As Confluent turns five years old, special guest Jay Kreps (Co-founder and CEO, Confluent) brings us back to his early development days of coding Apache Kafka® over a Christmas holiday while working at LinkedIn. Kafka has become a breakthrough open source distributed streaming platform based on an abstraction of the distributed commit log, and his involvement in the project eventually led him to start Confluent with Jun Rao and Neha Narkhede. 

In this episode, Jay shares about all the highs and lows along the way, including some of his favorite customer success stories with companies like Lyft and Euronext, which empower their real-time businesses through event streaming with Confluent Cloud.

Starting a company certainly comes with more than the technology, and Jay also reflects on some of the challenges around funding, support, and introducing Confluent to the rest of the world. How they have brought us from the beginning to now yields some wise words from Jay to any developer who is interested in establishing their own startup. 

EPISODE LINKS

• Lyft on Production-Ready Kafka on Kubernetes
• Euronext Stock Exchange Relies on Confluent for Event-Driven Trading Platform
• Join the Confluent Community Slack
• Get 30% off Kafka Summit registration using the code audio19