Why I left VC to join Cockroach Labs
I joined Cockroach Labs 7 months ago — since joining, I haven’t had the chance to blog since I simply haven’t had time. I used to blog often when I was in VC, and honestly, I’ve missed it. Blogging is as much a personal win as it is a professional one. The act of synthesizing and sharing information is hugely beneficial when it comes to generating new mental models that I re-apply at work.
To mark my return to blogging, I wanted to share what I’ve been up to over the last 7 months, starting with why I left VC to join Cockroach Labs. I’ll follow up with a blog post about how my experience in VC has and hasn’t helped my transition to Product at Cockroach.
Why VC is an awesome job!
Before Cockroach Labs, I worked in venture capital as an associate focused on enterprise software. Specifically, I covered ML/AI, open source solutions, developer tools, analytics/data, and moonshots. Moonshots included areas like agriculture, drones, and space. In fact, the two investments that I was involved in during my time in VC were in the drone and space industries.
Everyone always asks me why I left VC. People outside VC think it’s the most interesting job ever. People inside VC worry about the risk I took to join a startup.
To be honest, venture capital is an awesome job! I wonder why I left at least once a week, particularly when things get hard at Cockroach, as they do at every other startup. VC gives you a unique opportunity to go really broad — at any given point in time, you are developing opinions on trends in five different markets, talking to founders who have invested their lives to tackling those markets, and observing the successes and mistakes portfolio companies make. You know odd tidbits that cover when you should hire your first sales people, to what metrics to measure at a company-wide level, to how certain metrics compare across startups, to how to pitch to a VC. It’s hard to get that high level perspective early on in your career, and the overall VC experience was invaluable to me.
But here come the caveats that I’m sure you were expecting. Starting in venture capital so early in your career means that you end up going very broad, but only surface deep. I wanted to get hands-on experience working on a product I cared about. That’s when I started considering leaving venture capital. I knew that the longer I waited, the harder it would be to leave an amazing job that I was comfortable with.
Why I chose Cockroach Labs
Open source is here to stay: It’s becoming clear that infrastructure is increasingly expected to be open source. Companies are sick of being tied to proprietary software — they either want full control over their destinies, or they go with a hosted service. The open source business model is rapidly evolving, and being part of that evolution is very exciting to me.
CockroachDB is a differentiated product: The database and analytics space is incredibly crowded. However, OLTP workloads have been largely ignored by the newer NoSQL solutions, who trade off strong consistency for availability. CockroachDB brings the power of distributed systems to mission critical OLTP applications.
The culture is awesome: Cockroach Labs is a very transparent, open company. P.S. We have Free Fridays.
Yes, I drank the cool-aid.
This is a short post because we are about to launch our first 1.0 product, and I don’t have much time! I’m so excited to see how people choose to use CockroachDB. The more people use us, the more we can leverage that data to improve our product going forward.
As my old boss said to me as I was leaving VC, “upwards and onwards.”