Spring 2020 Issue
> NEHA NARKHEDE CONFLUENT CO-FOUNDER AND CTO ‘Resolving the Pain Points’ to Become a Pioneer of Event-Streaming Tech Give a girl a computer at an impressionable age, and she just might grow up to launch a billiondollar tech company. So goes the story with Neha Narkhede, Confluent co-founder and a pioneer of event-streaming technology. Indian-born Narkhede was only eight when her parents bought her her first computer. She took an instant shine to the creative power and problem-solving potential of technology, and so began a passion that continues to this day. Narkhede serves as Confluent’s CTO and is responsible for its technology and product strategy. “For a company like Confluent, where the technology is the product, it made a lot of sense for me to combine the CTO roles with the chief product officer role,” she says, “and that’s the path I’ve taken.” Silicon Valley based Confluent counts a number of big-name companies — with even bigger data flow — as clients: Goldman Sachs, Netflix and Uber. Confluent’s event-streaming platform is powered by the open-source software, Apache Kafka, which Narkhede helped to create during her five-year tenure as an engineer at LinkedIn. Before that, the computer science grad had led development projects as an Oracle engineer. At LinkedIn, Narkhede collaborated with colleagues Jay Kreps and Jun Rao to author the open-source software that would become an industry standard — and unite three colleagues as Confluent co-founders. LinkedIn donated Apache Kafka to the open source community in 2011, and Narkhede, Kreps and Rao launched Confluent three years later. “From ride-sharing applications to instant fraud detection, Kafka has been a foundational technology in enabling real-time products and experiences that weren’t previously possible,” Narkhede told Business Wire. She touted the fully managed Confluent Cloud service, which has enabled IT teams to “leapfrog months of effort”. “By offering an easy and fully automated way to use Kafka, event streaming is now an option regardless of a team’s size, expertise or budget,” she said. Confluent builds real-time data systems with far-reaching scalability. It is an advocate for, and contributor to, the open-source community. “Open source is less a business model and more a go-to-market strategy — a distribution channel,” Narkhede told Forbes, which placed her on its 2019 America’s Self-Made Women list, with a net worth at $360m.
The company has achieved rapid growth, including a six-fold increase in cloud customers. In January 2019, it announced the completion of a $125m Series D funding round, led by Sequoia and backed by other major investors such as Index Ventures and Benchmark. This latest round of funding puts the company value at $2.5bn. Confluent also rakes in the accolades, and was named in 2019 as Google’s Technology Partner of the Year for Data and Analytics, and as one of the top 10 in Forbes Cloud 100. In an interview with IDG Connect, Narkhede shared some advice for other tech entrepreneurs eyeballing the C-suite. First, she counselled, search for problems to solve, not projects that impassion. “Specifically, in your first six months in a new role or job, focus on resolving a series of pain points without worrying about how interesting the project at hand is. This builds trust and opens up many doors for one to grow in their role.” CFI.co | Capital Finance International
Next, she urged people to cultivate not only exceptional tech skills, but also personal conviction and authenticity. Like many modern professionals — and most minorities — Narkhede has been in situations where she felt discounted or marginalised, but that has only fuelled her fire to prove the haters and doubters wrong. The best way to do that is “to be amazing at your job”, she says. Narkhede hopes that 2019 will prove to have been a tipping point of lasting change; there were 21 female-founded or -co-founded “unicorn” companies. In 2013, just four billion-dollar companies with at least one female co-founder were registered. More women are making it to the executive suite – and data shows that diverse leadership fosters profitable returns. “I am creating and leading a company every day, despite the odds of working in a completely maledominated field, as an immigrant,” Narkhede said. “I'll always have ambitions beyond my dayto-day, but I'm incredibly lucky to have found a job that I love, and that I'm good at.” 49