Marten Mickos builds global disruptive businesses. He is currently entrepreneur in residence with Benchmark Capital. As CEO of MySQL AB for seven years, Mickos grew that company from a garage start-up to the second largest open source company in the world. After the acquisition by Sun Microsystems of MySQL AB for $1bn, he served as Senior Vice President of Sun's Database Group until the end of March 2009.

Previously, Mickos held multi-national CEO and senior executive positions in his native Finland. He is a member of the board of RightScale and Mozilla Messaging. Mickos holds a M.Sc. in technical physics from Helsinki University of Technology. In 2006 he received the Audemars Piguet "Changing Times Award: European Entrepreneur of the Year 2006" and the Nokia Foundation Award.