Creating A Safer Internet One Hacker at a Time with Marten Mickos of HackerOne
Today, we hear from HackerOne CEO Marten Mickos, who is on a mission to create a safer internet. From his humble beginnings in Finland to his meteoric rise in the U.S., Marten offers advice for aspiring leaders and how to embrace pain and suffering in order to grow. We also learn about technical physics and the importance of security and privacy in the new digital civilization.
Episode Transcript
Timestamps:
0:36 - Welcome to today’s episode with guest Marten Mickos.
1:28 - Overview of the HackerOne platform.
2:45 - Defining technical physics and the most important lesson Marten learned in the department.
6:06 - Work and culture in Finland vs. the U.S.
8:53 - Discussing MySQL.
13:56 - Unpacking the construct of work and home life.
16:44 - How HackerOne addresses privacy.
20:50 - Creating a new digital world.
21:47 - Embracing the pain and suffering in order to grow.
25:43 - Advice for aspiring leaders.
29:30 - Rapid-fire questions.
Welcome back to the Inspired Execution Podcast! Each episode shares the experience and learnings of a world-class leader on their journey to success. Our guests are bold, brilliant, and not afraid to change. As you navigate your path, we hope you feel inspired by their stories, lessons learned, and vision of the future. Today, we hear from Marten Michos, CEO of HackerOne who is empowering the world to build a safer internet. From his humble beginnings in Finland, Marten has made his mark in Silicon valley with headlines in Forbes, Fortune, TechCrunch, and more.
Marten was born and raised in Finland and graduated with a degree in technical physics. He chose the degree because it was the most difficult department to get into at the university. Learning difficult mathematical equations and concepts taught him problem-solving skills, philosophy, and how to work with people with above-average IQs. The most important lesson he learned from the department was that if you can’t figure out the answer to something, you should approach the problem in a new way. He moved from Finland to the Bay Area in 2003 and shares the things which stood out to him about America after his move.
Marten was the CEO of MySQL, a Scandinavian startup that became a billion-dollar acquisition. The platform was the first big success in open source software and had no idea it would become so huge. Their business model was based on the fact that some people will spend lots of time to save money, and other people will spend money in order to save time. The team was able to bring their vision to life without modern technology like Slack and Zoom. Then, Marten shares that it is actually a relatively new construct to think of work time and free time separately. Before the industrial revolution, everybody worked while at home and mixed work time with pleasure time. Rather than calling it remote work, we should consider using the term distributed work.
The mission of HackerOne is to create a safer internet. Marten believes that humans are currently building a new civilization that is digital in nature. It is a mistake to think that the laws and rules of the physical world seamlessly translate to the digital one. HackerOne supports privacy by making sure broken software isn’t the place for privacy to be violated. Since they have grown up in this environment, young people have an instinct for protecting themselves. As the episode wraps up, Marten opens up about the incident in which he thought his career was over. He realizes that without pain and suffering, you are not evolving as a human being. Finally, he offers advice for aspiring leaders before closing with a rapid-fire round of questions.
Thank you for listening and please don’t forget to like and subscribe!
Links:
Learn more about Marten Mickos.
Find more episodes of Inspired Execution here.
