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

**Brett Berson** (0:00)
For today's episode, I'm sitting down with Jay Kreps. He's the co-founder and CEO of Confluent, the data streaming platform built around Apache Kafka, the open-source system he and his co-founders created while they were working as engineers at LinkedIn. In our conversation, Jay shares what it takes to go from software engineer to CEO.

**Jay Kreps** (0:19)
I think the CEO job generally, you operate more in a kind of fog of partial understanding. Very quickly as the organization gets bigger, it's impossible to know everything about everything.

**Brett Berson** (0:30)
He traces Confluence origins as an open-source project and shares how they landed their first enterprise customers when the product was nowhere near done.

**Jay Kreps** (0:39)
The software product that doesn't have nearly enough features, we've taken that out to very large enterprises that we had no business working with for more money than we feel at all comfortable with.

**Brett Berson** (0:49)
How a single blog post did more for Confluence adoption than years of engineering.

**Jay Kreps** (0:53)
If we can't express why this is exciting, it's probably not going to be that successful of an open source project.

**Brett Berson** (0:58)
And why they bet everything on a cloud product than investors and half the company thought was a terrible idea.

**Jay Kreps** (1:04)
We just kind of bludgeoned our way through. Like none of it was pretty. Some of our biggest early customers quit on us.

**Brett Berson** (1:11)
Let's dive in.
What's surprised you most? Like you started the company as a software engineer. And now you've had the full. Yeah.

**Jay Kreps** (1:23)
I mean, lots of things have been surprising. Probably, initially, the surprising thing was just how much of a jump in the deep end. Learning curve there is for going from this.
The skill sets are almost exactly opposite, even though it's not uncommon for this kind of tech company, but it's still the set of things that you need to be good at, better communication. The decisions you're making are very different, certainly for engineering decisions. They're mostly knowable and there's mostly right and wrong answers, but usually, especially the early phase of the company, you're making a lot of very big critical decisions with a lot of unknowable aspects, but it will certainly impact how the company turns out. You know that, but you don't know what the right answer is and you won't find out until later. So I think in a lot of those areas, it's quite different than I think the CEO job generally. You operate much more in a kind of fog of partial understanding. I don't know that everybody understands that. Very quickly, as the organization gets bigger, it's impossible to know everything about everything. And so you have to kind of be roughly directionally right. And people see this often in executives and it bothers them. It's like, oh, they don't understand that thing. And it's true, right? But in practice, you can't understand everything about everything. You have to understand a lot about the most important things and enough about some of the other things and try and make that judgment. The feel of doing that and how you do it, I think, is probably also surprising. If you come out of it, you don't do that at all. There's no shooting from the hip.

**Brett Berson** (2:59)
In the first bucket, if you think about going from software engineer to founder and then over time founder to CEO, what's your clustering of the things you have to figure out at some point?

**Jay Kreps** (3:11)
Well, it's a lot of things. I mean, I think CEOs need to know about 80% of what their executives know about their function, I think, over time. So really kind of learn that discipline. Not enough to be good at it, but enough to know what good is and know if it's going well. And so I think there's just a very long, there's a large learning curve because you end up having to understand a bunch of these disciplines. What is a head of marketing doing? What are each of the subgroups of marketing do? And how are we doing it? And how does that apply in our business? And what's the finance team for? And all those kind of things. I think that-

**Brett Berson** (3:50)
Why do you think 80%? Not 90, not 50, not 20?

**Jay Kreps** (3:53)
Yeah, I think it's just, yeah, I mean, ideally it should be 100%, but it's just not practically, if somebody's done that job for 10 years and you're kind of a dilettante who steps in every time there's a role to fill and then maybe manages it indirectly through them, you know, 80% is going to aspirationally be the best you'll be able to do.