Jay Kreps explains how VCs initially didn't understand Confluent's open-source model or whether it was a database. Investors only moved when shown concrete traction: real users and measurable growth. Confluent achieved 3-3.5x year-over-year revenue growth, doubling every four months, and now employs about 500 people.
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When you brought this to the venture community, how did they react? They understand open source enough now to see this path clearly, this playbook?
Yeah, you know, it was interesting. It was an interesting time because, you know, I think the open source companies were not that well understood. Beyond that, it wasn't even clear what the category of thing we had was. So we could say, okay, look, this is really popular. And they would be like, well, is it a database? And we're like, well, kind of.
Yeah.
But really different. You know, is it— and so it was definitely work to explain it. And then, you know, but I think like the venture community generally responds well to traction. You know, the one thing you can't BS your way through is like real people doing valuable things with your product, whatever it is.
Yeah, that they— the attention of smart people on the platform. Smart people are not going to engage to do you a favor or you're not going to be able to fake that.
Yeah. You know, I think if you're in the business of having people come and tell you hopeful stories all day long, you kind of get, you start to just discount it. And so the things that are hard to fake, I think, are the things that people believe most in. So that was one of our big learnings in the early fundraising was we would go through this long pitch about why this was all inevitable. At the last slide, we would show some traction, which was amazing for this open source project. And then, you know, the whole time the venture people would be like on their phones, not paying attention. Last slide, they're like, holy shit. So, so then we were like, put that, yeah, put that up for, uh, that was our, our—
It's interesting. I wrote a blog post recently. I was like, if you want to close funding immediately, have this chart. And the chart is we're doubling every 4 months.
Yeah.
Because any company that can double every 3, 4, 5 months, you know, with whatever amount of resources they have, if given more resources, they could grow faster. You've been year over year. What's the revenue growth like at a company like yours to hit these kind of levels? Unicorn levels? Since we're having a unicorn conference.
Yeah, we grew over 3x, you know, closer to about 3.5x last year to this year.
Wow.
Yeah.
So 2019 versus 2018 is going to be 3x.
2017 to 2018. It was 3x. Yeah. 2019 is still happening.
Yeah. You think you can do another 3x or more like a 2x? Yeah. We're going pretty quick.
So we'll see. But yes.
It gets harder as you get— the numbers get bigger.
Yeah. That's right. That's right. This, you know, this last year we're definitely getting to scale. You know, the company is like 500 people. We have a bunch of customers.
500 people. Where are you based?
Yeah, well, everywhere. You know, the headquarters is in Palo Alto, but we have an office up here in San Francisco. We've got offices in London. We got really folks all around the world.
