Worldly vision guides CEO Simon Taylor of data protection firm HYCU

Taylor draws from Indian and English roots — plus ‘hard work and luck’

Pardon the quote by Henry David Thoreau, but if Simon Taylor’s worldly outlook puts him a bit out of step with more typical tech company CEOs, it may be because he hears a different drummer. Like Pete Best, perhaps.“My mother was a huge Pete Best fan. She was born in ’49, grew up in Coventry (England), going to see (the pre-Ringo Starr) Beatles all the time,” says Taylor.The other link to Best — an Englishman born in India — was Taylor’s father, a biracial Anglo-Indian displaced by the end of British rule. “My father had grown up with servants, and he arrived in England with the clothes on his back. They were sleeping four kids in the bed and all of a sudden my father realized he was different.”Gavan Taylor’s future looked bleak, his son says, until he met another outsider.“He met an Asian guy at a party. The guy said, ‘Come work for me with a new business. It’s called computers.’ That guy’s name was Dr. (An) Wang.”The elder Taylor relocated across the Atlantic to the new company’s headquarters in Lowell, staying until Wang’s death. He then took a job at a little-known investment company. Lightning struck twice: “It’s called Putnam Investments,” Taylor explains.With his father’s successes, Taylor, born in the UK and brought to the United States when he was 3, would have a life of privilege — though tempered by an admonition from Wang. “I have a book signed by him. It has two words: ‘Work hard,’” he says, adding his dad’s corollary: “Success is always 50 percent hard work, 50 percent luck.”To find that luck, Taylor in his 20s journeyed to Central Europe. “There was an enormous amount of math and sciences coming out of there at that time, but a complete lack of sales and marketing. A lot of these countries were coming out of socialism. I went to Prague to set up a consulting company to find and identify emerging tech companies.”