Cockroach Labs

Jeff Miller moved from a career in government to focus on the health and safety of NFL players. Due to the nature of their sport, they are more prone to injuries, including concussions, than other professional athletes. By leveraging the game’s unique elements, such as the volume of cameras filming on-field activities, the NFL can gather large data sets to track injuries, and then segment their likelihood of occurrence by position and design equipment and update game rules to minimize them. Jeff joins us to describe how the NFL has partnered with tech companies, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), to expand its technology fluency and implement these solutions. Listen to today’s episode to learn about specific equipment the NFL has produced and rule changes it has implemented to better track and protect its players, as well as one element of the game Jeff believes technology cannot replace. Read the episode transcript here. Guest bio Jeff Miller is the National Football League’s executive vice president overseeing player health and safety. He is also the NFL’s executive vice president of communications, public affairs, and policy. During his tenure, the league has used data, artificial intelligence, and engineering to improve protective equipment, make rule changes, and support independent medical research related to players’ wellness and the rate of concussions. Before joining the league, Miller spent a decade on Capitol Hill as chief counsel and staff director for the Antitrust and Business Competition Subcommittee of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. He earned his Juris Doctor from the University of Chicago Law School and his bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania.   Me, Myself, and AI is a collaborative podcast from MIT Sloan Management Review and Boston Consulting Group and is hosted by Sam Ransbotham and Shervin Khodabandeh. Our engineer is David Lishansky, and the coordinating producers are Allison Ryder and Alanna Hooper. Stay in touch with us by joining our LinkedIn group, AI for Leaders at mitsmr.com/AIforLeaders or by following Me, Myself, and AI on LinkedIn. We encourage you to rate and review our show. Your comments may be used in Me, Myself, and AI materials.

Jeff Miller

CRO

Cockroach LabsNFL

Spencer Kimball, CEO of Cockroach Labs, joins Corey Quinn to discuss the evolving challenges of database resilience in 2025. They discuss the State of Resilience 2025 report, revealing widespread operational concerns, costly outages, and gaps in failover preparedness. Modern resilience strategies, like active-active configurations and consensus replication, reduce risks but require expertise and investment. Spencer highlights growing regulatory pressures, such as the EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act, and the rising complexity of distributed systems. Despite challenges, Cockroach Labs aims to simplify resilience, enabling organizations to modernize while balancing risk, cost, and customer trust. Show Highlights (0:00) Intro (0:36) Cockroach Labs sponsor read (3:14) The foundational nature of databases (3:55) Cockroach Labs’ State of Resilience 2025 report (8:55) CrowdStrike as an example of why database resilience is so important (11:04) What Spencer found most surprising in the report’s results (15:13) Understanding the multi-cloud strategy as safety in numbers (18:29) Cockroach Labs sponsor read (19:23) Why cost isn’t the Achilles’ heel of the multi-cloud strategy that some people think (23:52) Executives are blaming IT people for outages as much (28:21) The importance of active-active configurations (32:01) Why anxiety about operational resiliency will never fully go away (37:52) How to access the State of Resilience 2025 report About Spencer Kimball Spencer Kimball is the CEO and co-founder of Cockroach Labs, a company dedicated to building resilient, cloud-native databases. Before founding Cockroach Labs, Spencer had a distinguished career in technology, including contributions to Google’s Colossus file system. Alongside co-founders Peter Mattis and Ben Darnell, he launched CockroachDB, a globally distributed SQL database designed to handle modern data challenges like resilience, multi-cloud deployment, and compliance with evolving data sovereignty laws. CockroachDB is renowned for its innovative architecture, enabling consistent and scalable database performance across regions and clouds. Under Spencer’s leadership, the company continues to redefine operational resilience for enterprises worldwide. Links Cockroach Labs: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/ The State of Resilience 2025 report https://www.cockroachlabs.com/guides/the-state-of-resilience-2025/ Sponsor Cockroach Labs: cockroachlabs.com/lastweek

Spencer Kimball

CEO & Co-Founder

Cockroach Labs

Whether you're going from nothing to something or already scaling and thriving beyond $10-100M, healthy, sustainable growth in SaaS is on every founder's mind. Cockroach Labs' CEO Spencer Kimball shares hard-won lessons from scaling from $0 to $5B and his time as an angel investor for more than 80 different startups. He'll walk you through the three stages of growth: 0-$1M — From nothing to something $1M-$10M — Building, innovation, and customers $10M-$100M+ — Scaling and thriving And what sustainable growth strategies you can implement (and pitfalls to avoid) wherever you're at in your SaaS journey. This edition of the SaaStr podcast is brought to you by: Prescient Security & Assurance. Your trusted partner in cybersecurity and compliance. Automated solutions, expert protection, regulatory compliance. Secure your future at prescientsecurity.com Can't afford an engineer in Silicon Valley? Tap the talent pool in Eastern Europe. Working with a global expansion partner, like Atlas, is a quick, cost-effective, and compliant solution. Visit www.atlashxm.com for a strategy call.

Spencer Kimball

CEO & Co-Founder

Cockroach Labs

Spencer was one of the original creators of open-source, cross-platform image editing software GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program), authored while he was still in college. He went on to spend a decade at Google, plus two years as CTO of Viewfinder, later acquired by Square. In 2014, he cofounded Cockroach Labs to back his creation CockroachDB, a cloud-native distributed SQL database. Database sharding is essential for CockroachDB: “a critical part of how Cockroach achieves virtually everything,” says Spencer. Read up on how sharding a database can make it faster. Like many engineers who find themselves in the C-suite, Spencer went from full-time programmer to full-time CEO. He says it’s been a “relatively gentle” evolution, but he can always go back. Like lots of you out there, Spencer started programming on a TI-99/4, the world’s first 16-bit home computer. Connect with Spencer on LinkedIn or learn more about him. Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Hughes M. for their answer to the question Multiple keys pointing to a single value in Redis (Cache) with Java. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Spencer Kimball

CEO & Co-Founder

Cockroach Labs

Bryan Boreham (Grafana Labs) and Jordan Lewis (Cockroach Labs) join Mat and Jon to talk about memory management in Go. We learn about the heap, the stack, and the garbage collector. There are also some absolute gems of wisdom scattered throughout this episode, don’t miss it. Join the discussion Changelog++ members save 3 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today! Sponsors: Sourcegraph – Sourcegraph is universal code search for every developer and team. Easily search across all the code that matters to you and your organization: find example code, explore and read code, debug issues, and more. Head to info.sourcegraph.com/changelog and click the button “Try Sourcegraph now” to get started. Equinix Metal – If you want the choice and control of hardware…with low overhead…and the developer experience of the cloud – you need to check out Equinix Metal. Deploy in minutes across 18 global locations, from Silicon Valley to Sydney. Visit metal.equinix.com/justaddmetal and receive $100 credit to play. LaunchDarkly – Ship fast. Rest easy. Deploy code at any time, even if a feature isn’t ready to be released to your users. Wrap code in feature flags to get the safety to test new features and infrastructure in prod without impacting the wrong end users. Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com Featuring: Bryan Boreham – X Jordan Lewis – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X Mat Ryer – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X Jon Calhoun – Website, GitHub, X Show Notes: Local meet-up shout-at Miriah Peterson (captainnobody1 on Twitter) says hello on behalf of the Utah Go User Group, as well as Women Who Go Utah. Some things mentioned on the show Statsviz gives you an instant live visualization of your Go application runtime statistics (GC, MemStats, etc.) in the browser sync.Pool helps you reduce allocations by keeping objects around when they might otherwise be garbage collected From the Go blog: The Journey of Go’s Garbage Collector Viewcore The viewcore tool is a command-line tool for exploring the state of a Go process that has dumped core. Jordan says: It’s complicated because it still doesn’t work out of the box, you need my branch which isn’t merged: https://github.com/jordanlewis/debug/tree/fix-bugs… (my branch) https://github.com/golang/debug/tree/master/cmd/viewcore… (the upstream) https://go-review.googlesource.com/c/debug/+/321736… (the CL that isn’t merged yet) Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Bryan Boreham

Software Engineer

Grafana Labs

Jordan Lewis

Engineer

Cockroach Labs

This week we’re sharing a recent episode from Founders Talk that we continuously hear about from listeners. Listen and subscribe to Founders Talk at founderstalk.fm and anywhere you listen to podcasts. On Founders Talk #75 — Adam talks with Spencer Kimball, CEO and Co-founder of Cockroach Labs — makers of CockroachDB an open source cloud-native distributed SQL database. Cockroach Labs recently raised $160 million dollars on a $2 billion dollar valuation. In this episode, Spencer shares his journey in open source, startups and entrepreneurship, and what they’re doing to build CockroachCloud to meet the needs of applications that require massive scale and ultra-resilience. Join the discussion Changelog++ members save 3 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today! Sponsors: Sourcegraph – Sourcegraph is universal code search for every developer and team. Easily search across all the code that matters to you and your organization: find example code, explore and read code, debug issues, and more. Head to info.sourcegraph.com/changelog and click the button “Try Sourcegraph now” to get started. Retool – Retool is a low-code platform built specifically for developers that makes it fast and easy to build internal tools. Instead of building internal tools from scratch, the world’s best teams, from startups to Fortune 500s, are using Retool to power their internal apps. Learn more and try it for free at retool.com/changelog Sentry – Build better software, faster with Sentry’s application monitoring platform. Diagnose, fix, and optimize the performance of your code. Cut your time on error resolution from hours to minutes. Use the code THECHANGELOG and get the team plan free for three months. Grafana Cloud – Our dashboard of choice Grafana is the open and composable observability and data visualization platform. Visualize metrics, logs, and traces from multiple sources like Prometheus, Loki, Elasticsearch, InfluxDB, Postgres and many more. Featuring: Spencer Kimball – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X Show Notes: Spencer is a co-founder of GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) (but is no longer involved with the project) Cockroach Labs CockroachCloud - Build and scale fast with CockroachDB-as-a-service on AWS and Google Cloud. How We’re Building a Business to Last Cockroach Labs scores $160M Series E on $2B valuation Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Spencer Kimball

CEO & Co-Founder

Cockroach Labs

In a study from Red Hat, 95 percent of respondents said open source was strategically important to their organization, while 77 percent agreed that open source will continue to grow. Yet, that doesn’t guarantee an easy sell. Selling open source software at the enterprise level requires an entirely different strategy than traditional software. For insight, we turned to open source sales expert Jeff Miller.  Joubin and Jeff discuss two topics, including Jeff’s career journey, and how open source sales teams can build and execute effective go to market strategies. This conversation covers: Jeff’s early experiences in sales, where he cut his teeth selling long distance service door to door — learning how to handle rejection and building an aggressive work ethic. How Jeff made the leap into software sales, where he learned the meaning of software and how to approach customers and sell them solutions that help solve problems. Jeff also explains what motivated him to move into enterprise software.  The value of having a strong mentor, and how it can open doors to greater opportunities. The key difference between open source and open core computing, and how it changes the sales process. The challenge of building an open source go to market strategy, when there is virtually no control over the sales cycle.  Why open source software requires a tight marriage between marketing and sales. The critical role that education and documentation play in the sales process, in addition to having an inside SDR/ LDR team to work with the customer, identify new use cases, and guide the customer in their journey.  How good, qualified leads can make all the difference, and make sales associates far more effective. Viewing developers are influencers, not decision makers when making open source sales. WhyJeff loves working with early stage startups, where you can make a huge impact fast without dealing with a lot of the red tape that comes with larger organizations.  Key metrics that Jeff looks for when qualifying early stage startup opportunities, where there is a lot of risk Links Connect with Jeff on LinkedIn: LinkedIn Cockroach Labs Connect with JoubinTwitter LinkedIn Email: gtmg@kleinerperkins.com  Host Twitterhttps://twitter.com/Joubinmir Learn more about Kleiner Perkins

Jeff Miller

CRO

Cockroach LabsNFL

Check out Cockroach Labs: https://cockroachlabs.com Follow Cockroach Labs: https://twitter.com/CockroachDB Follow Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis Thanks to our partners... Dell for Entrepreneurs - Save up to 50% off select products, and take an extra 5% off by going to https://launch.co/dell LinkedIn Jobs - Get a $50 credit toward your first job post at https://www.linkedin.com/unicorn Zendesk - 6 months free at https://www.zendesk.com/twist

Spencer Kimball

CEO & Co-Founder

Cockroach Labs

Peter Mattis is a creator of the CockroachDB open source database and co-founder and CTO of Cockroach Labs. His history in open source goes back to the creation of the GIMP image editor and UI toolkit Gtk at university in 1995, and his history at Google saw him work on storage and build systems. Hosts Craig and Adam ask him about all of the above. Do you have something cool to share? Some questions? Let us know: web: kubernetespodcast.com mail: kubernetespodcast@google.com twitter: @kubernetespod Chatter of the week Storm Ciara: Trampoline Leaves Big jets News of the week Docker Index Apache Aurora: Proposal to archive Summary from Stephan Erb New GitHub repo announcement containerd Project Journey Report Episode 71, with Derek McGowan CoreOS End-of-Life Fedora CoreOS Flatcar Linux Episode 79, with Chris Kühl Developing in Production by Will Sargent at Terse Systems Thanos Operator from BanzaiCloud Kubernetes sidecars in 1.18 Clear Linux OS now Certified Kubernetes Helm 3 in Real Life by Dawid Ziolkowski Kubernetes storage patterns by Nitish Tiwari Integrate Cloud Foundry with Kubernetes using the cf-operator and kubecf kubecf Deploying External OpenStack Cloud Provider with Kubeadm Frame.io Falco case study Supporting developers as they scale: a free Kubernetes eBook from DigitalOcean Register Now: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU Day Zero Events That discount code again again: KCEUGKP15 Links from the interview GIMP, the GNU Image Manipulation Program Pre-history GTK, the GIMP Toolkit Inktomi Episode 49, with Eric Brewer Colossus Bazel Square Acquires Ex-Googler Team Behind Viewfinder To Help Grow Its NYC Presence CockroachDB article Spanner and F1 papers CAP theorem Google Cloud Spanner Ticktock Networks and the HUYGENS paper Cockroach Labs Orchestration with Kubernetes Relicensing CockroachDB Business Source License Geospatial indexing CockroachDB on GitHub Peter Mattis on Twitter

Peter Mattis

Co-founder and CTO

Cockroach Labs

Summary With the increased ease of gaining access to servers in data centers across the world has come the need for supporting globally distributed data storage. With the first wave of cloud era databases the ability to replicate information geographically came at the expense of transactions and familiar query languages. To address these shortcomings the engineers at Cockroach Labs have built a globally distributed SQL database with full ACID semantics in Cockroach DB. In this episode Peter Mattis, the co-founder and VP of Engineering at Cockroach Labs, describes the architecture that underlies the database, the challenges they have faced along the way, and the ways that you can use it in your own environments today. Preamble Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out Linode. With private networking, shared block storage, node balancers, and a 40Gbit network, all controlled by a brand new API you’ve got everything you need to run a bullet-proof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute. For complete visibility into the health of your pipeline, including deployment tracking, and powerful alerting driven by machine-learning, DataDog has got you covered. With their monitoring, metrics, and log collection agent, including extensive integrations and distributed tracing, you’ll have everything you need to find and fix performance bottlenecks in no time. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/datadog today to start your free 14 day trial and get a sweet new T-Shirt. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, read the show notes, and get in touch. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Peter Mattis about CockroachDB, the SQL database for global cloud services Interview Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? What was the motivation for creating CockroachDB and building a business around it? Can you describe the architecture of CockroachDB and how it supports distributed ACID transactions? What are some of the tradeoffs that are necessary to allow for georeplicated data with distributed transactions? What are some of the problems that you have had to work around in the RAFT protocol to provide reliable operation of the clustering mechanism? Go is an unconventional language for building a database. What are the pros and cons of that choice? What are some of the common points of confusion that users of CockroachDB have when operating or interacting with it? What are the edge cases and failure modes that users should be aware of? I know that your SQL syntax is PostGreSQL compatible, so is it possible to use existing ORMs unmodified with CockroachDB? What are some examples of extensions that are specific to CockroachDB? What are some of the most interesting uses of CockroachDB that you have seen? When is CockroachDB the wrong choice? What do you have planned for the future of CockroachDB? Contact Info Peter LinkedIn petermattis on GitHub @petermattis on Twitter Cockroach Labs @CockroackDB on Twitter Website cockroachdb on GitHub Parting Question From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today? Links CockroachDB Cockroach Labs SQL Google Bigtable Spanner NoSQL RDBMS (Relational Database Management System) “Big Iron” (colloquial term for mainframe computers) RAFT Consensus Algorithm Consensus MVCC (Multiversion Concurrency Control) Isolation Etcd GDPR Golang C++ Garbage Collection Metaprogramming Rust Static Linking Docker Kubernetes CAP Theorem PostGreSQL ORM (Object Relational Mapping) Information Schema PG Catalog Interleaved Tables Vertica Spark Change Data Capture The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA Support Data Engineering Podcast

Peter Mattis

Co-founder and CTO

Cockroach Labs

Andrei Matei joined the show and talked with us about CockroachDB (and why it’s easier to use than any RDBMS), distributed databases with Go, tracing, and other interesting projects and news. Join the discussion Changelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today! Sponsors: Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com. Rollbar – Our error monitoring partner. Rollbar provides real-time error monitoring, alerting, and analytics to help us resolve production errors in minutes. To start deploying with confidence - head to rollbar.com/changelog Linode – Our cloud server of choice. Deploy a fast, efficient, native SSD cloud server for only $5/month. Get 4 months free using the code changelog2018. Start your server - head to linode.com/changelog Featuring: Andrei Matei – GitHub Carlisia Thompson – GitHub, LinkedIn, X Brian Ketelsen – GitHub, X Show Notes: CockroachDB Learn to create web apps using Go (affiliate link) Interesting Go Projects and News Agones Introducing Agones: Open-source, multiplayer, dedicated game-server hosting built on Kubernetes memviz gorush Saloon – Go Forums Free Software Friday! Each week on the show we give a shout out to an open source project or community (or maintainer) that’s made an impact in our day to day developer lives. Brian - GitPitch Andrei - OpenTracing + govet Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Andrei Matei

Software Engineer

Cockroach Labs

Spencer Kimball is the Founder & CEO @ Cockroach Labs, the open-source database for building global, scalable cloud services that survive disasters. They have backing from some of the greats of the world of VC having raised from the likes of Sequoia, Benchmark, Google Ventures and Index. As for Spencer, prior to Cockroach he spent 10 years at Google where he oversaw their hyper growth transition from startup to global behemoth. He also spent two years at unicorn payments company, Square as well as co-founding 2 prior startups. In Today's Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Spencer made his move from a decade @ Google to starting Cockroach Labs? 2.) Why does Spencer enjoy speaking to VCs? What has Spencer taken away from the best of VC conversations? What are the best ways Spencer feels investors can make initial contact? What are the signs of bad investor interactions? 3.) How does Spencer want his VCs and board members to interact with him? How do the best board members provide constructive advice and feedback? 4.) How can investors get into the best deals? If they fail the first time, what can be done on their behalf to show continued interest? 5.) How does Spencer implement a 4 day work week at Cockroach and remain so highly productive? What are the benefits of this for the team and culture? Items Mentioned In Today's Show: Spencer's Fave Book: The History of The Decline & Fall of The Roman Empire Spencer's Fave Blog: Ben Bernanke, Paul Krugman As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. Foundersuite makes the leading CRM for raising startup capital. Since March of 2016, Foundersuite customers have raised over $130M in seed and venture capital. Foundersuite's CRM sits on a database of over 50,000 investors, which will help you quickly populate your fundraising funnel including a beautiful and easy-to-use investor update tool, and the recently launched a new portal that helps investors and accelerators track their portfolio companies on a single dashboard. For a whopping 40% off a Monthly or Annual subscription use the code "20MinuteVC" at checkout. Greenhouse Software designs tools that help companies hire great people and ultimately build better businesses. Greenhouse works with over 1,500 of the world's most innovative companies such as Airbnb, Slack, Snap Inc. and Lyft. A wrong hire is not only costly for a company but can also turn an employee into an unhappy one. With Greenhouse's Applicant Tracking System, companies can make well-informed decisions and hire qualified candidates who are empowered to do the best work of their careers. Anybody who has a company that's scaling quickly but has trouble hiring and retaining the right people. Visit www.greenhouse.io today to discover how your company can grow.

Spencer Kimball

CEO & Co-Founder

Cockroach Labs