Mårten Gustaf Mickos (born November 6, 1962, in

Espoo Espoo (, ; ) is a city in Finland. It is located to the west of the capital, Helsinki, in southern Uusimaa. The population is approximately . It is the most populous Municipalities of Finland, municipality in Finland. Espoo is part of the Helsi ...

Finland Finland, officially the Republic of Finland, is a Nordic country in Northern Europe. It borders Sweden to the northwest, Norway to the north, and Russia to the east, with the Gulf of Bothnia to the west and the Gulf of Finland to the south, ...

) is a technology executive based in Seattle. He is most recently the previous

CEO A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a chief executive or managing director, is the top-ranking corporate officer charged with the management of an organization, usually a company or a nonprofit organization. CEOs find roles in variou ...

of HackerOne, a security vulnerability coordination and bug bounty platform. Mickos was

chief executive officer A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a chief executive or managing director, is the top-ranking corporate officer charged with the management of an organization, usually a company or a nonprofit organization. CEOs find roles in variou ...

MySQL AB MySQL AB was a Swedish software company founded in 1995. It was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 2008, Sun was in turn acquired by Oracle Corporation in 2010. MySQL AB is the creator of MySQL, a relational database management system, as well a ...

from January 2001 to February 2008, when

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010 which developed and sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services. Sun contributed sig ...

bought

. He served as senior vice president of the database group at Sun Microsystems until March 2009. Mickos moved from Finland to Los Altos Hills, CA in 2003 and currently resides in Seattle, WA after an extended residence in San Francisco.

Early life and education

Mickos is the third born of four siblings, and was raised in the town of

Kauniainen Kauniainen (; ) is a town in Finland, located in the southern interior of the country. Kauniainen is situated in the southern part of the Uusimaa region, and it is Enclave and exclave, enclaved by the City of Espoo. The population of Kauniainen ...

, outside

Helsinki Helsinki () is the Capital city, capital and most populous List of cities and towns in Finland, city in Finland. It is on the shore of the Gulf of Finland and is the seat of southern Finland's Uusimaa region. About people live in the municipali ...

, Finland. The family later moved to

Jakobstad Jakobstad (; , ) is a town in Finland, located on the west coast of the country. Jakobstad is situated in Ostrobothnia (administrative region), Ostrobothnia, along the Gulf of Bothnia. The population of Jakobstad is approximately , while the Jako ...

, where Mickos attended high school. His parents were both engineers by training. Mickos studied technical physics at Helsinki University of Technology (now called

Aalto University Aalto University (; ) is a public university, public research university located in Espoo, Finland. It was established in 2010 as a merger of three major Finnish universities: the Helsinki University of Technology, the Helsinki School of Economic ...

), and graduated with a M.Sc. degree. In 1987 he co-founded the compan
Polycon Ab
with student friends at the age of 24.

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. 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. 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 The GNU General Public Licenses (GNU GPL or simply GPL) are a series of widely used free software licenses, or ''copyleft'' licenses, that guarantee end users the freedom to run, study, share, or modify the software. The GPL was the first ...

(GPL). After Sun acquired MySQL in February 2008 for $1 billion, Mickos served as Senior Vice President of Sun's database group until March 2009. From 2009 to 2010, Mickos was the '' Entrepreneur In Residence'' of the

venture capital Venture capital (VC) is a form of private equity financing provided by firms or funds to start-up company, startup, early-stage, and emerging companies, that have been deemed to have high growth potential or that have demonstrated high growth in ...

firms

Benchmark Capital Benchmark is a venture capital firm founded in 1995 by Bob Kagle, Bruce Dunlevie, Andy Rachleff, Kevin Harvey, and Val Vaden. The firm is known for its equal partnership structure and focus on early-stage investing, typically leading the firs ...

and

Index Ventures Index Ventures is a European venture capital firm with headquarters in both San Francisco and London. It invests primarily in tech companies. History Index Ventures has its origins in a Switzerland, Swiss bond (finance), bond-trading firm cal ...

. 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. In March 2010, Mickos was appointed CEO of Eucalyptus Systems, the company behind the

Eucalyptus ''Eucalyptus'' () is a genus of more than 700 species of flowering plants in the family Myrtaceae. Most species of ''Eucalyptus'' are trees, often Mallee (habit), mallees, and a few are shrubs. Along with several other genera in the tribe Eucalyp ...

open source software for

cloud computing Cloud computing is "a paradigm for enabling network access to a scalable and elastic pool of shareable physical or virtual resources with self-service provisioning and administration on-demand," according to International Organization for ...

computer cluster A computer cluster is a set of computers that work together so that they can be viewed as a single system. Unlike grid computers, computer clusters have each node set to perform the same task, controlled and scheduled by software. The newes ...

s. When

Hewlett-Packard The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company. It was founded by Bill Hewlett and David Packard in 1939 in a one-car garage in Palo Alto, California ...

acquired Eucalyptus in September 2014, they appointed Mickos SVP and GM of HP's Cloud Business Unit. Mickos left HP in October 2015. Mickos served on the

Board of directors A board of directors is a governing body that supervises the activities of a business, a nonprofit organization, or a government agency. The powers, duties, and responsibilities of a board of directors are determined by government regulatio ...

of Nokia Corporation from 2012 to 2015. He also served on the boards of Electrosonic, RightScale, Mozilla Messaging and the Node.js Foundation. In November 2015, Mickos became CEO of the bug bounty platform company HackerOne.

Personal life

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

Awards and recognition

Mickos has received the following awards and recognition: * Honorary doctor of technology at

in 2022 * #65 on Business Insider's 2016 Silicon Valley 100 list * Nordic Entrepreneur of the Year prize by Silicon Vikings in 2012 * Audemars Piguet "Changing Times Award: European Entrepreneur of the Year 2006" * 2006

Nokia Nokia Corporation is a Finnish multinational corporation, multinational telecommunications industry, telecommunications, technology company, information technology, and consumer electronics corporation, originally established as a pulp mill in 1 ...

Foundation Award

Early life and education

Career

Personal life

Awards and recognition

References

Further reading