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Evan Kaplan

CEO, InfluxData · 1 appearance on the record.

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executivefounder@evankaplan ↗LinkedIn ↗influxdata.com ↗

Evan Kaplan has served as CEO of InfluxData since 2016. He previously was the founder and CEO of Aventail Corporation and served as President and CEO of iPass Corporation.

10statements → 4claims → 1claims resolved → 3.7/5average certainty → 2.3/5average debate potential → ≈4.0/5argument clarity, estimated →

1 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 3 not checkable as stated how the 4 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

2 predictions · 2 assertions · 2 opinions · 2 insights · 2 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 4 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 1 is resolved, and 3 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Evan argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
Amazon approached InfluxData for a partnership due to Timestream customer demand
“Last year we did a very unique deal with Amazon. Where they have Amazon's time stream, but their customers kept asking them for influx. And so they approached us.”
Evan Kaplan May 8, 2025 ▶ 30:11 Rewriting Success: What InfluxDB 3.0 Teaches About Scaling—and Scrapping—Your Core Tech

How they sound: speaking style how? →

257 words/min while actually speaking · 13.4 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Evan Kaplan: only 6 usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews. Their coarse estimate from 6 raw tape exchanges is ≈4.0/5, shown at half point precision because the sample is small.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 5,317 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

Everything Evan Kaplan said on the MAD Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Prediction Not checkable as stated
Kaplan: Lakehouses will absorb adjacent tools like ETL and governance
“You know, from my historical perspective on the industry, I think lots of capability that sits outside those things will fall inside those things. Whether it's data governments, whether it's different ETL, whether it's different conversions, these things are g…”
Evan Kaplan May 8, 2025 ▶ 12:02 Rewriting Success: What InfluxDB 3.0 Teaches About Scaling—and Scrapping—Your Core Tech
Opinion
Kaplan: Apache Iceberg is becoming the standard base table format
“And now it seems like Iceberg is certainly with Databricks buying Tabular. That'll be interesting, but Iceberg feels like the base format, although DeltaShare is also relevant.”
Evan Kaplan May 8, 2025 ▶ 17:53 Rewriting Success: What InfluxDB 3.0 Teaches About Scaling—and Scrapping—Your Core Tech
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Kaplan: AI models will run on lakehouses, not time-series databases
“We don't think the intelligence get built on our platform. Like, I know that's a hard thing to say because everything's AI now. We believe that we're fundamentally mining the data and making it available so that the intelligence models, which are largely going…”
Evan Kaplan May 8, 2025 ▶ 21:02 Rewriting Success: What InfluxDB 3.0 Teaches About Scaling—and Scrapping—Your Core Tech
Opinion
Kaplan: CIOs do not care about their company's time-series database
“It's not useful for me to have a meeting with the CIO. The CIO does not care about his time series database. I mean, he should maybe, but he doesn't.”
Evan Kaplan May 8, 2025 ▶ 28:49 Rewriting Success: What InfluxDB 3.0 Teaches About Scaling—and Scrapping—Your Core Tech
Assertion Supported
Amazon approached InfluxData for a partnership due to Timestream customer demand
“Last year we did a very unique deal with Amazon. Where they have Amazon's time stream, but their customers kept asking them for influx. And so they approached us.”
Evan Kaplan May 8, 2025 ▶ 30:11 Rewriting Success: What InfluxDB 3.0 Teaches About Scaling—and Scrapping—Your Core Tech
Assertion Not checkable as stated
InfluxData has 1.3 million open-source users but only 2,600 paying customers
“I argue that our first versions of one and two in open source were so good that you have 1.3 million users and only 2600 paying customers.”
Evan Kaplan May 8, 2025 ▶ 33:01 Rewriting Success: What InfluxDB 3.0 Teaches About Scaling—and Scrapping—Your Core Tech
Insight
Kaplan: General-purpose databases fail when scaling to high-volume telemetry
“So yes, in some cases there are, for many use cases, you can use a general purpose database. People have built stuff on Postgres. People have built time series on Mongo. Like those are highly useful. But if you're ingesting huge amounts of data, you want the q…”
Evan Kaplan May 8, 2025 ▶ 6:26 Rewriting Success: What InfluxDB 3.0 Teaches About Scaling—and Scrapping—Your Core Tech
Disclosure
InfluxData delays sales calls until users run software for three months
“We don't even talk to a customer unless they've been running our stuff for three months, generally, or they've built something.”
Evan Kaplan May 8, 2025 ▶ 29:46 Rewriting Success: What InfluxDB 3.0 Teaches About Scaling—and Scrapping—Your Core Tech
Insight
Commercial open-source success requires distinct product and monetization home runs
“So with open source, you have to hit two home runs. You have to build a project that developers love. And they deploy and they use and they love. And then you have the second home run, which you have to figure out a model to monetize it.”
Evan Kaplan May 8, 2025 ▶ 32:20 Rewriting Success: What InfluxDB 3.0 Teaches About Scaling—and Scrapping—Your Core Tech
Disclosure
Kaplan: 60% to 70% of InfluxData's business is IoT
“Now, here we are, it's 20, 25, and probably 60 to 70% of our business is now IoT.”
Evan Kaplan May 8, 2025 ▶ 27:00 Rewriting Success: What InfluxDB 3.0 Teaches About Scaling—and Scrapping—Your Core Tech

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
Rewriting Success: What InfluxDB 3.0 Teaches About Scaling—and Scrapping—Your Core Tech May 8, 2025 25m
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