Building Confluent: From open source side project to public company | Jay Kreps (Co-founder and CEO)

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