HYCU’s mission is to build a safer world by harmonizing protection and visibility for all the world’s data.
Simon Taylor, CEO & Co-Founder, shares details on HYCU and what it’s like to work there.
We discuss:
- Details on HYCU
- How they help their customers
- The Latest at HYCU
- The culture at HYCU
- Why now is an ideal time to join HYCU
Video Transcript
Simon, thanks so much for joining us.
Pleasure to be here, Keith.
I’m excited to talk to you because we’re going to talk about HYCU, which is one of the fastest growing companies in the Boston tech scene. So, let’s talk about HYCU. What does the company do?
HYCU is the world’s fastest growing data protection as a service business. We actually back up and recover data across on-prem, public cloud, and SaaS. I think our claim to fame is that there are 30,000 SaaS services in the world. Only five of them actually have any kind of backup and recovery mechanism whatsoever. And HYCU protects 86, which is 12 times anybody else in the industry. We’ve got about 4,600 customers in 78 countries around the world.
Yeah, it’s a problem that’s obviously massive scale and you just highlighted the number of customers you’re working with, and it’s just a problem that’s obviously just growing.
Yeah. No, absolutely. I actually wrote a book, Averting the SaaS Data Apocalypse. It’s a little bit of a hyperbolic title, but the idea behind the company really is that we’ve not only got so much data today, Keith, we actually have so much data in so many different places and it makes it really unmanageable. We have one of our most favorite and famous customers, the Boston Red Sox, ran our platform, our tooling, and discovered that they had over 900 different SaaS applications and none of them were backed up. And of course, they brought HYCU in. We’re like a Swiss Army knife, and we just started backing up all of their data across all those different areas. And I think this is the problem. There’s too much data in too many different places. And it makes it incredibly hard to manage and it allows those evil cyber attackers to get right in there and start stealing stuff from you. And that’s really what HYCU does to help.
So how does it all work?
Yes. I mean, I think we sort of looked at the whole data protection industry about eight years ago and we said, if you think about the way that backup and recovery was built historically, what would happen is a guy like me would wake up one morning and say, “Hey, I’m going to build a backup and recovery business for one specific thing.” So I’m company X and I’m going to back up Windows. I’m company Y. I’m going to back up VMware. I’m company B. I’m going to go and back up Google Cloud. Everybody sort of took this monolithic approach to how they were backing up and recovering data. And we said this doesn’t work because if you think about it, it’d be almost like having your iPhone and you’ve got a hundred different apps on your iPhone. Imagine if you had a different backup app for every one of those different applications. It’d be ridiculous. And so we sort of said, “Well, what if there was an iCloud backup but for the business?” And that’s what we set out to build: one simple sort of ring to rule them all in which you could very easily turn on the data protection, have it visualize all of your data across on-prem, public cloud, and SaaS, and then through a marketplace allow you to create integrations that give you enterprise-level backup and recovery no matter where your data is. So, it all sounds really complicated, but it’s very, very simple to use because, Keith, all we do is we let you press a button, discover your environment, show you where your data is, and then hit back it up, spin it up, and recover it. And with those three clicks of a button, you can get true enterprise-grade backup and recovery for your entire business.
That’s amazing. So, we obviously talked about, you know, HYCU is growing. So, what’s the latest at the company?
Yeah, I mean we are growing fast and furiously. I think we were at 3,200 customers last year, 4,600 customers this year, and it just keeps going. I think a couple of key things that we’re seeing. The first is that everything that we talked about in the book Averting the SaaS Data Apocalypse has kind of come to life unfortunately. One of the things we said in the book is that because we are so as a civilization now so dependent on these SaaS services that one day something was going to break, and then we saw the CrowdStrike outage and all of a sudden my mother’s calling me saying, “Hey, what is this? I can’t get on an airplane.” I think the world has become so dependent on these services and so dependent on the underlying data that they’re providing that when these things stop, nothing works anymore. So, very, very damaging for the world. And I think what that’s done is it’s driven tremendous amounts of awareness into sort of modern organizations who are now saying, “Hey, I do need to back up my Office 365. I do need to back up my Salesforce. I do need to back up my cloud.” And because of that, we’re seeing tremendous growth here at HYCU. Again, adding over a thousand customers in just under a year. And I think that that growth is going to be continuing going forward. The second thing that we’re seeing is we obviously we inked a partnership with Dell very recently. Dell now sells HYCU software along with its hardware worldwide. This has given us amazing scale because Dell’s 30,000 salespeople worldwide now have access to HYCU on the price list and all of Dell’s millions of customers can now buy HYCU directly from their partners. So I think we’re not only seeing the market prevailing market forces driving our business, we’re also building those partnerships out that are helping us to get more scale in the marketplace.
Now if someone’s part of the team at HYCU, what’s it like working there? What’s the culture like?
Yeah. You know, when I started the company, I always thought a lot about the kind of company I’d want to work in, which maybe is a little bit selfish, but I sort of looked at myself as, okay, I’m a guy who likes to have a good time, likes to have fun, likes to work really, really hard. And at the end of the day, I want to build a place where everybody is accepted and people really feel like this is a place that’s based on the merits. And so we created a core set of values of the business that drive the culture, drove the culture then and continue to drive it today. And we call it better with H and it’s authenticity, grit, and empathy. To sort of lay that out for you, I think that our culture is dependent actually on people showing up with their full selves. And that means feeling comfortable in your own skin, feeling accepted, feeling like, “Hey, no matter who I am, where I’m from, what I sound like, what my nationality is, as long as I put in a hard day’s work, and as long as I produce a great result, I’m going to be respected and cared about by this community in this company.” The second piece is grit. I think you can’t have a startup without grit or a scale-up company without grit. And for us, the grit is incredibly important. Every single person in this company gets their hands dirty. We all work hard. I always joke that I might be the CEO, but I’m a janitor on a Monday and I’m accountant on a Tuesday and I’m just the chief cook and bottle washer on a Wednesday. And that never stops. No matter how big we get, I think that ethos has to continue. And the final piece is empathy. And I want to just take a minute, Keith, if I can, and talk about this because I read a horrible article the other day about how empathy is now pay. I think, if you believe that, then don’t come work at HYCU. We believe firmly and fundamentally that empathy is the key to humanity and I think that in a world in which AI is becoming table stakes and sort of the calculus that goes into problem solving is becoming automated, it’s actually empathic levels of communication and humanity that are going to actually separate companies from the herd. And so again, so authenticity, grit, and empathy, that is the cornerstone, the bedrock of our culture. Always has been and hopefully always will be.
Top-tier talent regardless of market conditions. They always have options in front of them for their career. So why is now the ideal time to join HYCU?
So I think it’s a confluence of different things. The first is what we talked about before, which is that the data protection industry, frankly, I didn’t wake up when I was a little kid and say, “I’m going to be a backup and recovery CEO,” right? It was never a very sexy thing. But what’s happened is that the massive amount of cyber attacks and the supply chain attacks and ransomware attacks and the malware attacks and the social engineering attacks have made cybersecurity one of the hottest industries in the world. And I think when you look at what cybersecurity does is it’s trying to keep the bad guys out. It’s trying to build the moats deeper, build the walls higher, but at the end of the day, there are too many of them. There are too many terrorists. There are too many attackers. They’re going to get through. Data protection is your last line of defense. It’s the place where you go to actually secure your jewels. It’s the place where you go to build your insurance policy. And I think the most important thing to understand as a new Haikuer coming on board or considering the company is we keep people safe. That is what we do. That’s what gets us up in the morning. It’s that feeling of purpose where we kind of say, “Hey, when HYCU works with a customer, and they get attacked and they get taken down, oftentimes it’s only the HYCU data that will survive.” And that’s a great feeling because you sort of go, I’m not just selling a nice to have. I’m not selling something that people may or may not use and might get some efficiency out of. No, no, no. We’re talking about mission-critical situations where governments, where schools, hospitals, are going to have a really, really bad, the worst day they’ve ever had, a terrible attack happens, and then they’re going to call us up and say, “Guess what? The thing that saved us was actually HYCU software.” And I think that that is a sense of purpose that you just don’t get everywhere else. So, I can talk about how the market’s hot. I can talk about how cybersecurity attacks are off the charts. Talk about how great our software and technology is in our people. But at the end of the day, it’s the sense of purpose that I think really, really matters the most and really attracts the best talent here at HYCU. Well, if you are interested in exploring opportunities at HYCU, you need to go to their company page on VentureFizz, which has all their job listings. Go to venturefizz.com/hycu and you’ll see all their job listings. Simon Taylor, thanks so much for taking the time to walk us through all the details on the company.
Pleasure, Keith. Great to be here.
