![https://media.campusgroups.com/upload/image_69261_c78013da5f5e076f849ff3480d234549.jpg](https://media.campusgroups.com/upload/image_69261_c78013da5f5e076f849ff3480d234549.jpg)
Formerly, Mike was co-founder, president, and CEO of Sleepycat (Berkeley DB). He also worked with Oracle's new Embedded Global Business Unit in the wake of the acquisition of Sleepycat. Before that, he was VP of Molecular Applications Group ("cratered," in his own words). Just after his studies at UC Berkeley, he spent four years in Europe working as a farmer and line cook before realizing what he wanted to do in life.
Here are Mike's tips for a successful career -- which apply even if you are not going to launch a company.
- Insist on torrid romance. Choose what you are passionate about.
- Know everything you can. Be curious, try every function in the company.
- Seek pain. Understand how your company will alleviate the customers' pain.
- Choose founders wisely. Being married is easier than the relationship with your founders. Choose people that you can trust deeply, even when you completely disagree.
- Raising money is easy. It is certainly easier now than it was 20 years ago. There are angels, super-angels, the very well connected, the big names, and late-stage investors.
- Hiring is hard. You need to hire fast, and you need to find people that you will be able to trust.
- Be a generalist. Programming, software architecture, marketing -- understand each of these jobs and what they can and cannot do. .
- Bring in specialists. Run as much of the functional positions as you can. Then you'll bee able to find the right specialist for these jobs.
- Blame up, credit down. Create culture that attracts the kind of people that you want. Share the praise, but take responsibilities. If you share praise, you will also be able to correct people.
- Customers are better than competitors. Facebook focused on customers, not on what MySpace was doing. The risk of focusing on competitors is that you'll start to define yourself in terms of them.
- Play nicely. You can negotiate brutally, some do, but you won't create long-term relationships.
- Find the elevator, not the exit. Build a business that is sustainable in the long term.
Charismatic speaker, interesting company, exciting products.
See Mike talking about big data trends: