Mårten Mickos, CEO MySQL, Eucalyptus, Hackerone: Building a billion dollar software company
Mårten Mickos is a rare European founder. He has led 3 global software companies, including the Balderton-backed MySQL, and is now opening the London office of HackerOne, a new company which is used by Uber, Twitter and Github to protect their critical systems. Mårten joined open-source database company MySQL as CEO early in the company's journey. He remained in charge until the $1 billion acquisition by Sun Microsystems in 2011. Mårten's next role was again as a software CEO, at cloud software company Eucalyptus. Hewlett-Packard acquired the business in 2014. In this video, Mårten is interviewed by Balderton's Managing Partner, Bernard Liautaud. Like Mårten, Bernard spent the majority of his professional life as a software CEO at the very highest level. As CEO and Founder of Business Objects, Bernard become the first European to IPO a software company on Nasdaq in 1994, and continued in the role of CEO until the company was acquired by SAP in January 2008, for $6.8bn. For further reading, see Mårten's blog, which is intended help startup CEOs with questions around leadership and company-building here: http://schoolofherring.com/