Kreps: Open-Source Projects Require Product Marketing to Drive Adoption
Jay Kreps · How to build a company when you’re not an optimist | Jay Kreps (Co-founder and CEO, Confluent) · Mar 26, 2026 · at 19:46
Confluent CEO Jay Kreps reflects on realizing that technical merit alone was not enough to drive developer adoption for Apache Kafka without narrative framing.
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“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.”
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