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Spencer Kimball

Co-Founder & CEO, Cockroach Labs · 3 appearances on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

founderexecutiveengineer@spencer08433091 ↗LinkedIn ↗cockroachlabs.com ↗Wikipedia ↗

He is the co-founder and CEO of Cockroach Labs, which develops the distributed SQL database CockroachDB. Before Cockroach Labs, he spent a decade as an engineer at Google, co-founded Viewfinder, and co-created the GNU Image Manipulation Program.

38statements → 19claims → 8claims resolved → 75%fully supported → 3.97/5average certainty → 2.05/5average debate potential → 4.2/5argument clarity · the sources → 10said about them ↓

6 supported 2 partly supported 0 contradicted 11 not checkable as stated how the 19 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

1 prediction · 18 assertions · 1 opinion · 12 insights · 5 disclosures · 1 what if · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertions are the 19 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 8 are resolved, and 11 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 Spencer 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
CockroachDB collapses entire SQL transactions into single consensus latency round trips
“When you think of a SQL transaction from the begin to, you know, the various selects to the updates and inserts to the end transaction, we collapse that all into a single consensus latency.”
Spencer Kimball Oct 17, 2018 ▶ 7:48 Ultra-Resilient SQL for Global Business // Spencer Kimball, Cockroach (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
75% certainty 3
100% certainty 4
83% certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

Argument clarity: do they answer the question? how? →

4.2 / 5 directness 4.5 · coherence 4.5 · precision 3.9 · compression 3.6

answered every one of 11 assessed questions directly

This is a score against a rubric. It is not a rank. Every host question → answer exchange is scored with names hidden on directness, coherence, precision and compression, 1–5 each, on meaning alone: disfluencies are ignored, and only raw unedited episodes count. This is the score that measures thought. Every scored exchange, scores shown → · The rubric and its checks →

How they sound: speaking style how? →

251 words/min while actually speaking · 33.9 um and uh per 1k words

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 17,390 words across 3 episodes 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 Spencer Kimball said on the MAD Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Insight
Kimball: Customers with zero software issues are actually more likely to churn
“You're actually more likely to churn a customer if they never have a problem with your software. Because they look at it and like, why aren't we just using the open source version of this? There's nothing that's wrong with this. We don't need support. What are…”
Spencer Kimball Nov 17, 2022 ▶ 38:16 A Cloud SQL Database Built for Survival | Cockroach CEO & Co-Founder, Spencer Kimball
Insight
Kimball: Cloud services are cannibalizing the open-source business model
“Open source ate the software world, and now I think cloud services are very much cannibalizing the open source business model.”
Spencer Kimball Nov 17, 2022 ▶ 31:05 A Cloud SQL Database Built for Survival | Cockroach CEO & Co-Founder, Spencer Kimball
Insight
Kimball: Mandate to open source is weaker than when Cockroach started
“The mandate to open source is not nearly as strong as it was when we started Cockroach.”
Spencer Kimball Nov 17, 2022 ▶ 31:50 A Cloud SQL Database Built for Survival | Cockroach CEO & Co-Founder, Spencer Kimball
Insight
Kimball: Early exploratory sales hires usually must be replaced to scale
“As soon as that person starts to figure out what that motion looks like, you're probably going to need to replace them, because the person that can figure that out is not usually the person that can Mentor other salespeople and start to scale an organization a…”
Spencer Kimball Nov 17, 2022 ▶ 35:21 A Cloud SQL Database Built for Survival | Cockroach CEO & Co-Founder, Spencer Kimball
Insight
Kimball: Buyers fear cloud vendor lock-in more than database vendor lock-in
“What they're worried about is the vendor lock-in from the hyperscale cloud vendors. They're very worried about that. So the right way to assuage their concerns isn't so much to convince them that they're not going to be locked into your system. It's to convinc…”
Spencer Kimball Nov 17, 2022 ▶ 46:00 A Cloud SQL Database Built for Survival | Cockroach CEO & Co-Founder, Spencer Kimball
Insight
Kimball: Building a closed-source general OLTP database is a mistake
“I think that it would be a mistake for us or for anyone like us to build something that's closed source in terms of a general OLTP database system.”
Spencer Kimball Jun 19, 2015 ▶ 20:15 Spencer Kimball, Cockroach Labs // A New Kind of Database (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Kimball: Data infrastructure leaders will keep a narrow product focus
“In general, the industry leaders in each product category will continue to have a more narrow focus.”
Spencer Kimball Nov 17, 2022 ▶ 13:37 A Cloud SQL Database Built for Survival | Cockroach CEO & Co-Founder, Spencer Kimball
Insight
Relying on asynchronous database replication for performance is outdated thinking
“This idea that asynchronous replication is the correct way, maybe the only way to get performant database operation it should be sort of thinking from the past.”
Spencer Kimball Oct 17, 2018 ▶ 16:31 Ultra-Resilient SQL for Global Business // Spencer Kimball, Cockroach (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Opinion
Kimball: NoSQL databases lack sophistication for complex mobile app backends
“The problem is that, you know, in this day and age, mobile apps are getting increasingly complex, and when you have a complex mobile app, that translates to complex operations that are run in the cloud on the backend servers, and those the problem is that thes…”
Spencer Kimball Jun 19, 2015 ▶ 5:17 Spencer Kimball, Cockroach Labs // A New Kind of Database (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
Insight
Kimball: Solving strong consistency in application logic does not work
“It's actually an incredibly hard problem. It's incredibly hard to solve it above the database layer, which some people purport to do. You know, they're putting all these kind of checks in. Oh, well, you know, was I at this data center before? Am I at this data…”
Spencer Kimball Jun 19, 2015 ▶ 9:29 Spencer Kimball, Cockroach Labs // A New Kind of Database (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
Insight
Kimball: Be suspicious of strong-consistency databases not using Paxos or Raft
“So I'd be very suspicious if you see a database that claims to do this that doesn't use something like Paxos, Which is really the gold standard, and Raft, which just came out in in 2014 which is kind of a reimagined and simpler version of Paxos.”
Spencer Kimball Jun 19, 2015 ▶ 9:50 Spencer Kimball, Cockroach Labs // A New Kind of Database (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
Insight
Kimball: Retrofitting distributed transactions onto databases post hoc is very difficult
“You see a lot of the sort of distributed databases that currently exist attempting to sort of retrofit their database with distributed transactions. It's very difficult to do that post hoc.”
Spencer Kimball Jun 19, 2015 ▶ 13:12 Spencer Kimball, Cockroach Labs // A New Kind of Database (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
CockroachDB has open-source contributors from the US government and China
“We actually have you know open source contributors, like a whole team of 10 people from China, for example, And, ah, you know, some people from the US government because, ah, you know, they're so interested in it.”
Spencer Kimball Jun 19, 2015 ▶ 19:15 Spencer Kimball, Cockroach Labs // A New Kind of Database (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
What-if
Kimball: Most database problems at Square were solvable with Spanner
“If you looked at all the problems Square was having, and they had something like 70 externally facing use cases when we joined them, most of the problems that they were struggling with could have been solved with the use of something like Spanner.”
Spencer Kimball Nov 17, 2022 ▶ 7:38 A Cloud SQL Database Built for Survival | Cockroach CEO & Co-Founder, Spencer Kimball
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Spencer Kimball: Netflix operates hundreds of CockroachDB clusters
“They have hundreds of cockroach clusters already.”
Spencer Kimball Nov 17, 2022 ▶ 23:03 A Cloud SQL Database Built for Survival | Cockroach CEO & Co-Founder, Spencer Kimball
Insight
Kimball: Winning Global 2000 customers requires multiple software deployment configurations
“If you want to win, at least in 2022, the global 2000 as customers, you really do have to have a product that, that runs in a variety of different configurations.”
Spencer Kimball Nov 17, 2022 ▶ 24:01 A Cloud SQL Database Built for Survival | Cockroach CEO & Co-Founder, Spencer Kimball
Assertion Partly supported
CockroachDB combines NoSQL elastic scalability with SQL strong consistency
“So, you know, Cockroach bridges the gap. It's both of those things. It has both of those things, and it doesn't compromise.”
Spencer Kimball Oct 17, 2018 ▶ 0:57 Ultra-Resilient SQL for Global Business // Spencer Kimball, Cockroach (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Data center failovers rarely happen in seconds due to manual intervention
“You also expect that the recovery time objective, when you actually have a major failure in a data center, like a replication site can be, you hope it's in the minutes. It's rarely in the seconds, because these things can be slow if they're automated, and some…”
Spencer Kimball Oct 17, 2018 ▶ 4:16 Ultra-Resilient SQL for Global Business // Spencer Kimball, Cockroach (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Three-site consensus replication yields 43% higher non-storage resource utilization
“It does require three copies, so you're using three times, ah, three X storage as opposed to two X. But you actually get 43% higher utilization On your actual, ah, you know, resources other than storage.”
Spencer Kimball Oct 17, 2018 ▶ 5:52 Ultra-Resilient SQL for Global Business // Spencer Kimball, Cockroach (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
CockroachDB's regional cluster architecture closely mirrors Amazon Aurora
“This is a pretty interesting and common way to run Cockroach, and it's similar to what Amazon's doing with Aurora.”
Spencer Kimball Oct 17, 2018 ▶ 6:55 Ultra-Resilient SQL for Global Business // Spencer Kimball, Cockroach (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Assertion Supported
CockroachDB collapses entire SQL transactions into single consensus latency round trips
“When you think of a SQL transaction from the begin to, you know, the various selects to the updates and inserts to the end transaction, we collapse that all into a single consensus latency.”
Spencer Kimball Oct 17, 2018 ▶ 7:48 Ultra-Resilient SQL for Global Business // Spencer Kimball, Cockroach (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
CockroachDB hits full TPC-C throughput globally despite 100-millisecond latency increases
“We've run TPC-C-T-K at this, and we get full throughput. The latencies are just higher, and they're higher by, like, a hundred milliseconds.”
Spencer Kimball Oct 17, 2018 ▶ 12:07 Ultra-Resilient SQL for Global Business // Spencer Kimball, Cockroach (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Insight
Kimball: 95% of data in global software applications is inherently local
“When you're building a global service, most data, like 95% of it, actually happens to be very local.”
Spencer Kimball Oct 17, 2018 ▶ 14:09 Ultra-Resilient SQL for Global Business // Spencer Kimball, Cockroach (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Proper geo-partitioning enables zero RPO and low global database latency
“It's quite possible to have zero RPO and low latencies, even in a global case if you do this kind of partitioning correctly.”
Spencer Kimball Oct 17, 2018 ▶ 16:45 Ultra-Resilient SQL for Global Business // Spencer Kimball, Cockroach (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)

Show 14statements(14 left)

The other half of the tape: Spencer Kimball's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 10 times in 3 episodes on the MAD Podcast. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Matt Turck 6Nate Stewart 2Peter Fenton 1Jack Berkowitz 1

Every mention by year

tap a year for its mentions
0041812016201720182019202020212022episodesmentions
0112016201720182019202020212022episodes it came up in
0040.5812016201720182019202020212022episodesmentions per episode
2022 1 mention in 1 episode
2020 2 mentions in 1 episode
2016 7 mentions in 1 episode

Appearances (3)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
A Cloud SQL Database Built for Survival | Cockroach CEO & Co-Founder, Spencer Kimball Nov 17, 2022 41m
Ultra-Resilient SQL for Global Business // Spencer Kimball, Cockroach (FirstMark's Data Dr Oct 17, 2018 20m
Spencer Kimball, Cockroach Labs // A New Kind of Database (Hosted by FirstMark Capital) Jun 19, 2015 20m
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