Leveraging Channels and Slovenia to build Successful Businesses: Simon Taylor, CEO of HYCU (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: In this 2017 relationship with Nutanix that you started, how far did you go with Nutanix customers before you went into the next partnership?

Simon Taylor: We didn’t look at it like that. We looked at this as a multi-cloud Backup-as-a-Service platform. When you’re building with a strategic technology partner, you need to understand what matters to them. When you’re scoping, what workloads are important for them? How are their customers buying? It’s those questions that you want to answer strategically.

The great thing about Dheeraj is, he was very supportive. I was fortunate in that I’ve maintained a great relationship with him. We were able to build a strong partnership there while building a strong partnership with Google.

Sramana Mitra: You pursued the different channels in parallel?

Simon Taylor: Yes, there was probably a six-month lag. But then COVID hit. All of a sudden, everyone was going to the public cloud. Ransomware attacks were off the charts. People were looking for an easier way of managing these ransomware attacks. Our business grew by 450%. That was even with free solutions for everybody hit by COVID. It was at that point that Bain Capital called.

Sramana Mitra: Before Bain Capital, what was your financing?

Simon Taylor: It was all private financing. It was a combination of my previous business partner and ourselves.

Sramana Mitra: What was the total financing before Bain came in?

Simon Taylor: We don’t talk about our personal finances. We were very much bootstrapping it.

Sramana Mitra: But you had revenue. By the time Bain offered you $67 million, you had plenty of revenue?

Simon Taylor: We did.

Sramana Mitra: In your playbook, there are a couple of things that stand out to me. One is you, very effectively, leveraged these Slovenian outsourcing teams and carved out expertise. It’s a unique unfair advantage – finding good engineers at an affordable cost and being able to hold onto them.

Another one that stands out is how you navigated channels very well. Your Citrix channel was a textbook case study of channel navigation. Nutanix as well. I’m sure you did others like that. Those two stand out to me as uniquely well done. Is there anything else you want to discuss?

Simon Taylor: The interesting thing is when you move from private funding to institutional funding, the world shifts.

Sramana Mitra: A lot more pressure to grow fast.

Simon Taylor: Board selection is so much more important than you ever hear about. We won the lottery with Enrique Salem. He’s an incredible Board chair. We could have just as easily become unlucky. My message to entrepreneurs who are considering fundraising is, there is a lot of pressure to take the highest valuation with the best firm right away. Waiting a little bit and finding your way through can be really important.

Sramana Mitra: That’s our philosophy. We have this catchphrase, “Bootstrap first, raise money later. Do not go to VCs as beggars; go as kings.”

Simon Taylor: That’s beautiful. Once you embody that, your ability to sit with Board members and be selective will change your life. These are the folks you’re going to be working with some of the biggest challenges as you scale the business.

Sramana Mitra: Congratulations! Great story and great navigation. It was a pleasure to meet you.

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