Evan
Kaplan

Evan Kaplan runs the company whose database quietly powers half of what you think of as "modern infrastructure." InfluxDB - the time series database he has shepherded since 2016 - processes sensor readings from wind turbines in Texas, high-frequency trading ticks in London, heartbeat monitors in hospital ICUs, and telemetry from satellites. It does this for 1.3 million developers and counting. The number that matters more: when he walked in the door, there were 3,000.

That trajectory - 3,000 to 1.3 million - is the story of a particular kind of CEO: one who understood that the path to enterprise runs straight through the developer, not around them. Kaplan didn't come to the database world through a career in computer science. He has an environmental science degree from Western Washington University and an MBA from the University of Washington. His formative professional years were spent teaching people how not to die on mountains.

He was a climbing and skiing guide in his late 20s, working through the kind of compressed decision-making that mountain environments demand. The lesson he draws from it now is not about adrenaline - it's about the relationship between preparation, trust, and conditions that change faster than your plan. He carries that into board meetings. He carried it into the decision, in 2023, to rip out InfluxDB's core architecture and rewrite it in Rust.

That was not a casual call. InfluxDB 3.0 - launched in April 2023 - represented a complete architectural overhaul. The team rebuilt the engine on Apache Arrow and Apache Parquet, added native SQL support, and decoupled compute from storage. The result: unlimited cardinality, dramatically faster query performance, and a platform capable of handling the data volumes that AI infrastructure actually requires. "InfluxDB 3.0 delivers on our vision to analyze metric, event, and trace data in a single datastore with unlimited cardinality," Kaplan said at launch. That's a precise sentence. It doesn't wave its hands.

The timing of that rebuild matters. By early 2023, the AI conversation had exploded, and Kaplan had been watching it carefully. His position: every AI model that makes a real-time decision is, at its foundation, consuming time series data. Sensor readings, application metrics, market prices, network telemetry - these are all timestamped sequences. The database that handles them best isn't a nice-to-have in the AI era. It's load-bearing infrastructure.

InfluxData's reach reflects this. The platform runs in industrial IoT environments tracking manufacturing process efficiency, in financial services firms analyzing high-frequency data, in healthcare systems monitoring patient vitals, in cloud-native applications across AWS and other major providers. The 1,900+ enterprise customers span sectors most people wouldn't think to connect: smart city grids, gaming analytics, fleet management, energy utilities, automotive telemetry. What they have in common is that their data has a timestamp and something critical depends on reading it fast.

Before InfluxData, Kaplan had already done this twice - the CEO role, the full cycle of building something from early chaos into something that acquires scale. He was founder and CEO of Aventail Corporation, a pioneer in SSL VPN technology that was eventually acquired by Dell. He then led iPass Corporation, the global Wi-Fi connectivity company, as President and CEO. A brief stint as Executive in Residence at Trinity Ventures in 2015 gave him a look at the market from the other side of the table. He went back in-house when InfluxData called.

There's a specific discipline that mountain guiding installs: you do not confuse your map with the terrain. Plans made at base camp look different at altitude. The route that was obvious at 6 AM becomes a judgment call at 2 PM. You build the plan, then you build the judgment to abandon the plan when the conditions require it.

Kaplan describes his resilience and adaptability as a CEO in these terms - not in the language of business school case studies, but in the language of routes, decisions, and consequence. "I'm an aging climber and skier," he has said, without apology. The aging part is irrelevant. The climber part is still active inside how he operates.

This shows up in how he has navigated post-pandemic workforce shifts. In 2021 and 2022, Kaplan was one of the more thoughtful public voices on what he called a "complete and fundamental reshuffling of the deck." His position wasn't policy-forward or punitive. It was structural: the conditions changed. You have to build new routes. The organizations that thrive will be the ones that trade rigid org charts for trust, accountability, and flexibility.

"Everyone, from leaders to every part of the organization, will need to rely more on trust, accountability and flexibility than they did pre-pandemic," he said. That's a climbing principle applied to org design. It also turned out to be correct.