Peter Zaitsev and the business of letting go

Before Peter Zaitsev had a computer at home, he had paper. He taught himself programming on it. The arrangement had obvious limitations: a pencil offers disappointing processing power. But the attraction was already there. He wanted to understand how things worked, and programming promised something particularly agreeable - the chance to change an instruction and try again.

Years later, he would help build a company around making computers behave better. Percona began with MySQL expertise and grew into an open source database software and services business employing hundreds of people. Then Zaitsev applied a similar curiosity to his own job. The company was working. Was being its chief executive still the right work for him?

His answer arrived in 2022, when he handed the CEO role to Ann Schlemmer and took the title Founder. In a profession fond of collecting impressive job titles, he chose one with fewer instructions attached. His career has a recurring concern: how to make room for people, customers and himself to choose their own next move.

A pencil before a keyboard

Zaitsev grew up in Russia in a scientific family and studied at Lomonosov Moscow State University. He earned undergraduate and master’s degrees, and began his entrepreneurial career while still a student. In 1999, he co-founded Spylog, a service for tracking website statistics and usage. Understanding what a system was doing had become a business.

MySQL AB brought him into a wider community. He joined in 2002 and eventually led its High Performance Group, working on difficult database problems. After working from Moscow, he moved to the United States in 2004. His account of that period describes the appeal of a small company where an employee could feel closely involved in what was being built.

By 2006, the company had grown and he wanted to try entrepreneurship again. He moved to the United Kingdom. On July 31, he published a practical announcement: he was leaving MySQL and starting a consulting company. The proposed work included performance optimization, remote database administration and helping applications scale. He would keep participating in the MySQL community.

There was no need to invent a market on a presentation slide. People already had databases that needed attention. Zaitsev and his co-founder, Vadim Tkachenko, knew how to help. The opening offer was specific enough for an engineer with a slow application to understand immediately.

A company built on the right to leave

Two years into Percona, Zaitsev described a profitable business and an ambition to reward the engineers doing its technical work fairly. He also acknowledged the influence of MySQL co-founder Monty Widenius. The early idea was to bring capable engineers together and give them interesting work. The company’s technical reputation had to support its commercial promises.

That reputation traveled through relationships. Tom Basil, Zaitsev’s former manager at MySQL, later joined Percona and worked for him. Basil remembered Zaitsev’s exacting assessment of Tkachenko’s technical skills before their long partnership. The change in reporting lines makes an appealing career footnote: first Basil managed Peter; then Peter managed Basil. Familiarity had survived a change of seating plan.

Percona’s proposition also contained a commercial complication. Open source users can obtain software without buying a support contract. A services company must give them a reason to pay. Zaitsev argued that a provider could earn durable business by recommending the solution that suited a customer, even when the recommendation favored somebody else’s software.

In his 2016 argument for customer freedom, he defended support and services as a viable foundation for an open source company. Independence for the customer required discipline from the supplier: advice had to remain useful, and trust had to survive the next renewal. A customer’s ability to leave was part of the arrangement from the beginning.

The useful business of explaining things

Zaitsev helped turn database expertise into something people could read as well as buy. He co-authored the third edition of High Performance MySQL with Baron Schwartz and Tkachenko. Published in 2012, the book addresses optimization, backups and replication: subjects whose importance often becomes unusually clear when a system stops doing what its owner expected.

The range is telling. Making a database fast matters, but so does preserving its contents and understanding how copies behave. Writing about those responsibilities extends the work beyond an individual consulting engagement. An explanation can travel to engineers the author will never meet, and remain useful long after a conference room has emptied.

His later writing makes the business mechanics equally concrete. Percona’s early MySQL Performance Audit was a packaged service, with sample reports that helped customers picture what they would receive. Tools and repeatable processes improved delivery. Technical knowledge became easier to purchase because the customer could understand the shape of the result.

Community work brought recognition too. Zaitsev received the MySQL Rockstar 2022 award, presented at preFOSDEM MySQL Days in 2023. The event account highlighted his role in bringing people back to an in-person MySQL conference after a period of virtual events. For someone whose work moves through talks, books and conversations, getting people into the same room had practical value.

When Founder became the right job

The CEO transition followed a gradual transfer of responsibility. Schlemmer became Percona’s President in January 2021; by the time she took over as CEO in October 2022, she had already assumed much of the daily operational work. The formal appointment recognized a change already happening inside the company.

Zaitsev’s explanation was unusually personal. He described broad interests that changed quickly and a preference for pursuing work that caught his attention. He remembered Schlemmer asking, “what do you need to thrive”. It was a useful question for someone accustomed to thinking about how a system should be configured.

“what do you need to thrive”

Ann Schlemmer’s question, recalled by Peter Zaitsev

There were older choices behind the decision. He and Tkachenko had started Percona around the arrival of their respective second children. Early on, they declined work that would require lengthy trips away from their families. Building the business had always involved deciding which demands to accept, including demands attached to revenue.

The new Founder title left room to work with Percona’s community, customers and products while pursuing other ventures. In September 2023, he launched strategic consulting for open source founders. He offered help with positioning, sales, licensing, remote teams and operations. The offer also established a memorable boundary: database repair inquiries should go to Percona.

He remained involved in Percona’s leadership changes. In October 2025, he welcomed Peter Farkas as CEO and explained why he valued a technically experienced leader who cared about open source. The announcement offered a concrete view of the Founder role: he could help articulate what mattered to the company while another person took responsibility for running it.

Hundreds of graphs, one unanswered question

His move into Coroot followed a problem familiar from his database work. Engineers could collect abundant operational data and still struggle to understand a failure. Beautiful charts could multiply without making the next decision easier. In January 2024, Zaitsev announced that he was joining Nikolay Sivko at Coroot as a co-founder.

He was drawn to Sivko’s approach to observability: helping engineers find causes and useful actions inside complicated applications and infrastructure. That interest connects directly to the work that first attracted him to databases. A person looking at a slow system needs help understanding what is happening inside it, rather than another unexplained number.

His business advice remains similarly interested in consequences. In an August 2025 essay on open source sales, he distinguished users from paying customers. Increasing the share who pay can look attractive, but making the free product less useful can damage adoption. A founder has to consider what happens to the whole project when trying to improve one commercial measure.

His technical questions have continued into 2026. In an August conversation with Marc Linster about autonomous PostgreSQL, he discussed where AI might complement a team’s existing abilities. The conversation considered a practical middle ground: imperfect assistance may still help teams that lack database expertise. The value depends on the people doing the work and the problems they need to solve.

At Percona Live in 2026, his listed subjects included the open source database ecosystem and database operations in the age of AI. The vocabulary has changed since his first consulting announcement. The underlying interest remains recognizable: give the people responsible for a system a better chance of understanding and operating it.

A different sort of fieldwork

Outside the conference schedule, his curiosity has taken him to abandoned machinery. In August 2025, he joined a GeeksGoPeaks expedition in Svalbard. A contaminated fuel supply disrupted the original boat plan, and the group took a different hiking route. The change gave them access to old settlements and industrial remains that he enjoyed exploring.

His trip account notices practical details: equipment, changing routes, the traces left by former workers. Old Soviet cookware brought back memories of his early school years. He flew a drone, explored abandoned mining towns and photographed the leftovers of earlier attempts to make a living in a difficult place.

The resemblance to his professional interests is easy to see without making the hike a business seminar. Machinery invites questions. So do companies. Zaitsev has spent years looking inside both, learning what makes them useful and where their arrangements need changing. After building a company that gave customers more choices, he made a choice about his own role. There were other things he wanted to understand.