Greg Schott is the CEO of software company MuleSoft Inc., a platform which enables organizations to easily build application networks using APIs.
The software industry vet has over two decades of experience leading and building high growth technology companies from early stage through IPO. He assumed his leadership role at San Francisco, Calif.-based MuleSoft in 2009, just three years after it was founded.
The son of a Navy pilot and an office admin, Greg was driven to be hard working and entrepreneurial from an early age. In an interview with the New York Times, MuleSoft’s leader said that while he wasn’t a great natural athlete, he played a lot of sports growing up. “I learned that the harder I worked, the better the results. That was a good feedback loop for me.”
As a motivated kid, Schott started cutting lawns and shoveling snow, later picking up a job at a frame store near his high school. When the local shop decided to open another location, they asked 16-year-old Greg to design the factory himself. “It was a good reminder that if you put your mind to something and work at it, people will recognize it and maybe ask you to do something more important later,” said Schott, reflecting on the experience.
Greg’s self-described “drive for independence,” engrained in him through his parents, led him to want to pay his way through college and navigate his career in engineering to management in the high-flying tech space.
Directly before MuleSoft, Greg served in the software realm as Senior Vice President of Marketing at Agile Software (now owned by Oracle), where he was responsible for product management and marketing and led the company through a 600% surge in revenue. He also held the title of Vice President of Corporate Development at the product lifecycle management (PLM) software solutions provider.
The CEO held a role at DG Systems as President of Marketing and Vice President of Operations, where he helped build the provider of digital media distribution services from a small startup to a profitable public company. The Stanford and North Carolina State University grad also spent time as a manager at The Boston Consulting Group as well as at Westinghouse and IBM, where he served in engineering positions. Working at Westinghouse at age 22, the tech CEO managed an assembly line of 17 employees who built radar systems for B-1 bombers.
The tech executive’s vision for Mulesoft has always been for the company to be a type of “connection layer.” He explains in a company video on YouTube that he sees the firm’s offering as similar to an electrical system in a home that you plug everything into. Like standard outlets and plugs, Schott says MuleSoft does the same thing for connecting applications, data and devices, SaaS, SAP, Oracle and everything on the backend to things in the cloud. Alongside providing a platform for bringing everything together for enterprises, the CEO says a culture focused on “building something great from the ground up” has been a driving force behind the people he hires and what they do at the tech pioneer.
“Our greatest challenge is hiring superstars who can thrive in a dynamic, high growth, demanding environment. We are hiring across the company and are looking for brilliant ‘best athlete’ candidates with proven track records of success,” wrote Schott on his LinkedIn. The CEO has done his best to create an exciting, fast-paced company that is transforming its industry.
At the helm of the Silicon Valley software provider, Schott is responsible for keeping the company true to its mission of creating something “completely category defining.” In a 2014 video, he explains that the idea of the platform is “not just to make something that is going to go public or make a ton of money.” He believed from the get-go that if the firm continued to truly develop something unique, all financial rewards would follow.
In March 2017 MuleSoft went public on the Nasdaq trading under the ticker symbol MULE.
MuleSoft serves as the backbone for many of today’s leading applications and services, serving clients such as Netflix, Spotify and Salesforce. Its customers range from Global 500 corporations to emerging companies in over 60 countries across the world.
