Unicorn in The Making: Ross Mason, Founder of MuleSoft (Part 1)

Ross bootstrapped Mulesoft with a paycheck and also with services. Now, the company has raised over $130 million—the last round at an $800 million valuation. Very interesting story!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your personal journey. Where are you from? Where were your born and raised?

Ross Mason: I was born in London and raised, up until about 9, in London. Then, we moved to Wales in the UK. I was in Wales with my parents who had a hotel and eventually, hotel chains. I grew up in a business. My dad himself is entrepreneurial. I got used to dealing with customers and thinking about what people need at a very young age. From there, I went to college in Bristol where I studied Computer Science. Fairly soon after that, I got into working with banks and insurance companies. My focus was always around solving difficult problems.

Sramana Mitra: Can you put a chronological framework around this? What year were you graduating from college? What year were you starting to get into the industry?
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Aiming to Dominate Real Estate Brokerage: Robert Reffkin, CEO of Urban Compass (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: I think that’s only partially true because the level at which valuations are going out of control right now is way beyond the kind of rational justification that you presented.

Robert Reffkin: Uber has raised $40 billion. You can say that’s a huge valuation. If a majority of cars in the country are Uber, then it’s not. All you have to believe is one thing—that using Uber for a year for all of your transportation needs would be half the cost of owning your own car. If you believe that can happen, which is a very easy argument, then Uber will dominate transportation across the world. If they dominate transportation, there’s a lot of interrelated services that they can put on top of that.

Sramana Mitra: Let me give you a counter example. We just saw a complete implosion of Fab, which raised a lot of money and had similar kinds of grandiose rationale. Obviously, it did not play out. Investors were piling money on it until they imploded.
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Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Tom Hogan, CEO of Kony (Part 1)

Enterprise Mobility is a major trend. Here, we catch up with Tom Hogan, CEO of Kony, a leader in the space.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about yourself as well as Kony.

Tom Hogan: I’ll be brief with myself. I’ve been in the industry for 33 years in all. This is the smallest organization I’ve been associated with, but arguably the most exciting from a growth and potential relevance to change the landscape of the industry. I’ve spent a little over 17 years at IBM. That was my first job out of college. I spent some time at Siebel Systems in the heyday of CRM and had the opportunity to be the CEO of Vignette, which back in the late 90s was the global leader in the whole movement from classic brick-and-mortar to the Internet. Then I spent five >>>

Aiming to Dominate Real Estate Brokerage: Robert Reffkin, CEO of Urban Compass (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You said you raised a lot of money. What’s the total amount of financing you raised?

Robert Reffkin: $73 million.

Sramana Mitra: Why have you raised so much money? What have you done with that money?

Robert Reffkin: We raised $73 million because we wanted to hire the best people we possibly could.

Sramana Mitra: The large part of that $73 million is in people?

Robert Reffkin: Virtually, all of it is in people. We still have a vast majority of it.
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New Relic Delivers a Strong IPO

According to Gartner, the global app monitoring market grew 13% to reach $2.4 billion in 2013. The researcher believes that new companies with simpler models are making bigger waves in the market.

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Aiming to Dominate Real Estate Brokerage: Robert Reffkin, CEO of Urban Compass (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What else is interesting in the strategic story?

Robert Reffkin: While searching for the most valuable products and services to this business, we surveyed our clients and asked them what they cared most about. They cared most about helping them answer questions like what’s the right price for a home and how do you find a buyer. Our focus is on creating technology around the research on valuation tools to help our agents advise on prices. Then we identified a bunch of digital and non-digital exposure strategies to make sure that sellers are in front of all the right eyeballs as much as possible.

Initially, it was more around building a mobile app. As we progressed, it was becoming around saving time for agents and building valuation tools so that they can be better advisors. From a strategy perspective, I think it’s very easy when you’re young to not know exactly what >>>

Aiming to Dominate Real Estate Brokerage: Robert Reffkin, CEO of Urban Compass (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: From the time that you launched to getting to your first customers who were selling their properties on your platform, what was the time window? How long did it take you to get your first transaction?

Robert Reffkin: The first transaction was in the first month. It was a rental. We had more demands to see homes. We had to hire aggressively in order to meet the demands of all the clients who wanted to see homes.

Sramana Mitra: How did the agent ramp happen? How many agents did you start with? How did you scale that agent process? It seems like that’s one of the key scaling pieces.

Robert Reffkin: We started with just 20 agents. Now we have 100. We definitely have to grow quickly.
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Aiming to Dominate Real Estate Brokerage: Robert Reffkin, CEO of Urban Compass (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How did you get it off the ground? Was Ori someone you knew or did you meet him after you decided to do this project?

Robert Reffkin: I met Ori when I was working in the White House. I was an advisor on the company that he sold to Twitter. A year after selling, we got together and thought about doing something together? We sat down and said, “Where can we bring technology to a space that didn’t have it?”

Sramana Mitra: Ori was part of the selection process of what problem you were going to focus on?

Robert Reffkin: Absolutely. We’re co-founders.
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