Marten continues his story by describing the company’s first major challenge. A large US company filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against MySQL while the company was in the midst of raising its first round of funding. According to Marten, it was a demoralizing blow that would have spooked the investors, if MySQL had acquiesced to the US company’s demands. Instead, Marten and his Chairman executed a clever strategy, “This company that didn’t really even exist yet… we had practically no money and we got sued in the US by a publicly listed company. We were shocked. At that point MySQL could have died.