Jay Kreps is the co-founder and CEO of Confluent, the company built around Apache Kafka — the open-source data streaming platform he originally built while at LinkedIn. In this conversation, Jay shares his full journey: how Confluent grew from a scrappy group of engineers with no go-to-market experience into a publicly traded enterprise software company. He makes the case that the difference between what a company can do, and what it must do, is one of the most underrated building levers; illustrated through his years spent pushing Confluent towards a cloud product, in the face of widespread opposition.
In this episode, we discuss:
- Why moving from software engineer to CEO requires almost an entirely new skillset
- The product marketing pyramid Jay built to explain Kafka to the world
- How Confluent bludgeoned its way to a cloud-first business when the early product was “embarrassing”
- The critical difference between what a company can do and what it must do
- What keeps scaling companies from becoming “Chipotle”
References:
- Amazon Web Services: https://aws.amazon.com/
- Apache Kafka: https://kafka.apache.org/
- Benchmark: https://www.benchmark.com/
- Confluent: https://www.confluent.io/
- Jun Rao: https://www.linkedin.com/in/junrao
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/
- McKinsey & Company: https://www.mckinsey.com/
- MySpace: https://www.myspace.com/
- Neha Narkhede: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nehanarkhede
- Oracle: https://www.oracle.com/
- Red Hat: https://www.redhat.com/
- Snowflake: https://www.snowflake.com/
Where to find Jay:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaykreps/
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/jaykreps
Where to find Brett:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/brettberson
Where to find First Round Capital:
- Website: https://firstround.com/
- First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/firstround
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital
- This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast
Timestamps:
01:18 Making the leap from engineer to CEO
03:33 The 80% rule: what a CEO actually needs to know
04:54 Scaling different business disciplines
09:31 How Confluent’s story began in LinkedIn
12:13 The growing need for scalable data tech
13:37 What the early Kafka product looked like
16:38 Kafka’s underwhelming open-source launch
18:38 The blog post that accelerated Kafka’s adoption
20:16 Why so many marketing messages fail
28:08 The decision to build Confluent
34:24 Planning to fundraise before building the product
39:19 Confluent’s early years: Tough product decisions
47:07 The underrated growth lever question for companies
55:46 Why founder optimism is an overrated trait
1:00:29 What should founders give up as they scale?
1:02:47 Why people become trapped in a failure mindset
1:08:33 The Chipotle problem: Losing excellence at scale