Mårten Mickos speaks with GeekWire via video chat in advance of his keynote this Thursday May 14 at the third annual Nordic Innovation Summit, a free virtual event this year. (Screenshot via Zoom.)

Mårten Mickos is the CEO of HackerOne, a San Francisco-based venture that is hired by other companies to deploy squadrons of hackers to uncover vulnerabilities in their technologies. A native of Finland, he’s the former CEO of MySQL, the open-source database company that was sold to Sun Microsystems in 2008.

That blend of experience gives him a unique perspective on the US West Coast and Nordic tech markets. He’ll be offering his insights Thursday in a keynote address at the Nordic Innovation Summit, an annual event presented by the National Nordic Museum. Typically taking place at the museum in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood, it’s a virtual event this year, free to attend online.

Mickos spoke with GeekWire in advance of his talk, sharing his thoughts on security in the age of COVID-19, differences between US and Nordic innovation, and a key lesson to be learned from the current pandemic.

Todd Bishop, GeekWire: One of the most interesting aspects of the Nordic Innovation Summit is the juxtaposition between the cultures of the Nordic countries and the West Coast of the US. You’ve lived in both, worked in both. How would you characterize the differences and similarities when it comes to technology?

Mårten Mickos, HackerOne: In Scandinavia, a million is a lot of money, but on the US West Coast, an hour is a lot of time. We have developed amazing functionality and collaboration by working together and being equal to each other in Scandinavia. But we don’t act very fast. Whatever we do, we are slow, and we consider, and we contemplate, and we study, and we debate, and we go back and we go forward.

Whereas those who live here (on the West Coast), they move very fast. They shoot before they aim. They invest in things they don’t know, they trust people they haven’t seen before. And it creates this explosive nature — in a positive way — explosive nature of business. This is the place where you can build a cloud platform. There are three leading cloud platforms in the world. They’re all three here on the West Coast. You have two in Seattle and we have one in Silicon Valley.

To me, that is the difference. I would want the Nordic countries to learn to let go of all the apprehension of doing things. But I would like the US and California and Washington state and others to learn from the Nordics how you get by with each other, and how you respect people at all levels of society, how you take care of those who can’t take care of themselves.

TB: You became the CEO of HackerOne in 2015. You’ve said that you knew, 30 seconds into hearing what this company was about, that it was for you. What about its mission resonated so much with you?

Mickos: I just thought it was so amazing. Security had been this very dogmatic, closed, secret group of people, building advanced technology that makes life more and more difficult. And then here came a company doing exactly the opposite, distributing the work to freelancers coming from outside in, not believing in technology but believing in the human spirit and human creativity and curiosity. And not seeing cybersecurity as something where you need to be cynical, but something where you can be positive and creative.

And it was so liberating. I came to the meeting with so much prejudice, thinking, I will listen to it for a few minutes, and I will leave because I don’t want to work with cynical, nitpicky, negative people. Then I realized, here was this very positive group of cybersecurity experts. That’s why I turned around and not just applied for the job but begged them to hire me as CEO.

TB: And the whole concept is, companies hire hackers to find where the holes are.

Mickos: It’s like a vaccine. It’s like immunization, you take a little bit of the bad in order to protect you from the big bad. So inviting these hackers to hack your systems, now people realize it’s the fastest, most productive way to find vulnerabilities and fix them.

TB:  When you look at the threat landscape and vulnerabilities, how have things changed over the last four months in terms of security, based on what we’re going through with remote work and other changes that have resulted from the pandemic?

Mickos: The state of cybersecurity is so bad that everybody has too much to do, and everybody’s struggling to keep up, even in normal times. Now, with the pandemic, so many people are working from home, so the attacks are now on home technology. So WiFi, VPN, authentication, passwords, mobile phones and so on. So the criminals are, of course, going where the people go, and then there’s a lot of social hacking and scamming, phishing. But we have a lot of good hackers who will help a lot of companies, so as opposed to COVID, in cybersecurity we already have the medication, we should just use it.

TB: It’s almost like you are selling digital antibodies.

Mickos: Yes, it is exactly that. And of course, we stole this concept from somebody else. There’s an Israeli cybersecurity expert, named Keren Elazari, you should watch her TED talk from 2015. It’s beautiful. She lays it out so well. So we’ve taken the term she used and we think it’s a perfect description of the model.

TB: What could the global response to COVID-19 learn from the principles of open source? Certainly there are some elements in terms of the science, but is there more that could happen along those lines?

Mickos: I think it has happened. It was in software that we first built out this open source model and it became famous, but it has since then expanded into other parts of society — specifically journalism, politics, and research. So when you look at researchers today, they share information very freely. There’s a lot of collaboration between researchers in Seattle, San Francisco, Helsinki, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Oslo, and they may not call it open-source, but it is very collaborative. It’s peer reviews, it is sharing information. So I that’s why I have such faith that we will soon have various cures or medication for COVID-19, because they are sharing quickly and learning from each other.

TB:  As you look at the current state of the digital world, what else would you want to get across?

Mickos: We’ve been talking about a digital civilization for a while, and saying in the future it will be so digital. And now COVID is the planet’s warning to us, or instruction, that we must go there. It’s not just the naive dreams of entrepreneurs. It is imperative that we figure out ways to run our society so that we can have a good connection like this without meeting in person, that we can conduct our business without flying, that we can play games and entertain and be friends with each other without necessarily touching each other physically.

We have to realize that all this digital stuff we’ve been developing for fun or for money actually is needed. All the gamers of the world will now be thanked for having figured out low-latency collaboration technology. We look at our kids, and we think they are doing the wrong thing. They’ve been doing the right thing. They can build a society where we don’t have to worry about the virus, and then we can start hugging each other again.

We don’t need to hug everybody on the planet, but a few. And so we should realize that it’s a signal. It’s a reminder that we were too slow in our digital transformation.

HackerOne CEO Mårten Mickos will keynote the virtual Nordic Innovation Summit, hosted by Seattle’s National Nordic Museum, on Thursday morning. 

Like what you're reading? Subscribe to GeekWire's free newsletters to catch every headline

Job Listings on GeekWork

Find more jobs on GeekWork. Employers, post a job here.