Marten Mickos: Advice and Adversity

You easily. In a startup, you drive so fast that you get blind, you get tunnel vision. You don't know how fast you're going or whether you're going slow. You don't know where you're heading. You see some lights here and there and you drive there. And every now and then, you must rise up and say, where are we really? What do we believe in? And where are we heading? And that's what allows you to be successful and allows you to stay on track. But. But of course, like all entrepreneurial advice, they always come with a caveat. And there's always a contradiction in every piece of advice. So if I tell you, stay your course, stick to your strategy, believe in your beliefs, all of that, then tomorrow I'll tell you. Remember, if you need to, you pivot. If you need to change your strategy, do it. And then you say, so which one is it? Well, we never know. Advice always comes in two shapes. There's the advice against doing something and the advice for doing something. And you need to decide how you receive advice. And that was a very important learning from me in one of these episodes, the first that nearly killed MySQL so I joined a CEO. We had a partner in the US I traveled to them and said, hey, we love your partnership, but this paper we signed isn't really a partnership and you're not living up to your side of it. And. And we need to renegotiate and get a new model going. And they negotiated us, but they said, hey, what is this? You signed this paper. We now have these rights. We have the right to use your trademark in the US and we own this and we own that. What is this? And suddenly one day when we were negotiating with them on the last Friday, they said, could we take a break? We took a break and David Axmark and myself, the one co founder, and me, we came back at 5pm to their office and we were met by. We had traveled from Scandinavia. We were met by a local sheriff in the corporate office. And he said, are you Martin Mikos and David Axmark? We said, yes. And he handed us two yellow envelopes and said, you are hereby served. So we got sued by a public US corporation when MySQL was not even a company. MySQL back in Scandinavia consisted of four different companies of the founders. We hadn't raised any capital yet. We had term sheets signed a few days earlier, but we had no money. And I went back to John Vatin, our chairman to be, and said, what do we do now? We can't afford the lawsuit. We have no company, we have no money. What do we do? And I was ready to give up. I thought I'd been here just a few months. This isn't what I ordered. I thought this would be a business build up. But John said, martin, now let's figure out something really bold here. So we decided to go back to all the VCs and say, Guys, good news and bad news. Bad news, we've been sued in the us. Good news, we'll give you twice the amount of shares for your money. And now Scandinavia's pride is at stake. You're not allowed to withdraw. And of course any smart VC would have withdrawn. You don't invest in a company that is just being sued. But we used all our methods of influencing and said, you cannot withdraw because the Norwegians aren't. So you Swedes cannot. We had visas from Norway, Sweden and Finland. So ultimately we got all their money. We spent half of that money money on the lawsuit. We ultimately won. It was settled, but we got paid a payment. And it was the best marketing campaign ever for MySQL the little company from Scandinavia being sued by a big nasty US corporation. It worked. But that shows how you must have belief and somebody must believe in you for this to happen.