Jay Kreps
Co-founder & CEO, Confluent. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveengineer@jaykreps ↗LinkedIn ↗confluent.io ↗
While serving as a principal engineer at LinkedIn, he co-created Apache Kafka along with other infrastructure systems like Voldemort and Samza. In 2014, he co-founded Confluent to commercialize real-time event streaming for enterprise data, guiding the company through its 2021 Nasdaq IPO.
1shows
1appearances
22statements
2resolved
2supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
2said about them ↓ Everything Jay Kreps said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Kreps: Amazon built Kinesis to imitate Kafka before monetizing the open-source
“Amazon had a system that was actually built in, I believe imitation of Kafka called Kinesis. So it was incompatible, but kind of looked roughly like it. And that was popular. And we were like, oh man, that's going to take the opportunity. And if it doesn't, Th…”
Kreps: There is no business in selling pure open-source software
“And so, you know, if you're trying to sell a product which is purely open source, you know, effectively The price of that product should collapse to the cost of providing it, which is basically kind of a scale of zero, right? So, so there's no business in sell…”
Kreps: Confluent relegated its core cash-cow product to engineers' spare time
“Originally it was like a small group that was working on the cloud offering. And then we were like, no, okay, everybody. Only does the cloud thing, and we will work on the software product in our spare time. Team by team, which is a very dangerous thing to do,…”
Kreps: CEOs must learn ~80% of what functional executives know
“I think CEOs need to know, you know, about 80% of what their executives know about their function, I think, over time. So really kind of learn that discipline. Not enough to be good Add it, but enough to be, to know what good is and know if it's going well.”
Kreps: Extreme vendor lock-in lets infrastructure vendors over-extract value
“I think it is the case that some of these early infrastructure offerings, you know, that it goes too far where the lock-in is so tight that the vendor can actually, you know, extract in some sense more than the value they create because moving off of it is suc…”
Kreps: Existing Customer Pressure Naturally Starves Second Products
“I think inherently that a second product is always. Kind of irrelevant to people's main goals, you know, and the, all the pressure of a business is to satisfy the customers that you have, the big prospects coming in the door, that, that kind of main flow of bu…”
Kreps: Managers who recruit their own teams are massively more successful
“So I found that to be very true in hiring where, you know, people who just, you know, act like they have, they, you know, they just have to fight for their life to go hire this team by themselves as if there was no recruiting support and they're just really de…”
Kreps: Engineering decisions are knowable, early startup decisions are unknowable
“Certainly for engineering decisions. They're mostly knowable and there's mostly kind of right and wrong answers, but usually, especially the early phase of the company, you're making a lot of kind of very big critical decisions with a lot of unknowable aspects…”
Kreps: GTM construction is where early startups fail the most
“I think probably for early companies that go to market construction is, is probably one of the areas where this goes the most wrong. Where you're effectively, you're trying, you're talking to people and you're trying to cut and paste what they've done into you…”
Kreps: Half the challenge in ML products is data infrastructure, not models
“Half the problem in any of these products is actually not the machine learning stuff. It's actually just the data, like Getting, getting it, being able to work with it at scale, being able to apply it, being able to do that in the context of like a real runnin…”
Kreps: Open-Source Projects Require Product Marketing to Drive Adoption
“What was it that it took us probably several years to discover was basically product marketing. You know, in an open source context was, yeah, you gotta tell people why it's interesting.”
Kreps: Confluent coined 'data in motion' against databases for its IPO
“Our approach to that was for the IPO was very much like, okay, databases, data at rest. But now all the parts of the company are connected. There's going to be an equally important problem of data in motion. And so, you know, the goal was to convey, Hey, these…”
Kreps: Growing companies inherently lose their communication edge by addressing multiple audiences
“Usually as companies, as time goes by, as a result of that, many things become more watered down because you're trying to say something. To a bunch of people who have very different contexts. And you notice this, that companies kind of lose the edge in communi…”
Kreps: Startups can amplify founder-led sales by hiring early-stage IC reps
“And I think that's really a worthwhile investment of, you know, I think you can kind of amplify The founder led sale thing quite significantly with just a few people. But you need people who have been successful in early companies where they just.”
Kreps: High-level company problems are inherently cross-functional
“Anything that's not working
At a high level is inherently cross-functional. And you know, you'll see a weird phenomenon where people in each function are often don't have enough global context to totally diagnose it.”
Kreps: Demanding a three-month timeline forces engineering teams to break assumptions
“If you kind of just go back and say, well, okay, you know, what would the three month version of it look like? Maybe that's totally impossible, but a significant portion of the time, there is something you could do in three months. And what would that be? Is t…”
Kreps: Signal of a major problem is use cases growing tenfold
“You can kind of, you know, you're onto a big problem when the number of use cases just keeps, you know, going up by like an order of magnitude that kind of pop out and where the problem you're solving seems really fundamental.”
Kreps: Apache Kafka Sat on the Shelf During First Open-Source Year
“And you know, it actually took a while, you know, probably the first year, it mostly sat on the shelf as a open source project, which we were quite disappointed about.”
Kreps: LinkedIn offered an unprecedented balance sheet investment in Confluent
“When we went to quit, LinkedIn was like, oh, okay, well, this is, you know, first of all, we don't really want you to leave, but if you're going to leave, we do think this is really valuable. We would be interested in investing.
And we were like, okay.
Off the…”
Kreps: Confluent's initial seed round shifted to a Benchmark-led Series A
“And it went from something where LinkedIn was going to be the kind of major investor to being, you know, a smaller part of the round. And it went from kind of a seed investment to a series A through the course of that fundraising process. But yeah, it was, you…”
Kreps: Confluent's one-year pitch roadmap took five years to complete
“What we had pitched was actually very close to what we built. It's just, I said we were going to do it in a year. And I think in practice, The first thing we launched was much less than that. And to do everything on the slide took like five years.”
The other half of the tape: Jay Kreps's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 2 times in 1 episode across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
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In Depth 2
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Jay's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| IN DEPTHLEDGER | Co-founder & CEO, Confluent | 1 | 22 | 100% 2/2 | full record on In Depth → |