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• Alex's background as a builder and hacker |
• Early life experiences: taking apart engines, building electronic devices (e.g., tattoo machine) |
• Skipping grades in school due to accelerated learning |
• Immigrating to the US, facing language barriers, and adapting to new educational system |
• Career progression from cryptography research to software development and system building |
• Founding companies (Concord and Redpanda) and identifying gaps in existing technology |
• Pursuing passion projects on weekends, leading to successful ventures |
• The speaker's background in college and early career in cryptography and distributed systems |
• Switching to ad tech industry at Yieldmo, a fast-scaling startup in New York, where he worked on high-volume systems with low latency |
• Founding Concord, a compute framework, which was later sold to Akamai |
• Becoming obsessed with pushing the limits of hardware performance for software's sake, leading to the development of Redpanda, a storage framework |
• Exploring hardware and kernel settings to measure and optimize performance, including using profiling tools and kernel settings in their own data center or via cloud services |
• Writing open-source code under project SMRF, which used FlatBuffers and generated RPC mechanisms for high-performance use cases |
• The founder's experience of being a first-generation immigrant and feeling the need to "figure it out" without any financial or social safety net. |
• The impact of having an early exit from his previous company, Concord, which provided a buffer for him to pursue new projects and ideas without immediate financial pressure. |
• How this buffer allowed the founder to dream bigger and be more ambitious in his subsequent ventures. |
• Similarities between the founder's experiences and those of Adam Stacoviak, who also grew up with limited financial resources and had to rely on himself to succeed. |
• The role of punk rock and skate culture in the lives of both the founder and Adam Stacoviak as a way to cope with their circumstances and find identity. |
• The importance of empathy and connection in bridging cultural and background differences |
• Shared human struggles and desires across cultures and backgrounds |
• Founding of Redpanda, inspired by Kafka but with a focus on disaggregating compute and storage |
• Redpanda's three key tenets: speed, developer experience, and data safety |
• Competition between Redpanda and the Kafka community as a driver for innovation and improvement in the streaming space |
• Real-world use cases of Redpanda, including StoneX and Lacework, which value its predictability and performance. |
• Redpanda's latency improvements enable new use cases such as space exploration and electric cars |
• Traditional storage engines were designed for spinning disks, resulting in high latency and bottlenecks |
• Redpanda was built with modern NVMe drives in mind, allowing for 1,000x performance improvement |
• The company adopted a thread-per-core architecture to take advantage of hard drive capabilities |
• Redpanda allows users to get both data safety and performance, eliminating the need to choose between them |
• The platform enables exploration of different computational models, such as WebAssembly and tiered storage |
• Cloud support was initially lacking, but the company has since partnered with talent organizations to recruit cloud expertise |
• Redpanda's growth and decision to prioritize stability over scaling |
• Debate about whether to focus on a single path (cloud) or multiple paths (self-hosted and cloud) |
• Introduction of "Bring Your Own Cloud" feature, allowing users to run data in their own VPC while still using Redpanda's control plane |
• Discussion of data sovereignty and its importance for industries such as healthcare and finance |
• Explanation of how Redpanda achieves low latency with BYOC by using a proxy agent that communicates with the control plane |
• Credit given to recent technology improvements (e.g. Kubernetes, WebPack Federation) for making BYOC possible |
• Importance of data sovereignty highlighted as a key differentiator from privacy |
• Infrastructure choices made to support state-of-the-art future capabilities |
• Use of WebPack Federation for shipping multiple UIs and unifying product experience |
• Optimization of data plane performance through ARM-optimized builds, NVMe profiling, and empirical evidence-based instance sizing |
• Investment in complexity ownership and onboarding of technical debt |
• State of cloud service: launched November last year, SOC2-compliant, and VPC peering available |
• Plans to lean into open formats for streaming and tiered storage |
• Development of columnar projection technology for analytics and fast queries |
• Redpanda's BSL license and its implications on commercial viability and relationship with Kafka |
• Balance of licensing and monetization |
• Open source vs. proprietary models |
• Decision-making context and trade-offs |
• Impact of changing market conditions on business decisions |
• Redpanda's future goals, including IPO and product development |
• Importance of developer experience and adoption |
• Hack the Planet scholarship program for underrepresented backgrounds in tech |
• Program offers senior engineers a chance to work with top experts and set ambitious goals |
• Participants receive some financial support but are expected to put in effort, with little oversight |
• Selection process involves identifying the person who will have the most impact on their company or community |
• Program is intentionally small-scale, focusing on influencing one person per year at a time |
• Gallego has inspired other companies, such as DoorDash, to replicate the program's approach |
**Adam Stacoviak:** One interesting fact about your journey is you're an immigrant, and you've got this sort of like origin story of building, and you're a builder... Let's begin there, because I think that surfaces a lot of the things you've done at Redpanda - that's where you're at now - and what you've done to be a ... |
**Alex Gallego:** Yeah, my good friend \[unintelligible 00:01:21.23\] she likes to say that I was the kid that took apart the television, if you weren't watching... And so I guess part of my personal identity has always been being a builder. Growing up I was part of my uncle's -- he used to fix racing motorcycles, so l... |
Later on in life I went on to build other types of electronics. I think I was nine when I built my first tattoo machine... And anyways, I ended up selling that to another artist. It was really fun to take these engines apart out of these electronic cars, and then put them back together in a different form. That's defin... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** How did you graduate young? What's the story there? |
**Alex Gallego:** Yeah, I've been very lucky, but I skipped a bunch of grades; I skipped like third grade, and part of seventh grade and eighth grade and 12th grade. I just got lucky, in many ways. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow. So you're like four years early, basically. |
**Alex Gallego:** Well, so I started late, because -- when my mom put me in school, I started a year late, and then I skipped, because I was bored, and so they're like "Oh, actually, Alex could do fourth grade." And then I started doing the papers to migrate to the US, so I couldn't finish my seventh grade. I got here,... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow... |
**Alex Gallego:** Yeah, and so I started -- I was like "Well, I have to figure this out, the language thing", and so I started a reading club. It turns out I managed to accrue all of my credits by the time I was in 11th grade, and... You know, that's just how it was. It was like a year of study where I would only show ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It's interesting what happens when you've got a thirst for, I guess, progress, or achievement... I've gotta imagine your journey - you felt held back as you start to school later, right? But then you were able to progress sooner, and skip around, because you excelled, because you had a desire for it... |
**Alex Gallego:** You know, actually it was a similar story when I went to college. I graduated in like three and a half years. And the challenge -- it actually started being hard, because I went to not a great high school. It was just like -- I landed in the US and I kind of self-registered myself to go to high school... |
So long story short, I started just fine, and I went into his cryptography class, and the reason I kind of dropped out of my graduate studies in cryptography were -- I guess through the first few years I just took a class and I was like "This is fascinating." And then I ended up building prototype systems, got a bunch ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Is that right? |
**Alex Gallego:** Because I got to university. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow. |
**Alex Gallego:** Yeah. And so we ended up inventing class credit numbers... Because they actually don't exist in the books. You can't register for the classes that are registered to my name. And it was really all because I kind of became obsessed with this idea, I was like "How do you make cryptography usable?" And th... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[05:47\] Yeah. Well, I mean, I'm not gonna say I'm the same, but I get these obsessions. And I always have something. But I tend to obsess, and it's just interesting - there are certain hobbies where I go super-deep, because I just can't find all the knowledge. I can't satiate the yearn and desire ... |
**Alex Gallego:** You know, the story with Redpanda, and my previous company, Concord - I actually built them all on the weekends. And part of it was sort of -- with Redpanda in particular, it was "What is the gap between what the platform could do hardware, and the state of the art software back then - which was Kafka... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
**Alex Gallego:** Kind of one of those lucky things. And I know that for a lot of people -- my partner, she's a writer, and so she doesn't get paid well for the things that she likes to do right now... So it's lucky when kind of those two things get combined. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** At what point did you go from cryptography, and school, and earning a semester full of credits etc. to getting to a point where now you're an engineer; not just into cryptography, and different things like that; you're building different systems with software. How did you get to that point? |
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2023 Founders Talk Transcripts
Complete transcripts from the 2023 episodes of the Founders Talk podcast.
Generated from this GitHub repository.
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