Looking at the Current State of Resilience with Spencer Kimball
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
SaaStr 681: Scaling to $5B with Cockroach Labs' CEO Spencer Kimball's Formula for Sustained Growth and Resilience
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:
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A conversation with Spencer Kimball, creator of GIMP and CockroachDB
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.
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Massive scale and ultra-resilience (Interview)
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.
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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!
E1098 The Next Unicorns E14: Cockroach Labs CEO Spencer Kimball on the coming paradigm shifts in tech, competing against AWS & more
Check out Cockroach Labs: https://cockroachlabs.com
Follow Cockroach Labs: https://twitter.com/CockroachDB
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20VC: How Investors Can Get Into The Best Deals & Why Founders First Point Of Contact Should Be With The Investment Decision-Maker with Spencer Kimball, Founder & CEO @ 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
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