From writing the first lines of Kafka over a Christmas break as a LinkedIn engineer to running a public company as the CEO of Confluent, Jay joins the show to chat about how he and his co-founders convinced investors to take a chance on their vision, what many engineers get wrong about communication, and why engineers can make great CEOs - even when coding is not in the job description. And much more.

Segments:

(00:01:16) The Shaved Head Bet
(00:04:07) Fundraising
(00:12:16) The Role of Technical Background in VCs
(00:15:48) The power of believing in the possibility of important changes
(00:18:29) The Journey to starting Confluent
(00:27:11) Kafka's Controversial Beginnings
(00:34:30) Effective Communication in Engineering
(00:44:20) The Early Days of Kafka
(00:48:31) The Power of Storytelling
(00:57:19) Early days of Confluent
(01:03:06) Do Engineers Make Good CEOs?
(01:07:59) A Typical Day in the Life of a CEO
(01:12:24) The Evolution of Data Streaming

Show Notes:
- “The log” blog post that solidified Jay and his co-founders' conviction to found Confluent: https://engineering.linkedin.com/distributed-systems/log-what-every-software-engineer-should-know-about-real-time-datas-unifying

- Jay on twitter: https://x.com/jaykreps

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Music: Vlad Gluschenko — Forest License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en