In 2011, three employees LinkedIn – Jay Creps, Neha Narhede, and June Rao – develop technical tools to help networking professionals deal with many messages, network inquiries, and profile views. However, data flow awareness can be a problem for other companies, not just LinkedIn, the open-source trio, and then starting a Confluent company in 2014.
A decade later, when Confluent’s stock rose more than 20% on their first trading day, Kreps and Rao were billionaires, and Narkhede would join them if Confluent’s stock continued to grow. California-based Mountain View listed Confluent on Nasdaq Thursday at $36, grossing $828 million and a company value of about $9.1 billion. Confluent shares closed at $45.02 on their first day, up 25%, bringing Confluent’s market cap to $11.4 billion.
In an interview, Kreps said Confluent has benefited from the continuous shift of enterprise resources and data to the cloud. This trend propelled Snowflake, which went public last fall, to a market cap of more than $74 billion. Databricks, another player, was looking to help companies leverage their massive amounts of data. Recently hit a private market value of $28 billion, turning some of its founders into billionaires.
“There’s a lot of excitement about the larger data ecosystem,” Kreps told Forbes in an interview. “Switching to the cloud makes using this new data technology even easier.”
Confluent seems suitable as a “central nervous system” for all this data and significantly helps the flow of big data processed by large companies in real-time. (Apart from using LinkedIn for the first time, keep in mind that Netflix will respond to user input and filter recommendations or Audi will provide driver diagnostics.
That data, says Creps, isn’t exactly what you’d find in data warehouses, data pools, or infrastructure. Another, which aims to replace on-premises server racks rather than “moving data,” he said. A 2015 Forbes magazine profile compares the Confluent data stream to the chocolate stream at the heart of Willy Wonka’s fictional chocolate factory.
“Event handover” or another concept underlies Kreps sees the future IT infrastructure, “Open Source Service as a Service technically,” is not much better. “One of the things that cause Confluent to start is when you have something completely new, you barely have the vocabulary to talk about it,” Kreps says.