Jay Kreps is the co-founder and CEO of Confluent, the company built around Apache Kafka — the open-source data streaming platform he originally built while at LinkedIn. In this conversation, Jay shares his full journey: how Confluent grew from a scrappy group of engineers with no go-to-market experience into a publicly traded enterprise software company. He makes the case that the difference between what a company can do, and what it must do, is one of the most underrated building levers; illustrated through his years spent pushing Confluent towards a cloud product, in the face of widespread opposition.

In this episode, we discuss:

Why moving from software engineer to CEO requires almost an entirely new skillset
The product marketing pyramid Jay built to explain Kafka to the world
How Confluent bludgeoned its way to a cloud-first business when the early product was “embarrassing”
The critical difference between what a company can do and what it must do
What keeps scaling companies from becoming "Chipotle”

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