Hi!

In 2001, a week after 9/11, I was in Rhode Island at the second open source database conference. I had been presenting two papers, one on the stored procedure system I had developed at Andover.net for MySQL, and another on "Data Blades" that I had written for MySQL just a couple of years ago. Monty and David where there and we spent a bunch of time talking about MySQL. Monty offered me a job that weekend, which I politely declined. I was happy hacking on MySQL and maintaining my little personal fork I used for the websites I was running. While I thought that they had a good idea, I certainly didn't think it was a company, and I certainly didn't want to risk my career at it.

In 2003 David approached me at the first MySQL Conference again about working for MySQL. He let slip the SAP announcement and the news that they had gotten a major round of funding. I was still very skeptical. He spent seven hours in the hallway …