Slide, a startup BCDR company founded by Austin McChord (Datto founder and former CEO) and Michael Fass (former Datto general counsel and chief people officer), came out of stealth at the Right of Boom conference in February. With an investment from the Outsiders Fund, McChord’s early-stage venture capital firm, and an R&D team that includes some other Datto alumni, Slide came to market with the Z1 hardware appliance.
But in this conversation with MSP Success, McChord (pictured top) and Fass make it clear that there’s much more to come. McChord’s reason for jumping back into the BCDR space? “To bring back that ‘magic’ that was Datto for our team and for our partners, while at the same time solving a real problem that does matter.” This is an edited and condensed version of that conversation.
MSP Success: You debuted Slide at Right of Boom cybersecurity conference. Why did you choose that event, and do you think you surprised the channel?
Austin McChord: I hope we surprised the channel. We’ve been working on Slide for two years and so it felt like a lot of work to keep it a secret. Right of Boom was a very intentional decision. We are firm believers that BCDR is the most important and last line of defense when it comes to security. And we felt like the current solutions in the BCDR space weren’t keeping up and weren’t delivering. And so to show up and say, “This should set a new standard for what security means in the BCDR space,” and remind people how important BCDR is, really played into our decision to launch at Right of Boom.
MSP Success: Tell me about the technology.
McChord: The core underlying technologies that underpin BCDR have changed a lot over the course of the last half decade and all the solutions in the market are nearly 20 years old. And so the ability to enter [the market] is not [just bringing] back the culture that is Datto, but we need to bring back a product that’s meaningfully different … and set up for the next 20 years Instead of solving the problem of the last 20 years. We take advantage of a whole bunch of new stuff around ultra-high performance, NVMe flash storage [and] the AMD chips that are available to build something that’s much more performant and ultimately is going to unlock a lot of capability for MSPs.
I think the other piece that dovetails, and is the combination of both culture and technology, is an open API. Anybody can build on top of Slide [and] integrate in any way they want. That’s really important In allowing MSPs to craft the set of products and tools and process that makes the most sense for them, rather than a one-size-fits-all conglomerate.
MSP Success: Slide is a hardware appliance; will you be doing cloud backup too?
McChord: The hardware, the on-prem BCDR that replicates to the cloud, is the hardest form of BCDR to build … Our plan is to make sure that we have offerings out there for every type of data an MSP is responsible for, and we’ll work our way there. But we started with the hardest and the one that we felt was the most neglected and the most in need of a better, more modern solution.
MSP Success: As you know, there has been a lot of focus in the industry on tool sprawl and how that impacts an MSP’s profitability. What’s the incentive to switch to your appliance?
McChord: it’s a much better product at a comparable price point. And it’s a chance to build a relationship with a company that understands what it means to have partners. All of those contribute to the TCO. When you reach out and want support from Slide, it’s direct to a technician. When you want to buy from Slide, our team [is] not going to try to sell you something else along the way. So I think it’s that relationship and the fact that it’s a better product.
MSP Success: What’s on the Slide road map?
Fass: We are a backup company and MSPs have workloads that they are charged with protecting that are not just servers … cloud workloads, SaaS solutions, native Azure environments. There’s lots of employees at clients that MSPs take care of that have laptops that want to go direct to the cloud with those laptops or some workstations in that case. So there’s a whole universe of backup … we’re loaded up and ready to tackle a lot of different workloads.
McChord: There’s two axes. On one axis we want to protect any data that an MSP might be responsible for. The other axis is, how do you get that information back? How do you make that information accessible? And so how do we restore that, back to physical machines, back to laptops, straight to the cloud, straight to another SaaS service, usable through the API, ingestible by another tool.
It’s that end to end of all these different inputs need to be able to go to all these different outputs. In the most recent [iteration], the ways that you can join and do restores and connect different things over the network, what you can do with Slide, you can’t do with anybody else on the market right now. That was one of the things that our early customers asked for. That’s on the restore side. There’s much more that will be coming on the protection side.
MSP Success: Is your long-term vision to build a platform company that will compete with companies like ConnectWise and Kaseya?
Fass: We’re focused on backup. As we just described, there’s a lot of different workloads for us to tackle. In a few years, are there other products that will be relevant to us? Sure. But we have a lot of work to do to make sure that the best backups are in the hands of MSPs. That’s what we’re focused on for the near term.
MSP Success: Your Outsiders Fund has invested in some other channel companies like Cork and Zorus. Will you be bringing all these together?
McChord: No. We’re looking for companies that seek mastery and Slide is seeking to master protecting business data, the same way that Cork is seeking to master the concept of the warranty and aligning with MSPs. And Zorus has a better way of thinking about how to do web filtering. A lot of these are the unsexy, overlooked things. It’s these quiet businesses that sit behind the scenes that really matter for MSPs. Those are the ones that we want to see continue to move the ball forward technologically. And that’s why they’re ones that Outsiders Fund has backed.
MSP Success: What will you do differently at Slide from what you learned at running Datto?
McChord: We achieved success at Datto by doing everything wrong first and then figuring out how to fix it. My hope is to not repeat a lot of the mistakes that I made along the way. I think that how we build a team and what a great team looks like took us a decade to figure out at Datto. So we start out of the gate with a much better understanding there. But a lot of it is just trying to focus and keep the values that made Datto special and work to try to distill that and enhance it.
MSP Success: This is personal for you.
McChord: Yes, very. Datto had a value; it was to do your life’s work. We thought that by growing the business and becoming a publicly traded company, the business would be on a trajectory to persist indefinitely. [Ed note: Vista Equity Partners acquired Datto in 2017 and merged it with Autotask, then took it public in 2020. It was reprivatized when Kaseya acquired Datto in 2022.] But capitalism is what it is … We felt like our life’s work isn’t done. This is some unfinished business. We want to continue to deliver for MSPs and build a company that really is a great partner.
MSP Success: Austin, as chairman, will you be involved in the day-to-day at Slide?
McChord: I’m very involved in Slide.
MSP Success: Anything I didn’t ask that you would like to convey to our readers?
Fass: A partner asked me, “What’s to prevent you from raising your prices anytime you want, because you’re on a month-to-month basis?” I said that’s never going to happen. Our partners can rely on us to be fair and to be reasonable.
MSP Success: To be clear, whatever price you announced at your debut, that’s what it stays forever?
McChord: We hope to never have to raise prices, and we’ll do everything we can to prevent doing that. Consistency matters a ton to MSPs. Predictability matters a ton to MSPs. We understand that. …The technology that we’ve built our product under allows us to make a good margin and it’s technology that should become less expensive over time. We understand what we’re getting into, which should allow us to keep prices the same or less into the future.
