Nate Stewart is the CEO of Materialize, the streaming operational data warehouse based in New York. He took the role in April 2024 after seven years leading product at Cockroach Labs (CockroachDB), where he also sat on the board. He is a Michigan CS undergrad, an MIT Sloan MBA, and a former lead backend engineer at Bloomberg who won the MIT $100K entrepreneurship competition on his way out of business school.
Cockroach Labs builds CockroachDB, a distributed SQL database engineered to survive failures the way its namesake insect does. Founded in 2015 by three ex-Google engineers, the company combines the horizontal scalability of NoSQL with the strong consistency and PostgreSQL compatibility of a traditional relational database. CockroachDB powers mission-critical workloads at banks, retailers, gaming platforms, and AI companies that need to stay online through outages, scale across regions, and keep data inside specific jurisdictions for compliance.
Spencer Kimball is the co-founder and CEO of Cockroach Labs, the company behind CockroachDB, a distributed SQL database built to survive almost anything you throw at it. Long before databases, he co-wrote GIMP as a Berkeley class project in 1995, spent roughly a decade as an engineer at Google working on its file-system guts, and built a photo startup that Square acquired. He named his database after the one creature famous for being nearly impossible to kill - which turned out to be the perfect pitch.