SaaS Scaling Secrets
The SaaS Scaling Secrets podcast reveals the strategies and insights behind scaling B2B SaaS companies to new heights. Dan Balcauski, founder of Product Tranquility, leads conversations with successful SaaS CEOs, exploring their challenges, triumphs, and the secrets that propelled their businesses to the next level.
SaaS Scaling Secrets
Rethinking Risk and Retention in SaaS with Simon Taylor, CEO of HYCU
Dan Balcauski interviews Simon Taylor, CEO and founder of HYCU, the world's fastest-growing multi-cloud data protection company. With over 20 years of experience, Simon shares his insights on risk-taking, securing funding, and scaling HYCU to industry leadership. He emphasizes the importance of customer success, retention, and innovation, highlighting HYCU's groundbreaking use of generative AI for SaaS data protection. The conversation covers Simon's entrepreneurial journey from Eastern Europe to Silicon Valley, mentorship, and personal strategies for staying at the top of his game.
01:06 Early Entrepreneurial Journey
03:45 The First Big Risk
07:45 Founding HYCU: The Name and Mission
09:41 Challenges and Growth at HYCU
13:21 Fundraising Lessons and Strategies
17:20 Focus on Customer Retention
21:13 Customer-Centric Approach to Business
21:29 The Role of Customer Success Teams
24:39 Balancing Innovation and Customer Needs
25:45 Contrarian Approach to AI
27:10 Leveraging AI for SaaS Data Protection
29:47 Vision and Strategy for SaaS Companies
34:39 Rapid Fire Questions and Personal Insights
Guest Links
www.hycu.com
Welcome to SaaS Scaling Secrets, the podcast that dives into the trenches with leaders of the best scale up B2B SaaS companies. I'm your host, Dan Balcauski, founder of Product Tranquility. Today, I have the privilege of interviewing Simon Taylor. Simon is the CEO and founder of HYCU, the world's fastest growing multi cloud data protection company. With over 20 years of experience in go to market strategy, product Marketing and Channel Sales. Simon has led HYCU to secure 140 million in funding, become a leader in the data protection space. Join me as we explore Simon's unique stories, uncover the secrets to his success, reveal their strategies to scale HYCU successfully. Let's dive in. Welcome Simon to SaaS Scaling Secrets.
simon taylor:Well, thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here and thank you for having me on the show.
dan balcauski:I'm very excited and very appreciative of you spending some time with us today. On another podcast, I heard you quote, Hemingway. Live on a knife's edge until 30 and then spend the rest of your life writing about it. What does that mean to you?
simon taylor:It's one of my favorite quotes and I'll tell you what it does not mean. It certainly doesn't mean that you should do nothing after the age of 30. I think there's a whole lifetime of possibilities there. But I think what happens before 30 is you can live with a really high risk tolerance. And so, I went out to Eastern Europe when I was about 24 years old, started my first company in Prague in the Czech Republic. I sold that by the time I was 26 and then started another company, built a whole suite of different business partners, mentors, and really started to build my network. And so when I think about would me, myself at 44 years old, Take that risk, sell everything they had, move to Eastern Europe, with sort of a hope and a prayer and see what happens, maybe not. So, I always encourage younger people take that risk early on, do the wild, bold, crazy things and set yourself up for success so that later on in your life you can build upon those amazing experiences. But maybe do something that's a little bit more risk mitigated.
dan balcauski:Yes. Do not take away that life ends at 30. We are, we're both resemble
simon taylor:I hope
dan balcauski:that age. Love that. Well, you said you mentioned starting a company as early as 24, look, if we could go back and even earlier in your life, like it just put a microscope. Would we have noticed anything unusual if we observed your early days, say from between 12 and 18?
simon taylor:I'll go back even further. I was a really big fan of show and tell in the second grade. So I, I love this idea of getting to go into class and sell your best toy. And I really did look at it that way. I would not just pick the toy. I would come up with the story that I was going to tell about it. I remember when I was five or six, maybe seven. It was when Atari was first coming out, maybe Nintendo. I can't remember which one. And I stood on the fireplace with a ready made presentation and I pitched to my parents about hand eye coordination. They quickly shot me down and said there was no way I was getting one. But I think those early experiences of really, Trying to get a handle on what a pitch looked like were definitely germane to sort of, how I kind of grew up in form myself. Yeah,
dan balcauski:Shark Tank contestant have your children give post Thanksgiving dinner, they have to make the pitch for their Christmas toys. Coming. Oh, man. Well, I could see how entrepreneurship was in your future for that story. Well, look, entrepreneurs talk a lot about. The importance of taking risk, looking back on your entrepreneurial journey. Could you share an example of a risk that paid off significantly? Obviously you've had a bunch of success, but like, those don't always look, they're not always guaranteed going up front. Like what was it kind of at the time you thought was a really large risk that ended up working out for you?
simon taylor:I mean, as I was sort of saying in the beginning, my first company, I, Raised a little bit of money, half a million dollars. I wrote a business plan, and the business plan was essentially around how you would build almost like a business oriented dating app that would help to bring together engineers and, customers in the us. And so what I essentially had to do was build an algorithmic matching engine put a whole bunch of characteristics in. And then make it, and then build an enormous database of software engineers, and then a whole bunch of clients in the U. S. so they could find each other. And it was a kind of wild idea, in the early aughts. And I literally had to sell everything I had to do it. So I raised this little bit of cash, I sold my car, my house. I moved over to Prague in the Czech Republic. I remember staying in a hostel for the first month or two. Trying to figure out how you even rent a room in Prague. It was not quite as westernized, back then as it is today. And, when I look back on that adventure and I look back on all the things I didn't know, I mean, I think I still don't know a lot now, but back then I certainly did. There was a whole world of things I didn't know. I still wouldn't trade it for anything. I think there was so much. So much excitement in doing that, but it was also I remember calling up some friends and saying, I'm doing this. I'm selling everything. I'm going over there. And one of my friends said to me why on earth do you think you're going to be successful? What makes you think that this is a good idea? And I said, well, I know it's a good idea. I don't know if I'll be successful, but I know it's a good idea. And so I think if you have conviction and you have the ability to show that conviction in a meaningful way to others. You can do a lot. You really can, even at a young age. And so for me, that was certainly one of the bigger risks that I've taken in my life.
dan balcauski:Wow. That is, well, and a good friend because I had the exact same question in my head, like, what possibly gives you the at 24 and, I've done quite a bit of traveling in my life and I got to say, pre smartphone era very different especially early 2000s, Central Europe, Eastern Europe, very different, not as well trafficked as today, as you're, you pointed out Hey, what an incredible what an incredible move. Well, I want to
simon taylor:really was, and I'll tell you there was Yeah, go ahead, sorry.
dan balcauski:No, carry on.
simon taylor:Well, I was just going to say that there's nothing as entrepreneurial as going to a country That is sort of post revolution and is really trying to figure out what capitalism looks like. There were so many unanswered questions in the minds of the Czech people at that point, right? Because they knew they had an amazing talent pool. They knew they had this beautiful fairytale city in the form of Prague. And it was just a world of possibilities. I imagine that it was sort of similar to, Coming to the U. S. after World War II, maybe in the fifties, when everything was sort of bright and bold and new and sort of, sort of play a very tiny hand in working with folks over there at that time. It was an experience like no other. It was a little crazy for sure. I mean, I mean, it was not an everyday decision but I took it very seriously. And so I think you've got to have, again, that word conviction always comes to mind. If you're going to do something intense. Make sure you've got a lot of conviction because in those hard moments, you're really going to want to make sure that you can achieve what you set out to do and you can take it as far as you possibly can.
dan balcauski:Oh man, that is fantastic. Yeah. And that reminds me of just talking to another CEO also on this podcast and you're talking very much around he was based out of Estonia and coming out of, living in, USSR based Estonia into the, fresh shoots of capitalism coming out of that world and just very much yeah, very different Wild West frontier that was what came open in that space. So, look I do want to pivot more to, modern day. And we've mentioned a couple of times the company HYCU and it, it is spelled a little bit differently than it sounds. So I was curious, like, where did this name come from? Are you going to elaborate if folks are out there, like, trying to type into Google what we're talking about they, they may stumble on some Japanese poetry and not your company. So, help us understand who where the name came from.
simon taylor:So I'll tell you, it is pronounced Haiku. It's spelled H Y C U. And it is based on the Japanese poem, which is spelled very differently. And HYCU is a company that we founded so that we could make it really easy to back up and recover every kind of data in the world. We wanted to make it accessible and easy to protect companies, data, organizational data, whether it was in the cloud, whether it was in a SaaS service like Salesforce or 365, or even whether it was, your sort of legacy server data sitting in a basement somewhere. And so, so when I was coming up with the name, I was thinking about, What is a word that means taking all of the data in a language and making it really simple and easy to manage? And I thought about a haiku poem and about how you take all the data in all the words in a language and you kind of boil it down to this small elegant package. And then I thought, well, we're probably not going to be able to buy haiku. com. And I said, so, so what is an acronym That means the same as what we do, but sounds like haiku. And I came up with Hybrid Cloud Uptime because we keep hybrid cloud data up and running. H Y C U pronounced haiku sounds like the poem. And that's how I came up with the name.
dan balcauski:very nice. So, so, building on the tradition with the limited resources of a startup to actually go by the domain name that helps everybody find you. And out of that invention is born. Well, look every CEO founder faces challenges along the way. Has there been a specific challenge HYCU faced during its growth that was particularly difficult to overcome? Maybe a crucible moment that has made the company what you think it is today?
simon taylor:Yeah, absolutely. There's a lot, right? I mean, certainly every company has lots of challenges that they go through. A friend of mine who's an entrepreneur described being the CEO of a startup like, A cascading set of challenges that are constantly water falling down on your back and you either really like swimming or you should just get out of the water. And I do very much agree with that sort of conceptually. I think that is what it is. The first challenge, major challenge that comes to mind is when I first founded the company, I did so with a business partner who owns a lot of different companies. He's since left the business. But remains a great mentor and friend to me. His name is Veselin Evrasimovich. And he and I decided that he was going to go in a different direction and that I would go out and raise some institutional capital from venture capitalists. I'd never raised money from venture capitalists before. And, I remember going out there into the marketplace and every single venture capitalist I met with Was so friendly. They were so nice. I mean, every single conversation ended with, we love this. This is great. This is fantastic. And I thought, wow, I'm really good at this. This is this rate, raising money, things pretty easy. And then they wouldn't call back. And so for about a year, this kind of went on and I finally said to a friend of mine, what is the deal? They all love what we're doing. And he said, Simon, in venture, they're never going to tell, what they're either going to lean in and move forward. Or they're just going to stop. And what you're looking for is somebody who wants to lean in. I recommend you change your pitch and change your story and, change the way that you're telling this story. Cause it's a great story. You're doing amazing things. You've got to change the way you're telling it. And, it was just about then that COVID hit and we were fortunate that we grew 450 percent because our solution. enabled people, our platform enabled IT decision makers to move from on premises, so, data in the basement, to the public cloud without going into the office. So suddenly the IT department didn't have to come in the middle of COVID, and they could still do their job. And so we grew 450 percent as a result of that. Change the sales pitch completely, change the fundraising pitch, change the pitch deck and started to just have conversations with investors. When I would talk to investors, instead of pulling up the whole, fancy PowerPoint, I just started telling the story of why we grew so fast and what we had built and why it was so different in the industry. And I realized that really was resonating with folks. So, we went through an entire year of lots of wonderful, great company and then never hearing back to all of a sudden, raising 87. 5 million from Bain Capital Ventures. So, so, so it was and then a follow on, 53 million round with A Crew as well. So, so, so, I mean, I think that the sort of moral of that story is, A, don't never give up. But it's also, don't let your ego get in the way, right, of the work that you're doing. If you're not seeing tangible results, go ask someone, why not? Go get great advice from people that you trust. And first and foremost, make sure you have that network in place so you can really be successful.
dan balcauski:Well, I'm sure there's so many great parts of that story of like, yeah, well, they're all being super friendly. The beautiful story of of a naive founder in the B to C world. But I it probably not the first or last time that's happened either. I think probably made it a lot easier when you have a 450 percent revenue growth. Number to talk to you probably need to modify your story a huge amount. I'm curious cause you, you have raised a couple of rounds and sizable ones at that did your view on fundraising and sort of what was important change between those rounds? Because I, I think that's some where, different companies. Get caught out. And I think you're seeing a lot of it now where, especially in those, head easier interest rate times where maybe it was, quote unquote, easier to raise an A or a B. And now it's, definitely harder. Right. Is it the hardest it's ever been? Who knows? But people maybe felt like masters of the universe. Cause Oh man, I closed this giant round before I could do it again and then go out and like, now it's like, Oh, the P these people are looking for maybe something different, or maybe, I they're Now they're looking deeper into the numbers or like something where I didn't expect that going for the last round. Did you learn any lessons like that?
simon taylor:I mean, I think we probably remembered some lessons. I mean, my father used to say growing up, he would always say no free lunch. It was a very Common expression, no free lunch. Dad, what does that mean? Well, it means nobody's going to give you a free lunch. And I think, this happened in 99 or 98. It happened in 21, which is that, you started to see these valuations that were really divorced from reality. And I think there was a couple of different ways to approach that. One was to go, great, somebody's giving me a free lunch. I'll take the big valuation and I'll Put on the unicorn hat and dance around the office. The other way to look at it was, well, what are you really asking me for? Are you asking for a, triple liquidation preference? Are you asking for a lot of structure in this deal? Are you asking to change the nature of the deals so that my employees who have worked so hard are going to be less compensated as a result if there's an outcome, when there's an outcome? I think all of that sort of can get put on hold if you don't really kind of grab the table. And look yourself in the eye and say, what do I really think this is worth? I think having a logical. Practical approach to valuations is first and foremost, one of the most important things in running a business, you need to know who you really are, you can sell a bit, you can tell people things you can do, et cetera. But at the end of the day, you need to really care about your business and about the employees who are in your business and make sure that they're going to have an amazing outcome at some point as well. That's your responsibility as a founder. So I think that's part one. And I think we really moved away from that. And I started having meetings with people with 2 million in ARR who were telling me that they had a billion dollar company. And you sort of, you think to yourself like, well, okay I'm, I don't understand it, maybe I'm just not that smart. And I think when those things start to happen more and more, you realize how frothy the environment really was. I think that the biggest shift in terms of sort of, let's call them key metrics, what really matters. And it's not that these things were not important before, they always were. But I think there's a massive focus on them right now, which is gross retention rate and net retention rate. So when you think about how you manage a business, you care about your top line ARR growth, your subscription revenue growth. But you also need to look at if I have a hundred dollars of revenue at the beginning of the year, at the end of the year with those same customers, how much is left? How many of my customers have left? How many have churned and stopped using my product? And if that number is higher than, let's say, I don't know, 10, 12 percent, you may have an issue. You've got some things you really got to care about. HYCU's been really successful in that we've really tried to keep a gross retention rate of 90 percent or above for, for the sort of entirety of the business. That's been a real focus for us. In fact, when people would say to me, well, what are you going to spend the money on in our B round? I remember saying to people, it's not just going to be a bunch of salespeople or expensive marketing. I'm going to invest in a really good customer success team, because I think that it's not just about retaining and attracting, excuse me, it's not just about attracting customers. It's about retaining those customers and making sure that the revenue you have is high quality revenue. That you can count on for the future. That's how you build. That's how you scale.
dan balcauski:Well, I love that focus on retention. I say like, cause series B I would say even that's pretty unique. I don't see a lot of CEOs sort of pounding the table of we're going to go focus on our gross retention number with our B round for better or worse, I'm a huge fan of that, but was that, did that cause any sort of Like friction with with your investors, like was, or were they just like, oh yeah that's we're totally aligned with
simon taylor:Trust me, every, everybody wants you to have revenue that stays revenue. But you've got to be high growth in this game. I mean, if you're not growing fast, then you're going to have a tough time. So I think that kind of goes without saying. So you've got to, you've got to, have really solid growth, but if the if you're growing and you're churning a lot of your customers out the back end, It means three things. One, your sales process is going to be really inefficient. Two, you've got to spend much more time, money, and resources to make up for what you just lost, right? And so I think in a high growth economy with low interest rates, it was all about grow at all costs. And I think there's been a shift a little bit towards, path to profitability to some degree, but also this idea that you want to retain as much of your base as possible because you don't want to spend money to do it twice. I mean, again, it's just common sense. And I think that's something that's, that I'm a big fan of actually, and I know my board is as well.
dan balcauski:Well, I wanna break. That's a super, not an area I was planning on going into, but, I'm super interested in, this whole idea of focusing and investing on that retention side. So you already mentioned you had this idea to, take some of that series B money and invest in customer success. I'm curious kind of, of how you really thought about. Your investments on the retention side, how did you really think about, like, okay, what do we need from, maybe it's only customer success and, they'd love to learn kind of how you thought about that. But, maybe it's other areas of like, are we attracting, is marketing sort of targeting the right people initially? Do we have to look at, things like our pricing? Are we looking at things like our product investments? How did you sort of think about approaching that and how does that sort How has that lived out sort of day to day in HYCU? Like, do you have a, do you have a cross functional Tiger team that sort of is responsible for that number? Like how are you looking at that?
simon taylor:So I think it's a great question. So let me start by saying this, HYCU has 4, 000 customers in 78 countries. And so when you think about retention, you're also thinking about expansion. And so I think your customer success team need to be the honest brokers in your business that are not. Not directly going out and selling. When they interact with a customer, you want the customer to know, not just feel, but know that this customer success individual has their best interests in mind. But you do still need to expand the business. So how do you do that? The way you do it is you, once you have enough scale and enough customers, you have your AE team that does all of the new business acquisition. The hunters. And then you've got your farmers, your expanders, your account management team, who are a little bit more technical sometimes, really understand the product portfolio, work with customer success to identify opportunities, and then jump into the customer and say, Hey, I, I spoke to my customer success team. I understand what it is that you're going through. We've got a service or an additional product that you can turn on right now. That's going to solve that problem for you. And so all of a sudden, The account management team and customer success teams are working together. They're driving net retention rate through expansion. They're reducing churn because the customer feels highly satisfied. And you're driving up your revenue and your ARR and getting better growth. And it's more efficient growth because you're not having to pay to acquire a new customer. And I think the proof is in the pudding always. You gotta really measure these things with key metrics. And one of my favorite metrics is our NPS score, Net Promoter Score. We have a 90 NPS score. It's actually a 90. 2. And we track that. Constantly. Constantly. We have a whole Slack channel. I can see every single Net Promoter response that comes in. We know every single customer on that Vol 4, 000 plus of those customers. We know when a customer is not a 10. And we change the road map. We work with them. We make sure that we are putting the customer first. And I think when you take a customer first approach, when you have an honest broker customer success team, when your account management team is doing the right thing, it's All of those pieces sort of work together along with sales operations and finance, et cetera, to really build and craft a structure for your operational business that's going to drive up your MPS score, drive your GRR. Hello, Dan. Dan, really nice to talk to you today and it's Schnell.
dan balcauski:Well, yeah, NPS of 90 is fantastic and a GRR of greater than 90 or greater is also fantastic. So you've done a fantastic job on both of those. So, so in that thread that you just outlined, So you, your customer success person is they don't have quota carrying responsibility in that relationship. Walk me through that decision. Cause I think that's a big decision for folks. And it's something that I think a lot of. CEOs constantly sort of struggle with is like, it's like I've got because customer success could look like, okay.
simon taylor:Muy buenas tardes Michael. So I want to kick us off with a little bit about what you do. You have a really le name that you've gotten as an Knick name. Enterprise Software, right, through SaaS. I mean, it's a SaaS service, but we are backing up mission critical data, right? So, if you're selling something that may not contain such mission critical data, it's possible that you don't need what I'm describing. But, my view is that in a B to B enterprise software company, what you really need to be able to do is make sure that you understand what every customer is going through so that you can figure out your roadmap, so that you can figure out, where, how to prioritize, how to make trade offs on the product side, where your pricing is failing you, where you need to improve pricing, even things like packaging. When I hear from customer success, oh my gosh, they read all the marketing and they still didn't really understand that they could get this out of the product. It's wow, okay, now my product marketing team can improve the product marketing. So to me having this group of honest broker, customer success folks in the company and making sure that their data is locked down. They've got connective tissue to all the other departments in many ways, they become the nerve center. They know where the pain is, they know where the challenges are. They know why customers love us. I'll sometimes go to my head of customer success and just say. Hey, where, what's the wow moment for this? And he'll say, well, it's when we show them this in the demo, this is the wow moment, right? Or, well, some, it's funny because the wow moment is not even in the sales process. It's way afterwards when they're doing this. And all of a sudden you can start to, you can start to sort of re imagine. The way the entire sort of customer journey looks from the perspective of the customer. Now what I would say is that this is really important as you scale the business. I probably would not have taken this approach in the A round because you really need to go and grow and you don't have enough customers. You should build a customer advisory board at that point. People are wearing six to 10 different hats each. It's very different in the early stages, but as you get a bit bigger and you start to have departments, et cetera. What you're going to be looking to do is make sure that you protect those customers. Because again, you don't want to go out, you do not want to go out and have to sell them twice. And you don't want to build things that people don't need. I think as you start to scale your business, there's a lot of pressure to start to innovate and keep innovating and keep adding this and keep adding that. And as your engineering group expands and your product group expands, everybody's saying, oh, we got to have this, we got to have this. And at some point you got to stop and go, well, wait a second. Does the customer actually want this or do we just think it's cool? Right. And I think customer success, again, I always call them the honest broker in the business because they're going to provide you with some of those insights to really help you make those decisions. And you might say, you know what, nobody's asked for it, but I think it's going to be amazing and take the bet. And that's fine. That's innovation. That's great. But know that you're taking a risk. Don't do it blindly. Don't do it because you think that every customer is asking for it. Go and ask those questions. And I think customer success are the right folks in the organization to really do that.
dan balcauski:Well, I, man, so many breadcrumbs you dropped there that I all look tasty and delicious. And I would love to follow up on everyone, but I don't think we have enough time. Thinking of. This idea of innovation and like, where should we place our bets? Versus like, what are customers asking us to do versus, how do we go invest in innovative technologies? Well, there's probably nothing more buzzy or hype right now than AI. Is there like, how do you approach that with HYCU? Is, do you have any sort of contrarian take on AI at the SaaS world?
simon taylor:So, so how we start, so, so we, how do I start this? I have a very contrarian take on this which is we started out by saying, yeah what I said to the team was, We're not going to, when AI started to become really hot, and the LLMs were exploding. I said, I saw everybody else coming out with a co pilot and I said, I'm not going to launch something that is AI because you're supposed to launch AI. Right. I said, if we find a real problem and then we discover organically that the solution to that problem includes AI, great. But I don't want to go the reverse end. We're not going to just, sort of say, Hey, I've got to have an AI approach or I can't raise money. I've got to have an AI approach or I can't, look cool, on the internet, or I can't, get a good press release. That's not good for your customers. It's actually not good for your investors. You're wasting a lot of money, time, and resources. So, so, so while everybody else came up with these co pilots that did things like, Hey, my AI will help you walk around our website. Well, I can do that myself, right? I don't really need an AI to do that for me. What we ultimately though realized, about six months later. We were looking at the way that we develop our integrations without getting too technical here. What we ultimately do is we are the number one, world's number one leader in SaaS data protection. There's about 30, 000 SaaS services in the world. You ultimately want to back up and be able to recover about 250 of them. And only about five of those SaaS services are backed up by anybody in the world. And HYCU now backs up 96 and the way we were able to back them all up, the way we were able to create integrations in our marketplace was using a really special and unique partnership with Anthropic. We actually built on the Cloud2 model and then leveraged their model to automate the process of building these integrations. So we were actually able to get our engineering time on these integrations down from, Two years to about three weeks. I mean, it was a massive improvement. And then we were able to open up those APIs. And we now let third parties use the model so they can write their own integrations. So now we've got partners and SaaS vendors who are actually using our model with our enriched Cloud2 model so that they can now build on top of our marketplace. And I guess all of that is to say, not, it's not a sales pitch about HYCU. The reason I bring it up is, I started from a position of we're not gonna go out and just build ai, and we ended up becoming the world's first generative AI based data protection platform.
dan balcauski:that's amazing. So, I mean, I could just imagine you've got a technical, founders, leaders who just listened to you say, well, our development on these integrations went from two years ish to three weeks. And they just went, did the the scooby doo and then just said like, wait, so, so, I love this example, help me understand, and like, How is, how did you even sort of realize that this was an opportunity and like, how does the team get this sort of into reality? Because I think this is a beautiful example of leveraging these technologies, I mean, effectively under the hood, right? Like to make your own. Development Incredibly Efficient, right. And so, which is not, again you contrasted it very well with, it's not just a co pilot for external folks, but we're able to deliver these solutions to the market faster by really understanding these capabilities that are available. And you even mentioned you were doing it with cloud too, or for those of you who are not tracking, we're now on cloud three, five. So this is a couple of models ago. We're. Probably before most folks even realized Anthropic was a going concern. So I've just, what was the sort of genesis of that?
simon taylor:I'm gonna, I'm gonna take this a little bit circuitous path to answer the question because I think it'll be helpful. I always think that a c journey. Yeah. I always think A CEO has only three jobs, right? You build a vision, you sell the vision, and you hire a great team. Those are the only three jobs a CEO is really responsible for. They're not easy jobs, but like that, ultimately, when you really boil it down, if you've got an amazing vision, you're able to sell that vision yourself and your team is incredible, you're probably going to do pretty well. And so, I think our vision was to protect the world's data. And the way that we thought about how you would do that was different than everybody else. We said, there's, 30, 000 SaaS services in the world. And It was leaving this massive gap in data that was, it was not backed up. So meaning like in the old days, all the data was in their basement. You could buy a piece of backup software. It was all in the servers. You'd move the data from one server to another and you'd go, okay, so my data is backed up. And that's how companies did that. If you have an iPhone, how do you back up your data? You use iCloud backup. You just turn the little thing and it just backs up all the apps on your phone. Companies don't have iCloud backup, right? So companies are running hundreds and hundreds of these SaaS applications and they were completely unable to protect them. And so, so what we said is like, How would you go about building a platform that could protect all of them? And not just the ones that existed today, but the ones that were going to exist tomorrow. And we said, well, It's an endless number, like it's infinite. You would need an infinite number of engineers, infinite time, infinite money, infinite resources. That is not a solvable problem. Okay. And then we thought, okay, so if, what if we didn't try to build it ourselves? We built a platform that we had open AIs excuse me, open APIs. and was able to allow third parties to actually build integrations onto us. So instead of us building backup and recovery for 30, 000 SaaS services, what if 30, 000 SaaS services came to HYCU and actually built in a low code development platform and integration in our marketplace that allowed them to protect their own services. So we kind of flipped the problem on its head, we inverted the problem, the data protection problem, we inverted that challenge, and we created this platform called rCloud, letter r dash cloud, stands for recovery cloud. And what it essentially does is it allows you to build. So let's say I'm, I manage, or I'm Workday or I'm Salesforce. I can now go or I'm Office 365 or whoever it is, Box. com. I can go to HYCU. I can spend a couple of days using this artificial intelligence platform, and now I can build an integration onto HYCU's platform. And by doing that, I can now give my customers a simple service, which will allow them to backup and recover and restore. All of their data, right? So, so this was the vision. So remember I said, a CEO needs three things. They need a vision. They got to sell the vision and then they got to hire a great team. So that was the vision, right? So, so protect the world's data and we want to make, we want to ultimately eliminate the SaaS data security hole. Those were the two things we wanted to accomplish. And so we built this platform, right? We went out and raised 140 million to do it. So sell the vision. And then we hired an incredible team that said, okay, how would we get third parties to build our marketplace for us? And that's when. Our incredible team, my chief product officer, my CTO, myself sort of sat down together and said, well, what if we used AI for that? Like, what if we actually were able to create connective tissue between our low code development platform and the SaaS vendor, so we could expedite that path to building an integration. And so I think that was kind of our journey was start with the vision with a, identify a real problem in the marketplace. See a real solution for that problem and then expedite the fulfillment of that solution using AI.
dan balcauski:Oh, I that I love that whole arc. Thank you for elaborating that whole thing.'cause there's so many good points in there from Yeah. Right. I mean, obviously you're not in there writing all the lines of code. And so it, it don't expect that. But making sure that, I've been in that situation before as a product leader where you have, just all these different. Third party integrations you've got to do. And you've, you could tackle 1 percent of this long tail. Right. So I, I love the well business model or business problem inversion that you guys pulled off and then being able to sort of, use that as a foundation for like, okay, can we apply technology in a smart way here to, even accelerate or leverage up the capabilities that we have in house. That's fantastic. We're about to run out of time. So I want to wrap up. There's so many threads we didn't even get to today. We might have to have you on for a round two at some point, but I want to finish out with some rapid fire questions. Are you ready?
simon taylor:Sure. Hit me.
dan balcauski:Simon, I give you one year to study any subject in depth. All your other responsibilities are taken care of. You don't got to worry about, the company will be on the same trajectory, whether you're there or not. You can go off and study, one subject, like just dedicate yourself to it. What do you study?
simon taylor:History.
dan balcauski:History. Any particular part or just all of history.
simon taylor:I would go nuts on empire building historical ramifications of warfare. How generals, typically deployed armies in various different situations and how they overcame adversity in various different sort of David and Goliath kind of situations as well.
dan balcauski:Awesome. Fantastic. Look, when you think about all the spectacular people you've had a chance to work with, is there anyone that just pops to mind who's had a disproportionate effect on the way that you think about building companies now?
simon taylor:I get asked this question. A few people have asked me this question and my answer, continuously changes. I mean, I feel like it's changing constantly and I have been really fortunate to, to sort of meet a lot of different and interesting people. Gosh, what's funny is it really has changed a few years ago. I would have said Elon Musk. I'm not so sure now, But here's what I would say. I think that folks who have really disrupted industries and massively shaken things up are where I care the most, so when I think about like a Reid Hoffman. When I think about, some of the folks who have really shaken up industries, I think that's fantastic. Even a Mark Benioff, from Salesforce. I think what he did, not just by, rebuilding CRM as we know it, by building a marketplace that really. supports, not just billions of dollars in revenue, hundreds and hundreds of different companies that have really made their way based on the Salesforce platform. I think things like that are really exciting.
dan balcauski:Well, nobody of any success gets there alone. Has there been a close mentor or other leaders really helped you on your journey?
simon taylor:Yeah. I actually have a pretty decent group of mentors that, that I really care about. And I really do. I mean, I mean, it's, these mentorships can't be one way streets. I mean, it has to be reciprocal on some level. You may not be as smart as they are, or have the experience. But what you can certainly do is you can really care about the time that they are investing in you. The folks that have invested a lot of time in me are Al Montserrat, who was the CRO at Citrix for many years and went into PE. BJ Jenkins, the president of Palo Alto Networks. Enrique Salem and Teresa Gao, who are now, I'm fortunate enough to have on my board. I mean, I've just, I've been sort of surrounded with pretty incredible individuals. I mean, Enrique was the CEO of Symantec for many years. Chairman of FireEye, DocuSign, I mean, so many companies I can't even count. And with folks like this, you just learn constantly if you let yourself. And I think that really is the trick to it all. It's not a trick, but it's just, if you ever stop learning, you're dead. The moment you think you're there, you need to retire that second. I always think that, you have to earn the seat every single day and every single minute of every day because the you that was in the seat yesterday cannot run the company today. The company's bigger and better than you and you just have to keep up. You've got to keep up and keep getting better so you can actually service all the incredible customers, partners. And employees who have given up their time to make this a reality.
dan balcauski:Well, besides your interactions with Enrique and Al and the other folks that you mentioned, are there, being a CEO and trying to keep up could be very demanding. Are there any other ways that you've kept yourself on the top of your game, whether intellectually, emotionally, physically? A
simon taylor:Yeah, I hired a trainer finally. That was a big shift for me. Here's what I would say, actually, in all seriousness, I think making space for yourself is really hard when you're doing this job. And it took me a long time, probably longer than it should have, to realize that when I make space for myself, that old adage of. Putting the air mask on yourself before you give it to your child. It's like the company. If you aren't making space for your own life and for your own time and you are so heads down in the business every second that you're not you're just not going to perform as well. And so I take some time now to meditate every day. I try to be at peace with, the idea that I'm going to step out of the office for an hour to go and do a jog or run or something. And I think it has made me a better leader and certainly a more balanced leader. So for me, I think that's probably the most important thing.
dan balcauski:big fan of meditation. I'll add plus one to that. Look, if you could, if I can give you a billboard and you could put any advice on there for other B to B SaaS CEOs trying to scale their companies, what would you say?
simon taylor:Keep earning your seat, right? You have to earn your seat every minute of every day, and I think it's easy to think typically with startups, there's a little bit of a. Kind of a step up. Like it's like steps. It's almost like plateaus that you're climbing up. You kind of climb up a steep hill and then it feels flat for a few hours. And then, oh, there's another hill. You got to climb that one. And I think it's when it flattens out for a few minutes don't get complacent, keep earning your seat because that's how you're going to get better. That's how your company's going to get better. And that's how you're going to, you're ultimately going to have an outcome that you want.
dan balcauski:Keep earning your seat. I love that. Well, this has been absolutely fantastic. If our listeners want to connect with you, learn more about HYCU, how can they do that?
simon taylor:Just simply go to www. hycu. com.
dan balcauski:I will put that link in the show notes for our listeners. Everyone that wraps up this episode of SaaS Scaling Secrets. Thank you to Simon for sharing his journey insights and valuable tips. For our listeners, if you found this conversation as enlightening as I did, remember to subscribe so you don't miss out on future episodes.
