Profile / Builder of Unkillable Things
Spencer Kimball
He named his database after the one creature you can't stamp out. Twelve years later, the joke is running mission-critical workloads.
Co-Founder & CEO, Cockroach Labs
He named his database after the one creature you can't stamp out. Twelve years later, the joke is running mission-critical workloads.
Walk into a meeting with Spencer Kimball and you will eventually have to listen to him explain a name. Every investor, every Fortune 500 CEO, every new hire asks the same thing: why call a database CockroachDB? He has the answer down cold - cockroaches are nearly impossible to kill, and so should your data be.
Today Kimball runs Cockroach Labs, the New York company behind a distributed SQL database that treats failure as a daily certainty rather than a rare emergency. The pitch is almost boring in its confidence: spread your data across machines, regions, and clouds, lose any of them, and the system keeps answering queries as if nothing happened. The name that started as a throwaway placeholder turned out to be the cleanest possible summary of the product.
His design philosophy is blunt. "Anything that can go wrong, does go wrong," he has said. "You simply have to assume a constant rate of breakage, and then design extremely redundant systems." That is not pessimism. It is the operating manual for software that promises never to go down.
The instinct came from inside Google. Kimball spent roughly a decade there as an engineer, working on the plumbing most people never see - Colossus, the successor to the Google File System, and the Google Servlet Engine. Along the way he used Bigtable and watched its successor, Spanner, take shape: globally distributed databases that behaved like a single, well-mannered system. When he left, he discovered the rest of the world had nothing like them. So he built one.
CockroachDB began as an open-source project on GitHub in February 2014. Kimball pulled in two people he already trusted: Peter Mattis, his college roommate, and Ben Darnell, formerly of the Google Reader team. Cockroach Labs was the commercial wrapper around the code - a way to keep the project alive and pay the people maintaining it.
Cockroaches are hard to kill. That's their most impressive quality.- Spencer Kimball, on naming a database
In 1995, Kimball was a Berkeley undergraduate with a roommate named Peter Mattis and a club called the eXperimental Computing Facility. What the two of them turned in as a class project was GIMP - the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It became one of the most widely used open-source applications ever written, the free alternative to Photoshop that shipped on Linux machines everywhere.
He never treated it as a stepping stone. "From the first line of source code to the last, GIMP was always my 'dues' paid to the free software movement," he said. The free-software idealism never left; decades later, CockroachDB launched the same way - open, on GitHub, before there was a company behind it.
After graduating in 1996 he kept moving. He co-founded WeGo, a web-community tools company, as co-CTO in 1998. In 2000 he built OnlinePhotoLab.com, a browser-based GIMP whose technology was eventually folded into Ofoto. Then came Google in 2002, the move to its New York office in 2004, and the decade in distributed systems that would define everything after.
In 2012 he reunited with Mattis again - this time for Viewfinder, a social photo-sharing app, alongside Brian McGinnis. Square acquired it in 2013, and Kimball spent a stint working on the payments platform before the itch to build databases won out.
WeGo, Viewfinder, Cockroach Labs - Kimball keeps building with his Berkeley roommate Peter Mattis. Loyalty as a hiring strategy.
He assumes a constant rate of breakage and engineers around it. The result is software that treats catastrophe as routine.
From GIMP to CockroachDB, the code goes public before the business does. The free-software ethic is load-bearing.
File systems, servlet engines, databases. He gravitates to the deep, invisible layers other engineers avoid.
The placeholder that stuck became the best marketing the company never paid for. Memorable beats tasteful.
He calls his shift from full-time programmer to chief executive a "relatively gentle" transition - and notes engineers can always return to the keyboard.
The idea behind CockroachDB came from absence. Inside Google, Kimball had Bigtable and Spanner - databases that spread across the planet and shrugged off failed machines. Outside Google, nothing comparable existed for the rest of the industry to use.
So CockroachDB was built to survive: lose a node, a data center, even a whole cloud region, and the database reroutes around the damage and keeps serving. It speaks SQL, so developers don't have to relearn everything, and it can pin data to specific geographies for companies wrestling with data-locality rules.
That is the whole bet. Not the fastest database, not the cheapest - the one that refuses to go down. Named, fittingly, after the only animal anyone genuinely believes is unkillable.
Anything that can go wrong, does go wrong. You simply have to assume a constant rate of breakage, and then design extremely redundant systems.
Resilience is why Cockroach exists.
From the first line of source code to the last, GIMP was always my 'dues' paid to the free software movement.
When I first thought of the name, it was just a placeholder. Now I have to explain it to everyone - and people never forget it.
Cockroaches are hard to kill. When we were designing the database, we wanted something equally resilient.