Mårten Mickos

CEO in the service of AI startup CEOs.
Former CEO of HackerOne, Eucalyptus Systems, MySQL.

[Tim O'Reilly @timoreilly]

This says a lot about "the frontier wins everything" narrative. We have planes that fly 3x the speed of sound but airlines don't use them. We have cars that go hundreds of miles an hour, but we just use them for racing, not for ordinary driving.

[Mårten Mickos @martenmickos]

Is there an AI jobs apocalypse or not? Is it postponed? Or are we perhaps asking the wrong questions?

https://t.co/uXuRoWkstk

[Mårten Mickos @martenmickos]

@patrickc Good stuff. An interesting subset would be EU without the big central four (Italy, Spain, France and Germany). When in Europe, stay on the flanks.

[Mårten Mickos @martenmickos]

As the CEO, everything is your fault. That does not mean you are insufficient. You are just carrying the responsibility. The keys to improvement are in your hands. Whether the company is deteriorating or doing well, your job as CEO is to make it do better.

[Mårten Mickos @martenmickos]

Lovable's AI agent infra handles half a billion events per day. The new Chats feature helps everyone and everything work together.

[Fabian Hedin @FabianHedin]

Lovable’s agent infrastructure records ~500M events on a typical weekday.

Today we’re launching Chats, built on that foundation.

Getting agents to work together means more than handing off a task. What happens when the receiving agent is already busy? Which history should it see? How do results get back to the conversation that started the work?

Our approach separates an agent’s history, its incoming messages, and the machinery that runs it.

Chats uses that foundation to send work to the agents building your apps and bring their progress back into one conversation.

We’ve shared the architecture and tradeoffs for anyone building agents that need to work together.

Full breakdown: https://t.co/dBEaRHBptF

[Mårten Mickos @martenmickos]

@eastdakota Agree. And then we will learn that bug-free does not imply vulnerability-free.

[Mårten Mickos @martenmickos]

Jobs needed twelve years in exile to learn discipline and to listen to the customer.
https://t.co/DJR5viG2R6

[Brian Halligan @bhalligan]

Ali Ghodsi never wanted to be CEO. In 2015, he was interviewing for a professor job at Berkeley when the @Databricks board handed him the interim title. Revenue that year was $1.5M.

This episode with @alighodsi will go down as one of my favorites. 10 things I took away:

1. Focus the entire company, orders of magnitude of attention, on its single biggest bottleneck. Like a laser, almost to an extreme. The cycle is 1-3 years, not weeks. If your focus changes weekly, then you’re just in firefighting mode.

2. There is nothing worse than a conflict-averse CEO. They are wonderful people, but they are in the wrong job. Conflict is the gym for a CEO: nobody likes it, but everyone has to go.

3. Study your enemy carefully, understand their weaknesses and apply your strengths to those weaknesses. Snowflake had 2x his revenue. He didn’t copy them. He found three weaknesses (proprietary, no AI, expensive) and hammered them account by account for four years. Watch the competition, never follow it.

4. The concept of a Lakehouse was ridiculed internally and online. No one wanted to market with this new term. So he made the whole company religious about it anyway, killed the ads that converted better without the word, and put it in the sales comp plan. It worked. All hands on deck, no exceptions.

5. Be willing to take a step back for a much bigger vision, even when the company is already succeeding. At multiple hundreds of millions in ARR, he was unhappy, because the vision he pitched investors wasn’t the company he was running. So he took one step back to go ten forward.

6. On the flat org, player-coach model that a lot of people have talked about this year: “it’s BS.” Separate how the company thinks (AI, ontology) from how the humans get managed (they are after all, still humans). His staff meets 3x a week. I asked if it could just be coordinated in a Google doc. His answer: do you meet your wife and kids, or coordinate that in a Google doc?

7. His test for a sales leader: can they build the car, or just drive it? Ron Gabrisko, the Databricks CRO, had seen $0→50M and $50→100M+, and hadn’t changed jobs in 10 years prior to joining. Now he has been the CRO for over a decade. He built and drove the car the whole way. That almost never happens.

8. Hire execs ahead of the curve because by the time you need them, it’s too late. A real search takes 6-12 months. The extra time helps you increase false negatives and decrease false positives. Do an insane number of backdoor references because 80% of ‘front door’ references are bs.

9. The best salespeople are not super technical, so stop trying to force them to be. Square peg, round hole. The best win with professional aggression, high EQ, and mapping the real power base (how decisions get made high up in an organization), not technical depth.

10. Yes, your best AEs will annoy people. One of the first at Databricks got a meeting nobody could get, but got banned from the customer’s building for it. He told Ali, “what are you complaining about? I got the meeting.” Professionally aggressive is the bar.

One bottleneck, zero wussing out. He reminds me of @elonmusk that way.

Chapters

0:00 – Introduction
1:22 – The secret CEO search and why the board bet on a founder
4:11 – Professor or CEO? Always taking the harder option
8:18 – Pour everything into one bottleneck
12:16 – Killing PLG and learning what great enterprise sellers actually have
19:09 – Hiring ahead of the curve: sales leaders, execs, and back-door references
27:02 – The Snowflake rivalry: study your enemy, never copy them
33:22 – Lakehouse: conviction, ridicule, and the case for second acts
41:02 – The killer instinct and why conflict-averse CEOs fail
44:10 – Dunbar's number and rethinking the org chart around AI
48:00 – AGI is already here — enterprises just use it as a chatbot
52:55 – Does he still code? Two days for a connector vs. three quarters
57:18 – A day in the life, and why the Monday meeting isn't theater
1:04:53 – Why Databricks will go public, just not yet
1:08:09 – Get over conflict aversion, or don't be CEO
1:11:07 – Brian's takeaways

Link to more in the comments.

[Mårten Mickos @martenmickos]

If it's not trending well, don't pretend. Don't think it will self-correct. Just deal with it. - Milda Mitkuté, Vinted

[Mårten Mickos @martenmickos]

Milda Mitkuté, founder of Vinted, on stage at Aalto University, interviewed by two startup-curious students. Awesome conversation! 🔥

[Mårten Mickos @martenmickos]

Reid Hoffman is America's voice of reason. He is a voice of optimism too.

In this piece, he discusses data centers and AI.
https://t.co/xJ7Rare0nC

[Mårten Mickos @martenmickos]

Watch this inspirational video about fighting financial crime. And raising a round of funding.

https://t.co/NKlCeG4S6L

[Mårten Mickos @martenmickos]

What time of year should you fundraise?
Read all:
https://t.co/IkuLMljalW

[NFX @NFX]

https://t.co/96qnuO9lzZ

[Mårten Mickos @martenmickos]

@JamesCurrier @NFX Love the topic. James, you are the master of speed, and I am just a beginner. But I wrote down my own thoughts on the topic. Comments welcome! And tell me what I got wrong.
https://t.co/BBDcoopoGj

[Vinod Khosla @vkhosla]

Many great technologies have good and bad uses like nuclear and biotechnology. AI is no different in having great uses for the bottom three billion people on the planet and bad uses. Main difference no treaties are possible because unlike other technologies AI is not verifiable when used. Up to people like @DavidSacks to keep this danger front and center. Chinese originated Covid, despite treaties, caused 7million direct deaths and over 30 million including indirect deaths. And that is a verifiable tech we could detect when used.

[Mårten Mickos @martenmickos]

@jackclarkSF Would be great if your model calculated / estimated how the gini coefficient will change.

[Mårten Mickos @martenmickos]

In supply chain planning, the real opportunity is not another forecast. It is a connected view of the future.

https://t.co/q9jhspHptE

[Mårten Mickos @martenmickos]

Startup curious people at @HiveHelsinki. Ten years from now, they will be here sharing their unbelievable startup stories with the new generations.

[Mårten Mickos @martenmickos]

Five questions that reveal how groundbreaking your company's AI usage is.

[Ann Miura-Ko 🦖 @annimaniac]

AI adoption is cheap. Organizational capability is not.

The frontier isn’t “more agents.” It’s a software factory where anyone can build, the best ideas propagate, experience compounds, and the machine starts noticing what nobody thought to ask. https://t.co/aJD2Ylcc39

[Mårten Mickos @martenmickos]

When government debt is high, how does it get low again? Through tax increases and cuts in public spending.

https://t.co/ZtrVpcAgua