
Cockroach Labs, the ambitious database company with a funny name, has gone from strength to strength over the last few years. Started with three ex-Googlers in 2014, it successfully navigated in its early years the perilous waters of being an early database company that customers need to trust for mission-critical applications. Over time, it’s gained tremendous momentum with a now long list of marquee customers, and was most recently valued at $5B.
In part because we at FirstMark are proud investors in the company, we’ve featured Cockroach Labs several times at Data Driven NYC over the years: in 2014 (video), 2018 (video) and 2020 (video), and it’s been really fun to see their tremendous progress.
It was great to host CEO Spencer Kimball once again and check in on the latest, as well as lessons learned building a successful open source enterprise software company.
We covered a bunch of really interesting things, including:
- The origins of the company
- The evolution of the database market from SQL to NoSQL to NewSQL to cloud
- The current opportunity around serverless
- Open source license questions
- Go to market: community led, bottoms up, top down?
- Who’s the perfect first sales hire for an enterprise software company
Video and transcript below!
Continue reading “In Conversation with Spencer Kimball, CEO, Cockroach Labs”