Simon Taylor

I’m Simon Taylor, Founder and CEO of HYCU, the world’s fastest-growing multicloud and SaaS backup company. Born in Richmond, England, I moved to Boston in the US at an early age and started my career in research and finance at Forrester and Putnam — but I’ve always been driven by a passion to build, not just analyze. I sold everything I had in my 20s, moved to Prague, and launched my first startup — a developer matchmaking platform years before remote work was the norm. That company was acquired, and I joined Comtrade to launch its U.S. business, where I helped build and eventually sell our Citrix monitoring tools to Citrix itself. After earning my MBA at IE Business School in Madrid, I co-founded HYCU. We've since raised $140M from Bain Capital Ventures, Acrew Capital, Cisco Investments, Okta Ventures and Atlassian Ventures, and grown to 4,600+ customers and 450+ partners across 78 countries. I believe deeply in building global companies that are as mission-driven as they are high-performing. In 2023, I sat down to write about this experience and published "Averting The SaaS Data Apocalypse" which reached best seller status on Amazon. Finally, I believe strongly in the need to give back to the markets we serve. That’s why I also serve on the board of Uncornered — helping former gang members transition to college and careers. For me, entrepreneurship is about using business to remove barriers and unlock human potential, no matter where someone starts.

How did IE help you get to where you are today?

IE was a turning point. I chose it because it didn’t look like every other business school — it looked like the world. Diverse, entrepreneurial, and mission-focused. The global mindset I gained at IE became the foundation for everything I do today. One case study at IE — "the plumber" — taught me something that’s shaped every company I’ve built: your real customer may not be the buyer, but the person who champions the sale. That insight has stayed with me across three startups and still drives how we sell at HYCU. But more than anything, IE taught me to lead across cultures. At HYCU, we have engineers in Slovenia, India, Costa Rica, Serbia, and Bosnia — and when they say "I feel like a HYCUer, not just someone in a different country," I know we’ve created something special. That’s IE’s spirit of oneness, in action. It also helped me become more self-aware as a leader — someone who could break down barriers, inspire globally, and scale through people, not just product.

How did you come up with the idea for your company?

I had just sold my company to Citrix and I was in Vegas with a colleague Goran Garevski. He made the case that "data protection is ubiquitous, but nobody has disrupted the industry the way that let's say someone like Uber has to taxis." To me, disruption only occurs when you take something that is highly commoditized and that makes something truly disruptive is when you put a twist on something, make it more accessible, more approachable, and easier to use. We identified two key challenges in the data protection industry. First, we wanted to transform data protection from downloadable on-premises solutions into something "deployable as a service" that would be more easily consumable and economically viable. Second, we recognized an "equivalency problem" where organizations needed separate backup solutions for each platform they used (UNIX, Windows, VMware, etc.), which was becoming unsustainable as companies moved to hybrid multi-cloud models with dozens of platforms and hundreds of data sources. These challenges were inspired by consumer tech. If you look at the iPhone as an example, there isn't a backup product for every application on your phone. You simply go to iCloud backup. You swipe the screen and then it protects everything that's on your phone. But there was no iCloud backup for business. From there we set out to build – "One, easy-to-use, simple service that provided equivalent levels of data protection support across on prem, public cloud and SaaS." Today that company is HYCU, with thousands of customers across 78 countries.

What is the key to the success of your company?

The key to HYCU's success is our people and having a strong set of core values that drive our mission and purpose. At HYCU we focus on three core values: Authenticity, Grit and Empathy. Each one of these values serves as a constant reminder of what makes HYCU and its team unique and special. In addition, our mission: to build a safer world, clearly encapsulates our desire to use technology as a force for good, as we work to stop cyber criminals in their tracks, and protect the worlds data.