Cockroach Labs

“On the way I've done a lot of angel investing, so I've invested in more than 80 different startups.”

“No matter how good your idea is, or how novel it seems, the best ideas arrive by multiple people at the same time.”

“And the execution, if it's sort of blind, you're going to end up with a sort of local maximum, if even that. Instead, what you need to do is you need to inform all of that effort with a visionary belief in what you're doing. And that's what you bring as a foun…”

“And so when we decided that we were going to even consider doing another startup, which was Cockroach, we actually sat down, we wrote a manifesto on culture, before we even incorporated the company.”

“What we are trying to do, this is sort of empirically determined, is say that the first 20 employees of the company would have 10% of the equity. And the next 20 employees would have an additional five percent of the equity. And then the next 40 employees woul…”

“I mentioned before there's some exploitive behavior from the cloud service providers, in particular AWS, and so you have to be very careful about your license if you're doing open source. I would not just have a very powerful core that, for example, is with th…”

“To beat all of the incumbents that are there, you have to be 10 times better. It's almost impossible to be 10 times better at everything that an involved product category has. But you can be 10 times better if you define a niche in that product category that y…”

“So that early go-to-market leader that rolls up their sleeves, they probably won't scale very far with you. Maybe a year, and that's actually pretty good.”

“And even when you have egregious product failures, and believe me, when you're building a relational operational database, they can be pretty egregious. Every one of those has the seed of a stronger, more trusting relationship with that customer.”

“We were building a product before we had customers for about three years, and I was programming.”

“The mandate to open source is not nearly as strong as it was when we started Cockroach.”

“So the product team right now is about 25 people.”

“Because I can hire product managers a lot faster than someone that says, Hey, you already have to be a product manager or you have to have a computer science background.”

“With some breakthroughs in computer science, there was the Google Spanner paper that came out, and it said, hey, you can get transactions. You can have these types of guarantees in a distributed environment, and that was really the foundation for the work that…”

“So we don't look at the data that is in the database, but you know, where are people getting stuck when they're signing up? How long is it taking them to run that first query? That's information that was completely lost to us when we were just offering the ope…”

“One of the big things we did is we did change our open source license. So it's still source available. It's still free, but we moved from Apache to a license called the business source license. Which is just like Apache, you can use the software, you can redis…”

“We're still winning heads up versus Amazon Aurora in single data centers.”

“We recently ran a TPCC 50 K, which is 50,000 warehouses. It's a pretty big cluster and that was over a hundred plus nodes so, you know, it does scale.”

“Our expected time for the way cockroach comes out of the box configured is 4.5 seconds.”

“We've actually run TPCC, 10 K, we probably could run 50 K, but it's actually expensive for us to run 50 K, but 10 K with chaos, and what chaos is, it's kind of like the Netflix model, where you actually bring nodes down.”

“We don't have a, an enterprise edition that's closed source. All of our source code is, is available. It's all in the same GitHub repo.”

“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.”

“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 …”

“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…”

“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 …”

“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…”

“It's actually an incredibly hard problem. It's incredibly hard to solve it above the database layer, which some people purport to do. You know, they're putting all these kind of checks in. Oh, well, you know, was I at this data center before? Am I at this data…”