Thought Leaders in Big Data: Damon Ragusa, CEO of ThinkVine (Part 1)

The dream of digital advertising being 100% measurable and attributable is a myth. In this story, we kick around the issues with Damon Ragusa, CEO of ThinkVine.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with introducing our audience to yourself as well as to the company.

Damon Ragusa: I’m the Founder and CEO of ThinkVine. My background is in events analytics. I’ve spent a couple of decades in the analytics field primarily supporting strategic marketing objectives across B2B and B2C businesses. ThinkVine is a marketing optimization software and services company. We provide four core capabilities to our customers—software platform for planning marketing, the ability to attribute >>>

Unicorn in The Making: Ross Mason, Founder of MuleSoft (Part 7)

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 always a risk and a challenge. It’s not just the CEO but it’s the team around the CEO as well that really matters. He used to work at SpringSource and the CEO of SpringSource was a friend of mine. This was an open source company around the Spring framework that had a pretty good exit. Rod, the CEO at SpringSource recommended Greg. >>>

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. >>>

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. >>>

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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Unicorn in The Making: Ross Mason, Founder of MuleSoft (Part 2)

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 South America to Australia. Before I went, one of the partners called me and said, “I heard you just left. I know you want to go traveling, but do you want to earn some money before you go? We have a project we’d like you to do.” I had a couple of months, so I figured why not.

They essentially were building a campaign management system for charity donations. >>>

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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Building an Exciting Healthcare IT Company From Chicago: LaunchPoint CEO Terry Ryan (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: So about 2008, you were done with HP?

Terry Ryan: That’s when I started the current business I’m running. I had successful exits in the 90s with companies in which I was an early employee but I wasn’t a founder of those companies. I had some nice exits in three or four cases before I started Knightsbridge. Fast forward to 2008, I sat down with HP management and said, “I think if I point my guns in one direction for the next decade, I can move this battleship and make a difference. At the same time, I think I can make a bigger difference going out and building my next company.” I politely gave them all the time they wanted. I decided I was going to take six months off and think real hard about what I wanted to do next. I wanted to build on what we did in the Knightsbridge days, which was build world-class data warehouses that solved business problems. I wanted to take the next step, which was not only to do that, but also to own and build the software and solution set that provided great business value for the clients.

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