What nobody tells engineers about becoming a CEO | Jay Kreps (Co-founder and CEO, Confluent)

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” References: Amazon Web Services: https://aws.amazon.com/ Apache Kafka: https://kafka.apache.org/ Benchmark: https://www.benchmark.com/ Confluent: https://www.confluent.io/ Jun Rao: https://www.linkedin.com/in/junrao LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/ McKinsey & Company: https://www.mckinsey.com/ MySpace: https://www.myspace.com/ Neha Narkhede: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nehanarkhede Oracle: https://www.oracle.com/ Red Hat: https://www.redhat.com/ Snowflake: https://www.snowflake.com/ Where to find Jay: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaykreps/ Twitter/X: https://x.com/jaykreps Where to find Brett: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/brettberson Where to find First Round Capital: Website: https://firstround.com/ First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/firstround YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast Timestamps: 01:18 Making the leap from engineer to CEO 03:33 The 80% rule: what a CEO actually needs to know 04:54 Scaling different business disciplines 09:31 How Confluent’s story began in LinkedIn 12:13 The growing need for scalable data tech 13:37 What the early Kafka product looked like 16:38 Kafka’s underwhelming open-source launch 18:38 The blog post that accelerated Kafka’s adoption 20:16 Why so many marketing messages fail 28:08 The decision to build Confluent 34:24 Planning to fundraise before building the product 39:19 Confluent’s early years: Tough product decisions 47:07 The underrated growth lever question for companies 55:46 Why founder optimism is an overrated trait 1:00:29 What should founders give up as they scale? 1:02:47 Why people become trapped in a failure mindset 1:08:33 The Chipotle problem: Losing excellence at scale