MÃ¥rten Gustaf Mickos, former CEO of MySQL, is Benchmark Capital’s newest Entrepreneur In Residence (EIR).
Mickos served as chief executive officer for the open source database company from January 2001 to February 2008, when Sun Microsystems acquired MySQL for $1 billion. Benchmark was a relatively early investor in the company; they participated in the $20 million Series B round together with Index Ventures back in 2003.
Mickos holds a M.Sc. in technical physics from Helsinki University of Technology and is also a board member of Mozilla Messaging and RightScale.
In the tweets announcing the move, Mickos says he likes Benchmark because they care about the needs of entrepreneurs and because they can ‘think big’. He will be joining Keith Krach, Mike Cassidy, Bret Taylor, Jim Norris, Dan Finnegan, Sarah Leary and Nirav Tolia as EIR at the Silicon Valley VC firm, which is behind a number of high-profile investments in web startups like Twitter, Gigya, Prosper, OpenTable, Mint.com and FriendFeed.
Anyone care to venture a guess as to when Mickos’ next Benchmark-backed startup will see the light of day?
awesome
Here’s a wild guess on Marten Mickos’ first benchmark backed startup; He will back Jim Starkey’s company NimbusDB who is working on a scalable database much like google’s map-reduce principle. Jim Startkey created the first relational database Interbase/Firebird and worked on the new transactional database engine Falcon for MySQL.
In my opinion Jim showed great insights into where relational databases should be moving tomorrow and proofed to be able to come up with disrupting technology which makes competitors look silly.
Jim and Marten know each other from MySQL/Sun. Besides NimbusDB is also presented as a database for the cloud which might fit into the RightScale picture.
Just a wild guess.