I'm about to take a week off from my new gig as COO at Zendesk and it got me reflecting on the company and my decision to join. I stayed with MySQL through the Sun acquisition and left when Oracle acquired Sun. Although I have a lot of respect for Oracle, it seemed to me the only interesting jobs would be those that report directly to Larry Ellison. So I took some time off to travel, worked as an EIR at Scale Ventures for a few months and began thinking about what I wanted to do next.
I turned down offers from companies and investors to come in and "repeat the MySQL playbook" in Big Data or NoSQL or apps or whatever. I think Open Source can be a fantastic …
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