First, I want to give a big thank-you to Bennie Grant, who has been our Interim CEO over the past few months. Stepping into the CEO role is never easy — and doing it on an interim basis can be even tougher. Bennie, we’re grateful for the way you’ve helped steer us through this transition and kept things moving forward when there was a great deal of uncertainty and flux in play.  I am grateful Bennie has agreed to return to his COO role, and appreciate all the leadership stability he provides us with.
Now, onto Peter Farkas — I’m genuinely excited that our Board has chosen Peter as Percona’s new CEO. There are many reasons for my excitement, and I’d love to share a few of them with you.

Technical
I’ve come to believe that if a company wants to be a real thought leader in its technology ecosystem, it needs a truly technical CEO — someone who’s passionate about tech, a real “geek at heart.” Peter fits that perfectly. You’ll see him giving deep technical talks at conferences, and on weekends he’s just as happy tinkering with home automation using Home Assistant or flashing custom firmware onto his wireless router.

Open Source
Open Source is at the very heart of Percona’s DNA, so it’s crucial for our CEO to both understand it and truly care about it — and Peter absolutely does. Many of you know him as the founder and former CEO of FerretDB, a company built to provide an open-source alternative to MongoDB.

Entrepreneur
Peter Farkas is also a true entrepreneur and founder — he started his first company when he was just 14. He’s lived through the ups and downs of bootstrapping more than once. Being a founder is a unique experience you simply can’t get working inside a big corporation.

Percona Values
As many of you know from Peter’s own introduction letter, he was with Percona from 2011 to 2015 as our very first Director of Support. Those were hugely formative years for us — the time when we cemented our uncompromising open-source stance, our deep customer focus, and our drive to find the best solutions for users, not just the most profitable ones. I believe this approach is not only the right thing to do but also gave Percona a significant edge and inspired our customers, community, and staff. Over the past decade, some of that edge may have softened, and I’m confident Peter will help sharpen it once again.

Experience
Peter also spent time in senior leadership at Cloudera while building out a large team there. Cloudera was a major open source “big data” company that was highly successful in its time. That experience gives me confidence that Peter won’t just bring back the best of Percona circa 2015, but will also help guide the much larger Percona of 2025 into its next stage of growth and success.

Working for such an International company while being based in Hungary, also gives Peter a global perspective which is critical for Percona with staff based in over 40 countries.

Heart
Peter combines this with  a genuinely kind heart — he cares deeply about the well-being of our teams, our customers, and the wider community. At the same time, he has a brave heart, he’s courageous when tough decisions need to be made. Those choices aren’t always easy, but Peter has the heart and bravery to make the right ones.

Youth
When we started Percona, I was in my mid-20s — and back then, everyone that age felt perfectly ready for any leadership role. Nearly 20 years later, I sometimes catch myself looking at people that age and, almost unconsciously, thinking of them as “kids.” But I’ve learned that real strength comes from both sides: the hard-earned perspective and judgment that experience brings, and the fresh ideas, curiosity, and fearless appetite for learning that younger leaders contribute. Peter Farkas — younger than me by almost a decade, and younger than many of our senior leaders — is a great reminder that when we trust and learn from the next generation, while sharing the wisdom we’ve gained, we become a stronger, more adaptable company.

Finally, I wanted to share what Tom Basil, our Interim Board Member and before his retirement senior leader at Percona for many years has to say about Peter Farkas:

“In Peter Farkas I find a love for Percona and its people, a zeal for customer service, an intimate knowledge of the open source market, a wealth of entrepreneurial wisdom, and an honest man.  I am grateful he has accepted this CEO challenge, I believe Percona will be better for him, and I ask everyone to lend him their support.”

I’m very much looking forward to the next stage of Percona under Peter Farkas’ leadership. Please join me in welcoming him aboard!

P.S. If you are wondering what’s up with all these wolfs and rabbits – it is about our last names. Farkas means wolf in Hungarian where Zaitsev can be loosely translated as “of Hare” from Russian.

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