HYCU CEO Simon Taylor Podcast Interview

February 12th, 2026 | Jason Lopez | 10:29

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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.

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 into technical reality. How is it possible to better support IT services that live across on-prem and public clouds?

Simon Taylor: You’ve got your data in so many different places. You’ve got data that you’re spinning up and spinning down. It’s all containerized. And I think it takes modern platforms to be able to support that. HYCU is supporting 92 services across on-prem, public cloud, and SaaS. That’s more than 12 times any other data protection vendor in the marketplace. HYCU’s customers are able to stitch together the fabric of all of their data across 12 times more data silos than anyone else. You’re going to see a lot more coming out of HYCU in the coming months where we talk about the AI fabric that’s going to add tremendous value to HYCU and to Nutanix as well.

Jason Lopez: Taylor’s key message is HYCU isn’t just backing up data, it’s creating a unified view of everything. And AI can turn that big picture into powerful insights.

Simon Taylor: I’ve always thought of HYCU as a giant patchwork quilt. How are we going to help our customers to process and manage all that data? That’s a lot of different data silos. So we went out and we said, it’d be great if you could almost click a button, discover your environment, and then visualize where all that data is. And we call that Rgraph. So today we have an observability tool called Rgraph that will allow you to visualize every element of your data estate across on-prem, public cloud, and SaaS. So that’s fabulous. I think in a pre-AI world, that’s done a tremendous amount. Now I want you to imagine that that data protection toolkit can extend even further. I want you to imagine you can overlay AI across all of that. What I’d love you to just imagine is what could you do if all of the data across on-prem, public cloud, and SaaS was linked together with AI? When you combine what we do with SaaS, what we do with cloud, what we do with Nutanix, all of a sudden you can build a far more sophisticated picture of what your world actually looks like. And from that, you can leverage AI to do a whole lot of very, very interesting things.

Jason Lopez: Simon Taylor describes himself as a serial entrepreneur.

Simon Taylor: I would have started a fleet of ice cream trucks if the mood took me.

Jason Lopez: In his 20s he liked to write business plans in his spare time. And he says these plans weren’t tied to a technology but were about almost anything.

Simon Taylor: Ultimately, I came up with an idea for an e-sourcing and e-discovery tool that would allow you to cut the time, money, and resources involved in recruiting outsourced engineers. I decided that to do that, I needed two things. I need to build an algorithm matching engine that would allow me to do that matching. And two, I had to build a database of great engineers. I felt that there was an untapped resource in Eastern Europe for incredible engineering talent. I’d read a lot about it. I’d never been there. I don’t have any familial links, didn’t speak the language. But I knew two things. I knew that there was a lot of engineering talent there, and that it was a heck of a lot cheaper than the United States. So I raised a little bit of cash, sold what little I had. I moved to Prague in the Czech Republic, hired an engineering team, and I got to work. Then I started traveling. I went to Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Slovenia. Everywhere I went, I was building out this database of engineers that then went into the product.

Jason Lopez: The experience was so profound, Taylor says when his son talks about the future — where to go to college, what to major in — the advice was:

Simon Taylor: Just go overseas. Go international. Try different things. The more diversity you can bring into your life, the more you can open your eyes to different experiences, I think the better off you’re going to be.

Simon Taylor: How expensive is it from a time, money, and resources perspective to execute an attack on an innocent victim?

Jason Lopez: He says we’ve moved past the era of human hackers typing commands into a terminal. We are now in the era of agentic AI, where a hacker sets a goal, such as to find a CEO’s personal emails and the AI does it autonomously. In the past, you could spot a phishing email by its bad grammar or slightly off tone. AI eliminates those red flags. And the cost to hack has plummeted.

Simon Taylor: It used to be $100 to execute a white glove ransomware attack on the dark web. Today, it’s $1.50. When we first started this, people said that 90% of their ransomware attacks and all of their cyber threats were occurring through on-prem data. Today, 50%, according to our study of state of SaaS survey, 50% of those who responded said that their most recent ransomware attack or cyber attack occurred through SaaS and cloud. So all of a sudden, we’re seeing this massive shift, and that is happening because of AI. We’re seeing better phishing attempts. We’re seeing social engineering that we couldn’t have imagined years ago. Right here in my office the other day, somebody got a voicemail from me that sounded like me asking for gift cards.

Jason Lopez: But it goes both ways. AI gives security teams an advantage they’ve never had before with the ability to triage millions of data points across cloud, on-prem, and SaaS apps in seconds.

Simon Taylor: What we’re starting to see now is that it’s becoming cheaper for us to innovate on the side of the defenders, where we can leverage prompt engineering, we can leverage tools like Cursor and IntelliJ, we can build products faster, more swiftly, more adeptly, and we can go after these guys. We can do it aggressively, and we can do it at a fraction of the cost.

When I looked at the history of data protection, you have companies like Veritas backing up Unix years ago, and then you had Commvault for Windows, you had Veeam doing VMware. But when we really thought about the fragmentation of data protection across on-prem, public cloud, and SaaS, nobody had really looked at it from a holistic perspective. We set out to look at how you could bring together all these different elements of the modern data estate and make it incredibly easy to backup and recover the data almost as simply as you would on an iPhone with iCloud backup.

Jason Lopez: Simon Taylor is the founder and CEO of data protection company HYCU, a data protection company based in Boston. This is the Tech Barometer Podcast produced by The Forecast, I’m Jason Lopez, thanks for listening. If you want to take a deeper dive into this story, check out David Rand’s piece for The Forecast, entitled “HYCU CEO Simon Taylor Brings Order to Data Protection Chaos.” You can find that and more stories on technology at theforecastbynutanux.com.