Leveraging Channels and Slovenia to build Successful Businesses: Simon Taylor, CEO of HYCU (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You identified some Citrix monitoring IP. Where was this IP located?

Simon Taylor: It was in Slovenia. It became the technology capital of central Europe at that time. They have become incredibly adept at artificial intelligence. With what we’re seeing in Ukraine today and the attacks by Russia, it’s extremely concerning what’s going on in that region. We were fortunate. They were able to recreate upwards of a thousand jobs across the region.

Sramana Mitra: What was the situation? Were there people around this technology that you decided you were going to commercialize? Who was the cast of characters around that IP?

Simon Taylor: There was nobody. It was myself. There was a virtual IP closet. There were two pieces of IP monitoring tools that were located there. Nobody was doing anything with them. My first job was to understand what I had. Somebody hands you a monitoring tool that literally says Citrix on it. What was the first thing you wanted to do to understand this product?

I went to Citrix. I started to build relationships there. Help me to understand this monitoring tool that was created in Slovenia. What would be the value to your customers? How could we build a series of use cases that would support it? Very quickly, I realized that there was value. It was able to bridge the gap between’s Microsoft’s relationship with Citrix because it was an IP product that was monitored via Microsoft System Center Operations Manager.

Having the tenacity to look at something, not as an engineer, but as a business person to say that there’s an alliance to be had here. Once I understood that Citrix needed this product for their customer base, it became a question of how you partner very closely with them. How do you replicate their go-to-market strategy? How do you understand the channels and network through which they are positioning their own products?

Sramana Mitra: You did the Citrix due diligence before you told your business partner that this was the one you were going to double-click on?

Simon Taylor: What I learned is to do the due diligence first. Coming into it, I understood that this IP did have a business around it. When I signed on to bring it to market, I didn’t realize I was going to walk into this by myself. I was fortunate that I was able to put a great team around me. I was able to be extremely lean and mean. In doing that, I was able to sell the company for about $30 million in three years.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s get into the details of how you did it.

Simon Taylor: What I was trying to do is get us to the next part which is the company I’m running now. It just raised $87 million from Bain Capital. That is the story.

Sramana Mitra: In an entrepreneurial journey, your next company is going to be a lot easier so we can’t skip this one.

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