Leveraging Channels and Slovenia to build Successful Businesses: Simon Taylor, CEO of HYCU (Part 1)

Simon offers excellent insights into creating an unfair advantage with unique engineering team leverage in off-center locations. He also discusses creative channel strategy techniques.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Simon Taylor: I was born in London. My father was born in Bangalore. My mother was born in Coventry. They met in England. My father worked for a computer company called Wang Laboratories. In fact, An Wang gave us our green card. In the inscription, it said, “Dear Simon, work hard. Here’s your green card.”

My journey really begins when I was in my early 20s. I was reading a lot. I was devouring everything I can get my hands on. One of the things I noticed at that time was that everybody was talking about the Asian tigers. Eastern Europe was coming into its own. I felt that a lot of the research was biased and focused on the American point of view.

I thought what if you put boots on the ground in one of these locales, you can connect the gaps between emerging market technology vendors and potential partners in the United States. I raised a little bit of money from investors and I sold everything I had. I moved to Prague. I’d never been there before.

Sramana Mitra: What year was this?

Simon Taylor: This was in 2003. From there, I started traveling. I went to Lithuania, Bulgaria, Estonia, and Romania. I went to the government offices of these countries and introduced myself. I was saying, “Introduce me to your best technology businesses.” I had this idea that because these were nascent capitalist societies, there may be great engineering talent but not necessarily the ability to commercialize or market it.

Who knows what I was thinking as a 23-year-old that I could pull this off? Through bootstrapping, I was able to build a client base across Europe and bring them to the United States. One of the clients that I closed had 23 different, very large technology companies across Europe. He was primarily focused on outsourcing. He asked if he could buy my company and if I could go to the United States and exclusively work for him.

Sramana Mitra: Who were your investors?

Simon Taylor: These were seed investors and local business people who I was fortunate enough to know. Ernest Hemingway once said, “Live on a knife’s edge and then spend the rest of your life writing about it.” I think that’s true in entrepreneurship. In your early 20s, you have so much gusto. If you can leverage that to get out there and if you show a willingness to learn, you will be able to raise some money and do the impossible.

Long story short, what ended up happening with me is, I did this first business and sold it. I went back to work on building this outsourcing business in the United States. I decided to get my MBA. I moved to Madrid for that. That same individual called me back and said, “Do you want to sell outsourcing again?” I said no. I wanted to start a software company.

He said, “I’ve just bought a lot of companies. If you find something that’s interesting, we can build a business together.” I went through his IP library and discovered a Citrix monitoring tool. I’ve heard of Citrix. I know monitoring and infrastructure. I hired 20 engineers, four sales reps, and went from zero to 2,000 customers. I sold that to Citrix in 2014.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Leveraging Channels and Slovenia to build Successful Businesses: Simon Taylor, CEO of HYCU
1 2 3 4 5 6