You are listening to the DFJ Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series, brought you weekly by the Stanford Technology Ventures Program.

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It is my sincere pleasure to introduce our speaker today, Martin Micos.

He is quite remarkable entrepreneur. He was the, I'm going to make sure I get this all right.

He's a CEO of MySQL, which he grew in a course of seven years from a small garage-sized

company into a billion-dollar firm that was purchased by Sun.

And after it was purchased, he stayed around at Sun and was the senior vice president for

Sun's Database Group. Before he did all of that, he held many different positions in

Finland as senior executives in different firms. He's a physicist by training, and I'm sure that all of you will be delighted to hear his story.

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 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, with 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 California 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 Maya scale opportunity.

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