Ross Mason is the Founder and Vice President of product strategy at MuleSoft, an application network company based in San Francisco. MuleSoft’s mission is to help organizations change and innovate faster by making it easy to connect the world’s applications, data and devices. Ross founded MuleSoft in 2006 while living on the Mediterranean island of Malta. Over the years, he’s helped to grow the company from a one-man show to now over 890 employees globally.
What does entrepreneurship mean to you, and what underlying characteristics do you see in successful entrepreneurs?
Ross: Entrepreneurship is a calling, an internal force that pushes one to create something out of nothing and impose that thing on the world. It requires an obsessive need to solve a problem. The amount of setbacks, silence, barriers, naysayers and the occasional kick in the groin means the only way that idea will live and grow is through an almost lunatic passion for solving that problem.
What are you most proud of in your professional career?
Ross: Of course, I’m most proud of what we’ve built at MuleSoft from me writing code on my sofa at night to now hundreds of employees across 18 offices globally working toward a common goal. There are people at MuleSoft who come up to me and say that this has been their first job out of college, that they’ve grown in the company thanks to the amazing people and that they can’t imagine going anywhere else. It feels pretty special to know the positive impact a company can have not only on its customers but employees as well. Also, I’m proud of how I’ve listened to the mentors around me and been honest with myself about what I’m good at and where I need help.
If you could do something over in your life, what would it be?
Ross: In retrospect, it wasn’t feasible running a San Francisco-based company from Malta–a small island off the coast of Sicily with about 400,000 residents–where I was living when I founded MuleSoft. In the first few years of a startup, company culture forms around the founders. First-time founders often don’t realize how important their role is in setting the culture, defining what the company is, what it stands for and who should be hired to foster its values.
Not being present to provide guidance on a daily basis was hard on my growing team and me. We were supposed to be in this together, but I wasn’t physically there. Creating a home for MuleSoft and ensuring all U.S.-based employees worked together in one place proved critical for nurturing our culture and expanding our team. It allowed us to celebrate the company’s successes, solve problems shoulder-to-shoulder and share a common vision.
Tell us about an instance where you had to go against the flow to realize your goal.
Ross: In the early days, investors and people I looked to for help and guidance told me that going after enterprise middleware was a fool’s errand. They claimed the market was already mature, unsexy and dominated by big corporations–in essence, I would need millions just for marketing. However, my teams, my peers and I were battling with the problems of connecting applications and data every day. I could see companies struggling with it and projects failing because of it. I didn’t think it was well dominated or mature, but couldn’t argue it was sexy. So with two out of three, I started out on my mission.
Enterprises have largely been conditioned to buy different siloed products that solve individual problems. When starting MuleSoft, I went “against the flow” by going after what I believe is the largest unsolved problem in IT, and it required us to create a whole new category that we’re defining today as the application network category. We’ve created a single platform for solving all integration problems right in one place. It’s not been done before.
From an internal standpoint, we encourage our employees to go against the flow each and every day. We oppose the status quo, and actively cultivate an environment where everyone feels empowered to speak up, challenge each other and use their determination to reach the best result. If we focus too much on what’s been done in the past or worry too much about what everyone else is doing around us, we won’t accelerate forward at the rapid pace we’re looking to. Our guiding principle is to pave roads–if something is difficult, make it easier for the next person. These paved roads take us to bigger and better places.
What is MuleSoft doing that’s truly unique in the space? What challenges are you solving?
Ross: Everything is becoming more connected. Connectivity is now the foundation of every consumer experience, business model, process, product and service. Connectivity is critical to new technology advances in areas like the internet of things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI) and augmented reality (AR). None of this works if you can’t connect to the data and assets.
Yet with the explosion of the cloud, big data, SaaS, mobile and IoT, organisations are facing an exponential number of endpoints to connect to both on-premises and in the cloud. It’s overwhelming, and the old way of connecting is just too cumbersome, costly and resource intensive. This is where MuleSoft comes in: to help connect and manage the flow of information across all these applications and systems, creating what we call an application network. We make all of an organization’s data and software pluggable, so they can easily and quickly change and innovate to provide an exceptional experience for customers, employees as well as everyday consumers.
If you recently deposited a check through Wells Fargo’s mobile app, subscribed to Spotify or ordered a Big Mac through McDonald’s touchscreen, then you’ve interacted with APIs and MuleSoft behind the scenes. Increasingly businesses are turning to APIs to create better experiences, speed up product innovation and delivery, and expand to new geographies - all to benefit you.
What drives you? How do you measure success for yourself?
Ross: I’ve always been laser focused on our customers’ success. I came from an entrepreneurial family that ran a boutique hotel chain in the UK. At an early age, I learned how to engage and empathize with our customers, constantly thinking about what they needed and how we could improve their experiences. I love to build things, but there is no point building if you are not willing to do what it takes to delight your customers. This is really where my passion lies and where I get the most joy out of the job. Regarding measuring success for myself, I very much think in terms of company first, team second and then self. The most important thing for me will always be: Is MuleSoft truly helping our customers drive their businesses forward? And if we’re successful at that, everything else falls into place.
If you were to give advice to your 22-year-old self, what would it be? What do you know now that you wish you knew when you were graduating from college?
Ross: I would remind my 22-year-old self to follow the same trajectory, which I honestly stumbled upon versus planned. The most successful entrepreneurs, in my opinion, identify problems first-hand before deciding to start a company to solve them. That’s the approach I took. I started my career working at an investment bank in London, trying to connect over 100 systems including heavyweight backend systems. The woeful complexity and limitations of this IT environment were only slightly worse than the strikingly inadequate integration software available at the time. I ended up starting MuleSoft to solve this massive pain point that I was experiencing first-hand.
When I addressed Stanford CS graduates interested in my advice on how to get started with establishing their enterprise startups, I told them first to get a job in an established company; this was received with skepticism. I explained that it was difficult to solve a problem if you don’t understand the people dealing with the problem every day. If you don’t care enough about the problem your company is trying to solve, you won’t be successful. Every entrepreneur will tell you it is an insane amount of work to build a company from scratch and in your dark moments, you have to be able to justify why you’re doing what you’re doing.
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