Mårten Mickos has been at the center of multiple technology shifts, from open source and cloud to cybersecurity, and help build disruptive, category-defining companies in Silicon Valley. Most notably, he built one of Europe's earliest unicorn startups, MySQL AB, the database that powered Google and Facebook, before selling it for $1 billion.

Today, as a Venture Partner at Kvanted, he works closely with early-stage founders tackling some of the hardest problems in industrial AI and deep tech. In this conversation, we explore what leadership looks like in moments of deep technological change: how it evolves, what it demands from founders, and how to make decisions when the path forward is anything but clear.

“On your journey to become a better leader, you will never reach the goal. It is a lifelong pursuit of better leadership.”

You’ve led through multiple technology shifts that reshaped entire industries. What feels different, or uniquely difficult, about the current wave of industrial AI and deep tech?

Industrial shifts follow repeating patterns, yet every shift has its own uniqueness. The AI wave stands out in several ways. It is probably the biggest shift in digital technologies so far, and it is happening very quickly. Unlike previous shifts that stayed within the digital realm, this one touches every industry sector and every part of society.

For the first time, we are seeing new digital technology that will disrupt the top jobs of an organization. Shareholders, board directors, CEOs and senior executives are having to change the way they work, or they will be left behind.

Within industrial AI and deep tech specifically, we are seeing a speeding up of everything, especially research, experimentation, and testing. We can now create digital twins of entire real-life environments to test and simulate ideas and prototypes. This allows us to move much faster and test more variations, because each simulation cost us much less.

You’ve taken MySQL to a $1B exit, navigated near-death moments, and helped build entirely new categories. How has your leadership changed through those experiences and what has stayed the same?

Leadership may be one of the most quintessential human activities. AI will do a lot, but leadership remains a human prerogative. You start by leading yourself, and then you become ready to lead others. The underlying leadership principles remain the same as thousands of years ago, but the techniques vary by situation. If you want to be a good leader, you better have many leadership styles ready to deploy.

You treat all co-workers with equal respect, but you lead each person in an individual way. Your personality stays the same, but your style, mode, and role as a leader must vary by situation. Normally you do peace-time leadership, sometimes you must become a wartime leader. You will always push for faster action, but every now and then you must slow down and let a decision emerge organically. This is situational leadership. And while you are always raising the bar, you must also organize time for celebrations of what has been achieved. 

On your journey to become a better leader, you will never reach the goal. It is a lifelong pursuit of better leadership.

As a Venture Partner at Kvanted, you work closely with startup CEOs. What does that look like in practice and where do founders most often get stuck?

Every human being needs an outside conversation partner. No matter how strong your conviction and how clear your plan, you need an outside view, or you will at some point go badly wrong.

When I engage with founders, first I try to be helpful in their most pressing and concrete issue. It's nothing strategic, just something burdening their mind at that moment. Often, it’s a question of whom to hire, how to prepare for an important meeting, or how to allocate resources to product and GTM.

As we keep working through these practical issues, an understanding develops of what the most essential questions are. At this point, I turn from reactive to proactive. The goal is to get the CEO to self-reflect and engage in metacognition, seeing the situation from the outside, in a broad and unbiased way. When you can step outside of your own shoes to think, it is easier to see the wide variety of paths forward and to pick one.

Many industrial tech founders start as world-class engineers, tackling some of the hardest problems out there. What does it take to grow from expert builder to leader of a company that matches the scale of the problem?

Being a startup CEO is a journey of constant learning and expansion of one's mind. A big shift is when a technical founder learns to sell and to lead an organization. At the most fundamental level, these shifts require humility, curiosity and ambition.

The person must be ready to leave the comfortable space of being just a technical founder moving from things you know into a domain where you may know nothing. Just go! You will learn on the way.

A great book on this topic that I recommend everyone who is starting a company is Finders Keepers by Rich Hagberg (2025).

You’ve been at the center of major industry shifts; open source, cloud, cybersecurity. Industrial technology is now going through a similar transition. What does this moment demand from founders that previous generations didn’t face?

I am not sure I know. I think I know, but I am not assuming I can see the shift to AI as clearly as a new person might see it. My view is affected by past experiences of other major tech shifts. Perhaps I am better at pattern matching, but perhaps I am worse at detecting weak signals. I hear many people of my seniority talk with overconfidence about AI, and I am trying not to fall into that trap myself.

What I am observing is that everything is moving faster than before. Meetings must be shorter and decisions quicker. As a result, more things will go wrong. It will be vital to know how to recover from failure, and essential not to lose sleep over the fact that we can't grasp everything. We are just moving forward, trusting that there will be opportunities tomorrow to fix the mistakes of today.

In early-stage companies, the biggest decisions often have incomplete data and high stakes. How do you coach founders to make the right calls under that kind of uncertainty?

I don't think they need to make the right calls. They just need to be able to analyze quickly whether their decision was right or wrong, and they must know how to course-correct. I would put my effort into that rather than trying to find the right answer from the start.

“I don't think they need to make the right calls. They just need to be able to analyze quickly whether their decision was right or wrong, and they must know how to course-correct.”

Looking back at your first CEO role what’s one thing you had to learn the hard way that every founder should understand earlier?

All true startup learnings come the hard way. It feels terrible the first time you fire an employee, whether you were prepared or not. It hurts when promising prospects don't become customers or early customers abandon you. It is painful when you try to recruit great people, but they don't believe in your business. All these learnings are painful, but so what. A startup founder is not afraid of pain or struggle.

What makes startup builders succeed is tenacity - the power to keep moving forward despite losses and adversity. Winston Churchill said it well: “Success consists of going from failure to failure with undiminished enthusiasm”.