It's Meant to Be: Why I Joined InfluxData

By Will Paulus / Company
Jan 17, 2019

Full disclosure, I was one day away from signing another offer when I first met with Evan Kaplan, the CEO of InfluxData. However, after that conversation, I was so inspired by the combination of product, people, culture, and opportunity that I was all-in on Influx from that point forward. Equally important was the direction the company is moving in, with increased emphasis on the cloud product, since my background is almost exclusively in hosted API-based solutions. Breaking this:

• Product & Space:

I’ve had an interest in real-time analytics dating back to my time at Google, with Google Analytics, and more recently at Mixpanel. Bottom line, I’ve always been interested in products that offer new ways of collecting, measuring, and analyzing how various systems and people are performing, so the time series space is perfect for me. Plus, it’s comforting to know that we have the leading time series database technology, InfluxDB, available on the market.

• Opportunity:

InfluxData has a unique approach to open source distribution to allow developers with projects of all shapes and sizes to interact with the platform, while simultaneously providing compelling enterprise features on top of the software for use in production and distributed environments. With this dual-pronged strategy, the company has seen fantastic customer and revenue growth and has supported overall category expansion as time series has been the fastest growing type of database over the last two years.

• People:

Look, software is great, but in my professional experience, it’s always about the people. I’m joining a world-class team at InfluxData, with executives, managers, and individual contributors who are technical, passionate and working together to build the modern engine for metrics and events. It’s an executive team that I’m honored to be a part of.

Finally, closing the loop on the title: At the end of my first call with Evan, there was undeniable chemistry and I told him that I was very interested but that I had an offer exploding in 3 days. To that, he calmly replied: “I will fast track you as much as I can, and if it’s meant to be, it will be.” I’m certainly glad it was indeed meant to be and am excited for the journey ahead.