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Spencer Kimball

Co-Founder & CEO, Cockroach Labs · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

founderexecutiveengineer@spencer08433091 ↗LinkedIn ↗cockroachlabs.com ↗Wikipedia ↗

He is the co-founder and CEO of Cockroach Labs, which develops the distributed SQL database CockroachDB. Before Cockroach Labs, he spent a decade as an engineer at Google, co-founded Viewfinder, and co-created the GNU Image Manipulation Program.

16statements → 5claims → 2claims resolved → 3.81/5average certainty → 2.25/5average debate potential → 4.4/5argument clarity · the sources → 1said about them ↓

1 supported 0 partly supported 1 contradicted 3 not checkable as stated how the 5 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

2 predictions · 3 assertions · 4 opinions · 5 insights · 2 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 5 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 2 are resolved, and 3 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Spencer argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
Kimball: Benchmark operates with equal partner ownership and no support staff
“There's no more opposite approach in the industry than the one that Benchmark takes, for example. And this is a very small VC fund, you know, not necessarily in dollars, although it's not, it's by far not the largest. But, you know, it's a small number of part…”
Spencer Kimball Apr 14, 2017 ▶ 12:15 20VC: How Investors Can Get Into The Best Deals & Why Founders First Point Of Contact Should Be With The Investment Decision-Maker with Spencer Kimball, Founder & CEO @ Cockroach Labs

Their most notable contradicted claim

Assertion Contradicted
Kimball: Google replaced all sharded MySQL with Spanner and Bigtable
“Spanner is the database technology that Google has used to consolidate all of their various applications on top of. So they no longer use Sharded MySQL. Everything's on Spanner or on Bigtable.”
Spencer Kimball Apr 14, 2017 ▶ 4:22 20VC: How Investors Can Get Into The Best Deals & Why Founders First Point Of Contact Should Be With The Investment Decision-Maker with Spencer Kimball, Founder & CEO @ Cockroach Labs

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
none yet certainty 3
100% certainty 4
0% certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

Argument clarity: do they answer the question? how? →

4.4 / 5 directness 4.6 · coherence 4.6 · precision 4.4 · compression 4

answered every one of 14 assessed questions directly

This is a score against a rubric. It is not a rank. Every host question → answer exchange is scored with names hidden on directness, coherence, precision and compression, 1–5 each, on meaning alone: disfluencies are ignored, and only raw unedited episodes count. This is the score that measures thought. Every scored exchange, scores shown → · The rubric and its checks →

How they sound: speaking style how? →

243 words/min while actually speaking · 9.8 um and uh per 1k words

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 4,790 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

How the interview went all their pushback → series average →

Across 1 rated episode:

host pushback ▾ 2/10
pushed back at the host 3/10
setup questions received 75%

Everything Spencer Kimball said on 20VC that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Opinion
Kimball: GP advocacy is more valuable than VC platform support teams
“No matter how good the associate or the BV person or the BV team even, you know, in a much bigger VC, those guys are good, and they can do great work, and they can actually probably do more work in terms of volume, but I'd rather have Peter Fenton on the phone…”
Spencer Kimball Apr 14, 2017 ▶ 15:23 20VC: How Investors Can Get Into The Best Deals & Why Founders First Point Of Contact Should Be With The Investment Decision-Maker with Spencer Kimball, Founder & CEO @ Cockroach Labs
Insight
Kimball: Lowball VC negotiation tactics damage founder trust and board relationships
“So, you know, like you establish that trust early and I'm sorry, but like the, a very chaotic and unpleasant negotiation phase is not a good way to, you know, have then, you know, have that person transition onto your board. I know I think that there's a much …”
Spencer Kimball Apr 14, 2017 ▶ 10:25 20VC: How Investors Can Get Into The Best Deals & Why Founders First Point Of Contact Should Be With The Investment Decision-Maker with Spencer Kimball, Founder & CEO @ Cockroach Labs
Insight
Kimball: VCs win competitive deals when decision-makers lead founder outreach
“For the initial deal, the best way to get in is to have the true decision maker be the main point of contact for the company.”
Spencer Kimball Apr 14, 2017 ▶ 11:37 20VC: How Investors Can Get Into The Best Deals & Why Founders First Point Of Contact Should Be With The Investment Decision-Maker with Spencer Kimball, Founder & CEO @ Cockroach Labs
Opinion
Spencer Kimball: Google's 20% time was a failed policy
“What happened at Google was that nobody really took the 20% time. It was a little bit of a failed policy.”
Spencer Kimball Apr 14, 2017 ▶ 19:38 20VC: How Investors Can Get Into The Best Deals & Why Founders First Point Of Contact Should Be With The Investment Decision-Maker with Spencer Kimball, Founder & CEO @ Cockroach Labs
Opinion
Kimball: Ben Bernanke and Paul Krugman's macroeconomic forecasts blow everyone else away
“I'd say that their track record in terms of, you know, prognostications is incredibly good. I mean, it just blows everyone else out of the water.”
Spencer Kimball Apr 14, 2017 ▶ 26:10 20VC: How Investors Can Get Into The Best Deals & Why Founders First Point Of Contact Should Be With The Investment Decision-Maker with Spencer Kimball, Founder & CEO @ Cockroach Labs
Insight
Kimball: Databases consistently fail to keep up with evolving business requirements
“Databases actually suck for the most part. They never let you do what you really want to do for your business use cases, and that's, it's always been a game of sort of leapfrog.”
Spencer Kimball Apr 14, 2017 ▶ 26:44 20VC: How Investors Can Get Into The Best Deals & Why Founders First Point Of Contact Should Be With The Investment Decision-Maker with Spencer Kimball, Founder & CEO @ Cockroach Labs
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Kimball: Google's Bigtable spawned the entire NoSQL movement
“They built first big table, which really spawned the entire NoSQL movement that's with us today.”
Spencer Kimball Apr 14, 2017 ▶ 4:07 20VC: How Investors Can Get Into The Best Deals & Why Founders First Point Of Contact Should Be With The Investment Decision-Maker with Spencer Kimball, Founder & CEO @ Cockroach Labs
Opinion
Kimball: Proactive VCs with clear theses are the most helpful
“I actually happen to find the venture capitalists that find me to be the most helpful because they already have a thesis that they're working from.”
Spencer Kimball Apr 14, 2017 ▶ 6:37 20VC: How Investors Can Get Into The Best Deals & Why Founders First Point Of Contact Should Be With The Investment Decision-Maker with Spencer Kimball, Founder & CEO @ Cockroach Labs
Insight
Kimball: Pitching new VCs provides valuable test-audience feedback
“It's kind of like a test audience where you can give the pitch, you can talk about the vision, and you can either have crickets on the other end, or you can have someone that's very enthusiastic, and that's often a very good signal I've found.”
Spencer Kimball Apr 14, 2017 ▶ 8:01 20VC: How Investors Can Get Into The Best Deals & Why Founders First Point Of Contact Should Be With The Investment Decision-Maker with Spencer Kimball, Founder & CEO @ Cockroach Labs
Assertion Supported
Kimball: Benchmark operates with equal partner ownership and no support staff
“There's no more opposite approach in the industry than the one that Benchmark takes, for example. And this is a very small VC fund, you know, not necessarily in dollars, although it's not, it's by far not the largest. But, you know, it's a small number of part…”
Spencer Kimball Apr 14, 2017 ▶ 12:15 20VC: How Investors Can Get Into The Best Deals & Why Founders First Point Of Contact Should Be With The Investment Decision-Maker with Spencer Kimball, Founder & CEO @ Cockroach Labs
Insight
Kimball: Top VCs Win Allocations by Staying Proactively Engaged Between Rounds
“But I think that what separates the wheat from the shaft there is that the really good VCs, the ones that really want to land the deal, assuming that is their priority, you know, these guys will, and gals, will stay in touch, and they'll be proactive about it.”
Spencer Kimball Apr 14, 2017 ▶ 17:04 20VC: How Investors Can Get Into The Best Deals & Why Founders First Point Of Contact Should Be With The Investment Decision-Maker with Spencer Kimball, Founder & CEO @ Cockroach Labs
Disclosure
Kimball: Cockroach Labs Rejects Late-Arriving VCs Who Skipped Between-Round Touchpoints
“And then many of the VCs that I talked to in the previous round, they start to hear about it through the grapevine, and then they pop up, and they want to be involved, and no matter how much I like them, it's often pretty far along at that point, usually past …”
Spencer Kimball Apr 14, 2017 ▶ 17:52 20VC: How Investors Can Get Into The Best Deals & Why Founders First Point Of Contact Should Be With The Investment Decision-Maker with Spencer Kimball, Founder & CEO @ Cockroach Labs
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Kimball: Dedicated Free Fridays yield higher worker satisfaction than traditional weeks
“I think that ultimately leads to a much happier work environment in the sense that you're able to balance the sort of grind of those four days, which honestly people put a little bit more effort into those four days, but then you still have that fifth day wher…”
Spencer Kimball Apr 14, 2017 ▶ 20:41 20VC: How Investors Can Get Into The Best Deals & Why Founders First Point Of Contact Should Be With The Investment Decision-Maker with Spencer Kimball, Founder & CEO @ Cockroach Labs
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Kimball: Data sovereignty laws will not become less strict globally
“Pretty sure that they're not going to get less strict given what's going on geopolitically.”
Spencer Kimball Apr 14, 2017 ▶ 27:50 20VC: How Investors Can Get Into The Best Deals & Why Founders First Point Of Contact Should Be With The Investment Decision-Maker with Spencer Kimball, Founder & CEO @ Cockroach Labs
Assertion Contradicted
Kimball: Google replaced all sharded MySQL with Spanner and Bigtable
“Spanner is the database technology that Google has used to consolidate all of their various applications on top of. So they no longer use Sharded MySQL. Everything's on Spanner or on Bigtable.”
Spencer Kimball Apr 14, 2017 ▶ 4:22 20VC: How Investors Can Get Into The Best Deals & Why Founders First Point Of Contact Should Be With The Investment Decision-Maker with Spencer Kimball, Founder & CEO @ Cockroach Labs
Disclosure
Kimball: Recruited VC associate as Cockroach Labs product manager
“There's somebody that I met with in exactly this capacity at one of the really big funds, and she was working in Palo Alto for them, and she was the one that I was interacting with, and I actually really liked her. I thought she was incredibly intelligent, rea…”
Spencer Kimball Apr 14, 2017 ▶ 13:25 20VC: How Investors Can Get Into The Best Deals & Why Founders First Point Of Contact Should Be With The Investment Decision-Maker with Spencer Kimball, Founder & CEO @ Cockroach Labs

The other half of the tape: Spencer Kimball's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 1 time in 1 episode on 20VC. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 1

Every mention by year

tap a year for its mentions
0011112017episodesmentions
0112017episodes it came up in
000.50.5112017episodesmentions per episode
2017 1 mention in 1 episode

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
20VC: How Investors Can Get Into The Best Deals & Why Founders First Point Of Contact Shou Apr 14, 2017 21m
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