Ralf Wahlsten

As General Partner at OpenOcean, Ralf holds board memberships at MariaDB, RapidMiner, Nordic Telecom, HeavenHR and Verto Analytics.

Before fate brought him together with the rest of the Swedish speaking Finns in Helsinki to build OpenOcean, he had been an active angel investor, as well as a key advisor to the MySQL founders from the company’s inception, helping them develop their first business plan, strengthening the Board, and hiring the CEO – up until the exit to Sun Microsystems.

With a Management Consulting background, Ralf has broad experience in areas like Corporate and Business Strategy Development, Business process reengineering and Marketing Strategy from top consulting firms like AT Kearney, Booz-Allen and Indevo. He holds a Master of Science degree in Engineering from Helsinki University of Technology (Aalto University).

Having walked the path alongside the MySQL and MariaDB leadership teams from their very first days until scale/exit, Ralf has genuine empathy with founders, which, combined with a thorough understanding of team dynamics and firm-building, makes him the one person founders (and internal team!) would always turn to for strategic advice.