Ross Mason joins Lightspeed as a Venture Partner after 15+ years of working together during the incredible journey of MuleSoft. Ross founded MuleSoft in 2006 on the idea that connecting applications should be easy, building on the open-source Mule project he created. That’s when Ross first connected with Lightspeed investor Ravi Mhatre who led the firm’s initial and subsequent investments in the company beginning in May 2007. In 2017, Ross took MuleSoft public (NYSE:MULE) and in 2018 MuleSoft was acquired by Salesforce.
Ross is also a prolific angel investor, helping founders build the next generation of enterprise software companies, and he recently launched his own venture capital fund, Dig Ventures. Ross invests in and advises entrepreneurs solving the world’s largest problems backing exceptional founders in Enterprise SaaS in Europe and the US. In his Venture Partner role with Lightspeed, Ross invests in early stage companies in Europe and in his native UK, bringing some of the key operational knowledge he built while running MuleSoft and investing in the US tech ecosystem, to European founders and their teams.
Ross is no stranger to the global tech circuit – he is a regular keynote speaker at technology conferences like WebSummit and Dreamforce, and has been featured in WSJ, Forbes, Business Insider, Entrepreneur, TechCrunch, and more. He was named a Henry Crown Fellow by the Aspen Institute in 2020. His first book “First Break IT” explores how companies need to adopt new methods to drive innovation if they are to remain relevant; the methodology he presented has since been adopted by hundreds of multinational organizations. Ross was deemed one of the Most Important People in Cloud Computing by Business Insider, one of the world’s ‘Top 10 Innovators & Influencers’ by Information Week, as well as a ‘top 25 CTO’ by InfoWorld.
Ross has two beautiful daughters that he loves to spend time with building everything from Lego, rockets, software and Ikea furniture. Ross is an avid snowboarder and skis with his daughters every season. He is also a keen runner and cyclist, competing in triathlons a couple of times a year.
