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
