Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Mark Lee, CEO of Splashtop (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me a bit about the premise of Splashtop. What are you doing in Splashtop?

Mark Lee: When we started in 2006, the company was called DeviceVM. We pivoted in 2011 to become Splashtop. We have been bootstrapping. All of the funding in the first four to five years into the prior business – the DeviceVM business.

We then changed our business to browser OS. We predicted that Chrome Book and Chrome OS will be big and were the first to build a browser OS for PC OEMs. That was the initial business for the company. We changed our business to remote access and remote support around 2010.

Since then, we have bootstrapped the company to where we are today. We just announced a unicorn round last week. It has been a long journey for us with lots of ups and downs. All four of us are still together as great friends and co-founders. 

Sramana Mitra: That’s great. Congratulations. Let me double-click down into what you are doing and how you are doing what you are doing and why it is unique. Tell me a bit about why the customers are using your products. What products are you solving?

Mark Lee: COVID has accelerated our growth. Our main theme is remote work, remote learning, and remote support. I would say that those are the three primary use cases. Most of our focus has been on the SMB market.

When people are locked down, they need access to their office computers. We are in many offices and clinics of doctors, dentists, and accountants. For example, accountants need remote access to their QuickBooks. All of them are using our product to enable remote work. Our business grew 170% last year.

In remote learning, over 250 colleges and K-12 schools, MIT, Harvard, Stanford, UCLA, USC, and other community colleges have become our customers in the past seven months. They all have physical labs, and they need to enable students to be able to access these lab computers running specialized software like Adobe, AutoCAD, and so forth.

There is remote support too. When the employees are all at home, the IT needs to be able to remote support all these employees that are working. It is the same with teachers, they are at home and they might run into some issues.

School IT also needs to be able to operate remotely. There are all these school and student devices that need help in troubleshooting as needed. We have seen all three markets take off. 

Sramana Mitra: What does the competitive landscape look like for what you offer?

Mark Lee: Pre-COVID, we primarily competed with LogMeIn and TeamViewer. They are the gorilla in the marketplace. We have been successful in replacing them in the past several years because our products have higher performance and they are easier to use.

Our products are faster, better, and cheaper. We are more cost-effective. We are also easy to do business with. We provide very strong customer support. Our MPS based on recent G2 third-party reports is at 93. This is much higher than our competitors who are in the 60s range. People love our product.

Half of the people who try our product end up buying. It is a self-service approach. During COVID, everything accelerated, but at the same time, we found that a lot of businesses are embracing our solution to replace or bypass their VPN.

A lot of the cyber security enhancements are being worked on. Last year, we introduced a single sign-on. It’s about moving towards the whole view of the trust framework. 

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Mark Lee, CEO of Splashtop
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