Marten Mickos: Believe in Something Bigger Than Yourself [Entire Talk]

So, without further ado, Martin Mikos.

Thank you, Tina. Thanks for inviting me. It's a huge honor to be here today. And it's just amazing to see this audience and all the Finns and the Danes and the Brazilians and Colombians and Poles and everybody. I must just immediately tell you that when I joined Eucalyptus, where I'm now CEO, I was so excited because out of the founding team of six technical founders, we had one person from Russia, one from Poland, one from Italy, one from India, and two from the United States. And of the two from the United States, one was a little bit Polish and the other one a little bit Finnish. So it was a global thing, getting going in small Santa Barbara, pretty little Santa Barbara on the Californian coast. But I'm here today to talk about entrepreneurialism and my learnings over the years. And you should know that I'm a slow learner. It took me many, many attempts before I could be successful in the business. In the way that Tina just explained. I did six startups in Finland before jumping on the MySQL opportunity. And I believe that entrepreneurialism is essentially a belief system, meaning you must believe in something that is bigger than yourself, something that is bigger than the. The business you are attempting to address, something that is bigger than the VCs, bigger than everything. You must have a belief in something absolutely enormous that you can do for this planet or for this universe or for these multiverses. You must have a belief in something, an unwavering belief that there's something you can do that nobody else can do. And if you do it, the world will be a better place. You must have that as part of your entrepreneurial soul. You must also believe in yourself. And you don't need to be arrogant, and you don't need to be especially bold or anything, but you must have a basic, fundamental belief that you are useful, that you can do something important, that you can make a difference here. And you must keep having that belief through all the stages, because if you don't believe in yourself, who would? And being an entrepreneur is about convincing other people of things that don't really make sense until everybody has agreed with them. And then they make sense for everybody. But until then, they make sense to nobody. So you must believe in yourself. And all of this I knew for a long time, but what I've learned only in recent years was that I reflected over the fact that, thirdly, you must always have somebody who believes in you, and you must have somebody who believes in you more than you do. More than you can believe in yourself. Because a human being wakes up every morning asking him or herself, am I useful? Am I needed on this planet? Am I okay? Am I doing okay? And we have this nagging doubt, self doubt, that follows us throughout life. And when we are in a startup business or in the entrepreneurial world, we will face challenges, challenges that seem insurmountable, really bad situations. And then you have this double whammy that just when it is bad, it also feels bad. And you're sitting there as the entrepreneur and realizing that you don't really trust yourself. You are not sure you can make it through the day. You're not sure you can solve the problem or the challenge you have. So you have those moments of self doubt just when you cannot afford them. And that's the moment where you need somebody else who believes in you and who reminds you that you are capable and who reminds you that you're a wonderful entrepreneur. And it's actually much worse for everybody else. But this is a thing we cannot remind ourselves. We need somebody external to do it. And for me, I think I didn't realize it until recently, but in my youth I think it was my mother who was that person. And you know, I come from Finland, so it was Scandinavian style. So maybe the most encouraging comment I wrote from her was, perhaps you're not too bad. So I don't remember any specific encouraging words. I just remember this, that in her mind it was absolutely clear that I would survive. And that just stuck with me all the time. And then When I joined MySQL as CEO, we got John Vatin, a famous Swedish entrepreneur, as our chairman. And he believed in me. And we had an episode immediately after my joining which could have killed the company, could have derailed all of my SQL. And it didn't. And partly it was because I was ready to say, oops, this was not what we expected. I was nearly ready to give up. And he said, no, now we are not giving up, now we're doubling down. And I'll come back to that. And then a few years later, that same role was additionally taken by Danny Reimer of Index Ventures and Kevin Harvey of Benchmark Capital, who, as we grew the myscale business and we ran into new challenges that could have killed the company, just somehow believed in me. And I don't know why they did it, and I'm not sure they know why they did it, and maybe they doubted why they did it, but they did it and it always got me back on track. And one specific time it was my management team who, who rescued me because I had a moment of serious doubt and I thought I had failed. And I think they thought I had failed too, but they didn't let me fail. They said, let's try one more thing. Let's go this way and see what happens. And then now everybody knows MySQL as this fantastic success story. From 700,000 in sales back in 2000 to 100 million business. I was acquired for a billion by Sun Microsystems and then helped Oracle acquire Sun and is now one of the most fundamental pieces of the web infrastructure. So that today Facebook runs on MySQL Google's all revenues run on MySQL Twitter runs on MySQL whatever it is. The special effects of the Lord of the Rings Movie run on MySQL the terrestrial control station for the Mars Rover runs on MySQL. And of course, maybe the height of the fame was in the movie the Social Network. The most famous quote I have ever seen in that movie, the only quote I remember from that movie, when Zuckerberg is sitting at his laptop and he says, I need a MySQL backend. So all of that feels just fantastic to have all of that. But you, you must have a belief. So at MySQL we believe that we must bring superior database technology to the world, make it available and affordable for all. And that's the belief we followed all through the years. And still those who still work for the company still follow. That was the driving mantra for us and the motivation every day. And you could say that before MySQL and you may not have seen that, but relational databases were a little bit like handwritten Bibles, very few, very expensive, and only allowed by the high priests to use. So relational databases was a very exclusive group of people and businesses, and they cost millions. And then somebody invented a printing press, and it wasn't Gutenberg, but it was called Open Source. So suddenly you could produce the same goods at much higher quality, much higher speed, and for broad distribution. And we took that printing press called open Source, applied it to the database and said, we will go out and disrupt the whole database industry. Just like Gutenberg disrupted handwritten Bibles. And not that handwritten Bibles go away, and not that they've lost any value. They're probably more valuable today. But books today are available to anybody and everybody. And we went out to become what we call the IKEA of databases, modern Scandinavian design. You have to do a little bit of assembly yourself, but it's Much cheaper, much faster, much more modern. And if you don't like it, throw it away and buy the next one. So we believed in that. Now, as CEO of Eucalyptus, we believe that we must bring cloud power to you. We must let you try it at home. That's what we believe in. We believe that there will be more than 100 times more connected devices in the world. Devices with an IP address, typically a mobile device, a phone, a Kindle, an iPad, a gas meter, electrical meter, a medical device, a vehicle, a building, anything. There will be a trillion of them. And you guys will be developing services that run on those connected devices. And we want you to be able to do that with no worries about how it is served. The only way to serve that amount of connected devices is with cloud infrastructure. We will need public clouds. Think Amazon EC2. We will need private clouds, hybrid clouds, virtual private clouds, all kinds of clouds. So if you think of Amazon EC2 as the Pete's Coffee of computing, you can go there at any time. They are all over the place. You can buy one latte or a million lattes, they will always serve you. It's the same price, you know, it's very convenient. That's Amazon EC2. But then we have some of you who are connoisseurs. You go home in the evening and say, I am dreaming of an espresso machine. I love peach coffee, but at home I want to make my own coffee. I want to try with different beans and different this and different that. And I will run my own business. That's Eucalyptus Systems. We make the best espresso machines in the world, metaphorically, meaning if you want to run a private cloud of your own, we think you need our software and we believe we must deliver that to the whole world so that everybody can build their own cloud infrastructures, combine them with the public cloud, or not combine them. So that's clearly what we believe in and that's what's driving us every day when we go to the office. And we realize we have all these problems in the business, we need to hire people and we're delayed and we're not sure about pricing and marketing and positioning. So then we go back and say, but what do we really believe in? What is it that we must do? And it helps us streamline the strategy and decide to go for something specific that we are doing. So it's very, very important to have it, to go back to it and look at it and say, what is it really that we are up to? Because 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, 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 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, you know, 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? I 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 buildup. 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. And then we had a second incident which was probably even worse. So those of you who know MySQL as a product may know that there's a two tiered architecture, there's a database engine and a storage engine. And somehow the most popular and best storage engine was written by another fin who had his own company called InnoDB, or that's the name of the product. So we negotiated with him of buying innodb. We said, hey, hey, we will buy your company because we need to combine the two. And he negotiated with us and everything went well. But at some point he started hesitating and wasn't sure about our intentions and whether we would pay a right price. And he got worried. And in a series of missteps by me and the board and whoever, and I don't know what really happened, suddenly we got a call. I got a call from Charles Phillips, president of Oracle, who said, martin, I would like to tell you that this morning we acquired InnoDB. And we did not do it to slow you down. But there we had one of the most vital parts of our products being acquired by Oracle, the biggest database company on the planet. And I was ready to give up. I felt so bad. I felt I had betrayed the people I had hired. I had hired them to have A fantastic story. I said, this will be the biggest business ever. We'll go public, we'll acquire these companies, we'll get InnoDB on board, we'll embedded to tightly in the product. And suddenly the product was acquired by somebody else. And I flew back from London where I got the news back to the U.S. that was the worst flight I've ever been on. I sat the whole time just thinking of how bad and lousy and just unsuccessful I was 10 hours. But when I came back, my management team had already gotten together while I was flying. And they said, let's meet at your home tomorrow in two hours. So we had a meeting at our house and they came in and said Martin. And they didn't say, but I could see they were disappointed. But say, we are not letting this go, we will support you. Here's a plan of how to do it. So we in four hours created a plan for how to go out even more boldly in the market. And on Monday we told the press that because people thought this would kill MySQL we said trying to kill a dolphin. And you know, our mascot was a dolphin trying to kill a dolphin. Trying to kill MySQL by buying InnoDB is like trying to kill a dolphin by drinking the ocean. And that single statement just changed everything. And we went out to prove that there are many storage engines and InnoDB is just one. There's a whole ocean of open source software. And whatever you competitors buy away from our land, we will replenish it's open source. And it worked so well that the next spring at the MySQL users conference, we appointed Oracle Partner of the Year. We didn't tell them in advance, but we thought, you know, let's be bold. And this is a lesson on one of the successes and I was sort of coming to it later. But if you are a disruptor, you must play a bold and fun game with the big guys. You must make fun of them one way or the other. Just like you see Ikea making fun of antique furniture and you see Southwest Airlines making fun of the big guys. You see Virgin Atlantic making fun of the big guys. You must do it. You must seek this David versus Goliath situation. And it was just wonderful when we appointed them Partner of the Year because they reluctantly dragged themselves up on the stage to receive it. Of course they couldn't not do it because they were in the audience, but they didn't really like the fact. But that's actually how we handled the situation. And it all worked because my management team believed in me when I thought that I probably should resign or I will be fired the next day or something. And there was a third thing as well, which is probably even more difficult to discuss and talk about. And I won't go into too much detail, but we did have a complete fallout with the CTO and founder of MySQL. In later years, this could have derailed the whole company. I was running the business and I was realizing or concluding or thinking or erroneously thinking. I'll leave that to you to assess that the founder wasn't being productive anymore, didn't produce what he was supposed to do, didn't lead the way he was supposed to do, didn't let others lead the way they were supposed to lead. So I removed him from all important roles. We left all kinds of nice job titles, so it looked good, but we essentially stripped him of all responsibility because it didn't work. And he responded by starting to sabotage my work as a CEO. And managing this conflict between a hired gun, a CEO who came on board, and the founder is a huge stress for anybody. And I can tell you it happens in nearly every startup. It's amazing how or not amazing. It's sad how common it is that you get conflicts between founders themselves or between founders and the new guys, and you have to manage it somehow and you have to figure out a way out of it. But it's very common. And it can happen to any one of us that the one who is the biggest asset can the next day be the biggest liability. And as human beings, we don't like to acknowledge it, but it does happen. And it happens all over in life where you see people have done something amazing, built something amazing, and then comes a time where you realize that they shouldn't be doing it anymore. So these are very difficult things for a CEO to handle. But again, I believed in the mission of the company. Make superior database technology available and affordable for all. So it was okay to build a business. It was okay to give it out to everybody. We kept doing that, and the board supported me in all of this and kept me going. Although I was ready to say, hey, founders, I came on board to build this for you, and you're not letting me build it. You can have it. I'm done. I was ready. Many times I was ready to just walk out. But then, of course, you look around and see we have 300 people in the company. I've hired half of these. I promise them a great future. I can't walk out. No Matter how much I'm personally feeling that I'm suffering, I just have to keep going. And thank God I did because MySQL was just the best experience I've ever had in business. That's the most amazing thing that we did. And we just did it. And we had so many great learnings that we did then these were the, the traumatic ones. Then we had good ones that just worked. So one was the realization that came slowly that company culture is what drives and defines a business. And Peter Drucker, who is my all time superstar when it comes to leadership and management and everything, I think he's among the smartest guys we've seen in the last 1000 years. He said culture eats strategy for breakfast, meaning you need the culture first and then you can have a strategy. But a strategy without a culture is meaningless. And we were very deliberate at MySQL at developing our culture. And this is what I think made the organization so strong that we took this David versus Goliath culture. So we were a little bit sort of like Robin Hood out there doing things on our own, doing things the opposite way. When the logo was designed for us, the logo of the dolphin, our designer first painted it as a dolphin jumping up to the right. Like everything in the western world, everything in the western world must go up to the right because that's where Gartner and everybody have their magic quadrants. But we said, no, we're contrarians. We will have the dolphin jump from right to left just to make a point. So we did that and we chose a dolphin because we said a dolphin is fast, intelligent and kind, and in groups they kill sharks. So we're very deliberate on this, on building a culture. We were very global, so we had influence from every culture on the planet. We, we had people in 110 major locations, 32 countries, 18 time zones. So we had nearly everything on board. But we took some specific things from Nordic heritage and one was openness. So we really drove openness and we said we must share anything we can share with all employees. So we shared our problems, we shared the financial numbers, we shared our plans, and we tried to be as open as possible with people because when you show openness to them, they respond very favorably. And that's a difference I've seen in other parts of the world where openness isn't a given. But in the Scandinavian countries, public government, for instance, a document is by definition public unless it is declared secret. Most other governments say our documents are by definition secret unless declared open. But not in. In the Nordic countries. And in Nordic countries, there's a thing called right of public access, meaning anybody can use any land, any unused land. So if somebody owns a big, big forest, you can't lock people out. You can build fences all you like, but people have a right to climb over them and use the land. So there's sort of an idea of shared ownership of the land, which lends itself to open source and having a shared mission and sharing responsibility with people. So we learned to push out responsibility far out in the organization. And I always tried as CEO to make as few decisions as I could. When they came to me, I said, martin, how should we do this? What date should we have this on? I said, why do you need me to decide it? Because people have this tendency to believe in authorities. We have it from our childhood when we believed our parents. And then in business, we think the same, but we tried to turn it around and say, no, you are the smartest people, and you go out and do it. And I said, but what if you don't agree with me? I say, it doesn't matter. You are in charge. And many times my organization made decisions I would never make. And I was looking and saying, what is this? What have I created a culture where they do all these things which I find stupid? Well, most of the time turned out they were smart and I was the stupid guy. So luckily, I could restrain myself and sort of use duct tape to tie my hands to my seat or the desk to just not intervene. So it worked very well. And this notion of building a culture became so important that we had a culture that stipulated how we operate. And when we made decisions, we reiterated, we said, hey, our culture is to be open. The. Therefore, we are now opening up this thing. Our culture is to have fun, therefore we do this. Our culture is to be contrarians. That's why we are now doing this. So for decisions, we pointed them back at some specific principle of our culture so that people understand that, oh, yes, this is how the culture works. And fostering and building a culture is hard work, but I think it's worth work that pays off, because then it means that the organization can operate on its own, which you can now, I think I can proudly state. You can see with the MySQL team, all the decimated still at Oracle, inside Oracle operating along those same principles and practices. And, boy, you know, Oracle's company culture is not the one we had at MySQL, but there's a little island inside Oracle where they're still Contrarians, they share everything. They delegate authority to the lowest possible level. And. And it seems to be working well. I have no inside information, but that's what it looks like. So that was a very positive experience. And then building the global distributed organization, when we had 500 people on board, 70% worked from home. From home. It all started when I joined as CEO and our founder was in Helsinki and I was in a suburb outside of Helsinki. I mean, it was a half hour to drive between us, but we never did. We're just sitting there in our homes, working. We could have been in the same room, but we weren't. And so the whole culture, and even earlier, the whole culture became one of working from home. And I've realized that offices are so last century man has existed for 50,000 years ago. We all came out of Africa, sort of. And during those 50,000 years, 300 years we've spent in offices, but only 300. It's not like it's some natural thing for us. The natural thing is to have work where you live and to have people around you who you love and have food that you like and the place you like. That's the natural state of being. We don't all need to be in offices all the time. It was an invention of the Industrial revolution where human beings were used as machines and had to be channeled into a factory. And they had to take time on how much work they did and then go back out. But that's not how the real world works. Look at fishermen or shoemakers or anybody working with a craft. How do they go about it? Do they count their hours? Do they have vacation, do they retire? None of that. They just work when work is to be done and they have fun. They have big feasts when there's time for big feasts. So we created a culture of working from home. And we just said, everything goes online. Not just our business goes online, but our lives go online. So we had an email alias@mysql called lifeysql.com so people sent emails there about things happening in their life because we felt that as we are not seeing each other at the water cooler or in the breaks, we need to share life things as well. So we did that. And people would send emails about, I had a baby, yet another MySQL baby. Somebody sent a very touching email about his father nearly dying in surgery in the hospital the day before. So we were all crying in our 110 different locations. But we shared that completely online and it became a culture that worked Our technical support team, they did virtual Christmas parties. And we stopped calling them Christmas parties because we realized not everybody is Christian. I mean, we stopped saying good morning and good evening because whatever you say, it's wrong. We stopped saying spring because it's fall in Australia. We stopped saying remote because everybody is remote. But anyhow, they still had a sort of a holiday party and it was virtual. So Tom, who was the boss on irc, would say, domas, could you serve the eggnog? And he pretended to serve eggnog to everybody. And everybody was sitting all over the planet and then started giving Christmas gifts to each other. So Victoria, who had just moved from, I think Kiev to Moscow, she needed an apartment. So they gave her a whole building. They gave her a skyscraper because they pasted a URL of a picture of a skyscraper into IRC and said Merry Christmas. And she clicked on it and there was a skyscraper. And you laugh at this because in our childhood we want physical, hard Christmas gifts. But when you're grown ups, it doesn't matter. It is as much fun to get a URL that has a genuine intention than to get something you must open. It's nicely packaged and it's from Crater or Barrel and all those places, you don't need that. The thought is what really matters and it works. So we built this global distributed organization and people then say, but Martin, how do you know that they work? And you know what I say, how do you know that people work in offices? Much easier to fake it in an office. I can tell you how. Dress nicely, smile, talk to everybody, go to every meeting, say stupid things, but say things. Break up a little bit early and say, I must do this other thing. You never have to do anything. And people think you are very productive when you work from home. The only way to communicate productivity is through productivity. Show me the deals, show me the records you brought into accounting, show me the code you produced, show me the marketing you did. Show me the webinar you ran. So actually it works better that way. So we had many of these experiences in this time at MySQL. And that's why I think it just was an amazing experience to go through and go through all those traumatic moments where you really needed somebody to believe in you because you were ready to stop believing in yourself. But then also the joy of doing things that we felt nobody had done before and just doing them just in spite, just to show the world that you can do it in a different way. And sometimes we did it just to show because it was great. Entertainment. But it created a very strong culture and we don't have any secret handshake between former majesquellers. But there's a very strong sense of how to act online and quickly respond to emails and sort of cut out all the crap and just go to the point and get stuff done. And I think that is a model that will work for you as the younger generation. Because I'm still a digital immigrant. I grew up in the non digital world and I immigrated into the digital world 20 years ago. But many of you grew up with this. You are natives and for you it may not sound as amazing as it sounds to people of my age and older. So let me stop here with the presentation. I would be happy to take questions. I think Tina will help me with them.

I'm sure you agree this was how do you.

So I'm going to take questions for.

The audience, but I want to start with one.

Okay.

So I'm so fascinated with these distributed offices and I'm curious, a is there any downside and B how often do you actually see each other? Did you actually have to have a face to face relationship before this type of distributed working could work?

Yeah, there's always downsides with everything you do. So sure. Not all people like to work from home. We didn't really have distributed offices. We had people working from home which could be a little bit different. But yes. So not all people like it. Some people need that daily interaction and somebody seeing them so that they are in sort of the cadence of getting work done. You have to be very self driven to do it. And for instance, we just as an anecdote, we sometimes saw that young men who didn't have any other activity could sort of get too immersed by job and it go overboard. So we tried to make sure that they had a girlfriend or a mother or a cat or a dog or or a hobby or something that they did. So yes. So that's a downside then if you need to do error correction, it's much more expensive. You have a guy in Brazil and he's not motivated or it's not working out. What do you do? You send somebody there for two weeks. Yes. Or you ask him to come to your place for two weeks. Yes, that's expensive. But we took the money we saved on offices, we spent on travel and these things and then absolutely you need to get together. But when people work from their homes, when we have the all hands meetings and had them at MySQL, people just loved to see each other because they hadn't seen each other in many months. If you have an office and you do a retreat, you know, you have people who won't really stay there. They'll sneak out and go to a bar nearby or something because they've seen enough of their colleagues. And especially in the software industry, many people say, I love my colleagues, but I don't need to see them every day. So getting them together was important. And specifically, if you had a very creative stage of something, building a new user interface, then we would let them meet every month or even spend a month in the same place, because that's where you need that absolutely immediate, low latency interaction and body language and all the things that you don't really have online.

Great, thanks.

Question we talked about in our discussion class, you'll hopefully visit Aptis about a model where a couple days of the week people would go into the office. In a couple days a week they'd be at home. What do you think of a hybrid model like that?

Yeah, I think whatever works. Oh, sorry. Yes. So the question was a hybrid model where two days a week you are in the office, three days a week you work from home. Absolutely. It can work. I think it's about culture and the discipline that you decide that you will have that if people work from home, how do they communicate? And we're trying to install that now at UN Eucalyptus, which started in one location. But we say if we make a decision, the decision must be documented and distributed to everybody. If we discuss something, we need to let everybody know. So we're trying to take pictures of things and make sure that those who are not in that very location are aware of it or those who are working from home. So I believe that all these models can work, but I do know that human beings look for structure as well, so you can't keep it completely messy.

In what ways is Eucalyptus culture the same or different than MySQL? What have you learned in applying new things at Eucalyptus from a culture point of view?

So that's a great question. So in what way is the culture at Eucalyptus different from the1@mysql? I think they couldn't be more different. And I have to remind myself that now I'm CEO of Eucalyptus. I'm not experienced, I'm a new guy. I need to learn, I need to build this on my own. I can't just come in and think. I knew and I know how to do it. Because MySQL was a disruptor of the old. Eucalyptus is an innovator of the new that research project funded by NSF was the first private cloud software platform in the world and it was founded by six PhDs on a PhD program. MySQL was more like college dropouts and all those things work. It doesn't make one better than the other, but it does change a culture. So the Eucalyptus culture is different. We don't have any sort of big Goliath that we are disrupting. We are deeper in the infrastructure. So we sort of have potentially mathematically more difficult things we're dealing with, like building distributed software, which a cloud platform is, is more difficult. So we are more of a serious organization, whereas MySQL was more like a wild bunch. And there are other differences as well. So, as a CEO and why I joined Eucalyptus was I thought the founding team was just astonishing and I felt, wow, I want to work with these people. And I felt that the culture they had built was a good foundation to build on. When a CEO comes in, you have to change the culture somewhat. So we made us more outgoing, more focused on customers and the open source world and many changes we are doing, but we're keeping those basic principles of very high integrity, serious attitude towards how software is built. So it is a different culture and I'm enjoying it. I'm so happy that it's a new thing. I'm learning something new. I get to test some ideas and I can take some of my learnings from MySQL, but not at all all of them.

So I'm going to ask another question.

Yes, go ahead, Tila.

Speaking of learning. So you were a technology. You were a physics major in school, right? And then you transferred into becoming a CEO. Are there things you wish you had learned when you were a student or when you were younger that would have helped you on this path?

So I will answer your question very honestly, which isn't necessarily what every professor would like me to say, but I applied. I sort of, when I was young, decided that Helsinki University of Technology was the best school in Finland. So I'm going there. And then I looked at the different departments and saw that technical physics is the most difficult to gain entry to. So I said, okay, that's mine. And I was happy to know that it was the least technical one, because I'm not technical. I don't understand mechanics and construction engineering or chemistry or any of that. So I thought, okay, if I do physics, I'll be sort of a little bit secluded from all that technical stuff that I don't really understand. So that's why I studied engineering physics or technical physics, and I never could have become a physicist. I didn't get it well enough. But at the same time, I'm so thankful that I learned all those complex things because in my business dealings I see nearly everything as some sort of mathematical formula. I see Schrodinger's equations here and there and the Heisenberg. And we do this, have those analogies in business. We say, is this like a Heisenberg situation? And people nod. So I'm very thankful that I learned technical physics because it helps me structure problems. Like in mathematics. How do you solve a different mathematical problem? Well, you change to a different coordinate system and suddenly you can resolve it. So, so you do those tricks to the equation to make it solvable. And I realized in business you can look at the problem from a different angle and it looks like a different problem. So I'm very thankful I did it. But I don't sort of do proper credit to that institution because my fellow students, they became famous physicists and they are solving real world problems and they are building nuclear reactors and stuff that I don't think I could ever do. Terrific. Another question, we had a big debate.

In our class about the pros and cons of commercial open source business model, you being the godfather of that model. So as what in a decade, what's changed? What were the lessons learned and how does that impact your strategy at Eucalyptus?

So that's a good question. So one of commercial open source and what does it mean, how has it changed? It's a controversial topic, as you said. So there's this big world of open source and there's a big world of successful software companies. And I believe, I have this absolute belief and conviction that there's a Venn diagram and in the middle you can have a very successful open source business which makes money and produces open source code. But not everybody agrees with me. Some people think that if you do open source you mustn't make money, or if you make money, you mustn't do open source. I happen to believe that it's doable and I haven't learned yet. So I'm doing it again. I'm again building a business. And we meet people who don't like the business model of Eucalyptus and I'm telling them this is the best way to bring the power of your open source code to yourselves. This is how we reward those who actually produce the code. So what I've learned is this sort of unpleasant truth that I believe open source is by far the best way to develop software, you will produce better software faster. At the same time, to build a massive business and go up and challenge those big vendors of closed source software, you must have a revenue model. And we've concluded at Eucalyptus, as most open source companies have by now, that you must have some features that only the paying customers can obtain. And this is the controversial thing that not everybody agrees with. But look at any of the companies out there. They have something in their product offering that you only get when you pay money. And that's true for Sugar CRM, and it's true for Zend, and it's true for all of them. It's true for Eucalyptus, but it doesn't get universal acceptance in the world. But then we also learned at MySQL one thing. If nobody's against you, you're not really popular. It goes with popularity and fame that somebody.