Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Mark Lee, CEO of Splashtop (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Where do you have your telesales team?

Mark Lee: The Inbound team for the US market is mostly in San Jose. We have a team in Taipei for the APAC market. For the European market, we have a team in Amsterdam. We also have a team in Tokyo and Singapore. Singapore is focused on channel sales. Tokyo is focused on channel and direct sales. We are trying to do multilingual support. 

Sramana Mitra: You raised a round of financing recently. 

Mark Lee: Last year, we closed a round of $50 million. We will be closing a second round next week for another $15 million. That’s a total of $65 million valuing the company at just over a billion dollars. 

Sramana Mitra: What is this new funding for? Is it to expand into more countries?

Mark Lee: Earlier, I mentioned that we are generating over $27 million in cash last year. 

Sramana Mitra: That is why I’m asking the question. Do you think that you lack cash when you are generating so much?

Mark Lee: We have been generating cash for the past five years. We haven’t fundraised for over ten years. Our goal is to ultimately offer an IPO. We want to attract top talent. We are in the process of doing an executive search for a CMO and CFO.

Doing a round will amplify our brand and attract more talents. At the same time, we are going to go beyond organic growth. Given our cash position and valuation, we will be looking at some buy potential. 

Sramana Mitra: Can you outline the other areas that you are looking to potentially buy companies? This is one of the things that I like to cover – the open problems that you are learning from customers that you are trying to fill gaps in. 

Mark Lee: We are still focused on the small and medium businesses. We like this market because of its sales and marketing efficiency. Word of mouth drives a lot of leads to our product. We get over 600 business user trials per day. We get thousands in the consumer market. We do have a consumer line. That is also just exposing our brand.

In terms of where we see some great opportunities, one area is definitely around the security area. In the SMB space, a lot of people don’t have active directory services. People have too many passwords. Password management is an interesting area because that is foundational.

How do you have a secure password manager when people have so many passwords lying around everywhere? A secure password manager is an interesting arena for us.

Today, most of our customers are managing 80% on windows and 20% on Macs. We do see an expansion of Macs. IOS devices are everywhere already. We see that there is an opportunity to expand into the MAC MDM market. Apple has been changing the whole MDM framework. Every time Apple makes a drastic change, it is actually leveling the playing field.

We have a strong following in the education, design, and design industry for support and work from home, so we see a lot of Macs too. We see an opportunity to expand into the whole Mac MDM arena which is tied to security. It’s part of that whole end-point security need that people have.

We also see a lot of customer engagements and collaborations because remote learning ties a lot to collaboration. We are developing a range of features in that whole arena.

For example, we have stylus pen support. People do remote drawing and we want to make it easier for people to collaborate as a whiteboard solution in the cloud. Quite a few developments are going on, but at the same time we always open to acquiring companies moving forward. 

Sramana Mitra: I am very happy that we connected. It’s good to know what you are doing and looking for. We see a lot of small companies all the time so I will keep that in mind if something comes up on my end. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Mark Lee, CEO of Splashtop
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