Mickos is the third born of four siblings and was raised in the town of Kauniainen, outside Helsinki, Finland. The family later moved to Pietarsaari, where Mickos attended high school. His parents were both engineers by training. Mickos studied Technical Physics at Helsinki University of Technology and graduated with a M.Sc. degree.
Career
Mårten 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. Mickos oversaw the settlement with NuSphere Corp over a dispute regarding the use of MySQL AB's trademarks, copyrights and compliance with the GNU General Public License. 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 venture capital firmsBenchmark Capital and Index Ventures. In 2009, Marten participated as an expert witness for the European Commission when they were looking at the Oracle-MySQL merger through antitrust perspectives. In March 2010, Mårten was appointed CEO of Eucalyptus Systems, the company behind the Eucalyptus open source software for cloud computing on computer clusters. When Hewlett-Packard 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 of Nokia Corporation from 2012 to 2015. Mickos also served on the Boards of Electrosonic, RightScale, Mozilla Messaging and the Node.js Foundation. In November 2015, Mickos became CEO of bug bounty platform company HackerOne.
Personal life
Mickos and his wife married in 1988 and 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:
#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"