Farewell, MuleSoft

I have resigned from MuleSoft, the company I founded in 2006 on top of the Mule project I created in 2003. This is a big move for me; to step away from the company that I grew from a line of open-source code in my bedroom to a publicly-traded company on the NYSE in 2017. And a year later was acquired by Salesforce for $6.5 Billion - one of the largest enterprise software acquisitions of all time.   

Building MuleSoft was a wild ride. From the outside, it's often easy to discount building a company as something that just happens. But building a software company is like everything worth doing; was challenging and complicated. The "overnight success" came from the tireless efforts of many amazing people over many years. I remember my MuleSoft days most fondly around the people and the experiences we went through. With my parting note, I will share a few fun stories and learnings along the way.

Risk Mitigation 

MuleSoft was a distributed company from day one, and we did many activities together as a company to bring people closer together. We would do full company meet-ups, where we'd fly everyone globally to a single location for a week of cross-functional fixing, strategy sessions, and team building. We did this even after we had over 1,200 employees. These meet-ups were a significant investment for us. Taking people out of work for a week may seem counterproductive, but some of the best work happens when you take the whole company out of the day-to-day to fix the hard stuff. In the early days, we did more adventurous team activities like rafting. At one of the last rafting trips, we made the mistake of putting all of the exec team in one boat. Now the stories differ significantly on what happened, ranging from Simon purposefully flipping the boat, to Chris saving Adriana, to Mahau almost drowning. All I know is the boat did flip, and looking at the footage (see zoom), Mahau did appear to be drowning. The key learning was that you should never put all your execs in the same bus, plane, elevator or raft!

Rap Caviar

Another activity we used to do every year, in the spirit of bringing people together, was to have a video contest with a theme. The themes started off with topics that aligned with MuleSoft culture and values, but the videos quickly evolved (devolved?) into music videos and Carpool Karaoke. As much fun as these videos were to make and watch. I hope none of these videos gets on YouTube! We learned that founders and CFOs should never rap; it's just not our strong suit. It's always good to try new things (in fact, I live by the rule of pushing myself out of my comfort zone at every opportunity), and when building a company, it is essential to know your limitations too. (It's a shame nobody told Jack Ma).

The Kiss

Hiring at MuleSoft in the early days was difficult, the competition for talent in San Francisco was fierce with FaceBook and Google dominating, so we decided to build an office in Buenos Aires. We had two open-source developers writing Mule code down there. BA was attractive because the universities are strong, the people are culturally aligned, the bilingual and in an overlapping time zone. It was easy to find excellent engineering talent in BA but more challenging (at the time) to find engineers who understood how to build software products. We took a long view and focused on hiring and training to create product teams in our BA office.

That meant that we made frequent trips to BA to train and help build the culture. On one trip, the office had grown to the size where people didn't know everyone. One morning I got to the office early and was working on email when a man walked over and kissed me on both cheeks. I was a little stunned, and lost for words and blushed while the office manager ran over to explain this was customary in Argentina. I had blown my chance at cultural immersion - sadly, no one kissed me after that.  I often look back and realise how lucky I was to have exposure to such a broad range of people and cultures through my work.

Ross, I am your father

One thing became apparent in the early days of MuleSoft, in a crowded enterprise market, software alone will not set you apart, no matter how good the software is. And the more fuzzy the market is, the harder it is to differentiate; and enterprise middleware is a shaggy beast. Early on we took to the road with a small team of execs and MuleSoft specialists. We started hosting MuleSoft Summit events in major cities from London to NY to Sydney to Atlanta. These summits were structured around delivering insight into the current state of IT and then providing technical and non-technical sessions on how to deal with the challenges of a rapidly changing IT landscape. Since we were talking to IT leadership all the time, we could educate our target market on what we saw from a macro perspective. And provide practical methods to help IT teams tackle enormous challenges, from connecting applications to shifting their whole business to the cloud, to leveraging APIs. One evening after a MuleSoft Summit in New York, the exec team had an evening out. It was my round, so I went to the bar, ordered and got chatting to the friendly barmaid who served me. As the drinks arrived, Greg came over to help me carry, and barmaid remarked: "Oh, did you come with your dad?". Needless to say, I never let Greg live that one down.

The software market has become crowded, and new companies have to figure out what your audience needs to get excited about what you do, as often the software alone is not enough. Getting on the road delivering knowledge and insights through MuleSoft Summits was vital for our success.

Hiring Superheros

While building MuleSoft, I did something that most founders don't do. I actively tried to hire myself out of a job. I felt that I could always find someone better to do the role I was doing, and therefore that I should always be ready to set aside my pride, along with my position in the company. I was not the best coder, architect, CTO,  salesperson, marketer,  operator, nor the best CEO, but at times I had to fill all of these roles.  I learned valuable lessons from doing this. I learned my limitations by watching other's step in and take things to a new level. It meant that there was room to hire great people that wouldn't have been able to take a lesser position. 

It was scary at times to let go of the reigns, but it was also liberating. I would sometimes disagree with a decision and know that I didn't have the final call. Still, it did force me to become a much better leader, to move the organisation not by position, but by providing a clear strategy - a path for us to get to our vision. It also forced me to become a strong communicator. For the last few years at MuleSoft, I didn't even have a formal title. My title was "Founder", and I worked between Sales, Marketing and Product, being the conduit and voice of our customer and industry. I feel I did my best and most impactful work during this period, unencumbered with a title. We had a leadership team of superheroes, and it was a real privilege to work alongside these people.

Open Source to IPO

Not many people know this because I didn't dare to talk about it, but I always wanted to take MuleSoft public.  Even in the very early days, I would talk about the Mule software being an enterprise Swiss army knife, and I'd think about building MuleSoft as the Switzerland of integration; connected with everybody but fiercely independent. I believed independence was critical to our success because we had to connect everything to fix the integration problem - thus I reasoned that the only natural outcome as an ambitious founder was that MuleSoft would have to be a publicly-traded company. I didn't speak about it because I didn't know if it was possible, so I just focused on building great software and a great company. When we took MuleSoft public on the NYSE on March 17th 2017, it was an incredible moment and a dream come true for me. I wanted to be the first open-source founder to take the company public, and as a nice tie-in, our stock ticker symbol was the same name as the open-source project that I registered on SourceForge on April 20th, 2003; MULE.

Aloha, Salesforce

After going public, we set our sights on hitting one billion dollars in revenue. Thanks to our incredible team and product, our customer retention is industry-leading, making this target very obtainable. While we had nurtured a close business relationship with Salesforce over the years, their acquisition offer came out of the blue, at a valuation that we couldn't refuse. Having built our brand and culture in the market for being independent, we initially struggled with this proposition. We finally agreed that this would be an excellent outcome for our employees and customers and that we would be able to retain our independence. Fast forward two years and MuleSoft is proudly a Salesforce company, but we have maintained our independence and continue to connect the world's applications, data and devices.

So to all you Muleys, friends of Mule, our customers and user community,  it has been one heck of a run. Thank you for making this such an incredible, mind-expanding, life-changing journey. 

Stay connected, my friends.