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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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Predicting the Success of Design Driven Startups

By Guest Author Soren Petersen

In stark contrast to previous decades, starting a new venture can be accomplished on a shoestring budget. This is due to the diminishing cost of information and tools combined with the relatively high value of knowledge, skills, and experience that founders bring to the equation. Bootstrapping is now often possible up to Round A Financing. This is where capital is required for marketing to scale rapidly and New Product Development is required to deliver high quality offerings. >>>

Unicorn in The Making: Ross Mason, Founder of MuleSoft (Part 3)

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 big back then. So, I went there and I remember turning up at the Thirsty Bear bar. I was absolutely mowed down by lots of people who were using Mule and they didn’t know who I was. I stayed anonymous and kept a pretty low profile. My whole week after that went into meeting people in San Francisco who had known and were using Mule. It made me realize that there was an opportunity behind the open source project.

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. Are we talking 2006?
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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 7)

Sramana Mitra: Is there anything else from your strategic thought process that you want to share that has helped you achieve what you’ve achieved so far?

Terry Ryan: I would just like to touch for a moment on VCs, private equity, and growth capital, I’ve done all the above. When people talk to me about that kind of stuff, I say to those people, “I feel I’ve successfully worked with those markets.” I don’t have the story where someone came in and took over my company because something went sideways. They came and helped. Three years later, we exited and everyone was happy and I still have Christmas dinner with them every once in a while. When you’re dealing with those groups, you have to realize that maybe all of them won’t tell you that what you have isn’t good or that you’re positioned wrong. They’ll try to convince you that you’re always at the right stage for them. There’s a bunch of things that you need to do as an entrepreneur to size up the companies that you decide to >>>

Building an Exciting Healthcare IT Company From Chicago: LaunchPoint CEO, Terry Ryan (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: You’ve been in the market for five years. You have not raised any other funding after that $10 million seed round. Where are you now?

Terry Ryan: We have definitely turned down funding. It’s a very interesting world in healthcare IT right now.

Sramana Mitra: Yes, it’s a very interesting world.

Terry Ryan: We have 34 live clients today. On average, those clients run one to six of our seven in-production applications out of a total of 15 in our product roadmap. I can build a product and a half per year organically without outside capital. We became profitable as a software company last year. We’re a self generating machine but at the same time, you have constraints when you’re working within that same self-generation. We’re scaling the business. We were 100th on the Inc 500 list. We had 3,600% growth over the last three years.

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Building Large Scale Enterprise Software Companies: Louis Tetu, Founder of Taleo, CEO of Coveo (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: There are a lot more hubs that have developed where interesting companies are built. You probably know Greg Gianforte who had built up a very interesting unorthodox place like Montana into a very nice technology destination.

Louis Tetu: Technology is ubiquitous. Regardless of where we are, we all have the challenge of distributed teams. At Taleo, we have 500 employees in the East Bay. It wasn’t easy to recruit them nor was it easy to keep them.

Sramana Mitra: It’s absolutely incredibly difficult to recruit right now.

Louis Tetu: Of the core team that moved over in 2005 from Copernic, 5% churned and 95% is still there. That’s critical because the aggregated knowledge is kept intact. That’s really important.

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