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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Personally, I love Angel Investing! Not only does it provide an opportunity for outsized returns (if you’re making good choices) but also, compared to being LP in the early-stage Venture Fund it often allows you to have a direct line to founders, which tends to be awesome, and an opportunity to contribute to business success. 

Yet as I found helping to organize Coroot “Family and Friends” pre-seed round, not everyone thinks this way!   Even among my high net worth connections who have capital available, many are not interested, even before they know the project.    Sometimes the reason is the lack of time they need to evaluate if it is a good investment or not being familiar with the logistics of making such investments, in many cases though I think it is something different…

Early stage Angel Investing is not different to other early-stage investments, such as those done by VC funds – overall most startups fail, resulting in complete capital loss, and even if you’re good at picking winners you will have to deal with large amounts of failures and many people… just do not like it.  Even worse, while failures often happen within the first 1-3 years after investment, you may need to wait 5+ years for that runaway success to fully materialize,   making perception even worse than reality.

Investing in some form of early-stage fund, which makes a substantial amount of investments makes failures less visible and also with regular NAV calculations can make you feel good about unrealized investments quite early in the game. 

This reminds me that Entrepreneurs, like me, tend to have a higher risk tolerance and ability to deal with failures – it is an important part of the entrepreneurial journey, though I’m probably more risk-tolerant than average even among this group. 

If you like Angel Investing as an idea but are not sure where to start and how to stomach it, I would suggest starting by thinking about it as Gambling but with higher expectations of returns and possibly even more fun. If you’re OK losing $1000 in Las Vegas you probably will be OK losing it on your Angel Investment too.  Start with your play money, not retirement money, especially before you get a feel for how it works for you. 

The other good practice is to build a portfolio of investments, rather than have a single investment and look at portfolio, rather than single investment performance – some 20 investments would be a good start. 

Finally, you may want to spread your investments in time over multiple years as for various reasons some years may turn out better than others.

This may sound like a significant amount of work, and it is -work tends to be required to achieve good long-term outcomes in about every field.   It is essential if the financial results of your Angel Investing are your primary goal, which it might not be, it is not uncommon to do a small number of “investments” in businesses led by family or friends with the primary focus of supporting them or supporting the mission of the company  – many contribute to charities after all, where no direct financial return is expected. 

If you invest in your Family or Friend’s business for this reason, I would suggest asking yourself a question whenever investment loss is likely to ruin your relationships, and if it is worth it in the end.   Thinking about such an investment as a gift may help. 

I’m having fun doing Angel Investments and I think more people can have fun and profit from doing it too!

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As you may have heard, ScyllaDB is moving to a Source Available License. Seeing this move from so many companies from MongoDB to Redis should not surprise everyone. This is what happens to “corporate-owned” Open Source Software these days. Yet it is interesting to explore ScyllaDB’s situation in more detail.

First, I think ScyllaDB’s license change is much more similar to MongoDB’s move to SSPL back in 2018, rather than Elastic or Redis license changes. With ScyllaDB using AGPL license its Open Source version already was not “Embedding Friendly” and as such the license change does not pull the rug from so many Independent Software vendors as often happens when software previously licensed under permissive license (APL, BSD, MIT etc) goes source available. 

I’m also aware if there has been a substantial contributor community for ScyllaDB – the number of contributors at Github is 157 as I write this, and most are probably employees and affiliates, compare this to almost 2000 contributors to ElasticSearch

This means it is unlikely ScyllaDB will be forked in any meaningful way as it happened with Redis (Valkey) or ElasticSearch (OpenSearch).

I did a quick poll on LinkedIn and here are the results:

Roughly a third of folks think ScyllaDB will get a serious fork (not just fork on GitHub), I think the probability is much much lower, for the reasons stated.

I think it is also interesting to take a look at what is happening to ScyllaDB popularity per DB-Engines 

First to note DB-Engines measures “Popularity” which does not always correspond to the “Revenue” the technology ecosystem generates. For example, while MongoDB has been in a Down Trend for a while MongoDB Inc revenue is still growing.

What this shows though, is that the fast growth that the Open Source community is so good at supporting is gone. It is natural for a company to shift focus on monetization, to ensure more technology users are paying customers… and also existing customers are paying more because the Source Available “free as in beer” version will be an acceptable alternative for fewer of them.

Something is interesting in the ScyllaDB announcement though – focusing on the single release stream “ScyllaDB Enterprise” which will change from “conventional proprietary” to “source available proprietary”, giving access to Enterprise Features in the free tier – smaller deployments (see FAQ).

This makes ScyllaDB’s Source Available license very different from ones used by MongoDB and Redis – where they tend to focus on a “Non-Compete” angle and their Source Available license allows some users to use software for free at any scale, ScyllaDB basically requires any serious large scale user to have Commercial Enterprise License. This is similar to the CockroachDB approach yet actually less restrictive – allowing for some production use, not just development and prototyping.

It is also interesting to see ScyllaDB’s stated reasons to go source available – it is not “unfair competition” and need for “everyone to pay their fair share” but rather simplifying the development process – no need to maintain multiple versions of multiple components. 

While I do not have any inside information on this topic, I can speculate ScyllaDB is looking for a path to go public and a nice (if short-term) revenue boost this license change can provide can be helpful. 

I’m disappointed that such an awesome piece of engineering is leaving the Open Source ecosystem. This surely leaves a gap and with the ScyllaDB fork unlikely I would not be surprised if some other Open Source solution will rush to fill this space.

As of now though, if you can’t use ScyllaDB anymore because of the license change you may want to re-visit Cassandra, which promises significant performance improvement with Cassandra 5 release, or take a look at YugabyteDB which has Cassandra compatibility.

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I played with the rather unconventional thought of viewing life choices through the mindset of startup investors and bankers. Looking at the difference in risk-taking and potential outcomes of these investment strategies, are there any learnings we can apply to our personal lives? Can we think like a banker if our desired result is that of a startup investor?

Banker mentality focuses on minimizing risk, “preserving capital,” and what many would call a “playing it safe” or “playing not to lose” mentality. I call it “Banker Mentality” because when banks lend someone money, their upside tends to be limited (with relatively low interest rates), and their priority is to ensure they get their money back.

This approach also follows conventional choices, as when the road is well traveled, the perception is that a lot of risk is well known.

The “returns” of such a strategy though are rarely outstanding, you will unlikely 100x your capital by investing in treasuries and AAA bonds, and you also will also unlikely to make the largest difference in your field if you avoid risky choices.

Because such a mentality avoids failure, when it happens they may be affected hard.

Another challenge with “Banker Mentality” is – that we’re going through a period of tremendous change when it comes to politics, international relationships, and of course AI, so what was a very safe choice yesterday… may not be such tomorrow any longer. As someone through lived through the collapse of the Soviet Union I’ve seen firsthand how quickly unthinkable changes can really happen.

Startup Investor Mentality is the opposite, kind of, rather than prioritizing the return of the capital, you prioritize diversification (investing in multiple startups) and the chance of outsized return. For example, one startup investor described their philosophy that 10% of startups they invest in provide 25x return… whereas the other 90% fail or go nowhere – barely returning the capital.

Startup Investor Mentality also means “playing to win”, often going “against the status quo” and picking the road less traveled.

Startup Investor Mentality also deals see failure differently. They like saying “You Win or you Learn” and often expect to fail a lot, making them a lot more resilient. They also tend to think that if you’re not failing in anything you’re not taking enough risks, which are required for greatness.

At the same time, this mentality requires managing failure well – to decide when to persevere and when to give up (or “pivot”) and to fail fast – keeping the cost of failures small from a time and money prospective. 

Think about how “startup investing” works – A company tends to start by raising a little bit of money to reach early-stage success, when larger and larger rounds as it progresses, meaning at the early stage when risks are highest the capital loss is limited.

While it works in investing it is harder to apply in Personal and Professional life – most of us can’t have 10 life partners in parallel or 10 different careers. Yet there is a lot that can be applied too.

For example “trying out” the career you considering early or cutting your losses quickly if it ends up not working for you is a good option.

I also always recommend making sure you put yourself in a position to have options with different companies, industries, and geographical locations. Investing in building your personal brand and investing in networking and people skills (this is especially valuable for folks from the tech industry, where so many focus on their technical skills alone)

While being an entrepreneur is not for everyone, I think this path gives the most flexibility, and something possible to do part-time with your main job to get started.

In the end with enough “diversification” and many “high-risk” bets during your life, you have a high probability of achieving great outcomes in your life and probably have much more “fun” along the way too.

While it may look like the choice between these approaches is “either-or”, it is not. Nassim Taleb has suggested, what he calls “Barbell strategy” where you mix high risk with low risk for optimal outcome. This may mean having some of your capital in low-risk investments such as treasury bonds and index funds and some in highly speculative investments with the potential for great risk.

The same can also be applied to the career – you can keep a safe job while trying to build your first startup on the side, while risks are especially high.

I particularly like this approach to capital allocation to different passive investments, as their performance tends to depend on your emotional attachment.

When I started Percona, though, I put myself in a situation where I had no choice but to succeed. Staring into the abyss brings me the energy to do whatever is needed for success, though I also know many people who find fear paralyzing.

While I do not pretend to know the optimal way of thinking in every situation, I think it is great to stop and think about how you’re approaching the situation and whether it is indeed the optimal way. Way too often, we just follow the inertia of our minds, which can easily lead us astray.

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If you work in Technology, everything in that industry changes rapidly, and whenever you are in a Technical or Management position, you need to learn quickly. If you don’t, operating on outdated assumptions will lead to ineffective decisions, or both.

As with most things in life, I do not think there is a universal magic technique which works for everyone in every situation, so do not take this blog post as a recommendation, but rather as the outline of key practices that work for me.

Ask – I tend to learn faster by asking questions and having discussions rather than passively consuming information. Some might even call it Arguing rather than Asking. This helps me to process information better as well as focus on details which I consider relevant, rather than what the person doing the presentation thinks they are. This interrupting presentation or lecture with “random” questions may not work in all cases and frankly can be seen disrespectfully but it works best for me. I also think it is important not to be afraid to ask “stupid” questions as we all have information gaps in what others may consider “obvious” and ignoring such gaps only makes them bigger. I think we can learn a lot here from young children who tend to ask questions without paying attention to how relevant their question is. As we grow, we become more polite and pretend to be smart, but we pay for it with slower learning.

Practice – The “Theoretical” knowledge I gain by asking questions may not stick for long. Putting this knowledge into practice is very helpful to ensure long-term retention and familiarity with non-obvious “nuances”. When you read a book or attend a presentation, you often get a simplified and “sanitized” version that is likely to miss many of the nuances of real life that apply to a particular situation. Good practice takes a lot of time, so I have to be discerning about what I get “hands on” and what I just study theoretically. This is also the reason why I often abuse my position to save time by handing the team raw notes on problems I’ve discovered, rather than creating proper detailed repeatable case studies. You might call it laziness and selfishness, or you might recognize that different people in an organization have different “values” of their time and energy.

Teach – Finally, teaching a topic you’ve just studied is a fantastic way to improve the depth of your understanding. I believe that if you can’t explain something, you don’t really know it. In so many cases, when I think I know something, I find that I don’t understand in depth, especially in preparation for possible questions that people might ask. You also learn a lot from the questions people actually ask, because they will undoubtedly be completely different angels that you haven’t even thought about. This is one of the reasons I encourage everyone (both individual authors and managers) to blog about their field of expertise, share their thoughts on social media, and participate in related events. Teaching is a win-win-win when you can help the world by sharing your knowledge, help your company, and build your personal reputation.

These three shortcuts can be remembered by their APT (Ask-Practice-Teach) abbreviation. Want to become a better student? Consider practicing APT 🙂

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