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

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

From In Depth by First Round

March 26, 2026 · 1h 7m

About this episode

Jay Kreps discusses his journey from engineer to CEO and the challenges of scaling 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…

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Guest: Jay Kreps

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Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Confluent, LinkedIn, Amazon Web Services, Apache Kafka, Benchmark, McKinsey & Company, MySpace, Oracle, Red Hat, Snowflake

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