My Renewed Focus - Paul Dix

By Paul Dix / Use Cases
Jan 14, 2016

Today I’m excited to announce that Evan Kaplan is joining InfluxData as our new CEO. Evan has a post that tells his story and why he’s excited to be joining us. I wanted to write this post to talk about why we brought in a new CEO and why I’m personally thrilled to be working with and learning from Evan.

Todd Persen (my co-founder) and I first met Evan at Trinity Ventures’ office last September. He was an EIR there at the time and Dan Scholnick, our board member at Trinity, suggested we meet him. There was no real agenda, just a chance to meet an experienced entrepreneur to talk about what we’re doing.

What was originally supposed to be a quick hour lunch following one of our board meetings turned into a 3 hour session where we talked not only about Influx and our vision for what we’re building, but also about startups, the dotcom bubble of the 90’s, our backgrounds, and our shared love of Crossfit.

After that first meeting we tapped Evan to help us do some long term planning and preparation for our next board meeting. Todd and I are completely new to board meetings so our preparation up to this time consisted of me updating some very basic slides during our commute to Sand Hill the morning of the meetings. Our first experience working with him to put together an operating plan to present to the board was exceptional. His attention to detail, thoughtfulness, and ability to facilitate and enhance communication between our team was evident from these very first meetings. We also managed to squeeze in some Crossfit workouts before our working sessions.

Over the course of the next few months we developed a great working relationship with Evan. At the same time, I was feeling spread thin and really wanted to refocus my energies on our products and technology. Todd and I decided that if we could convince Evan to come on board, we’d have a great collaborator and mentor to help us build the business.

I’m excited to be working with Evan and energized by my renewed focus on our products and long term vision for how we can help the promise of IoT, sensors and time series data become a reality. For the community of users of InfluxDB, this means I’ll be more focused on delivering the components of the TICK stack. Clustering, ease of use, the new storage engine, enhancements to query functionality, and all new features related to scaling out, managing, monitoring, and working with time series data will be my day to day.

Evan, Todd, and I have taken over a small office here at InfluxHQ, and despite occasionally bumping chairs, we’re getting more excited everyday about delivering our vision for InfluxData.