influxdb
(3)
Paul Dix Put Time in a Bottle - Then Rebuilt the Bottle
A failed monitoring product left Paul Dix with five weeks, a stubborn hunch and the beginnings of InfluxDB. Thirteen years later, his career is a study in the useful art of rebuilding before comfort hardens into doctrine.
InfluxData
InfluxData is the company behind InfluxDB, the open source time series database purpose-built for high-volume, timestamped data from sensors, applications, infrastructure, and IoT devices. Founded in 2012 and led by CEO Evan Kaplan and founder/CTO Paul Dix, InfluxData rebuilt its engine in Rust on the Apache Arrow, DataFusion, Flight, and Parquet stack for InfluxDB 3. The platform is used by more than 1,900 paying customers - including Tesla, IBM, Cisco, PayPal, and Nordstrom - to collect, store, and analyze real-time data at scale.
Evan Kaplan
Evan Kaplan is the CEO of InfluxData, the company behind InfluxDB - the world's most popular open-source time series database with over 1.3 million developers. With nearly 20 years in CEO roles across multiple companies, he took InfluxData from a scrappy open-source project of 3,000 users to a platform handling billions of data points per second for 1,900+ enterprise customers. His path to the C-suite ran not through computer science but through environmental science degrees and years spent as a mountain guide in his late 20s - an unconventional origin story that shows up in how he thinks about resilience and long-term endurance.