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Dear Mr. Hewson, Thank you for submitting your tape of "U2" to RSO Records, we have listened with careful consideration, but feel it is not suitable for us at present.

Patrik Backman

General Partner

,

Helsinki

A General Partner at OpenOcean, Patrik’s heart lies with the “data-intensive” bit of our investment thesis. Before starting OpenOcean, Patrik co-founded MariaDB, and spent 6 years managing product and business development at MySQL AB, where he served as a Director of Software Engineering from 2003 to 2008, and managed the company’s strategic technical alliance with SAP AG. With his business hat on, Patrik was part of MySQL Management Team, and worked in management consulting at eCraft Management Solutions and A.T. Kearney. Patrik is on the board of Nosto, Booksy, Supermetrics, Import.io, AppGyver and MindsDB, works closely with NearGroup, and has held directorships at Ironstar Helsinki, MariaDB, and SkySQL. He received a Master of Science (Engineering) degree from Helsinki University of Technology and Master of Science (Finance) from Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki.

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9
min read

Portfolio spotlight: Dreamfold

Welcome to our portfolio spotlight series, where we highlight the teams behind some of the most ambitious technical companies. A company is only as strong as the people behind it, which is why we share the stories of the teams driving these disruptive innovations.
5
min read

What founders get wrong about speed and scale

Every founder faces the same question: how fast should you go? In conversation with our Venture Partner, Duleepa “Dups” Wijayawardhana, we explored why so many startups struggle to balance speed, quality and scale, and how to get it right (at least most of the time). As Dups puts it, for every rule there is an exception, and for every exception there is something to learn.
9
min read

Quantum computing in Europe: lessons from IQM and OpenOcean

When we met Jan Goetz, Professor Mikko Möttönen and the rest of the IQM founding team in late 2018, we knew we were seeing something rare. The science was hard to grasp, even for my colleague Patrik Backman, who had studied physics and some quantum theory, but the ambition was unmistakable.