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“A good sign that you have a good idea is when people keep telling you you’re crazy,”  chirps David Axmark, co-founder of the MySQL Project and the company behind it.

He’s speaking in front of another full-house at London Business School’s Entrepreneurial Leadership Speaker Series, that brings leaders from the technology community to campus to share insights in building high-growth, global businesses. David then goes on to explain with great humility how three engineers, all working from home, went about starting building an open-source database company that would later be sold to Sun Microsystems for $1 billion.

Only securing VC funding after years of organic growth, David offered excellent advice for entrepreneurs looking to lengthen their runway. “If you start with nothing, you get used to staying lean,” says David and explains how he never made the move to Silicon Valley, although his CEO did, and he believes the value of Silicon Valley has fallen with advancements in communication technology.

The low-cost, distributed company also worked exceptionally well until they grew large enough to demand a centralized HQ, where decisions were increasingly made. The company already began to feel ‘too big’ for David and following the Sun acquisition in February 2008, he left later that year.

David identified five ‘seeds of success’ which helped MySQL grow:

1) Solve a common problem
2) Practical product use
3) Focus on a few (but fast & stable) features
4) Easy to install (15 minutes rule)
5) Documentation (although boring, it has to be simply and easy to use)

An avid supporter of the open-source movement, David is now supporting and investing in other open-source ventures.

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