EP362 · Economy · first published 2025-11-26
Silicon Valley's formula for growth | Mårten Mickos | Negotiator 362
Mårten Mickos walks through the lessons of his book Kasvun kaava (The Formula for Growth): why Silicon Valley runs at a different clock rate from Europe, why in digital business it pays to do something imperfect quickly rather than something perfect slowly, and why time is worth more than money when growth is exponential. The MySQL story is told from the hired CEO's perspective - Mickos refuses the founder title and explains why ego plus power is a bad combination - along with the Working 9 to 3 line that won Kleiner Perkins over. The sharpest disagreement comes at the end: the host wants the public sector's share down, Mickos wants more maternity units, not fewer. Also covered: AI as a democratising force, the gaming world as the model for remote work, and a concrete list of what Finland should do about growth.
Silicon Valley’s formula for growth | Mårten Mickos | Negotiator 362
Summary: Mårten Mickos walks through the lessons of his book Kasvun kaava (The Formula for Growth): why Silicon Valley runs at a different clock rate from Europe, why in digital business it pays to do something imperfect quickly rather than something perfect slowly, and why time is worth more than money when growth is exponential. The MySQL story is told from the hired CEO’s perspective, along with the Working 9 to 3 line that won Kleiner Perkins over. The sharpest disagreement comes at the end: the host wants the public sector’s share down, Mickos wants more maternity units, not fewer.
How to read this
This is a book interview, and the interviewer admires the book. The host says at the outset that he rates Kasvun kaava above two other Finnish growth-company books he has read [00:00:00]. That is honestly stated, but it sets the tone: this is a sympathetic conversation, not a stress test of the book. The article therefore marks separately the places where guest and host end up in different positions — they are the most valuable part of the episode.
There is an ad break in the episode. About two minutes in there is a commercial spot in which the host points listeners to a Futucast episode about the platform economy; the episode’s own chapter list marks it as a commercial collaboration with Wolt [01:32–02:19]. It has nothing to do with Mickos’s book and is not summarised here.
The host’s own affiliation comes up mid-episode. He mentions working at Translink Corporate Finance and having founded a Vibe Coding Society there together with Lasse Mikkonen [37:08]. That is worth knowing when reading the AI section.
Quotations are spoken language, tidied of filler. The episode’s chapter list is genuine this time — 59 entries, irregularly spaced and tracking the conversation — so the timestamps match the recording.
Clock rate: the one concept that makes the book worth reading
The episode’s core concept is clock rate, and Mickos condenses it into the best line in the episode:
“In Europe a million is a lot of money, but in Silicon Valley an hour is a lot of time.” [02:19]
The explanation is not cultural but mathematical. In traditional industry and society, behaviour is linear: something grows a couple of percent a year, steadily. In digital sectors, changes compound:
“If something starts to rise, it rises really hard. If it starts to fall, it falls hard. Pandemics follow exactly the same pattern.” [03:05]
And from that follows what makes time more valuable than money:
“In a normal business a day’s delay shows up nowhere, because everything is linear. In the digital world even a day’s delay can be too much, because that’s when competitors get past you.” [03:54]
The host attaches his own profession’s analogy: compounding in investing is the same phenomenon, which is why postponing the start costs more than bad timing does [04:40]. Both reach for the classic illustrations — the lily pond that fills in 50 days and is half full on day 49, and the grains of rice on the chessboard [05:27, 06:16].
The practical conclusion is culturally uncomfortable, and Mickos says so outright:
“It’s better to do something faster and get it wrong than to do it slower and get it perfect. And that goes against everything we learned from our mothers: it’s not the quantity, it’s the quality.” [06:16]
Silicon Valley’s own slogans — move fast and break things, fail fast — are in his account condensations of the same thing, and the host adds Peter Thiel’s Zero to One lesson about dominant market position [07:04].
The book’s other durable insight is trivially simple, and the host raises it for exactly that reason: if time is exponential money, cold-starting yourself is just taking the first step and then the second [08:36]. The counter-force is analysis paralysis — and, in Mickos’s account, a whole culture in which “less is enough and we take it easy” [09:22].
Speed is not the opposite of happiness
This is where Mickos separates himself from the Silicon Valley caricature, and it is worth reading carefully before the book’s lessons get read as a hymn to hurry:
“I don’t believe in the happiness-versus-briskness framing. We have time to be happy once we handle work matters briskly. When we work, we work really fast. When we don’t, we can take it easy. We go to dinner and sit there for three or four hours. Life should have a great many slow things in it — business should not.” [09:22]
The same distinction extends to thinking. Mickos says that while making the book he recorded two-hour conversations with, among others, Risto Siilasmaa, and thought they ought to be published as they were — the long-form format does not force compression into a “TikTok flash” [10:09]. And he gives a concrete example of why not everything can be accelerated:
“I had a phone call three days ago, and yesterday it occurred to me: only now do I understand what he meant. I could not have accelerated that. No AI would have told me straight away.” [10:54]
Together these make the book’s actual claim: speed belongs to doing, slowness to understanding — and the two should not be confused.
Twenty thousand contacts and the 30-second encounter
Silicon Valley’s social machinery is the episode’s most concrete observation, and Mickos’s number is memorable:
“I’ve been in Silicon Valley for 22 years, and in that time I met about 20,000 people to the extent that we exchanged business cards and I knew the name.” [12:27]
From that follows a practice that feels rude to a European but is, in his account, a precondition for efficiency:
“Americans don’t take offence at somebody being in a hurry. In Europe we have a bit of a habit of getting annoyed if somebody doesn’t spend a lot of time with us. An American thinks: okay, 30 seconds is enough — and you can come back to it later.” [13:15]
The other half is physical density: many people in a small area, events, collisions, experienced serial entrepreneurs starting again [13:15]. “Density of know-how is a very important thing,” Mickos says.
“Finland’s original sin”: being in a side role
The episode’s harshest criticism of Finland concerns neither taxes nor regulation but attitude, and it is worth quoting in full, because it is the most contestable passage in the article:
“In Silicon Valley almost everybody is a doer, but in Finland and Europe there are a lot of hair-splitters, commentators, questioners, ponderers, contemplators, writers, readers — a lot of people who don’t do things but comment on them or criticise them. They’re in a side role, and when there are too many of those, critical mass never forms.” [14:02]
He clarifies that the problem is not having opinions but not doing anything oneself: “In Silicon Valley they may have plenty of opinions, they may debate and discuss, but almost all of them also genuinely build or produce something.” [15:35] And he names the symptom: “I find a lot of places in Europe and especially in Finland that are only discussion clubs, where the goal is only discussion” [15:35].
The host recognises the same in himself and recounts a high-school classmate telling him bluntly that “the purpose of an argument is not to disagree” — and admits he first found it bitter [14:47].
This is a claim about national character and it is not measurable. The article presents it as Mickos’s position; readers may disagree — which is, of course, precisely the activity he is criticising.
MySQL: what a hired CEO actually does
The MySQL section is the episode’s best piece of business history, and its value lies in Mickos coming into a situation already in motion and refusing to embellish his role.
His own timeline for context: the founders had worked together for 12 years and developed MySQL for six before it was made into a real commercial company in 2001 — which is when he came in as CEO [16:23]. The code was originally closed and moved to the GPL in 2000 [17:09].
The reason for the product’s success was, in his account, a single design principle:
“They had a design principle that MySQL must save the user’s time. Everything had to be easy, fast, effortless. Earlier databases were complicated and slow, installation took days — and then came MySQL, where it took 15 minutes and everything worked.” [17:09]
The host attaches a broader claim: open-source databases are what made social media scalable, and he cites the Telegram founder’s account of there being no distributed databases available [17:57].
A CEO’s first tasks were not strategy. This is the single most useful passage for anyone stepping in to run an early-stage company:
“I had to make sure we had a company incorporated — because there wasn’t one — and that all the contractual matters were in order: copyrights, employment. Now we need financing. Then you have to think about growth, we need a growth strategy, and I have to work out what kind of key people we need.” [19:27]
And he adds a detail that says more about the stage than any plan could: there was no company and no financing yet, so he handled things “on my own credit card” [20:14].
Founder or hired gun — and why the distinction matters
The host offers Mickos the founder role — even via the Elon Musk / Tesla example, where someone who joined later is called a founder — and Mickos declines unusually clearly:
“People often say: when you founded MySQL. I didn’t found it, and I don’t even want to be a founder. What matters more to me is being correct about what my role was. I’m proud to be the kind of hired gun who arrives and builds.” [20:59]
From there he moves to Musk, and the passage is balanced in a way worth noting — he starts by acknowledging the achievements:
“Musk is a phenomenal entrepreneur and has built enormously impressive companies. But he does have ego in a way that I don’t. And that really is not an advantage, because when too much power meets ego, that’s a very bad combination.” [20:59]
The host offers a counter: turning Twitter into X produced exactly what Musk wanted. Mickos accepts that as an owner’s right but separates the question of the goal: “I would not have wanted to produce what was produced there” [21:44]. The disagreement is left open, and it is better that way.
Asked why he did not negotiate himself a founder’s stake, the answer reveals his own rule for choosing:
“I seek out circles where the people are intelligent and kind — both at once. And then I go on exciting adventures where something genuinely pioneering and disruptive is being done. The terms are what they are. It’s not a deal-breaker for me.” [23:15]
Leadership, from the scouts to the management team
Mickos’s leadership doctrine comes, by his own account, from the scouts and the navy, and it condenses into one principle: the leader’s job is to make the group better than it would otherwise be — including when he did not choose the group [24:46].
“My kind of leadership is to think about what we have here and how we get the best possible result out of this group. There’s no more money, no new people — we go with these. And it’s a good principle even when you do have resources.” [25:32]
The ambition is still maximal: “we have to perform better than everyone else in this sector, we have to be the very best management team” [26:20]. And the method is shared: he says he puts the question to the management team itself — “how do we make ourselves a really strong team?” — and that both proposals and people willing to take responsibility emerge from it [26:20].
Publicity: Collins’s humble leader versus the disruptor’s megaphone
The host spots the episode’s most interesting contradiction: the Level 5 leader in Jim Collins’s Good to Great is humble and self-effacing, whereas Mickos has been a loud apostle for open source [27:05]. Mickos’s answer is not a defence but a division of roles:
“I’m suited to the stage. I like performing and getting people to come along with me. Disruptive companies do need to explain themselves and bring others along into the disruption. You shouldn’t recruit me into a company where that isn’t needed, because I enjoy it so much that I’d do it anyway.” [30:57]
Working 9 to 3. The funniest and most instructive story in the episode is how a single quip won the financing. Mickos met Kleiner Perkins partner Ray Lane, who asked him why he was doing this:
“I said: Ray, I’m working nine to three. It sounds so lazy that it’s shocking. He asked what I’d just said. And then I explained that the database market was 9 billion dollars at the time, and that I work to turn the nine into a three — it shrinks to a third, and I’m the only survivor.” [28:40]
Lane was thrilled, because he had held senior positions at Oracle and had left with unfinished business; the idea of disrupting Oracle was “the best thing he had heard”, and he was determined to invest [29:25].
Out of this comes the episode’s clearest criticism of Finnish leadership. The host asks whether Finland needs more leaders who are loud in public, and Mickos answers first drily — “let the others be quiet, then I get to talk more; it’s not my problem” — and then seriously:
“Finnish society is too normative. The aim is that everyone follows the same rules in the same way, and that produces a uniformity out of which no good ideas or new growth emerge.” [33:16]
He names the exceptions: university campuses — Otaniemi, Hervanta, Lappeenranta, Turku, Vaasa, Hanken, the University of Helsinki — where “people speak openly, debate and dare to say things” [33:16]. Aalto University’s values of courage, collaboration and responsibility get his praise, and he names one difference from Silicon Valley: at Aalto things are genuinely done as a team, so a venture does not depend on one ego and is therefore more durable — “it may not always produce the very fastest growth, but it produces sustainable activity” [34:48].
AI democratises — but only for those who can specify
Mickos’s view of AI is optimistic and precise at the same time:
“Software development used to be the business of specialists. Now that AI brings tools like Lovable and Cursor, almost anyone can build. But that doesn’t mean everyone will manage it, because you have to be very precise about how you define the task.” [36:20]
His analogy is good and usable: AI is like a really smart summer trainee, useful only if you give clear instructions [37:08]. A second consequence is geographic: “AI does bring the same powers to the countryside too, if only somebody knows how to use them” [38:45] — so an Otaniemi-like advantage no longer requires Otaniemi.
The host describes his own practice here: he is taking Harvard’s CS50 course and has founded a Vibe Coding Society at Translink Corporate Finance with Lasse Mikkonen [35:35, 37:08]. The subject is covered at length in Best practices in AI-assisted work.
Remote work: the model comes from gaming
The host steers the conversation to remote work, and Mickos gives two arguments for it, the second of which is unusual.
First: the gaming world solved this already. “In gaming, people have learned how to do intensive in-the-moment collaboration while sitting in different places. They show each other their screens, discuss tiny details, headsets on the whole time.” [40:17]
Second: you cannot fake remote work. This inverts the usual supervision argument:
“It’s easier to cheat in a real office: you sit there, your desk is a bit messy but not too messy, and you ask clever-sounding questions. People think you’re productive when you’re not. In remote work nothing shows except what you produce. If you produce nothing, it shows immediately.” [41:48]
As a counterweight he raises remote work’s real problem, which is not supervision but humanity:
“In remote work only the professional output shows, and then everyone looks like robots. That’s why it matters to bring the human dimension in. At MySQL we learned to bring in pets, to let children be visible, to talk about hobbies. If you’re only a robot, a robot will soon replace you. But if you’re a human being, a robot can’t replace you.” [44:51]
The host offers the opposite example from Kela, Finland’s social insurance institution, whose management has drawn criticism for requiring a return to the office even once a week [41:03]. Mickos will not judge the individual case but returns the question to leadership: “any organisation can have good leadership, so that employees trust the management and management trusts the employees” [42:33].
A shared observation concerns parallel channels: at MySQL, IRC was used during all-hands Town Hall sessions so that only a few people spoke aloud while the rest of the conversation ran as text [46:23]. Mickos now applies the same principle in Google Docs: in Aalto Founders School’s weekly meetings everyone writes into the same document simultaneously, so that “when the meeting ends, all the action items are already there and no time goes into after-the-fact sorting” [49:28].
A formula for Finland’s growth
Asked what Finland should do, Mickos answers in two parts, and the first is an instruction about what not to do:
“If you’re a startup founder, you have to go and just found that company. You mustn’t think that Finland is at stake and it’s on your shoulders. If you go in as a firefighter to rescue things, you’ll never build a great company — you’ll only rescue.” [51:00]
The second part is for society, and it starts with scale: the startup world is, by his estimate, about 2 percent of Finnish business activity, but it has the fastest growth rate, and the share could rise to five or ten percent [51:48].
The means are deliberately mundane:
“There’s no silver bullet that brings us riches. It consists of many small things that somebody simply decides to fix. How do we remove the friction points? How do we speed up permits, remove complications, remove permit fees?” [54:08]
Taxation is on the list but not at the top: “of course taxation has to come down in certain places, but you have to think more broadly” [53:22]. And he proposes a proportionality principle for regulation: in small-scale activity things need not be exactly and precisely right, with requirements tightening as the business grows [54:54].
On the education side he points to initiatives like Aalto Founders School, where potential entrepreneurs are identified and given the capabilities and the challenges to develop [53:22].
The episode’s sharpest disagreement: how small a public sector
This is the best passage in the episode, and it is best because the guest refuses the host’s framing.
The host’s position. He presents three numbers: the combined turnover of Finnish companies is about €513 billion, GDP is “about 200 billion”, and the public sector has risen to 60 percent relative to that — and since the public sector draws its cash flow from the first two, its share should come down [55:42].
A correction to what was said. The GDP figure is wrong: Finland’s GDP was already over €273 billion in 2023, roughly a third higher than the €200 billion cited in the episode. (Statistics Finland) Finland’s ratio of public expenditure to GDP genuinely is high by international standards, so the host’s underlying argument does not collapse on an arithmetic slip — but the ratio he states does not follow from the numbers he gives.
Mickos’s answer is the episode’s most surprising, because it comes from an advocate of growth entrepreneurship:
“There are genuinely difficult problems in that. I do think that if the public sector is 60 percent, it has to come down. But on the other hand I think healthcare has to have enough resources that we get services close to people. It appals me that there are now fewer maternity units than there used to be. What kind of wellbeing is that?” [57:15]
The host answers with demography: cohort sizes have fallen from a hundred thousand to 40,000, so maternity units could be cut by 60 percent too [58:02]. Mickos refuses:
“I don’t agree. You mustn’t build these vast edifices in some large city if there’s then nothing anywhere else. We do want people to live all over Finland. And if we can’t afford that, then we don’t have a welfare state — then we have to admit this is some kind of centralised welfare state. That’s not enough for me.” [58:47]
And he grounds it in his own motive, which makes the passage more than a political position:
“If I ask myself why I work so much and have kept going so long, it’s that I want to see the results in society: a society that offers its citizens fantastic services for the people who are starting families and having children. That is the ideal society for whose sake we business people keep building companies.” [58:47]
The host does not concede but shifts the ground to administrative structure — 292 municipalities, 21 wellbeing services counties and one monolithic state [57:15] — and Mickos grants that transferring employment services to municipalities was a good thing [58:02]. The disagreement nevertheless stays open, and the article leaves it open.
Hospitality and the returning-expatriate tax experiment
The end of the episode is a list of what Finland lacks, and Mickos’s headline is unexpected: not money and not skills but the welcome.
“We don’t know how to be hospitable to newcomers. It’s really hard and cold for immigrants — and I don’t mean cold weather, I mean a cold reception. Those are the things we should put right, so that industrious people gather here.” [01:01:09]
The host offers a practical initiative: English-language visibility for expatriates living in Finland, and mentions as an example the Irishman Ian Mac Eochagáin, who has learned Finnish [01:01:55].
The most concrete policy detail is a tax change that Mickos calls an interesting experiment: the so-called key employee withholding tax drops from 32 percent to 25, and the benefit is extended to Finns who have lived abroad for at least eight years [01:03:25]. The host notes the decision has already been made and takes effect the following year, and that details remain open — for instance whether the employer had to be foreign [01:04:10]. The effects of the same change are worked through in The most damaging taxes down.
Mickos’s vision for Finland follows from this and is deliberately concrete: a safe place, clean air, good services, easy to found a company and build a global business from, cheap energy and good connections — “the finest small state in the world” and “the best place in the world to found companies” are both, in his view, serviceable goals [01:00:23].
What to take away
One concept from the book. Clock rate is the one to keep: in exponential business a day’s delay is not a day’s delay but a compounding loss. Everything else in the episode follows from it.
One practical rule. Do imperfect things fast while you are working, and live slowly when you are not. Mickos is not selling a culture of hurry but a life at two speeds.
One lesson about roles. A hired CEO who refuses the founder title is a rarity — and his reasoning (be correct about your role; ego plus power is a bad combination) is more usable than most leadership books.
One disagreement worth keeping. An advocate of growth entrepreneurship is not a cutter of the public sector: Mickos wants services close to people and treats that as the measure of the very society for which companies are built. The episode leaves this open, which is a more honest outcome than agreement would have been.
What the episode lacks. Any critical testing of the book. The host is an admirer, and nobody asks, for instance, how well Silicon Valley’s clock rate transfers to sectors where mistakes cost more than speed earns — healthcare, energy or finance.
Sources
- Piilaakson kasvun kaava | Mårten Mickos | Neuvottelija 362
- Statistics Finland: gross domestic product
- Best practices in AI-assisted work | Nurminen, Mikkonen | Negotiator 408
- The most damaging taxes down | Sami Pakarinen | Negotiator 372
Summary for AI search
Negotiator 362 (published 26 November 2025, recorded the week before Slush) is Sami Miettinen’s interview with Mårten Mickos, former CEO of MySQL and author of Kasvun kaava (The Formula for Growth). The episode is a book interview.
Core concept: clock rate. Silicon Valley operates at a different speed from Europe because growth in digital business is exponential rather than linear. Mickos’s summary: “In Europe a million is a lot of money, but in Silicon Valley an hour is a lot of time.” The practical rule: better to do something faster and get it wrong than slower and perfect — but speed applies to doing, not to understanding; thinking takes time and AI does not accelerate it.
MySQL: the founders had developed the product for six years before it was made a commercial company in 2001, when Mickos became CEO; the code moved to the GPL in 2000. The product’s design principle was “save the user’s time” — a 15-minute installation where competitors took days. The CEO’s first tasks were incorporating the company, contracts, copyrights, financing and growth strategy; in the early phase he paid costs on his own credit card. Financing from Kleiner Perkins came out of the “I’m working 9 to 3” line: the database market shrinks from 9 billion dollars to 3 and MySQL survives. The partner was Ray Lane, who had held senior positions at Oracle.
Role and ego: Mickos refuses the founder title (“I’m proud to be the kind of hired gun who arrives and builds”) and considers the combination of power and ego a bad one — citing Elon Musk, whose achievements he nevertheless acknowledges.
On Finland: too many commentators in side roles and too few doers; a society that is too normative. The exceptions are university campuses, especially Otaniemi and Aalto (values: courage, collaboration, responsibility).
AI and remote work: tools like Lovable and Cursor democratise software development, but the benefit goes to those who can specify a task precisely; AI brings the same possibilities outside the campuses. The model for remote work is the gaming world; you cannot fake productivity remotely, but the human dimension has to be brought in deliberately.
Finland’s growth recipe: a founder should not try to rescue Finland but build a company; society should remove friction through thousands of small decisions, scale regulation to company size, and invest in the startup sector, which is about 2 percent of business activity but grows fastest. The key-employee withholding tax falls from 32 percent to 25 and is extended to Finns who have lived abroad for at least eight years.
The disagreement: the host wants the public sector’s share down; Mickos instead demands services close to people and treats the decline in maternity units as a measure of the welfare state — “if we can’t afford that, then we don’t have a welfare state”. The GDP figure given in the episode (about €200 billion) is wrong; Finland’s GDP was already over €273 billion in 2023.