Sramana Mitra: Can you talk about what made that a successful transition? What did you do as a founder? What did your new CEO do as the incoming CEO? Obviously, it has been a successful transition since you’re working with this person for a while. Ross Mason: A few things. Bringing someone new in is
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
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
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
Sramana Mitra: You decided to come back to London? Ross Mason: Yes. On the way back, we went through the Pacific Islands. My wife said, “Let’s stop in San Francisco because we haven’t seen it. You talk about it a lot.” When I landed in San Francisco, there was this conference JavaOne, which was very
Sramana Mitra: Were you working with other clients? Of course, you had deep insight into the problem with your experience but did you also work with other clients at that time? Ross Mason: The way it came about was in 2003, I decided to leave the company I was working at and go traveling through
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