First Round Review · 26 March 2026 · Operating Insight

What nobody tells engineers about becoming a CEO | Jay Kreps (Co-founder and CEO, Confluent)

First Round Review

Jay Kreps reflects on his journey from LinkedIn engineer to Confluent CEO, sharing lessons on transitioning from technical to executive roles, the critical importance of clear product messaging, and the conviction required to pursue "must-do" initiatives like building a cloud offering despite internal resistance.

Read the full post on First Round Review ↗

Topics: Enterprise Software · Developer Tools · Data & Analytics

Published by First Round Review · their site ↗

More from First Round Review

SandHill indexes 800+ venture capital blogs and newsletters and sends the best of them every Sunday. Browse the sources · browse by topic · read the blog.