The Central Nervous System for Modern Business | Confluent CEO Jay Kreps

**Jay Kreps** (0:00)
Certainly, being a software engineer is more fun than being a CEO. You typically have a lot of bigger problems that have to be solved. There's always more pressure. People who enjoy software engineering, you get to just do that. For the CEO, it's like whatever the biggest problem is, you need to get that solved. Kind of a meme that AI, you can just be like 10 times more efficient. I don't think that's quite true. Some of the AI companies are lean, but a lot of that is just time. You look at how they're adding people, they're adding people, like at a rapid rate. And in practice, the more human-intensive things, like a larger sales force, you just are only going to build at a certain rate. But I think companies that do big things, it takes more time. When we started the company, it was kind of an open source, B2B infrastructure thing. It was actually not an attractive space. As some of the models were proven out, get a ton of excitement, then less excitement. So the world will change around you several times, and you have to be relevant throughout that and continue to adapt in whatever way.

**Joubin Mirzadegan** (1:08)
Welcome to Grit, I'm Joubin, partner at Kleiner Perkins, a show where we go beyond the highlight reel and explore the personal and professional challenges of building history-making companies. Today on the show, we have Jay Kreps, co-founder and CEO of Confluent, the company bringing real-time data and streaming to the modern enterprise. Before Confluent, Jay was one of the creators of Apache Kafka while at LinkedIn, helping to find the architecture that powers countless applications today. Jay is a legend and continues to carry on an amazing tradition of building huge companies in Silicon Valley. Enjoy the episode. Thanks for doing this.

**Jay Kreps** (1:42)
Yeah? Yeah, I'm excited to be here.

**Joubin Mirzadegan** (1:43)
I appreciate it. I will say that you are one of the few people that I have ever seen look better with short or buzzed hair than, like, I was looking at your old LinkedIn pictures. And I'm like, I think he looks better with shaved head. Yeah, maybe I'm biased because I shaved my head and I'm just looking for, you know, role models of head shaved people that look good. But you got like the Jason Statham vibe.

**Jay Kreps** (2:10)
I had no choice, you know, it's like over the course of doing the company, the hair all fell out. Yeah, it just got progressively shorter. And now it's all gone. Yeah, and people regularly in the company tease me with early pictures from me presenting or something looking quite different.

**Joubin Mirzadegan** (2:25)
Yeah, it's a crazy time right now, isn't it?

**Jay Kreps** (2:27)
Yeah, it's a crazy time.

**Joubin Mirzadegan** (2:29)
And you've joined the Board of Anthropic recently? When?

**Jay Kreps** (2:32)
Yeah, I guess it was about a year ago.

**Joubin Mirzadegan** (2:34)
You know, we've had Daniella on. She's a gem.

**Jay Kreps** (2:37)
Yeah, she's amazing. She's amazing.

**Joubin Mirzadegan** (2:38)
How is it being on that board?

**Jay Kreps** (2:40)
It's super interesting.

**Joubin Mirzadegan** (2:41)
Do you feel like you're seeing?

**Jay Kreps** (2:42)
Yeah, I feel very lucky. It's an amazing company, you know, a ton of passion. You know, it's interesting to watch. It's a very kind of aligned group of people going after something at full force. And it's like a crazy time.

**Joubin Mirzadegan** (2:57)
Yeah.

**Jay Kreps** (2:57)
I mean, it's a crazy time for Silicon Valley as I've seen, so.

**Joubin Mirzadegan** (3:01)
You know, you've been doing Confluent for how long?

**Jay Kreps** (3:05)
Ten years.

**Joubin Mirzadegan** (3:05)
Ten years.

**Jay Kreps** (3:06)
Yeah.

**Joubin Mirzadegan** (3:06)
Public company, big public company. Yeah. You ever like go over to an anthropic board meeting and see what they're doing and be like, whoa, like the world has changed. Maybe your company is, I think, actually reasonably well positioned in that new world of change. But you're like, as a technologist and as a builder, I would be like, oh man, if I was doing it all over again, maybe I would join this company or something. Does it get the juices reflowing?

**Jay Kreps** (3:31)
It's a totally different world. I mean, in terms of just what's moving versus five years ago. I think for a technology company, that's always how it is. It's interesting.
In Silicon Valley, we love the new companies. But in some sense, the most impressive thing is the companies that have actually managed to hit a couple of these generations and survive it. So like a Microsoft, in some sense, is the impressive thing, that they can come back and hit another wave, and maybe come back and hit another wave.