Kreps: Amazon built Kinesis to imitate Kafka before monetizing the open-source
Jay Kreps · How to build a company when you’re not an optimist | Jay Kreps (Co-founder and CEO, Confluent) · Mar 26, 2026 · at 37:51
Jay Kreps, co-founder and CEO of Confluent, discusses the early competitive landscape and threat posed by Amazon's cloud offerings against Apache Kafka.
0:00 / 0:19exact quote · 19.7s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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, They'll build something around the open source, which they did.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Jay Kreps
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…”