How SaaS Partnerships Took HYCU to 4,000 Customers in 78 Countries

Omer (00:09.760)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host Omer Khan and this is a show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business.
In this episode I talked to Simon Taylor, the co founder and CEO of Haiku at Data Protection as a service company for on prem cloud and SaaS applications.
In 2016, Simon was at a Las Vegas steakhouse when he bumped into Goran, an engineer from his past.
They got talking about what Goran was working on and the state of outdated data protection solutions.
Initially, Simon was uninterested in data protection.
He found it rather unexciting.
But by the end of the night, the idea of building a modern Uber for data protection had sparked his enthusiasm.
The duo assembled a team of engineers to design a platform that could handle on Prem Cloud and SaaS applications, which one engineer had told them was impossible.
Eventually, the team overcame the big technical issues, but marketing and sales proved to be incredibly challenging.
Early on, Simon had people doing cold calling to generate leads, but soon realized this would undermine their brand's perception and trust.
Convincing potential customers to take a chance on their fledgling startup instead of established competitors was also an uphill battle.
And getting their messaging right was also difficult.
Simon had to rethink how they were compared to legacy data protection companies by focusing on simplicity instead of technical details.
But taking this totally different approach from the norm made getting traction really tough in those early days.
However, today haiku protects over 4,000 customers and across 78 countries they've grown to 300 employees, generating eight figures in ARR and have raised $140 million.
In this episode, you'll learn how Simon overcame the challenges of positioning Haiku as a better choice against well established legacy data protection solutions.
What lessons Simon's learned about the power of partnerships and what you should and shouldn't do to build successful partnerships.
How Simon's boldness and persistence were crucial in securing a major partnership despite having to wait a year to get a meeting.
We also talk about the insights Simon's learned about content marketing that provides real value and education rather than just promoting your product.
And how a recent partnership with Anthropic has become a significant AI advantage, allowing them to integrate new partners in in record time.
So I hope you enjoy it.
Simon, welcome to the show.

Simon Taylor (02:49.430)
Omar, it's great to be here.
Thank you for having me.

Omer (02:51.910)
It's my pleasure.
Do you have a favorite quote?
Something that inspires or motivates you that you can share with us?

Simon Taylor (02:56.950)
You know, Ernest Hemingway once said, live on a knife's edge until you're 30 and then spend the rest of your life writing about it.
And that one's always kind of stayed with me.
I thought it speaks to how you can live sharp and try anything until you're 30.
And then after 30, you know, go get it done.
Go make something happen.

Omer (03:16.600)
I watched that.
There was a pbs, I think, documentary about Hemingway a while back.
Man, that guy, he's a beast.

Simon Taylor (03:25.159)
Total beast.

Omer (03:26.120)
Really inspirational.

Simon Taylor (03:27.320)
He was like, you know, hey, I'm going to go write a book about war.
Let me go into a war, you know, totally different level.

Omer (03:34.280)
All right, Haiku, tell us about what does the product do, who's it for, and what's the main problem you're helping to solve?

Simon Taylor (03:41.130)
So Haiku is the world's fastest growing data protection as a service company, and we say that we are de risking innovation because effectively today the average company has their Data in over 212 different data silos.
It makes it incredibly hard to know if you're protected and how to recover your data in the case of accidental deletion, loss or even a ransomware attack.
We've developed the only unified platform that protects data on prem in the public cloud and across the entire SaaS universe.
And we actually use generative AI technology to ensure that the 30,000 SaaS services across the entire world can be recovered in the event of a ransomware attack.

Omer (04:25.900)
We're going to talk about the Generative AI because that's a recent partnership that you just announced.
I think that's super, super interesting.
Give us a sense of the size of the business.
Where are you in terms of revenue, size of team, customers, how much you've raised?

Simon Taylor (04:40.830)
So, you know, Haiku was founded in April of 2018 and today I'm very proud to say, Omar, we have over 4,000 customers in 78 countries across the world.
And our NPS score is actually a 91, which, which I think is a statistic that doesn't get the same sort of oomph as a huge customer count, et cetera.
But for me, it's the most valuable because it means that 90% of our customers, 90 plus percent of our customers are ranking us, a 10 out of 10 are saying they would absolutely recommend Haiku to a friend or someone they trust.
And to me, that is the genesis of how you build great business is by ensuring that you're delivering true customer satisfaction and value at every turn.
So 4,000 customers, 78 countries been around since April 2018, have about 300 people in the company, and we've raised about $140 million to date from Bain Capital, a crew, Cisco Ventures, Octave Ventures, Atlassian Ventures.
It's been a lot of fun.
We've really been able to grow fast and furiously and still keep the same timeless tradition we have here at Haiku of driving our business along three core values, which are authenticity, grit, and empathy.
We call it better with age A G E. Authenticity, grit, and empathy.
And I think that's an easy thing to master when you're five people, 10 people.
It's a lot harder as you get into the hundreds and you start to add thousands of customers.
I'm very proud of the business we've built and the people who work here.

Omer (06:12.830)
Awesome.
Before we talk about the story and where the idea for this business came from, let's just talk about the name.
Now, when we say haiku, we're not talking about the H A, I, K, U, we're talking about hycu.
But there are some similarities, right?
Maybe you want to tell us about that?

Simon Taylor (06:33.470)
No, there 100% are.
Ever since I was a young kid, I always like to name things.
If I had a group of friends when I was 10 years old, I had to come up with an acronym for the Group of Friends.
Friends.
It was always sort of my thing.
When I thought about building haiku, when I thought about building a business that was really designed to take all of the data in the world and make it simple, safe, and accessible, I thought about a haiku poem.
And I thought about the fact that with a haiku poem, what you're doing, you're taking all the data in a language and you're condensing it into a small, elegant package.
And I sort of said, that's us.
That's what we are.
We are a haiku in the technology sense.
And obviously we couldn't get the haiku URL, so I had to think about a different spelling.
And so I said, okay, if haiku was an acronym, what are we?
What do we do?
And what we do is hybrid cloud uptime.
We help hybrid cloud users stay up and running.
So Hycu Hybrid cloud uptime became our spelling of haiku.

Omer (07:36.330)
Love it.
Love it.
All right, so let's talk about where the idea came from.
So the business has been going since 2018.
Before that, like, what were you doing and how did you come up with the idea?

Simon Taylor (07:50.730)
Yeah, it's a funny story.
I had sold my previous business to Citrix, and it was probably, I don't know, 2016, 17, something like that.
And when you're in your mid-30s and you sell your first company, you're excited, and you go and have a party and celebrate.
And I went and did that in Las Vegas.
And I was in Vegas and celebrating, and I ran into an engineer, an architect that I had known in my first company that had sold years prior.
And so I'm standing at this bar, and I looked at this guy, I saw this bald head at the bar, and I said, my God, that's Gordon Gorebsky.
And I went up to him and I said, gorn, man, I haven't seen you in ages.
What are you doing?
And he said, oh, I'm an architect for data protection company.
And I said, you mean backup?
I said, oh, that's terrible.
I'm sorry.
And he said, what do you mean, sorry?
I said.
I said, you know, that's.
That's kind of the, you know, it's not.
It's not the coolest business around.
I mean, it's one of those everyone has to have it, but nobody really wants it kind of things.
And he said, well, you're in the monitoring space, Simon.
It's not like you're, you know, running a.
Running out, running a band or something.
And so we had a laugh about that.
And then he said to me, but really, Simon, data protection's so important.
Why don't you see that?
And I said, you know, it's one of these again.
Everyone needs it, but nobody really wants to have it.
They don't care about it.
And he said to me, and I'll never forget this, he said, simon, how did you get here today?
Did you take a taxi?
And I said, no, I took an Uber.
And he said, aha, but there's no Uber and data protection.
And I said, what do you mean?
And he said, look, just like data protection, just like backing up data.
It's like a taxi.
Everyone needs it.
Nobody wants to get in a taxi.
They smell bad, they're hard to locate, they're a pain, they're difficult, they only take cash, et cetera, et cetera.
He said, if I get it right, one day, I will build the Uber of data protection.
And so we sat down at dinner that night in Las Vegas.
I realized, of course, I'd sold my company, so I actually didn't have a job.
And we sat down at the Gordon Ramsay Steakhouse and we started talking about what it would take to actually disrupt the data protection market.
And, you know, we sort of.
We tiered it into two distinct problem sets.
The first was the Sassification of backup.
This idea that data protection software always, you know, the old school stuff, the legacy providers, man, you need Accenture to come in and install that stuff.
It's old, it's legacy, it's duct tape and wires and glue.
We said this should be a simple SaaS platform that you just turn on and it works.
That was easy.
The second problem set was much harder because what we realized is that data today is not just in one place.
Data today is literally in 30,000 different SaaS services.
And we decided that we had to build a platform that was going to provide an equivalent level of data protection support across on premises, public, cloud and SaaS services.
And we've spent the last five years doing that.

Omer (10:55.170)
Wow, great story.
All right, so I've been involved in conversations like that where you're at dinner with somebody and you get this idea and the napkin out and you're drawing these things of what you could go and go do.
And most of the times it's like, yeah, let's stay in touch.
And it goes nowhere.
So what happened with you guys?
What did you do, like, differently that that got you started here?

Simon Taylor (11:18.940)
So.
So I actually, I left this part out because it almost sounds too good to be true.
But now that you've asked this follow up question, I'm going to answer it.
I was very much excited about this idea and I wasn't sure though, would it really go anywhere because like you, Omar, you know, I get the same.
You know, we have a lot of these calls, conversations, you meet great people.
It was fun, it was exciting.
You know, we'd had some wine, you know, you never really know.
Well, we got the bill.
And no sooner had I paid the bill than streamers and balloons fell out of the ceiling of the Gordon Ramsay Steakhouse.
And they announced that we were the 10,000th customer at the restaurant.
Yes, way.
And they brought over signed cookbooks and they were taking our picture and Goran and I were hugging.
And I remember him looking at me and he said, if this is not destiny, I don't know what is, you know.
And so of course, this story, I think, actually had this dual effect of feeling very faithful.
And at the same time, I was telling the story to everybody because it was such an interesting story.
And I think that it became a self fulfilling prophecy.
But the thing that really made it happen was we took a very big risk.
We put in some money with a third partner that we had at the time and we flew a whole bunch of engineers to Costa Rica.
This seemed crazy.
We didn't have a company.
We had an idea, we flew them to Costa Rica, we put them in a room, very hot room.
I remember the air conditioning was broken and we said, beach outside, we can all go swimming.
The moment that we solve these two problems, how do we sassify data protection and how do we provide an equivalent level of data protection support across on prem Public, Cloud and SaaS?
And the act of putting a little bit of our own money into it and bringing people together in Costa Rica, it created this sort of first spark of this can be something we're already in now, right?
And the more I think you create, you sort of push the rock up the hill.
Push the rock up the hill.
But once you've started pushing up the hill, it's like going to the gym.
I don't love going to the gym, clearly, but when I go once, twice, three times, what starts to happen is I say, well, I don't want to screw it up this time.
I think a startup is very similar.
You start that cycle, that sort of muscle burn, and you invest in it, your time, your resources, your blood, sweat and tears.
And pretty soon it takes hold of you and then you're really going for a great ride.

Omer (13:48.910)
So how far did you get in Costa Rica?
Did you guys end up kind of building some kind of prototype or at least kind of some kind of architecture in terms of how you're going to go and solve this problem?

Simon Taylor (14:04.830)
I would say there were two major revelations that occurred in Costa Rica.
One was that the backup and recovery space was so old and so legacy that even very normal terms like SAS were so divorced from the entire industry that people didn't want to use them.
They kept saying, you can't say SAS data protection.
You can't say it, it's just not done.
And so what do you mean it's not done?
It's not a fashion show.
What are you talking about?
But people were so staid in their thinking.
And so I think Revelation 1 was this was going to be a true disruption.
We were going to have to go at this problem completely differently and really start to tell people, hey, what worked on Prem?
What worked in your data center when you had boxes and dusty storage bins and tape drives doesn't work in Cloud and SaaS.
So I think from a messaging perspective, that started to happen.
The second thing we realized was that I'll never forget this.
I asked the question, how do you create one platform that provides equal levels of backup and recovery support in your data center, in the cloud and across SaaS services.
And everyone just kind of sat there for five minutes.
And I said, come on, whoever answers the question can go swimming right now.
And this guy in the back of the room, and he says, he raises and he says, it can't be done.
And I wrote it can't be done on the board.
And it was the best thing he could have said, Omar.
Because by saying it can't be done, it.
It forced a room full of brilliant engineers to want to challenge him.
And immediately the ideas started picking up that sort of, you know, you can't do this actually acted as a way of propelling ingenuity and innovation.
And ultimately we came up with a very simple solution, which was to build microservices for each site and then up level all the data using an abstraction layer under a single pane of glass.
We effectively built our platform backwards with the services first and the single pane of glass last.
And that ultimately led to us becoming the only extensible architecture in the entire industry.
And it was all because one smart, brave guy said, it can't be done.

Omer (16:17.760)
Wow.
Wow.
Yeah.
I mean, when I was looking at the Haiku website, I was trying to get it, like, I was trying to get my head around it.
Like, how does this thing work?
Like, backing up SaaS products, I can probably think about, okay, you can build integrations or something and figure out how to do those backups.
But then when you was, you know, I looked at, it was like, oh, you do on prem as well.
Oh, you do the infrastructure, you do these other.
Then I was like, whoa, like, how does this happen?
And so I can understand, like, it's a really complicated problem to solve.
Solve, but it also sounds like a really complicated problem or solution to go and sell to people.
So when.
When you, like, first of all, like, how long did it take for you to kind of build.
Build the product or something that you.
You felt that you could go out and sell?
And what happened when you went out

Simon Taylor (17:17.460)
to the market, you know, selling data protection, the way we built it is like selling a Swiss army knife versus being one of those guys on TV with the knife shows with all those individual knives.
Right.
I think what we effectively were saying to the market is, let's think about it in a very simple way.
Look at your iPhone right now or whatever phone you have, and you've probably got 100 different apps on it.
Imagine if every app had another app that said backup for app A, and then the next one was backup for app B, and the next one was backup for app C. That would be so annoying.
So what do you have instead?
You have icloud backup.
You just swipe right or left or whatever it is, turn it green.
You turn on your icloud backup and it backs up all your data.
It doesn't just back up one app.
The crazy thing to me was that that didn't exist for enterprise.
It didn't exist for businesses.
There was no swipe right near safe.
Instead it was, well, I'm going to buy this backup product for this service and buy this backup product for that service.
So really, all we were saying is, let's just make it as easy as an iPhone.
If it can be done there, it should be able to be done here.
And you're right in the sense that once we built it, once we figured that out, we would go to these meetings and at first customers would say, well, I mean, I've got 12 backup products right now, and I'm spending $5 million a year to back up all my data.
What on earth makes you think I'm going to believe that I can replace all that with you and your band of married people?
That maybe there's 20 of you?
Right?
It seems impossible.
And so.
But what I started telling everybody was, look, I'm not an engineer.
And they would say, well, now we really don't trust you.
But what I always say is, so when you're not an engineer, you're not trying to make it smart, you're trying to make it simple.
It's the only way my brain will compute the information.
And so for me, it wasn't about building the most complicated, intense data protection.
It was about building data protection that was simple, accessible, and worked right, and would back up everything.
And so from a selling perspective, it was all about just leaving it with people and saying, just try it.
Try it on three things.
Try it on your Google Cloud, try it on your Nutanix, and try it on your Salesforce.
And if those three things don't replace anything, then, you know, we'll take it back.
Don't worry.
I mean, it's just a service.
Turn it on, try it and see and go.
And nine times out of 10, what we realized, actually, I'll give you a real stat.
50% of the people who tried our product in the first year bought it.
It's almost unheard of in the first year, you know, 50%.
And these were large enterprises.
This was companies like Broadcom.
I mean, these are big companies.
And ultimately, I think that ease of use and that accessibility, you know, really made it what it Is the second question you asked was about how do we actually do this?
Right?
It's all well and good to say.
We built the Swiss army knife of data protection.
And you know, wouldn't it be great to have an iPhone for your business that allows you to back up all your apps and databases with one single toggle?
You know, but doing it was, was rather complicated.
And what we ultimately, what I ultimately remembered when we were sort of designing this was the, was the words of an old mentor of mine and as a Serbian gentleman named Veslan Yevrosimovich, great guy, spelled, you know, a massive, massive enterprise across Europe.
And you know, he had said to me before I became a CEO, he said, Simon, don't try to be a CEO.
That is thinking for 10,000 people.
You want to be the kind of CEO where 10,000 people are thinking for you.
And that always resonated with me.
It was kind of an odd comment at the time, but as I became a CEO, I realized you can surprise, sort of surround yourself with sycophants and people who will just say yes all the time, or you can get those really tough people, the really hardcore ones, who will say no, Simon, you're not right about this.
We should do it this way.
And that makes you better.
You want to hire people that are smarter in their various different domains when you're building a business.
And I sort of thought, I remembered that.
And then I thought, you know, we're faced with a very similar construct with the problem that we're trying to solve, which is that there's 30,000 SaaS services in the world.
Nobody can actually build backup integrations for all of them.
But what if we didn't try?
What if instead of trying to build 30,000 integrations, we tore the COVID off our platform, opened it up as a universal API to all, and let SaaS providers and partners, and even customers build those integrations via a low code development platform.
And that's what we built to solve this problem.
And I'll tell you, it's gone gangbusters.
We now have the largest data protection marketplace of integrations in the world.
We're not the largest company in the world, but we've absolutely got the largest marketplace by number of integrations to a factor of 10.
I mean, it's pretty incredible what we've been able to build in a short time.
And I think by harnessing the power of the community in a safe and constructive way, VR low code development platform, we've actually been able to become really sort of the de facto Stander and leader in the SaaS data protection industry as a whole.

Omer (22:43.260)
So rather than you going out and saying, I mean, anybody who's trying to build an integration knows what a pain in the butt it is, right?
And so like, rather than saying, oh, we're going to multiply this complexity by 30,000 times and spend the next 75 years building these integrations, right, we're going to do it the other way around.
Smart.
And so I guess really then the work that's involved on your side is just getting persuading each SaaS company to build the integration and making it as easy as possible for them.

Simon Taylor (23:19.990)
And Omar, you know, it's funny, that's exactly what I thought was going to happen.
And unlike, and I guess very much like everything in building a business, it never works out the way you expect, what actually started to happen is that we had hundreds and hundreds of partners calling us up, systems integrators, consulting companies saying, whoa, you don't need the SaaS company.
We want to build these integrations because we want, we're selling those SaaS services and we'd love to monetize the data protection as well.
Can we do a rev share?
And so we started offering revenue sharing partnerships for any partner that build these integrations.
And it just started to speed up faster and faster and faster.
And, and obviously now we've also integrated with Anthropic so that we can leverage artificial intelligence to make that move that process from a three day development cycle to 36 minutes.

Omer (24:12.620)
Wow.
Wow.
Okay, we'll talk about that in a second.
So I have a question about.
You said one of the ways that you were persuading customers or potential customers was to try the product.
And you said, you know, turn it on for a couple of services and see what it's like.
Now the icloud analogy in the backup is great, right?
From a consumer perspective, Apple's done a beautiful job that it's happening in the background.
You get a new phone, you turn the icloud back on and you know, your apps and your settings are back there.
I still remember the days, 10, 20, maybe over 20 years ago where just because you were doing backups didn't mean that you'd actually be able to do restore those backups or it was going to be a pain in the, you know, but to actually do that.
So how, how did you get them to kind of get confidence with that part as well?
Because, you know, it's kind of like one side of the problem.
Like, yeah, yeah, it's backing up Great.
But what happens when you know the hits the fan?
How do they know that it's actually going to work?

Simon Taylor (25:12.740)
Yeah, so.
So I actually hate the word backup because.
Because of exactly what you just said.
Backup doesn't matter.
It's just a very simple form of moving data from one place to another.
It's how you recover the data that is always the most important part.
One of the things that we did here is the local development platform opens the API so that you can support the backup.
But all of the recovery is done centrally by the Haiku platform.
It's our thousands and thousands and thousands of engineering years of expertise and data protection leveraged in a platform that allows you to perform granular recovery across any source of data on prem public cloud and SaaS.
We actually, it was such a versatile architectural design that we were able to patent it because the beauty of our system is that whatever SaaS service, you decide to back up, you're recovering the data in exactly the same format that it's backed up in.
So I'll give you a real life example.
Think about Salesforce, right?
What do you use Salesforce for?
Well, you've got opportunities, you've got leads, you've got contacts.
When you recover the data, you don't want it to say file system x3bz, right?
You want to say, I want to recover my opportunities from January 4th, thank you very much.
And so that's exactly what you see now when you go to Jira to back up Jira and recover Jira data.
You don't care about opportunities anymore.
You care about events, about tickets.
Right.
And you'll see exactly that.
So the vernacular that we use in the recovery process is through AI, through generative AI.
And a lot of testing and development is actually mapped to the service that it's actually backing up.
And that allows us to provide granular recovery across any.
Any SaaS service, or any service at all across on prem public, cloud and SaaS that's in the Haiku marketplace.

Omer (27:11.830)
Got it?
Got it.
Okay.
All right.
So now I know you went out and you used partners to go and acquire your initial customers.
Did you initially try to go directly and sell?
And how easy or hard was that?

Simon Taylor (27:28.150)
You know, I actually, I've always been a huge fan of partnerships.
Two things that I care deeply about.
One is Blue Ocean strategy.
I love going into markets where nobody else is, but where there's a huge need.
And the second is partners.
I've always fundamentally believed that you alone can only do so much.
The value of exponential growth through Partnership is, to me the golden ticket.
It's the ubiquitous key that allows us to unlock doors that we would never ordinarily have access to.
And so in every company that I built, the only, and this is my third or fourth company now, the only similarity between them, other than that they are all technology based, is that we built them on partnerships.
So for me, partners from day one is critical.

Omer (28:18.410)
So how did you do that?
How do you go about building those partnerships in practice?
It makes sense.
It sounds simple.
Is it really as easy as it sounds?

Simon Taylor (28:33.240)
No, it's terrifically hard.
It's terrifically hard.
And I think, respectfully, most people do it the wrong way.
And the wrong way of building a partnership I'll start with is to show up at the door and say, hey, I'm Simon.
I've got the best technology in the world.
It's so important and great, you need to see it.
Every ear in the building just got covered up and every eye just went blind.
Nobody cares whatsoever.
You know, the best way to start a partnership is to purely think about the person that you're talking to.
You do not matter your technology, no matter how brilliant it is, how great it is, how long and hard you worked on it, it's completely irrelevant to these people.
They don't care about you at all.
What you have to do in that first meeting is figure out, figure out really, really intuitively and hopefully you've done your homework so that you can go into the meeting and you can talk about what matters to them.
And it's only if you can talk about what matters to them that you can be successful.
And I'll give you, if you'd like, I can give you two real life examples.

Omer (29:37.980)
Yeah, yeah, please.

Simon Taylor (29:39.500)
So, all right, so example one.
In my second company, we were, I told you, we built monitoring software that connected Citrix and Microsoft.
And I remember, you know, going into the Citrix office for the first time.
I was relatively young at the time and their office luckily was in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, so at least it was warm out.
And if they kicked me out to the curb, at least I could go look at the ocean or something, have a shrimp cocktail.
I went over there to the Citrix main headquarters and I asked to speak to the Director of Alliances.
The Director of Alliances, shockingly, was unavailable to a random guy who showed up on the strip, off the street, and a wonderful lady who ultimately became the VP of Alliances, but at this time was not showed up at the door.
And she said, hi, my name's so and so and well, actually I'll tell you her name because she's so wonderful.
Her name is Vicky Palmarico.
She worked at Citrix for years.
Probably one of the best alliances people in the business.
And I remember Vicki, I walked in, she had no idea who I was or what we did.
But I said to her, I think that I know your Microsoft relationship is important to you.
And all we do is we build a little bridge between Citrix and Microsoft so that Microsoft users can understand what their Citrix environment looks like.
It wasn't about my technology.
It wasn't about how great our monitoring was and how effective it was and how it was better than everybody else's.
It was just, you care about your relationship with Microsoft and I think this will help make that relationship even better.
Thanks to that wonderful lady and that initial conversation and all the work after it, we went from 0 to 2000 customers and were ultimately acquired by Citrix.
My second example, which is not so dissimilar, a little wilder maybe, is with Nutanix.
Nutanix, you have to understand, five, six years ago, was probably, maybe it's even beyond five or six years.
Maybe five or six years ago, it was really the darling of Silicon Valley.
You talk about rock stars Dhiraj Pandey and Sunil Potti, these guys had built something, they'd invented the category of hyperconverged infrastructure.
And I wanted to be the backup product for them.
You know, I wanted Haiku originally.
You know, I told you all of our ideas about simplicity and everything else and ease of use and multi cloud.
But we also wanted to build a partnership with Nutanix because they were hci and we thought if we can include them in what we're backing up and recovering, we'll be able to piggyback on their customer base and grow with them.
And nobody else was protecting that data.
And so I thought, okay, that's a blue ocean strategy with a hot, cool company.
I need to go over there and convince those guys to care about us.
But I'd never been in the data protection space.
Nobody knew who we were or what we were doing.
There was no credibility whatsoever.
And I remember, I thought, okay, I've gotta be very memorable.
And I went out and I got this white jacket, this very, very bright white jacket, and I put a red carnation in there.
And I drove up to Nutanix headquarters and I walked in Philip Bravado, and I said, I need to speak to the CEO.
And they brought out this guy, Tommy Gustavuson, who had just joined the company that week.
And you know, to this day we laugh about this story.
We sat down at this table and instead of saying, oh, but I wanted to meet with the CEO because I'm important, right?
I immediately thought, of course they're not going to introduce me to the CEO.
They have no idea who I am.
Thank God they gave me a meeting.
I'm excited about this.
And I remember sitting with Tommy for two hours and showing him videos and pictures of everything that I could think of that would get him excited about what we were doing.
And then ultimately it wasn't really going anywhere.
Great guy and he was terrific, but I just, I didn't have it together.
I could see I wasn't selling him.
And then I said I had done my homework and I knew there were four or five areas where I thought we could be really helpful.
And I said, look, I'm going to get out of your hair, I'm going to leave.
Would you mind checking with somebody in product?
If a company for no charge built one of these four things, which of these would be most important to Nutanix?
And he literally picked up this little.
I scratched out the four things on a piece of paper, he took it back, talked to someone, and the next thing I know we're sitting with a product person and the next thing I know there's somebody else coming in the room.
And by the end of the conversation we had six or seven people and I think Sunil Potti, the cto, just as a joke, almost walked in just to see what was going on.
And we had this wonderful conversation and it ended with me saying, again, full of bravado, okay, nobody's built you end to end data protection.
You don't know who I am.
I'm not going to ask you for anything.
But if I come in here a year from now and I have application aware data protection for Nutanix and I can do it within one year, do you promise me a meeting with all of you to discuss it?
We came in a year minus, a week later I walked in the office with my cto, the same guy I had met earlier in Vegas, and we showcased that product.
Today we've got thousands of new customers who are backing up Nutanix on Haiku.
And it was all because we chose to go in with a partner first mentality and look for ways we could solve their problems, not show off about our technology.

Omer (35:25.670)
I don't know, I think maybe, maybe it was the white suit that did it.
All right, so let's talk about growth.
So we've talked about partnerships and how important that they've been to helping you acquire customers.
What about content marketing, webinars?
That's something that you guys have also done.
Can you just explain a little bit about what you did and what are some of the lessons that you've learned from the do's and don'ts?

Simon Taylor (36:01.330)
This is the hardest thing because now we're talking about tactical execution of marketing programs.
And I'll just be very honest, if there's anybody listening who's starting a company, you're going to get most of it wrong.
I know I certainly did.
You're going to make a lot of mistakes and you're going to feel like at times nothing works.
But I think for me, the biggest lesson learned is that when you stay true to providing customer value, you win.
And when you try to make a buck, you lose.
And what I mean by that is, let's look at webinars, for example.
Remember what I said about building those partnerships, Omar?
It wasn't about how great our tech was.
Yes, our technology is amazing.
I think it's incredible.
But going in to talk to a partner who's bigger and stronger than you and doesn't know who you are and bragging is just a great recipe to get kicked out on the curb.
Right?
But instead I went in and I was talking about them and how I could help and what we could do and how it can make their life easier.
On some level, I think that content marketing has to approach the customer with that same ethos in the sense that what you want to do is you want to look at where your customers actually are seeking information and what they really are looking to understand.
And then instead of going out there and sort of thinly veiling some knowledge based webinar with a massive product pitch, what you really want to do is you want to bring somebody on who has nothing to do with your business or is tangentially, you know, related or topically related, but is not working for you.
And you want to have them on the phone or on the webinar actually providing guidance and lessons.
And if they, you know, if you, if you, if you do the same thing and you follow up and you also provide knowledge and you use your position as, as a knowledge leader in your industry to help customers, they're going to figure out where you work, they came to the webinar, they know who you are.
What they're not looking for in those moments is a product pitch.
And I think a lot of times we get 1002-003004-00500, people on a phone call or webinar, there's an instinct, isn't there, to just go, okay, I got to make a buck.
I got to sell.
But you got to rein that in, and you got to say, you know what?
This isn't the time.
What we want to do now is actually add value.
The more demonstrable you can be with the value you're adding, the more customers and people in general, I think will trust you and your business, and ultimately, that sets you up for a lifetime of success.

Omer (38:35.690)
So some good advice there and lessons.
When it comes to things like webinars and educating customers, I think there's a fine line that you have to walk if you want to.
When I think about this initially, like Haiku and data recovery, I'm like, okay, well, what are you going to educate customers about without talking about your product?
There's this one scenario where you tell them, hey, this is how you do data recovery.
And.
And even though you don't talk about your product, you're just kind of explaining how you use your product to do all of these.
These great things.
Or you educate them on something like maybe give us an example of what.
What a webinar was about and how you walk that line where you're educating them without necessarily selling the product because you don't want to educate them and just say, hey, still keep using the 200 different backup solutions that you have in your.
Your business.

Simon Taylor (39:39.140)
No.
No.
So I'll give you a great example.
Ransomware attacks are legitimately going through the roof right now.
It's one every 11 seconds.
It might even be one every six seconds, we think.
And 52% of those ransomware attacks are occurring through SaaS services.
Okay.
And a majority of them are successful.
So just think about that for a second.
You've got 200 SaaS services running in your company, and half of ransomware attacks are going to occur through SaaS.
And.
And if they happen, they're probably gonna succeed.
I mean, this is, like, terrifying.
So you could run a webinar.
So let's say that, you know, that's a problem statement.
Choice one would be to run a webinar where you say, look at Haiku, we back up and recover your data.
If this happens, you're gonna need our product.
Okay, I get it.
Product pitch.
Here's what we did.
We invited a gentleman from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the FBI, a special agent who was focused on cybersecurity, to come and give a talk on why these ransomware attacks were becoming so prevalent.
How Dangerous they were, and what the federal government recommends you do to protect yourself.
And then we said.
And then sort of, you know, obviously he spoke highly of haiku and said, you know, companies like haiku, but the principle of protecting your data across SaaS on prem and public cloud is critical, but it's really hard to do.
And then afterwards, it's no problem to jump in and say, one way we can help you to simplify that is by turning on this free tool that's going to do this, this, and this.
And we've got a free assessment you can take if you go to this website, and it's going to help you understand, free of charge, whether or not you're at risk.
Right.
So rather than going for the dollars, you're going for the value.
And because you've got somebody who's not in your business and is certainly not commercial, I mean, it's the government, for goodness sakes.
You know, they're giving a very honest assessment in a way that people really want to hear.
You're educating people.
You're making.
You're making the world a safer place.
And so I think, again, it's about being authentic, it's about being true to who you are, and it's about being focused on that customer value.
I could very easily have said to the team, okay, guys, let's.
Let's get a bunch of slides.
We've got 2,000 people on this webinar.
Forget about this guy, you know, let's show him how great haiku is and, you know, make a buck.
But you don't do that.
You're going to be much more successful if you focus on actually educating your marketplace on how they can get value.
Right.
And how they can.
How they can.
How they can get information, get better at their jobs, get better at their lives, be safer in their lives.
So, you know, that's probably one of my best examples of one of the ways that we did that.

Omer (42:21.360)
Yeah, that's a very good example, actually.
You really.
I think that was an excellent way of just.
Basically what I heard was you can identify a problem.
You use the opportunity to educate customers about the problem, why it's an issue, what the risks are, what.
What are the best practices to protect themselves.
And if you can get somebody else to come along who's not associated with your company to educate them, it probably 10x is the credibility of the message that they're hearing as well.
Love it.
Love it.

Simon Taylor (43:03.850)
Yeah.

Omer (43:04.730)
Great.
Okay.
I think you were also doing some cold emailing to go and acquire customers or Was it how much did you do?
Or was everyone just relying on you and the white suit to go out there and get those customers?

Simon Taylor (43:23.140)
Now look, my team gets all the credit.
I've only got one white suit.
I gotta drag me once in a while.
I think obviously you go through the plethora of marketing innovations to try to reach customers.
You're doing emails, you're trying cold calling, you're doing all digital ads, etc.
What I love about this conversation is that it's thematic in the sense that, you know, it all comes back to the same principle, which is customer value.
And you get a lot of, I think, bad, unsolicited advice when you're starting a company, right, about how you've got to harass people on LinkedIn and you've got to do this and you got to do that and you got to have funny, you know, things and you got to.
I read, I read a blog recently where somebody said you got to kind of insult people in your email to really get their attention these days.
Well, I think all of that is awful.
I think it's, I think it's, I think when you're building a brand, which all of you are like, when you're building a company, you're actually building, think of it like, you know, growing a child, right?
You need to feed it healthy food and you know, I've got a 10 year old son and you got to make sure he gets some sunlight, doesn't have too much spring screen time.
Your brand is this living organism.
And if your living organism is feeding the world with insults via email and it's not focused on customer value, it's focused on quick wins and transactions, it's not going to go anywhere.
You may end up with a quick product, tech tuck in acquisition or something, but you're ultimately not going to be able to grow and get the best out of your marketplace.
I think what we learned pretty quickly is that when you have honest dialogues via email with customers and it's hard, you got to break through and there's success rates and there are people better suited than me to go through all those metrics.
But ultimately what we found, when I've looked at emails that drive value, it's the same principles, the webinar, it's the same principle as the partnership.
You want to be able to go in there and you want to be able to say, did you know this thing is happening in the world?
And let me provide you with something that doesn't cost anything, that will educate you, provide you knowledge make your life a little bit better in this context, it should be topical, it should be focused.
So to give a more specific example, we launched a piece of functionality within our platform called rGraph.
And very simply, you turn it on, it discovers your environment and draws you a picture of every department and all the SaaS services that are running in it.
All your services, cloud, on prem, public cloud, SaaS, etc.
And it tells you what's protected and what's not.
Free of charge.
You just turn it on, you go, you know, again, we could have just given it to every salesperson, had them call people, but instead what we did is we said, you know, 52.
Again, that same, that same statistic.
52% of ransomware attacks are occurring through SaaS.
Do you even know what SaaS services are running in your company?
Find out now.
Right?
And then you let them use it, let them try it, let them get value.
And I think once they get that value, then they're going to come back for more and you can actually have a real conversation with them.

Omer (46:40.060)
Love it.
Okay, I want to talk about the anthropic partnership in a second, but I also don't want people to walk away from this thinking this was easy for you in terms of getting to where you are today.
You're obviously, you're a serial entrepreneur.
You've gotten some great traction with this business.
Just give the listeners just a little taste of some of the things that you tried that didn't work.

Simon Taylor (47:08.960)
Cold calling.
I think when we first started, I had this.
This, this funny vision in my head, or this picture in my head of this big office filled with people on the headsets and they were all dialing for dollars and the money was just rolling in and everything was just going easily because everybody just loves what we do, and it all makes sense.
And you just keep adding those people and go.
And, you know, again, the, the problem, the mistake that I made is I was divorcing my own ethics, my own beliefs around all the things we just talked about from how I thought you were supposed to go to market.
And so you hired a bunch of people, you put them in the rows.
You have somebody saying, call, call, call.
And very quickly I realized these people who were just doing activities, they were just performing a function over and over and over and over again, were actually damaging the customer's understanding of who we were.
We were the annoying people on the phone.
You know, who likes a telemarketer?
Nobody.
Right.
I think there are ways you can succeed with cold calling.
I'm not Saying it's a terrible practice.
But what I'm saying is that my interpretation of it when we first started out was thoroughly wrong and if anything it recentered me on stay focused on your core values, stay focused on adding customer value and be empathic.
Put yourself in the other person's shoes.
If you wouldn't like that phone call, they're not going to like that phone call.
Big miss on my part and you know, frankly, really glad at what the team's doing now, which is always very, very focused on driving customer value.

Omer (48:49.140)
Okay, so Anthropic, let's talk about that.
Because that, you know, you've already explained how you do the integrations and how you've made that easier.
What is this recent announcement and how does that.
Why do you consider that to be game changing?

Simon Taylor (49:06.840)
It's a great question.
I think artificial intelligence is the buzz term of all buzz terms.
And I think the problem with buzzwords and fads, and I'm not saying AI is a fad, but I think anything that's cool in the industry and cool to say and is going to get you pressed always runs the risk of being misused.
And I think we're seeing a lot of that with AI.
And what I was noticing actually is that there was a lot of pressure for us to put out something a year ago that had AI in the title.
And I kept saying to people, and luckily again, I've got a very strong team who kept saying to me, no way, no way, no way, we're not going to have a little bot on our website that just tells you how to get from the homepage to the product page, right?
That's just irrelevant.
It doesn't add customer value.
It's a waste of time.
Just so we can say we've got a copilot.
You know where AI became really interesting for us is when we started thinking about the fact that it took three days to build an integration using our low code development platform.
There's 30,000 SaaS services and that number is growing every day.
And even three days was too much.
It suddenly occurred to us that because it was a low code development platform and because the SaaS services are using APIs, it may be possible to leverage an LLM, a large language model, enrich it with our understanding of data security, data protection and the industry, and then reduce the development time for those integrations.
And so we looked at all the LLMs and we decided that Anthropic was the most advanced when it came to code delivery and code development.
And we found that our ability to enrich the anthropic model in a very concise and focused manner worked really well.
And so we did that and we effectively enriched the Haiku R cloud platform with generative AI, which now reduces the development time for a single integration from three days to 36 minutes.
And I think, I think that to me was really exciting because it is quantifiable customer value.
It is not just a bot.
In fact, we're calling it beyond the Bot because it really is taking customers beyond this co piloting concept that we're seeing kind of pop up on every website into something that is truly innovative and is actually adding substantive value for our customers.

Omer (51:49.470)
Okay, so if I understood this correctly, so if I'm a SaaS provider, I come along, I look at your no code, low code environment and I kind of like try to figure out how am I going to build this integration, 36 or three days or whatever you said that doesn't sound bad compared to some integration work.
Right.
So what happens now?
Basically, I can use this large language model and the generative AI and it will look at my API and it will tell me what I need to do.

Simon Taylor (52:21.460)
You actually just ask it.
It's called rscout R Scout.
We love the letter R for resiliency or recovery.
We just love the letter R here at Haiku.
So it's rscout and you ask rscout, you say, I want to build an integration between Haiku and this and it's an enriched version.
It's a Haiku enriched version of anthropic Claude 2 LLM model.
And what effectively it will do is then pull up the code and it will tell you, give you precise instructions on how you can copy and paste that into the low code development platform, which then automates the process of development.
Now I will say this, I do not believe that AI is at a point where it should be deployed without supervision and human intervention.
The certification process is the certification process.
We will not allow integrations onto our platform unless they've been thoroughly tested by our own team.
That is for the safety and sanctity of our own customers, partners and the world at large.
So you're not going to, you're not going to plop down some AI code and stick it into our system.
What you are able to do though, is expedite that platform.
And because we're simply managing the Delta between the SaaS service and the very specific requirements that we have in our own local development offering, it becomes a very elegant process to build that integration.
And obviously makes it even easier for us to certify as well.

Omer (53:44.350)
Yeah, that was one of the things I was thinking.
I mean, I think using PLOD in terms of the chat experience, I think it's great, I think for many use cases and I use it a lot for production of this podcast.
Podcast.
Right.
In terms of going back and looking at transcripts and saying, what did Simon say about that?
Or what was that number he mentioned?
Right.
Rather than having to go and manually figure that stuff out.
But I also know that Claude has bad days where like I might get a good result today, three days later I go back and ask the same question and it's like, what the hell, man?

Simon Taylor (54:20.690)
It's like, again, it's very important to note that this is not Claude you're using.
It's haiku enriched LLM, which means that we've actually taken it and we've added our own security and focus so that it really is providing only haiku accurate data.
It's not able to hallucinate.
It's very, very restricted in what it's actually delivering to.

Omer (54:43.540)
Right.
But at the same time you still have the humans basically verifying this.
Yeah, I think that's a great example of actually useful AI.
Like a lot of the things that you see on LinkedIn today is like, hey, use AI to send even more cold emails.
Right.
Use AI to apply for a thousand jobs a day.
Right.
And that just doesn't feel right.
That's not the way forward.
But I think this is a really good example of a good way to use that technology.
So I love that.

Simon Taylor (55:17.340)
It reminds me, Omer, of remember when the Internet was sort of first coming out and you had these banner ads and pop ups that were so prevalent?
Right.
It was kind of.
Everyone had a pop up and a banner ad and thank God we moved beyond that period of time.
I think AI is becoming similar.

Omer (55:32.850)
Yeah.
All right, we should wrap up.
Let's get onto the lightning round.
I've got seven quick fire questions for you, so if you can just try and answer them as quickly as you can.
What's one of the best pieces of business advice you've received?

Simon Taylor (55:48.240)
Presentation is everything, which I credit my father for saying to me.
It's very true.
It's all about presenting.

Omer (55:54.160)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?

Simon Taylor (55:57.120)
Amp it up by Frank Slootman.
I think he built data domains.
Snowflake ServiceNow really knows what he's talking about.
One of the best scale up books I've ever read.

Omer (56:06.480)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder.

Simon Taylor (56:10.240)
Self awareness.
I think you have to be able to understand where your flaws are and how you can get better.

Omer (56:14.910)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?

Simon Taylor (56:17.870)
Reflection at the end of the day, using basic meditation techniques to make sure that I can properly calm down.
Try to instill a little bit of patience in my very impatient mind and reflect on what went well and what didn't go well and what we can do better.

Omer (56:32.030)
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time?

Simon Taylor (56:36.110)
AI Safety I think is going to be critical and I think advocating for the safety of artificial intelligence in our world is something that is becoming very important to me.

Omer (56:47.920)
What's an interesting or fun fact that most people don't know about you?

Simon Taylor (56:51.200)
I am a massive foodie.
Every birthday I go to an exotic and interesting chef around the world and try a unique type of food that I've never tried before.

Omer (57:02.880)
Awesome.
And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?

Simon Taylor (57:06.640)
World travel.
I love experiencing other cultures.
I love getting to know other people and really learning about how other people flourish in different societies.

Omer (57:15.000)
Love it.
Great.
So if people want to learn more about haiku, they can go to Haiku.
That's h y c u.com and if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

Simon Taylor (57:27.560)
They can email me directly@Simoniku.com Simon thank you.

Omer (57:33.680)
It's been a blast.
Really enjoyed this conversation.
Thanks for kind of unpacking the last six years and sharing some of the lessons and story of building this business.
One of the more entertaining interviews I've done, so it was fun.
So yeah, I appreciate you making the time.
Thank you so much and I wish you and the team the best of success.

Simon Taylor (57:57.940)
Omar, it's a pleasure to be here.
Thank you so much for having me on the show.

Omer (58:00.980)
My pleasure.
Cheers.