Journey to CEO, again

Key takeaways

Humility and relationship-building are foundational for effective leadership, especially when transitioning roles in a company.
A strategic open source approach can be powerful, but it requires careful licensing, community engagement, and balancing monetization with openness.
Focusing on the product and empowering developers to build with your tools creates a strong foundation for success and differentiation.
Building a supportive community and nurturing company culture based on values like inclusivity, accountability, and getting stuff done is critical for sustainable growth.
Personal routines, reflection, and valuing family are vital components of resilience and long-term leadership success.
Celebrating wins, no matter how small, fuels motivation and fosters a positive environment amidst the challenges of leadership.

Summary

Evan Kaplan's Career Journey and Leadership Philosophy

This section covers Evan Kaplan's extensive background before becoming CEO of InfluxData, highlighting his experience as a CEO for over 22 years across multiple industries, including aerospace, networking, and high-tech startups. Evan emphasizes the importance of humility, relationship-building, and community engagement in leadership. He discusses the significance of partnership, especially with Paul Dix at InfluxData, noting that their success relies on mutual respect and shared vision. He shares insights into decision-making processes, the importance of slowing down to celebrate wins, and navigating difficult times with a relentless attitude, drawing on personal and professional experiences.

Open Source Strategy and Business Model

This section delves into InfluxData's open source approach, focusing on how the company has balanced community engagement with commercial viability. Evan discusses decisions around open core versus full open source, the significance of licensing choices, and the strategic value of community involvement. He shares their evolution with the IOx project, emphasizing the importance of building a thriving, independent open source ecosystem and how open source cloud platforms can be monetized effectively. Challenges such as competing with cloud giants like AWS and the importance of community-led development are highlighted.

Product Vision and Market Trends in Data and IoT

This segment explores InfluxData's product focus on real-time, high-performance time-series data, especially for IoT applications, sensors, and edge computing. Evan explains their cloud-native platform, the development of IOx technology, and their strategic move into on-prem and edge environments. He highlights the expanding physical world of sensors, data collection, and the need for fast, scalable data processing as major market drivers. The company's aim is to empower developers to build time-series applications with a comprehensive platform, differentiating from traditional observability tools.

Company Culture, Values, and Personal Life Integration

Evan shares his insights on fostering a company culture rooted in humility, diversity, getting stuff done, and accountability. He discusses the importance of aligning personal and professional values, particularly how family plays a central role in his life. His routines, including exercise, meditation, and continuous learning through podcasts, are described as key to maintaining focus and resilience. Evan advocates for building relationships over transactional interactions and emphasizes that meaning and motivation often come from the humans he works with and the support from family.

Leadership Challenges and Future Outlook

This section addresses the emotional and mental challenges of leadership, like the constant weight of decision-making, and how Evan manages isolation and stress. He emphasizes the importance of community among CEOs for support and the value of reflection and celebrating wins. Evan shares upcoming priorities for InfluxData, including the commercialization of IOx and expanding their products' reach into cloud, edge, and on-prem environments. The conversation closes with a reflection on the importance of process, mindset, and continuous improvement.

Show notes

Today Adam is joined by Evan Kaplan, CEO of InfluxData. Evan's journey to become the CEO was not by way of founder, in this company. Evan has founded several companies in the past, and he's been in a CEO position for more than 22 years. But InfluxData was founded by Paul Dix, and Paul knew years ago that his role (best role?) was to lead the technical and product direction of the company, which lead him to Evan. Today we share that story as well as a glimpse into operating the business that built the defacto platform for building time series applications with deep roots in open source.