Mårten Gustaf Mickos
Born	(1962-11-06) November 6, 1962 Espoo, Finland
Alma mater	Helsinki University of Technology
Occupation	CEO at HackerOne

Mårten Gustaf Mickos (born November 6, 1962, in Espoo, Finland) is a technology executive based in San Francisco. He is the current CEO of HackerOne, a security vulnerability coordination and bug bounty platform.^[1]

Mickos was chief executive officer of MySQL AB from January 2001 to February 2008, when Sun Microsystems bought MySQL AB.^[2] He served as senior vice president of the database group at Sun Microsystems until March 2009.^[3]

Mickos moved from Finland to Los Altos Hills, CA in 2003 and currently resides in San Francisco.^[4]

Early life and education

Mickos is the third born of four siblings, and was raised in the town of Kauniainen, outside Helsinki, Finland. The family later moved to Jakobstad, where Mickos attended high school. His parents were both engineers by training.^[5]

Mickos studied technical physics at Helsinki University of Technology (now called Aalto University), and graduated with a M.Sc. degree.^[6][7] In 1987 he co-founded the company Polycon Ab with student friends at the age of 24.^[8]

Career

Mickos was a co-founder and CEO of MatchON Sports Ltd. Prior to this, he was CEO of Sonera subsidiary Intellitel Communications Inc, and held sales and marketing positions at Solid Information Technology Ltd and other software companies.^[9]

Mickos became CEO of MySQL AB in January 2001, and served in this role until February 2008. During this time, he became a voice for the value of, and business model behind, commercial open source.^[10] He oversaw that settlement with NuSphere Corp over a dispute regarding the use of MySQL AB's trademarks and copyrights and compliance with the GNU General Public License (GPL).^[11] After Sun acquired MySQL in February, 2008 for $1 billion, Mickos served as Senior Vice President of Sun’s database group until March 2009.^[12]

From 2009 to 2010, Mickos was the Entrepreneur In Residence of the venture capital firms Benchmark Capital and Index Ventures.^[13][14]

In 2009, Mickos participated as an expert witness for the European Commission when they were examining the Oracle-MySQL merger because of their concern over an antitrust issue.^[15]

In March 2010, Mickos was appointed CEO of Eucalyptus Systems, the company behind the Eucalyptus open source software for cloud computing on computer clusters.^[16] When Hewlett-Packard acquired Eucalyptus in September, 2014, they appointed Mickos SVP and GM of HP’s Cloud Business Unit.^[17] Mickos left HP in October 2015.

Mickos served on the Board of directors of Nokia Corporation from 2012 to 2015.^[18] He also served on the boards of Electrosonic,^[19] RightScale,^[20] Mozilla Messaging^[21] and the Node.js Foundation.^[22]

In November 2015, Mickos became CEO of the bug bounty platform company HackerOne.^[23]

Personal life

Mickos and his wife married in 1988. They raised three children, now adults, in Scandinavia and California.^[24] The couple divorced in 2015.

Awards and recognition

Mickos has received the following awards and recognition:

• Honorary doctor of technology at Aalto University in 2022^[25]
• #65 on Business Insider’s 2016 Silicon Valley 100 list^[26]
• Nordic Entrepreneur of the Year prize by Silicon Vikings in 2012 ^[27]
• Audemars Piguet "Changing Times Award: European Entrepreneur of the Year 2006"^[28]
• 2006 Nokia Foundation Award^[29]

References

Further reading

• Patrik Lindfors (2007-02-28). "Databasen". Forum (in Swedish). No. 2007–02. p. 24-27. ISSN 0533-070X.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)
• Torsten Fagerholm (2016-01-28). "Denna gång är det annorlunda". Forum (in Swedish). No. 2016–01. p. 07. ISSN 0533-070X.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)