Mailing the story:

MySQL started in 1995 but it was really only three years ago that we started to target businesses. Before that nobody was even cashing the cheques coming in; everyone was writing code. There was no venture capital. It started from when the founders were out there consulting. They needed a highly reliable, high-performance offering that was less complicated than the commercial databases. There was a 15-minute rule - the database had to be up and running inside 15 minutes.