In this Tech Barometer podcast, HYCU (https://www.hycu.com/) CEO Simon Taylor takes listeners into the mind of a creative, disruptive entrepreneur who’s turning data protection into an AI-powered arsenal against cybercrime and ransomware attacks.
Get tech leader insights (https://www.nutanix.com/theforecastby...) to move faster and smarter
Get more stories by subscribing to The Forecast (http://www.nutanix.com/theforecastbyn...) .
Podcast transcript:
Simon Taylor: I was in a bar in Las Vegas and I happened to bump into an engineer that I'd known from Slovenia and I said, what are you doi...
Questions asked in this interview
2
3:06How is it possible to better support IT services that live across on-prem and public clouds?
7:05How expensive is it from a time, money, and resources perspective to execute an attack on an innocent victim?
I was in a bar in Las Vegas and I happened to bump into an engineer that I'd known from Slovenia and I said, 'What are you doing now?' And he said, 'I'm in the data protection space.' I was trying to prove to him that data protection was this sort of old, ugly, fugly world that no one would be interested in because it was so old school. It was in the plumbing. Who cares about it? He said, 'Simon, how did you get here today?' So, what do you mean? Did you take a taxi? No, I took an Uber. He said, 'Aha, but there's no Uber in data protection.' It struck me that if you want to truly disrupt the marketplace, you need three different things.
Simon Taylor is the founder and CEO of Haiku. This is the Tech Barometer podcast. I'm Jason Lopez. Haiku is a data protection company and its name is spelled H Y CU. There are ways to construe Japanese poetry with data protection, but the truth is the pronunciation haiku is an unintended benefit of the acronym
We're called hybrid cloud uptime HYCU Haiku for a reason because we believe in the power of on-prem and the power of public cloud and we want to make sure there's a seamless transition whether you're going one way or the other.
You need a technology that is sort of used by all and liked by none. Two, it's got to be something that is highly commoditized. And three, it's got to be something that is truly undisrupted in this space. In other words, nobody's gotten there before you.
AI is here. It's here to stay and it's only going to get better because that is the nature of technology. Taylor likes to talk about AI not so much in terms of the technologists who create it. Not from the economist point of view or from the hype and the news, but as he describes it, a positive energy customers have when they envision how AI can benefit their businesses and products.
I kind of break down AI into three proof points. Humanity, exceptionalism, and resourcefulness. So, humanity, is it good for human beings? It seems really odd, but at the end of the day, we are humans. So, the only kind of AI I care about is that which is good for human beings. The second one is exceptionalism. It's how do we leverage AI in our daily work to make sure that we're not falling behind and in fact that we're getting ahead. Yeah. And the last one is resourcefulness. How can we be resourceful in terms of driving more value to our customers?
This is where he moves from a guiding philosophy of humanity, exceptionalism, and resourcefulness into technical reality. How is it possible to better support IT services that live across on-prem and public clouds?
10 more exchanges in this transcript
Sign in free to read the rest of this interview. No card required.
Taylor, S. (2026, February 12). HYCU CEO Simon Taylor Podcast Interview [Interview transcript]. Audio podcasts. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1059324/
MLA
Simon Taylor. "HYCU CEO Simon Taylor Podcast Interview." Audio podcasts, 12 Feb. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1059324/.
BibTeX
@misc{taylor2026_1059324,
author = {Simon Taylor},
title = {HYCU CEO Simon Taylor Podcast Interview},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, Audio podcasts. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {feb},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1059324/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
