Timestamps:

1:06 - Being obsessed with running businesses

6:28 - Creating the mulesoft open source project

12:15 - Should you solve your own problem?

21:00 - Open sourcing software

1:01:30 - Getting prospective clients to follow through

1:04:08 - Letting go of your CTO position

1:07:51 - Falling into a depression

1:11:14 - Ringing the bell at the NY stock exchange

1:35:10 - Adapting to a slower paced life

About Ross Mason

Ross Mason is the founder of MuleSoft Inc. and Dig Ventures. He is also a Board Member at Stackin' and Syncari.

Ross has always had an entrepreneurial spirit, and jokes that at the ripe age of seven, he was already running his own bootleg Lego club! His parents were business owners, and taught Ross two important lessons for his future projects: you should never lower your bar, and working hard isn't necessarily a bad thing if you enjoy what you do.

In 1997, Ross graduated in Computer Science from the University of the West of England and started his career in corporate work. However, he knew he wanted to build his own path, and open source software was his prime choice, since it gives you widespread distribution and insight about potential product/market fit. That’s exactly how The Mule Project was born. The platform started out as a SourceForge project in April 2003, and its aim was to make programmers’ lives simpler by allowing them to easily enable the sending of data between their SaaS (software as a service), on-premise software and legacy systems platforms which was previously hard and tedious to do.

This philosophy of avoiding “donkey work” became a guiding star for his endeavors. Born in 2006, MuleSource, later MuleSoft, got the timing just right: many open source companies were becoming commercial, and investors were starting to realize it’s actually a viable distribution model. Ross had a strong drive for building the next game changer in a fragmented market. Though integration had taken a big hit after the rise of web services, MuleSoft kept the ball rolling by uniting many different approaches in one platform, with all the proper testing, monitoring, debugging and graphical environment.