Leveraging Channels and Slovenia to build Successful Businesses: Simon Taylor, CEO of HYCU (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the sales side. How did you leverage the Citrix channel to reach the customer base?

Simon Taylor: I was in my late 20s. I flew to Fort Lauderdale where the Citrix headquarters was. I walked in and just said I wanted to talk to the Alliances team. I was introduced to Vicky Pomarico who was an Alliance Marketing at Citrix. She said, “I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what your company does.” She spent about an hour with me. I said, “I just want to learn how we can be the best possible partner for you. What are the things that partners do that light you up?”

She said a couple of things. One is folks who follow the product roadmap. Two is folks who remain loyal to our brand. Three is folks who understand the needs of our sellers and are able to go in and build a clear go-to-market that establishes a use case that those sellers can use. It really comes down to how you find individuals that can add value.

Our approach was how do we give as much as we can to you so that you want me to come back the next day. We were able to go from zero to 2,000 with four salespeople. I hired four sales channel people to do that. It was a really astonishing partnership and it’s something that taught me a lot about the need to show that you’re a high-value solution and that the value you provide is not selfish value.

Sramana Mitra: Four channel salespeople were supporting the Citrix sales force to sell this product?

Simon Taylor: That’s correct. Every single seller that we hired was able to work with a hundred sellers at Citrix. That commitment and channel philosophy and our understanding of the use case were critical in helping us to be critical.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of revenue does that equate to?

Simon Taylor: We don’t talk about that publicly.

Sramana Mitra: You sold it to Citrix for $30 million?

Simon Taylor: That’s correct.

Sramana Mitra: What year does this bring us up to?

Simon Taylor: I was out in Las Vegas and I was celebrating the success of this exit. I ran into a gentleman who was a Lead Architect for data protection in Slovenia. We sat down and had dinner. We started arguing about Infrastructure-as-a-Service and what was happening in the backup industry. He was a data protection engineer.

I was telling him I don’t understand why data protection is so darned complicated. I’m a simple person. I like to boil things down. I got a 75-year-old mother who knows how to back data up. I don’t understand why it takes teams of professional services to backup the enterprise. This led to a very long conversation about how you could disrupt the backup industry.

At the end of the dinner when we came up with a core thesis, I paid the bill. Streamers and balloons fell from the ceiling. They announced that we were the ten-thousandth customer of the Gordon Ramsey steakhouse. We got to work. We hired a team. We grassrooted it. We were able to bring in another team of engineers who were solid in data protection.

Sramana Mitra: You found a team within the business outsourcing portfolio.

Simon Taylor: Exactly. I cordoned them off. We moved them to an entirely legal entity. The name was HYCU. It still is. It stands for Hybrid Cloud Uptime. If we were going to manage data, how do you take an enormous amount of data and boil it down into a small elegant package? I thought about a haiku.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Leveraging Channels and Slovenia to build Successful Businesses: Simon Taylor, CEO of HYCU
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