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 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 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 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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15 Private Unicorns I Am Tracking

We’ve looked at a number of Unicorn companies in Billion Dollar Unicorns. We will look at more.

Today, however, I want to share with you a list of technology companies that I am tracking that have the potential of becoming billion dollar public companies, or getting acquired for over a billion dollars. In other words, we’re looking for companies that are likely to have billion dollar exits.

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Domain Knowledge Drives SaaS Unicorns

We’ve looked at a number of Unicorn companies so far: Tableau, FireEye, RightNow, Palo Alto Networks,Kayak, SuccessFactors, and Marketo. Today’s featured company is ServiceNow.

Fred Luddy, the founder, was a classic nerd. After meandering his way through various companies as a programmer, he ended up as the CTO of Peregrine Corporation that built software for the help desk and service desk markets. Peregrine acquired numerous companies and eventually grew to $500 million in revenues, but filed for bankruptcy due to accounting irregularities in 2003.

Fred, however, developed domain experience with the IT service desk market through that process. He decided to start a SaaS company in that space. >>>

How Marketo Built A Billion Dollar SaaS Company

We’ve looked at a number of Unicorn companies so far: Tableau, FireEye, RightNow, Palo Alto Networks,Kayak, and SuccessFactors. Today, we look at Marketo.

Marketo was founded in 2006 with the stated objective of building a high-velocity SaaS company focused on a critical (and then somewhat new) business process called lead nurturing.
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A Latin American Unicorn From Argentina

Adapted from my new book, From eCommerce To Web 3.0.

So far, we have only looked at American companies [Tableau, FireEye, RightNow, Palo Alto Networks, Kayak and SuccessFactors] in the Unicorn series.

There is a market of 500 million people – nearly 8.6% of the world’s population – that the business media all too often neglects, serving up story after story on China and India. Forgotten is all of Latin America.

Between 2000 and 2007, the number of Internet users in Latin America grew from 18.1 million to 122.4 million, a compounded annual growth rate of 32% compared with only 12% in North America during the same period. Average penetration across Latin America was approximately 21.5%, compared to 71.4% for the US. Even with such low penetration, Latin America’s Internet population represented close to 10% of the world’s Internet users.

Fast forward to 2014, numbers have exploded, touching 300 million. Analysts forecast 393 million users in 2017.
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