Marten Mickos - Agenda Setters 2009
Name: Marten Mickos
Title: Former CEO, MySQL
Position: 39 Last year: Not ranked
Why? Open source success story
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Marten Mickos left MySQL, the open source database company founded in 1995, at the beginning of the year, less than 12 months after it was acquired by Sun Microsystems.
Sun has of course since been acquired by Oracle and one Agenda Setters panellist suggested this was due to the presence of MySQL in Sun's portfolio. And you can see why, with MySQL being used by numerous big names around the world, including Facebook, Google and Nokia.
One of the Agenda Setters judges suggested it was down to the presence of Mickos that Sun shelled out $1bn for MySQL in the first place.
Of Mickos, another judge said: "Proof that an open source project started by one guy can grow into both a successful community and a successful company. Bought out by Sun for a billion dollars, he's moved on to his next open source project!"
After leaving MySQL, Mickos became a board member at Mozilla Messaging and cloud computing management company RightScale. He recently joined venture group Benchmark Capital as entrepreneur in residence.
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