Leveraging Channels and Slovenia to build Successful Businesses: Simon Taylor, CEO of HYCU (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: There is a lot of IP that didn’t quite get anywhere. SuccessFactors is a company that was built exactly how you did it. Lars Daalgard bought the IP at a Redwood City auction and repurposed it. This is a way of building companies if you can locate IP that has value.

Simon Taylor: When we did this, there were about 17 monitoring companies focused on Citrix. All of them were entrenched. Some of them were doing $30 million to $50 million in ARR. Some of them like Splunk were doing billions of dollars a year. Entering a very crowded market like that as a no-brand, the no-name individual is almost crazy.

When I would sit down with folks to say what I would be doing, they would say, “This doesn’t make any sense.” I stuck to the use case. The use case is, this is the best way for Citrix customers to work with Microsoft. If you’re a Citrix customer with a Microsoft environment and you want to monitor it, there’s no better way.

For that niche market, it’s incredibly successful. Don’t think about trying to make money. Don’t think about raising money. Don’t think about the technology. Think about what solution you’re going to provide to a specific individual. Identify the cohort you’re selling to and tell me what problem you relieve.

Sramana Mitra: I have two questions. Can you describe the nature of the partnership that you created with Citrix and Microsoft to be able to reach that audience? The second is the fulfillment of this. You said you had no team in Slovenia. Maybe you had a codebase. But what would you do with the codebase? You’re not a technical person.

Simon Taylor: The first thing that I did when I moved over to Europe was running an outsourcing company. We’ve got this IP. Is there anybody experienced in these languages and who also has domain expertise? We needed to identify 20 engineers. We had a gentleman named Mario who built the team. Once you hire that one key individual and if you’ve got access to resources you can trust, that can alleviate most of that situation.

Sramana Mitra: This was in Slovenia?

Simon Taylor: Yes. It was a unique experience. I found the people to be warm and welcoming. They understood that this was an interesting opportunity. Walking in the early to mid-2000s and saying, “We’re going to build a global software company.” If you had only been working on outsourcing, the idea that you could put your brand on something was exciting.

Sramana Mitra: Were these people part of the outsourcing company?

Simon Taylor: Absolutely. I call it leverage to scale. If you’re starting a company, you have to find a leverage point everywhere you look. If you’re going to spend a dollar, you should expect to make $10 back. If you’re going to walk down the street, you should see if there’s a way you can drive.

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