Jay Kreps is the CEO of Confluent, Inc., a company backing the popular Apache Kafka messaging system. Prior to founding Confluent, he was formerly the lead architect for data infrastructure at LinkedIn. He is among the original authors of several Open-source projects including Project Voldemort (a key-value store).

Jay Kreps is the CEO of Confluent, Inc., a company backing the popular Apache Kafka messaging system.

Prior to founding Confluent, he was formerly the lead architect for data infrastructure at LinkedIn.

He is among the original authors of several open source projects including Project Voldemort (a key-value store).

Apache Kafka (a distributed messaging system) and Apache Samza (a stream processing system).^[11]

When Jay Kreps was at Linkedin, he had several mission-critical responsibilities. He was the technical lead on the platform’s search systems, recommendation engine, and social graph. But perhaps most impressively, he was one of the co-creators of Apache Kafka, an open-source software now used by over 100,000 organizations globally, that helps companies efficiently handle real-time data feeds like LinkedIn’s own.

But back when Kafka was built in 2008, hardly anyone understood the product outside of the developer community.

So when Kreps left LinkedIn in 2014 to build Confluent, which was supposed to be “a fully managed Kafka service and enterprise stream processing platform,” few people knew what that meant and almost nobody believed in the mission.

To Kreps and his co-founders Neha Narkhede and Jun Rao (who also left LinkedIn and co-created Kafka), that was okay.

From day zero, he was determined to build a successful business in the event streaming niche, one he predicted six years ago “could serve as a kind of ‘central nervous system’” to some of the world’s most complex systems and applications.^[12]