Golden Nuggets for Tech-Founders with Ross Mason

We sat down with MuleSoft and Dig Ventures founder Ross Mason to discuss some of his key learnings on taking his company from $0 to $6.5bn.

After starting his career at Atlassian as a developer, Ross founded MuleSoft in 2006 off the back of his open-source Mule project. Just over 10 years later, he took the company public — before it was acquired by Salesforce in 2018.

🥠 Golden Nugget #1: “Learn to say no to customers”

Productise, productise, productise. “We set a rule from the start that the maximum we’d ever do in any year or with any customer was 20% services (i.e., 80% recurring). Unlike our competitors who were using customisation as a lock-in, I wanted users to subscribe to us every single year because they loved the platform.

And so I became very good at saying no to customers. Every time they asked for a feature, we would first do a workshop and get to the bottom of what they really needed: often, the platform could already solve their issue, they just didn’t know how.

If it really was a brand new capability that we felt was needed, the message we learned to communicate was: “We know this feature is important to you, and we will build it. But if we add it now just for you and then we do a new version of the software, you won’t be able to migrate, and then you’ll be out of support — so it’s much better if you just come along on the journey with us.”

With some clients, I had to have that conversation every week. But it was the right call: what the customer wants is not necessarily right for the product.”

(Thank you Christian for the root question that led to this great insight)

🥠 Golden Nugget #2: “Stop looking for that COO”

A lot of founders eventually want a COO — and many actually need one at some point (the question is when and who).

What’s the problem? “If COOs are good enough, they will inevitably want to be CEO. My perspective was thus: find the best right-hand possible, and if you have to give up the CEO title, so be it. I always felt that my goal was to do myself out of a job.”

🥠 Golden Nugget #3: “PMF could take a while — you might need to wait for the market”

“Our first Product-Market-Fit moment was the open source software adoption. We were clearly addressing a need for developers: it wasn’t just about the software being free, users were being vocal about why they loved working on the platform and why it was different…

…and then it took a long time to find commercial PMF after that.

As a middleware company, it was very hard to describe MuleSoft — particularly to non-technical people, which were usually our economic buyers. We spent 4 years selling our software in ‘developer knife fights’: we were selling based on adoption volume, i.e., we put an open source software out there and some percentage of OSS users would convert to enterprise with a bit of selling. There were 30 other solutions on the market back then for integration, and some incumbents would squeeze us out of an account by just knowing the right people in the organisation to shut us down. It was terrible, it really wasn’t a good period for us — in fact, we almost pivoted.

And then, we had an inflexion point. We lost a very big deal to Oracle. I had good relations to the CIO of Facebook, so we were able to get a truthful tear-down of why they’d picked a legacy platform over us. The CIO’s bottom-line was: “All our apps are now in the cloud, and we use Oracle for databases. So if I were to run anything on-premise I may as well run Oracle — then I have just one vendor on-premise and everything else is in the cloud.”

That was interesting because a few months prior, I’d been unsuccessfully pushing the exec team to get more aggressive about us going to the cloud. Bear in mind that back then there were maybe 5 applications people were really using in the cloud, it wasn’t clear that cloud was really going to be THE thing. So what that CIO did was validate that newer companies (and thus, older companies eventually as well) were indeed moving to the cloud, and those who couldn’t get integrations in the cloud were going to be left behind.

And that’s how we found PMF again. We re-thought the product, making integrations not only on prem but also for the cloud. Initially this implied a shift in our audience, from on-prem first to cloud-friendly organisations. But as it turns out, the former soon became the latter: big legacy organisations also wanted a cloud version of our product alongside the on prem version, so the fact that we could run both turned out to be a big differentiator.

We just had to wait for the cloud and pick it up when we saw the signals.”

🥠 Golden Nugget #4: “Now could be the time for High Volume Low Touch”

“There are two types of strategies in enterprise software: Low Volume High Touch (few large customers with a lot of hand-holding), and High Volume Low Touch (many small/medium-sized customers, mostly self-serve).” Like most of the big outcomes in recent IPOs (e.g., Palantir, Snowflake, Medallia etc.), MuleSoft very much grew thanks to the Low Volume High Touch model.

But “if everyone is remote, there could be an opportunity for High Volume Low Touch growth. The challenge is in making the economics work because you need a lot of reach to drive a lot of customers, and you need to automate everything. This is what Atlassian did very well: simple software that most people can go figure out on their own. This is clearly a hard play; it’s a 1:10 ratio on how many Atlassians there are versus MuleSofts, but maybe being remote-first will make it easier.”

(Thank you Rachel for the root question that led to this great insight)

🥠 Golden Nugget #5: “Go global as late as possible”

70% of MuleSoft’s business came from the US, a figure that never changed. “We could have easily gotten to the billion mark just focusing on the US, and it would’ve made life a lot easier! There is an art to operating a global organisation; it’s not just adding sales and customer service reps. It changes the whole dynamic and cadence of the business. Leave it for as long as possible.”

(Thank you Adam for the root question that led to this great insight)

You can find the full interview here (video). And as always: if you’re (thinking of) launching a new gig and want to have a friendly chat, get in touch with Ross and us ! 🤩