Keep pulling the thread on Jay Kreps.
Jay Kreps observes that Anthropic faces the unique challenge of operating simultaneously like a four-year-old startup and a multi-billion dollar revenue company.
It has been publicly reported that Anthropic's revenue grew from one to four billion dollars in a six-month period.
Early in Confluent's history, Amazon Web Services launched competing products, leading to public perception that AWS would put Confluent out of business.
Jay Kreps predicts that for AI to enable hyper-efficient companies, models must improve in quality for autonomous work and gain the ability to directly orchestrate internal company tooling, capabilities he believes are a couple of years away.
When an executive departs Confluent, Jay Kreps's standard practice is to personally take over and run that function for the interim period to gain a deep understanding of the role's requirements.
As part of his interim management practice, Jay Kreps has personally run Confluent's engineering team and previously ran the People (HR) team for five months while searching for a new leader.
Confluent is actively hiring for a Chief Technology Officer (CTO), and CEO Jay Kreps is serving in that role in the interim.
Jay Kreps joined the board of directors at Anthropic approximately one year prior to the interview.
Jay Kreps finds it impressive that large technology companies like Microsoft have managed to survive and succeed across multiple generations of technological change.
Jay Kreps observes that rapidly growing AI companies like OpenAI are succeeding with fast, frictionless go-to-market motions like product-led growth, as traditional enterprise sales tactics are too slow for the current pace of change.
Confluent's market capitalization declined from a peak of $32 billion to $9 billion.
When Confluent was founded, the open-source B2B infrastructure market was considered unattractive to both top engineering talent and investors.