you exited with the last 4,000 number. You're still going here, it sounds like, at least today with the next 4,000. That's a good number, good round number.
It is. What's funny is people always ask me, is this it? Are you going to flip it out? And I always joke with them, but it's true. When you've done a couple of these tech tuck-ins, you start to feel like it'd be great to build something that has great staying power. I think this one really has legs. I'd like to see it get to 10,000, 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 customers, but what I really want to do is fix the way we think about SaaS data and make it something that people think about protecting all the time.
Okay, all right, cool. We'll come back to that. But I want to go back to the past real quick. Tell me a little bit about what it was like founding a company in Eastern Europe versus founding a company in America. What were some of the differences, and also selling and working with customers in that market? Just for our listeners, both folks that are looking to work in that part of the world and also maybe sell into that world.
Just to give context, I moved there in 2004, 2005. The internet was younger. I downloaded a 200-page Czech expat's handbook and printed it at Kinkos, flipping through it on the plane. Before I had a cell phone. Prague had just opened a McDonald's, very few brand names. I stayed in a youth hostel, had very little. But we raised about half a million dollars from angels relatively quickly. What helped me through the cultural shift was the business itself – negotiating leases, buying computers, hiring staff – those principles are global. I anchored myself in the normality of building a business. That has stayed with me. At HYCU or any business I run, I see it as a safe space. I don't care about political ideology, religion, background – just be a good HYCUer, show up, care about the place, and we will respect you. Business has the power to normalize things that may otherwise be uncomfortable.
Yeah, that's a great comment. I think the company can be a hard place to be for people who don't like their job and are just waiting to get out, or it can be the safe place where you escape the craziness of your life and focus. I can appreciate that as an entrepreneur. My first job was similar to yours – I was knocking on doors in San Diego trying to sell painting jobs. That's a good thing to have in common. As an entrepreneur, you knock on doors, literally back then, or now call and text and use LinkedIn. It's all about finding your first customers, getting people to believe in what you're doing, and it's all about the people. Investors, employees, first customers – they're hanging their hat on you and depending on you to deliver.
It's interesting. There's a quote I love by Ernest Hemingway: 'Live on the edge of a knife until you're 30, then spend the rest of your life writing about it.' I think when you're in your 20s starting out, you can take considerable risk. I remember walking into the Deputy Prime Minister of a country's office, knocking on the door, and his assistant said, 'Who the hell is this guy?' I said, 'I'm Simon from Boston, I'm here to build a technology database with the Prime Minister.' That was naive, but I really meant it. Being naive and unashamed to believe in an idea is powerful. It comes easier when you're younger; with scar tissue it gets harder. But you have to make yourself do it to be successful. As you get older, you realize it takes time. When you're naive, you think it'll happen in three years; when you're older, you know it takes about ten.
All right, cool. Let's talk a little bit about Haiku. I have a very personal experience. As CEO of Gigamon, we had an analyst who lost a report. We went to Google, said, 'Hey, we have an SLA, can you give us our document back?' They said, 'Let's go check.' Came back and said, 'We don't have that.' We looked in our MSA and everything, and it was confusing. It sounded like they have a backup but they don't. That's probably the experience for a lot of companies. With the explosion of SaaS, it's easy to use apps, but none of that data is backed up. We lost tens of thousands of dollars on that report. So tell us about from starting in 2014 when SaaS was newer, to now where there are thousands of SaaS apps. How have you grown the company and how has the challenge changed for customers? As you build a company, problems change over time.
