Aug 5, 2020 · 42m · mad
Fireside Chat: Nate Stewart (CPO & BOD at Cockroach Labs) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this Data Driven NYC fireside chat, Nate Stewart, Chief Product Officer at Cockroach Labs, joins host Matt Turck to discuss his career journey, distributed SQL database architecture, open-source commercialization, product management leadership, and diversity in tech.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Matt holds 14.6% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Matt as informed peer 2.4 Guest teaching 5.0 Guest disagreement 1.6 Matt pushing back 0.6
speaking balance: gold is Matt, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 40:41 Reframing the ACID vs SQL premise
Nate directly challenges the premise of an audience question, stating that no developer left SQL for NoSQL by choice if they required ACID transactions, but rather traded ACID away out of scale necessity.
Hardest push from Matt ▶ 37:07 Challenging Cockroach's GTM alignmentJack reads Shant's audience question that explicitly challenges Cockroach's go-to-market fit for smaller developers compared to MongoDB and Postgres.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 14:01 Deep dive on Amazon Aurora architectural limitationsNate provides a detailed technical lesson on why Aurora's single-master execution architecture creates write scale and availability limitations compared to CockroachDB.
Matt holds his own ▶ 17:14 Framing open source commercialization modelsMatt demonstrates strong domain mastery of open-source business models by accurately articulating the evolution from open-source project to enterprise software and managed cloud offering.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Matt as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Matt pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nate Stewart's Career Journey to Cockroach Labs | 2 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Matt open with friendly conversational prompts about Nate's background at Bloomberg, Microsoft, and Cockroach Labs. Nate provides an informative overview of his journey and how he structures his product management team around customer jobs to be done. | |
| CockroachDB Core Architecture and Value Propositions | 1 | 5 | 1 | 0 | Matt prompts Nate to explain CockroachDB's value proposition to newcomers. Nate delivers a detailed breakdown of core database architecture covering resilience, horizontal scaling, and data locality. | |
| Evolution of Databases and the Emergence of Distributed SQL | 2 | 6 | 1 | 0 | Matt asks Nate to walk through the historical context of database evolution. Nate educates the host and audience on the trade-offs between traditional relational databases, the NoSQL movement, and Google Spanner's breakthrough. | |
| Product Positioning Against Amazon Aurora and Apache Cassandra | 3 | 6 | 2 | 1 | Matt names specific market competitors including Amazon Aurora and Apache Cassandra. Nate clearly breaks down the architectural limitations of competitors, such as Aurora's single-master bottleneck and Cassandra's rigid query schemas. | |
| Commercial Strategy Across Open Source, Enterprise, and Cloud Managed Offerings | 4 | 5 | 1 | 1 | Matt demonstrates good understanding of open-source business models while asking about commercial strategy across open source, enterprise, and managed cloud. Nate explains top-of-funnel efficiency and serverless cloud goals. | |
| Lessons Learned in Building Cockroach Cloud Managed Service | 2 | 4 | 1 | 0 | Matt asks about operational learnings in launching Cockroach Cloud. Nate explains why vertical integration was chosen over licensing and describes the organizational shift from bi-annual releases to agile SaaS iteration. | |
| Developer Engagement and Cockroach University | 3 | 3 | 1 | 0 | Matt asks how Cockroach wins developer mindshare. Nate shares insights into practical Postgres compatibility and educational programs like Cockroach University. | |
| Actionable Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Strategies in Tech | 3 | 5 | 1 | 0 | Matt raises a thoughtful question regarding actionable diversity and inclusion in tech. Nate provides concrete strategies implemented at Cockroach Labs, including inclusive job requirements, pay equity bands, and updated product personas. | |
| Q&A: Open Source Licensing Strategy and Business Source License (BSL) | 2 | 6 | 2 | 0 | In Q&A facilitated by Jack, Nate explains the transition from Apache 2.0 to the Business Source License (BSL) to protect against cloud provider exploitation while guaranteeing eventual reversion to open source after three years. | |
| Q&A: Executive Leadership Lessons and the Power of Communication | 2 | 6 | 3 | 2 | An audience question pushes back on Cockroach's go-to-market strategy for non-enterprise users. Nate reframes the premise by arguing that zero-downtime maintenance and schema changes provide huge immediate value to small developer teams. | |
| Q&A: Demystifying the Shift from SQL to NoSQL and NewSQL | 2 | 6 | 3 | 1 | An audience question asks if developers left SQL for NoSQL due to ACID guarantees rather than SQL syntax. Nate clarifies and reframes the lineage, explaining that developers reluctantly gave up ACID to achieve horizontal scale. |
Statements from this episode (16)
Nate Stewart: Cockroach Labs product team has about 25 people
“So the product team right now is about 25 people.”
Stewart: Dropping CS and PM requirements speeds up product manager hiring
“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.”
Stewart: Traditional relational databases require offline downtime for schema changes
“In traditional relational databases. You're going to have to take the app offline. You're going to have to lock a table.”
Stewart: CockroachDB presents as a single Postgres database to developers
“From the point of view of the application developer, it looks like they're talking to a single Postgres database, but it just so happens to be elastically scalable.”
Stewart: Google Spanner paper provided the foundation for CockroachDB
“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…”
Stewart: Modern relational databases must be shared-nothing distributed SQL
“We think that again, if you were to build a relational database today with the current state of art, you would end up with a shared nothing, a SQL database that supports transactions.”
Stewart: Amazon Aurora's single master limits write scaling and creates downtime risk
“If you're, if you have a lot of rights, they're still going to a single master. They didn't rewrite the execution engine. So if that master goes down, your apps offline, if you want to scale your rights, you're going to have to get a larger and larger master m…”
Stewart: CockroachDB scales reads and writes arbitrarily across supported PostgreSQL features
“We don't have full Postgres compatibility today, but every Postgres feature we have is cloud native. It will use the full power of the cluster to serve your queries and we can scale writes arbitrarily. We can scale reads arbitrarily.”
Stewart: Cassandra offers fast reads but requires upfront knowledge of queries
“Cassandra can give you extremely fast reads, but it's going to come at the cost of some flexibility because for Cassandra, you have to know your query patterns ahead of time. You have to design your data for a particular set of queries.”
Stewart: Cockroach Cloud will be default way people experience CockroachDB
“Cockroach Cloud, which we believe will be the default way that people experience CockroachDB”
Stewart: Enterprise managed cloud demand is driven by SRE hiring bottlenecks
“When we first built it, we were thinking, hey, this is for the startups. This is for the growth stage companies. But what we've seen in practice is that even the enterprises are like, we cannot hire site reliability engineers or operators fast enough to run th…”
Stewart: Cockroach Labs lacked telemetry before building managed cloud service
“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…”
Stewart: Online education will drive CockroachDB adoption into mission-critical apps
“We believe that online education really is the future way that we're going to get CockroachDB into more mission critical applications.”
Stewart: Cockroach Labs adopted BSL, open-sourcing code after three years
“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…”