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Interview with Marten Mickos, Entrepreneur and ex-CEO of MySQL

Background to interview:

This interview between Santiago Iniguez, dean of IE Business School and Mårten Mickos took place two months ago and the compromise to publish this today was made not knowing the European Commission's preliminary objections to the Oracle 7.4 B$ acquisition of Sun due to the MySQL part of the deal. (Here are a list of commentaries related to the proposed acquisition). The European Commission faces a January 19 deadline on whether to approve the planned takeover of Sun by Oracle, the world's second-largest business software maker.

Here are two posts on this blog about Marten and MySQL:

Entrepreneur series (3) - Mårten Mickos, Finn and ex-CEO of MySQL AB (and ex-VP of Sun's Database Division), 25 May 2009.

Marten Mickos letter to EU: Approve Oracle-Sun deal, 9 October 2009.

This interview in PDF (115KB)

Santiago Iñiguez: What management thinker has most influenced you?

Peter Drucker was one of the most brilliant thinkers on management and leadership in the past one thousand years. His ideas are absolutely outstanding.

In these uncertain times what advice would you give to someone thinking of setting up their own business?
                       
I like an answer that Linus Torvalds once gave about Open Source. Somebody asked him “Linus in what circumstances should I consider becoming an Open Source developer,” and he replied “only if there is nothing else in the world that you can see yourself doing”.

There are times when too many people try to be entrepreneurs. This was apparent during the Internet bubble when everybody was cheering on entrepreneurs, including governments who gave financial assistance. Indeed there were many who were not fit for it who tried and failed. Although a part of entrepreneurialism is that you try and fail and then you rise again, there were people who just really didn't have the mindset.

You have said that different types of personalities can be successful CEOs, what is the one trait that every successful CEO should have?

The one common trait of successful CEOs is that they know themselves and are confident about themselves. You also have to be convinced and committed to be an entrepreneur. It may look nice when you hear the success stories, but being an entrepreneur or CEO is very hard and nerve-wrecking work that typically takes many, many years to reach fruition.

As a CEO, everything I did was people related, and when it is people-related, it is also related to your own persona.