---
title: "Databases and MariaDB | Patrik Backman | Open Ocean | Neuvottelija 177"
titleOriginal: "Tietokannat MariaDB | Patrik Backman | Open Ocean #neuvottelija 177"
episodeNumber: "177"
guest: "Patrik Backman"
datePublished: 2023-02-26
duration: "41:48"
youtube: "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aX9hTYa3Dxs"
originalLanguage: "fi"
topics: ["saas_software","investing_markets","ai_enterprise_tech"]
subtitleMethod: "none"
provenance: "Owner page assembled from YouTube metadata, the neuvottelija.fi episode record and a MacWhisper transcription of the Finnish audio. The chapter marks are the publisher's own, as released with the video, and each was verified against the transcript cues. No English caption track was produced, so no transcript is published here. The host's disclosure of a small personal holding in Leadoo is made in the episode itself and is carried onto this page."
fiCanonical: "https://www.neuvottelija.fi/fi/episodes/263-tietokannat-mariadb-patrik-backman-open-ocean-neuvottelija-1"
canonical: https://www.neuvottelija.com/podcast/episodes/ep177-tietokannat-mariadb-patrik-backman/
---
# Databases and MariaDB | Patrik Backman | Open Ocean | Neuvottelija 177

English subtitles are not available on this page. This is an episode summary, not a curated transcript.

## Chapters

- [00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aX9hTYa3Dxs&t=0s) Intro: MariaDB's multiples and Supermetrics' recent growth
- [00:54](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aX9hTYa3Dxs&t=54s) Patrik Backman, a great fan of Argentinian football
- [02:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aX9hTYa3Dxs&t=150s) Open Ocean's investment focus, Translink's SaaS and Slack
- [05:40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aX9hTYa3Dxs&t=340s) Truecaller's growth in India and elsewhere, and Fonecta
- [08:40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aX9hTYa3Dxs&t=520s) Databases: MySQL, MariaDB and Oracle
- [14:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aX9hTYa3Dxs&t=860s) MariaDB's fallen valuation on SaaS multiples
- [17:33](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aX9hTYa3Dxs&t=1053s) Metrics of a scalable SaaS company: ARR, Rule of 40, NRR, churn, 10x vs 100x
- [20:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aX9hTYa3Dxs&t=1252s) Supermetrics from Google Analytics-to-Sheets, and two chief executives
- [28:17](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aX9hTYa3Dxs&t=1697s) Leadoo, website marketing and sales analytics
- [32:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aX9hTYa3Dxs&t=1950s) Nosto and e-commerce software such as Shopify and Videoly
- [35:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aX9hTYa3Dxs&t=2106s) AppGyver to SAP
- [36:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aX9hTYa3Dxs&t=2160s) MindsDB, ChatGPT's brilliance and its errors; B2B SaaS vs B2C such as WordDive
- [40:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aX9hTYa3Dxs&t=2445s) Patrik Backman, Patrick Bateman and Erlich Bachman
- [41:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aX9hTYa3Dxs&t=2480s) Outro: Mikonkatu neighbours Open Ocean and Translink Corporate Finance

## Summary

**Patrik Backman** of Open Ocean came on to talk about open source databases, how SaaS
companies are valued, and early-stage investing. He was at MySQL from the early 2000s
until 2008, and the best explanation in the episode is his analogy for what a database
is at all: **a bookshelf.** Data is organised into books, the books go on the shelf,
and the shelf gives the data back quickly.

**MySQL.** In the late 1990s Michael "Monty" Widenius and his co-founders put the
database on the internet for free as open source, inspired by Linux, built to be as
fast, reliable and efficient as the internet needed. The timing landed: all the early
Amazons, Facebooks and YouTubes put their data into MySQL and pulled it back out to show
anything on their pages. Backman joined a 50-person company and left a 600-person one
with just under 100 million in revenue and an exit of roughly a billion.

**Why MariaDB exists.** MySQL was sold to Sun Microsystems in 2008; Sun did badly, and
Oracle bought Sun — in Backman's reading, precisely because MySQL was so popular.
Customers, users and former employees doubted that a hard-edged commercial operator
would keep an independent project free, and MariaDB was founded from the last stable
open version. The argument for the fork is structural rather than ideological: Oracle
has a commercial reason not to develop MySQL into a competitor for its own large
systems, so it is constrained in where it can take the platform. Backman is candid that
MySQL remains more popular; MariaDB is the alternative, around 20 million users and one
of the ten largest databases in the world.

**The SPAC.** Miettinen raises an HS Vision analysis that had left the impression the
listed company was close to worthless. Backman, no longer on the board and declining to
speak for a listed company, explains the mechanism instead. The SPAC was priced a year
before the listing, when markets were high. By the time the company reached the market,
multiples had fallen, and the investors who had committed money redeemed it — entirely
rationally. There was no dilution, because no shares were issued, but the funding did
not arrive either. A valuation of about 700 million, a multiple of 14 on roughly 50
million of revenue, stood at 250 million and five times at the time of recording.
Backman calls that a disappointment and far too low, arguing the price ignores the 20
million user base; Miettinen answers with scepticism about "eyeball valuations".

**What a buyer looks at.** The ARR multiple, which compresses a complex valuation into
one number and which Miettinen stresses is worth far more than ordinary revenue; Rule of
40, the sum of growth and profitability, below which a large part of the buyers walk
away; Net Revenue Retention and churn, where five per cent churn is already very good;
and gross margin, which small companies without a CFO routinely compute wrongly by
leaving database costs out. Backman adds the investor's view, which differs: a venture
investment should return a hundredfold. His sharpest observation is that the first
tenfold can be argued from the metrics, while the second — ten million to a hundred —
depends on whether the team has the capacity and the ambition to hire people better than
itself. That, he says, is the hardest judgement in venture capital.

**The portfolio.** Truecaller is the best of the cases because it is market-specific:
it scaled in the Middle East and India because there the recipient pays for the call, so
not knowing who is ringing costs money. The first version of Fonecta Caller was in fact
licensed from Truecaller, which held every market except Finland. Supermetrics was
profitable from day one and Open Ocean's investment still sits untouched in its account;
its origin was a Google representative promising a t-shirt to whoever could get Google
Analytics data into Google Sheets, which Google itself could not then do. Nosto grew
from five people and 100,000 in recurring revenue to 30 million. AppGyver was sold to
SAP. MindsDB puts machine learning inside the database, and had just announced a Series
A led by Benchmark.

**ChatGPT in February 2023.** Backman demonstrated it at the Christmas table, producing
a thank-you speech in rhyming verse and extending it iteratively with the ham, three
cats and the white wine. He also reports its failure: asked why Messi had never won a
European championship, it explained that Argentina had not qualified for the final
tournament. His advice to listeners is to found a software shop that codes with ChatGPT,
delivers twice as fast and bids at three-quarters of the price.

## Disclosure

The host states in the episode that he is himself a small investor in Leadoo, one of the
portfolio companies discussed, and describes calling Leadoo's largest customer as his
own commercial due diligence before investing. He is also a partner at Translink
Corporate Finance; Translink and Open Ocean share an address at Mikonkatu 1B in
Helsinki, which the episode closes on.

## Watch

The recording lives on the Neuvottelija channel:
[Tietokannat MariaDB | Patrik Backman | Open Ocean #neuvottelija 177](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aX9hTYa3Dxs).
A Finnish edition of this episode is published at
[www.neuvottelija.fi](https://www.neuvottelija.fi/fi/episodes/263-tietokannat-mariadb-patrik-backman-open-ocean-neuvottelija-1).

## Explore the ideas in depth

- [Enterprise AI Agents: Economics, Governance and the Shift From Tools to Workers](https://www.neuvottelija.com/guides/enterprise-ai-agents-economics-and-governance/): A guide to enterprise AI agents — the real cost model behind agent work, why owning your own stack is becoming a strategic question, a working governance framework with approval gates and audit trails, the agent risk matrix, the EU AI Act timeline as it stands, and who captures the productivity gains. Grounded in a real multi-agent lab, two 2026 keynotes, and Neuvottelija conversations.
- [Nordic SaaS Valuation & M&A: How AI Reprices Software Companies](https://www.neuvottelija.com/guides/nordic-saas-valuation-and-ma/): How software companies in the Nordics are valued and sold as AI moves inference into the cost of goods sold — where multiples stand in mid-2026, the metrics that get repriced, why vertical SaaS defends its premium, AI due diligence, and the shift from seats to outcomes. Grounded in Translink's SaaS valuation work and Neuvottelija conversations.

---

Cite as: Sami Miettinen, Neuvottelija — Databases and MariaDB | Patrik Backman | Open Ocean | Neuvottelija 177, https://www.neuvottelija.com/podcast/episodes/ep177-tietokannat-mariadb-patrik-backman/, 2023-02-26. For quotes include episode 177 and timestamp.