Greetings, I'm Keith Klein, the host of The Adventure Fist podcast, where I interview the most fascinating people in the tech scene. This is episode 358, and today's guest is Simon Taylor, founder and CEO of HYCU. One of the things that I love about this podcast is hearing the stories of entrepreneurs and the ambitious moves they make to build their companies. For example, last week's interview with Brian Lou was a perfect example where he and his co-founder co-called and got the most recognizable law on the planet, that being Robert Shapiro, involved with LegalZoom in the early days of the company. Simon's story is also legendary. At the point of having an MVP, they wanted to partner with a fast-growing company called Nutanix. He flew out to the company's offices in California and, unannounced, he asked to speak to the CEO. After pitching his company and convincing team members during that initial unannounced call, the CEO did finally sit with him, and after building a backup solution for Nutanix, a partnership was established, and they're off and running. HYCU is a leader in the multicloud and SaaS data protection as a service industry. The company's raised $140 million in venture capital funding to date. In this episode of our podcast, we cover lots of great topics like a discussion around leveraging a partnership model for a company's go-to-market strategy and how to build it with the right mindset and approach. Simon's background story includes receiving a signed book from legendary computer entrepreneur An Wang, the founder of Wang Laboratories, when his family moved to the US; starting his career in cubicle jobs and how he learned the importance of rigor, like his experience as a 401k rep answering phones and how it helped shape him as an entrepreneur; building his first company in Prague, an IT outsourcing company which was acquired by Comtrade, and then his next company, a monitoring tools company that was acquired by Citrix; the full life cycle story of HYCU and all the details about their platform; the benefits of raising capital from corporate VCs, and so much more. Okay, before we get into this podcast interview, here is a brief word from our sponsor, Silicon Valley Bank. I'm excited to share that this podcast is brought to you by one of the strongest longtime supporters of the local startup ecosystem, that being Silicon Valley Bank, a division of First Citizens Bank. SVB serves innovative tech, healthcare, and life sciences companies, including 60% of CNBC's Disruptor 50 list, 72% of Forbes Cloud 100 list, and 48% of Forbes AI 50 list. Companies with more than 1,500 bankers and relationship advisers and $42 billion in loans through Q2 2024. SVB delivers the right people, service, and resources to support your entire financial journey. Learn more at svb.com. All right, without further ado, here's my interview with Simon. Simon, thanks so much for joining us.
It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks so much for having me on the show.
Yeah, I'm excited to talk to you. So you're a serial entrepreneur, you've accomplished a lot, and we're going to talk about the current company that you've been skiing in, but before we get into that, one of the things that I noticed throughout your professional history was your go-to-market approach. Now, there's some companies that would — and actually had a founder recently on my podcast that was all about you know outbound sales, right, just having a collaborative team, they're all working together and they're you know doing whatever they're doing as far as outbound activity, whether it's emails, making dials, whatever. But you have a different approach that's more on the partner side of go-to-market. So I thought it'd be helpful to understand your way of thinking there and then you know advice for entrepreneurs that may consider that model.
Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think that the word partner is a really important one to understand. Partner is not a replacement for the word selling. And I think sometimes when people approach the world of entrepreneurship or starting up companies or scaling companies, what they really mean when they say 'I want to partner with you' is 'I want to sell you my service.' And so I think the very first thing to keep in mind is when you are partnering, the approach needs to be very empathy driven. It needs to be: what does the other person across the table need most, and is there a way for us to collaborate so that we both get something of equal or greater value? So I think one of the examples I often talk about is in one of my earlier companies, we built a wonderful relationship with Citrix. You know, if you call up Shar Mutti, who's the EVP for Product at Citrix today, and you say 'Hey, what was it like working with Simon Taylor?' he'd say 'Well, we worked together, we partnered.' And I'm very proud of that. Because that was two companies ago; we've since sold that company to Citrix ultimately. But what we did is we tried to understand what Citrix, a much larger company, was trying to achieve. In the case of Citrix, they were trying to achieve a great relationship with Microsoft. And so we were able to walk in and not say 'Hey, we have the best technology.' We were able to come in and say 'We understand that this Microsoft partnership is really important for you. Here's how we think our little company could help your path to greatness with that relationship.' All of a sudden, it takes a lot of the pressure off that discussion. You actually find yourself really building a relationship because you're sitting across the table and going 'I understand what it is that you're trying to achieve, and I think I can play a small part in trying to help make that happen.' And I think that's what it is. When you're in these David and Goliath scenarios, it's not always about taking the slingshot and shooting the other guy's eye out. A lot of times it's about actually sitting there and going 'Hey, I'm a lot smaller than you are, but I think I've got something really great and a value to offer you, and let's have a conversation about whether or not that's the case.' Yeah, I think like anything, relationships matter so much. Obviously you have to have a powerful solution that's adding value to their portfolio of solutions that they're providing, but relationships are so key. Not hoping that this is going to be the silver bullet that's going to generate all the revenue for your company. Actually, it's funny you mentioned silver bullet. I've got a funny presentation I used to give and it's got a picture of Harry Potter on it with a big red X and it says 'No magic, no silver bullet. We're here to build something together.' And the idea really is that I think we often get lost in this idea that technology is going to win, and it's very rarely tech that wins. You could argue in the current world of AI maybe having the better stronger algo or something is going to be helpful, but in general, when you're building any kind of business, whether it's a hot dog stand or a technology company, I think at the end of the day it is about those relationships. It's about people being aware of who you are and who your company is and understanding they're going to get a great amount of value out of what you're offering. And I think that comes from this idea of partnering. You know, I was just looking on LinkedIn this morning and I saw one of these InMail chats from an outsourcing company that was trying to sell to me. It said 'Hey, you know, we think we're the perfect partner for you because you know blah blah blah.' And at the end of the day they've got a number of outsourced engineers and they're trying to sell C programmers or Java programmers, and you just think to yourself, it's kind of a bastardization of the word partner, right? Because at the end of the day, you don't know what I'm trying to do, you don't understand anything about our business, you haven't had a conversation even, but you're throwing out this word partner so that I don't feel like I'm getting sold to. And I think we got to stop that trick. We got to stop the con. And we really got to start looking at partnering the way it was intended to be used, which is let's actually get to know each other, how we can work together to collaborate and create more value than we would have independently.
All right, well let's rewind the clock. So where did you grow up? What were you like as a child?
Precocious, I don't know if that's the right word. So I was born in London, England. My father worked for Wang Labs, if you remember Wang back in the day. And Dr. An Wang actually got us our green cards and we came over here. He signed a book for me when I was four years old and it just said 'Work hard, I'm An Wang.' That's cool. A bit of tech history right. I mean, it's funny, I don't even remember Wang, but it was such a key part of the Massachusetts technology world and the US technology world at the time of DEC and Analog Devices, and you had Wang. So I was sort of deep rooted in tech from a very young age. My father went on to become the CIO of a large investment company, and he was a buyer of hundreds of millions of dollars in technology in the 80s and 90s. So you would hear stories about Larry Ellison and Bill Gates and all these people growing up. It was interesting to me that growing up around a technology buyer, somebody who was really deep in the street with purchasing next generation software and next generation hardware, you really understood how important those relationships were going to be. So I grew up in Boston, but then I went to college back in London, got my MBA in Spain at Instituto de Empresa in Madrid, and I started my first company in Prague in the Czech Republic. I think that's kind of where my career really took off. I had this idea going back to 2004, and the idea was that I was going to build an algorithmic matching engine that was going to help — it was going to have a database of software engineers with all these characteristics, and almost like a dating app, it was going to connect buyers of outsourced engineering with the actual database of engineers. I decided to move to Prague because it was cheaper, and I thought I'll go out there, I'll raise a little capital, and I'll go build this company. I did that, and I sold that in 2006.
But so you didn't come out of college like — so you went to Northeastern? Yeah, and then like what were some of your first jobs for you know getting your MBA?
Oh my gosh, so many. I call them cubicle jobs. So I worked at Thomson Financial, I worked at Putnam Investments for a few, I worked at Forrester Research. Huge respect for all these businesses. I actually think one of the best things somebody can do is go to a job they don't necessarily love but that has an enormous amount of rigor really early in their career. Because I will tell you that being an entrepreneur, you have no guard rails, and you have to know to some extent how to put those guard rails in place to be successful. So my first job, I remember I was a 401k representative at Putnam. I was — it was thank you for calling Putnam Investments, can I help you with your 401k plan? And I think it was two bathroom breaks a day or something. See, this is like — I'm like wait, people need to know this about you because it's not like you just went straight into entrepreneurship and exited a company. No, you earned your way. Like saying where I work for a staffing firm that I absolutely am grateful for, but yeah, 60 dials a day you had to make. If you didn't, you were going to be in major trouble.
Well, and I think it's lost. You know, sometimes I see these reels and different things that people talk about today where it's sort of people who came out of COVID have a very different expectation of the way the job market really functions and works. And I actually think that putting yourself — it's like anything else, whether it's physical training or sports, it doesn't really matter — you have to really practice your craft and you've got to find ways to be surrounded by people that are better than you. When you are 22 years old and you think you're probably going to be good at sales, you're going to have a little bit of a biz dev sort of impulse, I think there's no better way than to learn how to actually have a proper conference call, how to actually show up to work every day, how to build some rigor into your schedule.
