Lessons learned scaling to $5B with Cockroach Labs’ CEO

Spencer Kimball on Cockroach Labs’ shift to the cloud and embrace of consumption-based pricing

A couple of weeks back I had a chance to hop across the pond, spending a few days at SaaStr and the Pavilion CRO Summit in London. There were incredible speakers across the three days, but I was perhaps most excited for my next guest: Spencer Kimball, CEO and co-founder of Cockroach Labs.

Cockroach Labs has had a fascinating journey. The company began as popular open source software (with 27k+ stars on GitHub), taking database technology used at Google and making it available for the masses. They now offer proprietary self-hosted, dedicated cloud, and – as of 2022 – serverless editions.

The company is clearly onto something promising, announcing a $278 million Series F in December 2021 along with news that Cockroach Labs’ cloud business was growing at 500% year-on-year (😲). 

Cockroach Labs is part of a broader wave in infrastructure tooling that’s betting big on cloud and consumption-based offerings. We’ve seen similar moves from public companies like MongoDB, Elastic, Confluent, and Ha…