Episode Details

In this Tech Barometer podcast, HYCU CEO Simon Taylor takes listeners into the mind of a creative, disruptive entrepreneur who’s turning data protection into an AI-powered arsenal against cybercrime and ransomware attacks.

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Podcast transcript:

Simon Taylor: I was in a bar in Las Vegas and I happened to bump into an engineer that I’d known from Slovenia and I said, what are you doing now? And he said, I’m in the data protection space. I was trying to prove to him that data protection was this sort of old, ugly, fugly world that no one would be interested in because it was so old school, it was in the plumbing, who cares about it? He said, Simon, how did you get here today? So what do you mean? Did you take a taxi? No, I took an Uber. He said, aha, but there’s no Uber in data protection. It struck me that if you want to truly disrupt the marketplace, you need three different things.

Jason Lopez: Simon Taylor is the founder and CEO of HYCU. This is the Tech Barometer podcast I’m Jason Lopez. HYCU is a data protection company and its name is spelled H-Y-C-U. There are ways to construe Japanese poetry with data protection, but the truth is the pronunciation, haiku, is an unintended benefit of the acronym.

Simon Taylor: Hybrid Cloud Uptime, that’s where the name really comes from, H-Y-C-U, Haiku.

Jason Lopez: Taylor says HYCU was launched on the idea of making it easy to back up and recover data of disparate elements in enterprise computing.

Simon Taylor: We’re called Hybrid Cloud Uptime, H-Y-C-U, Haiku, for a reason, because we believe in the power of on-prem and the power of public cloud. And we want to make sure there’s a seamless transition, whether you’re going one way or the other.

Jason Lopez: But before we go forward on that, let’s complete Taylor’s thoughts on disrupting the marketplace… you need three different things.

Simon Taylor: You need a technology that is sort of used by all and liked by none. Two, it’s got to be something that is highly commoditized. And three, it’s got to be something that is truly undisrupted in this space. In other words, nobody’s gotten there before you.

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Simon Taylor: AI is here, it’s here to stay, and it’s only going to get better because that is the nature of things, the nature of technology.

Jason Lopez: Taylor likes to talk about AI not so much in terms of the technologists who create it, not from the economist’s point of view, or from the hype in the news, but as he describes it, as a kind of energy customers have for their vision of how it can benefit their businesses and products.

Simon Taylor: I kind of break down AI into three proof points, humanity, exceptionalism, and resourcefulness. So humanity, is it good for human beings? It seems really odd, but at the end of the day, we are humans. And so the only kind of AI I care about is that which is good for human beings. The second one is exceptionalism. It’s how do we leverage AI in our daily work to make sure that we’re not falling behind, and in fact that we’re getting ahead. And the last one is resourcefulness. How can we be resourceful in terms of driving more value to our customers?

Jason Lopez: This is where he moves from a guiding philosophy of humanity, exceptionalism, and resourcefulness