Introduction

In 2011, Jay Kreps was an engineer at LinkedIn, leading the platform's search, recommendation engine, and social graph. In an effort to figure out how to make real-time streams of data useful to organizations, he started an open-source project called Kafka, and it took off. Realizing a major business opportunity, Jay took the leap into entrepreneurship and started Confluent in 2014. Today, over 70% of Fortune 500 companies use Kafka, and he took Confluent public in 2021. Jay shares what it means to process "data in motion," why it's daunting to go from being a software engineer to CEO, and why he only spent one year in a traditional high school before deciding to teach himself.