The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
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Narkhede: Confluent ignored narrow ICPs to capture the broad Kafka base
“Kafka, you know, that was one of the reasons why we couldn't or we didn't sort of narrowly focus on an ICP like traditional companies do for good reason. It was because, you know, the Kafka adoption base was so broad and for Confluent to quickly convert those …”
Narkhede: Commercial open-source requires all project creators to found together
“For the success of an open source company, all the creators should be part of it. And when that doesn't happen, you have two companies and they're competing on things they shouldn't be competing on, which mostly comes down to pricing and it's just a race to th…”
Narkhede: Confluent chose not to separate on-prem and cloud sales teams
“We actually decided to not split it. And that was because we ultimately wanted to transition to a cloud first business. So we put in a, instead a lot of thought and a lot of investment in sales enablement you know, internal education of why this is important, …”
Narkhede: Confluent probably would have failed if it started as SaaS-only
“Would it have just been feasible if we started with a SaaS only offering? And the answer is probably not because, you know, one of the most important things an open source company needs to do is quickly establish yourself as the market leader, quickly establis…”
Narkhede: Kafka was used by 50% of Fortune 500 when Confluent launched
“Confluent kind of started with a proven technology that was used at, you know, roughly 50% of Fortune 500 companies at that point in time.”
Narkhede: Transitioning enterprise sales to consumption models is the hardest challenge
“Sales was just a whole different, you know, dynamic. It was The most difficult one to solve for because in the early days, you know, if you're offering a software product, you have the traditional salespeople who are used to selling a subscription-based softwa…”
Narkhede: Confluent relicensed add-ons to stop cloud vendors reselling managed services
“So we introduced value-added offerings like stream processing, KSQL, under licenses that were similar, very similar in spirit to the open source friendly Apache two dot O, but these licenses had specific provisions that prevented other entities from just offer…”
Narkhede: Operational ease is the right starting point for open-source companies
“The first one was operational ease, you know, offering tools and enhancements to simplify the deployment, management, and scaling of Kafka clusters, which is actually, I think, the right starting point for many open source companies.”
Narkhede: Competing against a thought leader is harder than product-level competition
“I think what differentiates the top 20% from the rest is thought leadership. You know, thinking of develop developer evangelism as one of the most important tools to establish yourself as the thought leader in the space, because that is actually a core differe…”
Narkhede: Features enabling end users should remain open source
“Features that directly
Enabled the end users of the open source product.
We believe should ideally remain open source or be open source.”
Narkhede: Confluent never split engineering teams between cloud and on-prem
“We kept the foundational teams the same. So there was only one team ever working on Apache Kafka and the foundation. There was only one team that was ever developing a specific proprietary feature set. So we never split, you know, specific teams or individual …”
Narkhede: Oscilar targets risk executives because they lack in-house engineering teams
“In Austin, I realized that the head of risk, which is the buyer, actually does not have the engineering team. They just don't hire for it. They don't report into it. They just don't have the team that can build the technology and the product they want. So they…”
Narkhede: MongoDB Atlas is arguably the most successful cloud product
“And back then I remember that the CPO of MongoDB and today Atlas, their product is the most successful cloud product out there, arguably.”
Narkhede: Confluent was founded four years after Kafka was open-sourced
“So this conference started four years after Apache Kafka was open sourced and became successful and
It was very much an organic decision.”
Narkhede: Confluent initiated SaaS product two years in
“So about two years in, we realized that there must be a SaaS offering because at that time, the whole industry was in the middle of this transition from on-prem environments to the public cloud.”
Narkhede: Confluent Cloud is nearly larger than its on-premise software business
“And today, our cloud business is growing and is, you know, almost larger than the software business as well.”
Narkhede: Fraud and risk is Kafka's largest use case by dollar spend
“The whole fraud and risk space came to mind because it's one of the largest use cases of Kafka on a dollar basis.”
Narkhede: Confluent's initial branding was easy because of Kafka's popularity
“At Confluent, we could lean on the brand of a very popular Open source projects, so the zero to one branding phase was actually really easy. With Ocelor, you're, you know, humbled that you're starting with something that people don't really know about.”
Narkhede: Chose closed-source SaaS for Oscilar to avoid hybrid software headaches
“I specifically chose a company that would be entirely different. You know, the reasons are like, A, one is just simplicity. You know, you kind of have the experience you've had already balancing building a software business and a SaaS business and trying to ba…”
Narkhede: Pre-validated Oscilar by pitching Figma prototypes to 80 risk executives
“Set up meetings with about 70 or 80 different buyers who are, you know, heads of risk. At different companies in different industry verticals and literally sort of showed them a Figma prototype of what they would be using if they were to use a product like Oce…”
Narkhede: Passed on Customer 360 Startup Idea Due to Crowded Market
“There was one other, maybe problem space again, sort of drawing on my experience, which is a helping companies build like a customer three 60 product where you have like a central platform to tap into, to understand your customer usage patterns, your customer …”
Narkhede: Confluent had to combat strong developer DIY mentality around Kafka
“We spent a lot of time focusing on convincing the company that they didn't need a team managing Kafka or their team could be much smaller. Effectively, you're dealing with a, you know, target customer base that just wants to do it themselves, right? So the DIY…”
Narkhede: Confluent hired MongoDB's CPO as cloud strategy advisor
“And proactively reached out to the CPO there and regularly had conversations, hired him as an advisor at Confluent and was very helpful in avoiding some of the problems that they ran into and learning from the experience that they were, they had because they w…”
Narkhede: Kafka was built only after finding no existing streaming platforms
“We actually began by researching the market to see if anyone had built something like that. So definitely wasn't the preference to build Apache Kafka, but when we realized that nothing else existed, we decided to take the leap and start Apache Kafka, open sour…”