Marten Mickos on European Innovation

Marten is on stage kicking off the second day of Innovate Europe, starting with a brief background about himself and MySQL. He has been involved in a number of companies, and had quite a few successes, and some failures (including a bankruptcy).

MySQL is not the primary topic of his talk so he just states that it is the largest open source company, doubling revenues every year, growing 20 times over the past 4 years - to $20M run rate (not sure if this is their run rate, or their 2004 actuals). MySQL is used by the largest corporations in the world now, Internet "giants" and is THE standard database for most startups as part of the LAMP infrastructure. Just one data point: it is downloaded 40K times a day (1 every 2 sec). Marten refers to the company as the "RyanAir" of databases.

MySQL today is a company with 200 employees, 70% working from home, in 22 countries, and almost 100 locations. This created a lot of HR, legal and logistical headaches... but is also a great asset from a support standpoint. Employment contracts and stock options plans were a big issue because of the different tax and regulation systems MySQL had to deal with. Also they implemented a five weeks of vacation policy like in Sweden, no matter the country. Healthcare benefits are adapted to each country, with a policy of not being equal, but to be fair.

Marten makes a few remarks about innovation, and certain of its characteristics:

• Innovations happen in frugality, in encounters, in openness, and contends that large companies are throwing too much money into proprietary research projects, losing track of the fact that their resources could be better deployed by opening and sharing.
• Europe, because of its diversity, could actually build very strong innovations if companies were to pool their talents.
• "True innovators don't mind being laughed at", which means that one needs to have the courage to be different and go "all the way", which is typically difficult from a cultural standpoint in  Europe. Marten cites the example of Monty Wilenius, one of the co-founders of MySQL, who faced cynicism when he announced his intention to develop a new SQL database. 
• Innovation produces wealth (the contrary is sometimes not true): YOU MUST BE HUNGRY TO INNOVATE.
• "The world is flat": Anyone can innovate, from anywhere, especially in software.

He then went onto addressing the main topic of his talk: Issues Europe is facing in terms of fostering innovation, and preserving its competitive position. First and foremost, there is a big resistance to change in Europe: change in business approach, technology, processes. And we Europeans tend to complain, a lot.
Some typical traits mentioned by Marten have been echoed by many other presenters over the past two days:

• Pride  is high (great!), but so is shame. European's tendency to always refer to its history, and culture, is an impediment to "out of the box" thinking.
• Quality of work is generally high, but the lack of a sense of urgency is problematic
• Personal bonds are strong, but openness is  too limited across countries, industries and even different geographies of large companies.
• Sense of competition is strong, but encouragement and positive feedback are rarely provided (personal note: it is true that I used to be like that as well when I was a young manager: if I don't yell at you, you are doing a good job - wrong).
• Wealth is honored, but making money is not: it is as though "old" money is OK, but "new" money has to be hidden - even though the new money has a much higher probability of being spread.
• Success is honored, but failure pitied. Marten mentions that after one of his companies went bankrupt, his Finnish compatriots were saying that his career was over, and that's why he was forced to move to the US (duh).
• Humility is a virtue, but high ambitions are not - preventing people from dreaming about things which are out of reach.

During the Q&A, Marten pointed out that the database market was worth $15B, which means that MySQL still has a massive growth potential. The will maintain its sheer focus on being the reference database vendor for all types of applications, not competing with its clients/partners going "up stack" like Oracle did/does.
He also pointed out that Open Source is a software production model (and philosophy), not a business model. Each Open Source company needs to come up a clear value proposition that allows it to grow profitably without offending the community. Example is Apache: most successful Open Source piece of infrastructure in the world, and nobody is making a lot of money from it.

Very interesting point of view, and great guy. We had a good chat last night at the "after dinner" party, and I found Marten extremely approachable. It is interesting to see that despite our difference of background, country of origin and functions, we pointed to the same issues - which I am sure will make their way into the Innovate!Europe white paper.

Tag: innovateeurope05

Comments

[Lionel]

Hi, Jeff. I love the way Loïc Le Meur shows your pitch: very concrete.

[Dennis Howlett]

But the people I met gave me a lot of hope that Marten's 'list' doesn't matter to those who want to go for it. I met a few of these types. They don't give a rat's arse about cultural issues.