Unicorn in The Making: Ross Mason, Founder of MuleSoft (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Do you have drivers that a lot of people need that you’re making significant business out of? Have you seen that?

Ross Mason: We certainly see clusters around certain SaaS applications. Obviously, Salesforce is leading the charge on enterprise. They really opened up that market. As such, we have a very strong relationship with Salesforce on many levels. We partner with them and they’ve also invested in us as a company. We work very closely with their field teams and even their product teams on helping drive more value to the product they’re bringing to the market by unlocking the data inside the organization.

To give you an example, when Salesforce announced Wave, we were one of the strategic partners there to drive data into their new Wave data analytics platform. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Eldad Farkash, CTO of Sisense (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Where would you point entrepreneurs to look for new problems to solve a new startup to build now?

Eldad Farkash: If you’re coming from a scientific background, I would say focus either on deep learning or NPI. These would be the two major topics I would focus on if you’re a scientific kind of startup. If you’re trying to solve a problem by combining a stack together, I would try to start from the lower level. I would start looking around and see what hardware and what data sources are not existing yet and how do we tap into those data sources and make something meaningful out of that. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Tom Hogan, CEO of Kony (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: That is actually a segue into the kinds of opportunities out there that are open problems. It’s one thing for corporations to try to innovate and come up with new ideas and processes using all these technologies. It’s also that same activity and ideation process that is going on the entrepreneur side. I think people are thinking about how to take advantage of those kinds of capabilities as it pertains to enterprise mobility. Have you seen anything really compelling in that field?

Tom Hogan: There are ideas and approaches that we see everyday that you scratch your head and say, “I would have never thought of that.” In terms of big productized offerings versus use case ideas, I think it’s still early innings. In terms of opportunities at the entrepreneur level, I would think the best opportunities would come from use case ideas. The abused example is Uber. The reason everybody uses them is because it’s so pervasive. Who would have thought, even four years ago, that somebody was going to create a $40 billion business.

Sramana Mitra: It’s a $40 million market cap driven by very artificial valuation drivers.
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Unicorn in The Making: Ross Mason, Founder of MuleSoft (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: During this period when you had a lot of users and you didn’t have the model figured out, what experiments did you run to get to the heart of that issue—because the whole business is predicated upon that?

Ross Mason: No one has ever asked me that question and it’s a great question. I like it because we did have to experiment. We might be doing somewhere in the region of $4 million in revenue. It shows promise but we weren’t showing growth. Then the financial market crash got everyone spooked. Some of the analysts were saying, “The model was potentially going to harm our business because people were buying us but doing big architectures like SOA.” We really had to play around with it. What we did was started looking, very early on, at application ecosystems and what was changing there.

Even in 2007, we tried to do Mule On Demand. Salesforce is becoming very interesting, not just as a CRM, but as a way of delivering applications. We started toying around with the idea and that started to shape other things such as the way we would deliver connectors for applications within the cloud. Between the years 2009 to 2010 was when we realized that what we should be doing was to harness the changes that the cloud was bringing to market. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Eldad Farkash, CTO of Sisense (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: There is one area that I think still has some openings. Some of this is very large opportunities but a lot of it is also small to mid-scale opportunities of these vertical solutions that take advantage of the more mature infrastructure layer underneath. But then, you need a serious amount of domain knowledge on top to be able to actually do meaningful things with that infrastructure. Are you in agreement with that statement?

Eldad Farkash: Yes, I do agree with that. I think there is a lot of potential for innovation on how to simplify those huge projects. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Tom Hogan, CEO of Kony (Part 5)

Tom Hogan: I was with our clients last week and have had multiple conversations like this in the last two months where they’re waking up and saying, “I better go figure this out. Forget about how to do it. First, we’ve got to figure out what we need to deliver and enable before we figure out how we do it.” We’re convening 50 of our top leaders tomorrow for two days. We’re just going to brainstorm and ideate on what we can and should do with mobile to transform our businesses because we don’t know.

Sramana Mitra: I think there are two categories of applications though. There are some that are actually re-engineering existing business processes to go mobile. Then there is this new category of applications that are possible because of the geo-location services available on the mobile. What kinds of capabilities does that offer as it pertains to a particular business? That requires original thinking and fresh approaches.

Tom Hogan: I think that’s right. In the former case, which is less difficult to get your head around, there’s still some subtle differences. I’ll give you the simplest example. I’ve got a CRM system or a general ledger HR system and I want to be able to render it on a mobile device. That’s fine >>>

Unicorn in The Making: Ross Mason, Founder of MuleSoft (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Ann actually told me that the person who first mentioned MuleSoft to her was an industry analyst from the banking sector who had heard that several banks were using MuleSoft. He told her about you and that’s when she started investigating and liked what she saw.

Ross Mason: I’m actually trying to remember his name. I had a very funny interaction with him. He mentioned that to Ann without ever speaking to me directly. I think Ann brokered a meeting with him. I think he was interested because he was hearing this name pop up and didn’t know anything about me. I stepped in and he was sitting at the restaurant. I went down to sit next to him. He looked quite confused at first. I said, “Hi, I’m Ross.” He just looked at me a bit. I looked so young and he was expecting someone so much older. He was completely confused that I was the guy that was creating this software.

Sramana Mitra: In 2006, how much did you raise?

Ross Mason: We did $4 million.
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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Eldad Farkash, CTO of Sisense (Part 3)

Eldad Farkash: Another trend would be regarding the sources of data. Today, we’re just starting to grasp the value of data. What’s missing is more sources. When I say more sources, I’m not talking about the conventional databases. I’m talking about machines and environment. Blending this data into what we do on databases has tremendous impact. I’ve seen only the huge companies able to do that usually because it requires a massive amount of investment in technology and infrastructure. As for the hardware trends in the upcoming years, we expect to see more and more getting squeezed up into smaller machines that can do much more with much less.

Sramana Mitra: Would it be fair to say at this point that the infrastructure landscape and ecosystem is becoming pretty mature or would you say that there are still issues with that side that need to be solved?

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