Spencer Kimball

CEO, Cockroach Labs
New York, New York,United States
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Who Is Spencer Kimball?

Total Experience26 years
CompanyCockroach Labs
CountryUnited States

Spencer Kimball is a prominent computer programmer, entrepreneur, and business executive, best known as the CEO and co-founder of Cockroach Labs, the company behind the distributed SQL database CockroachDB. His career began notably at UC Berkeley where he co-created the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP), a now-famous open-source image editor. He later became a key engineer at Google, working on critical infrastructure projects like the Colossus file system. As an entrepreneur, he co-founded the photo-sharing service Viewfinder, which was acquired by Square. His work consistently revolves around building scalable, resilient, and distributed systems, making him a respected figure in both the open-source and database communities.

How Did Spencer Kimball's Career Path Shape Their Journey?

Spencer Kimball's work history includes a series of influential roles in various companies. Here is a detailed list of his professional journey:

Cockroach Labs - CEO(2015 to Present)
Square - Engineer(2013 to 2015)
Viewfinder - CTO(2011 to 2013)
Google - Staff Software Engineer(2002 to 2011)
WeGo Systems - CTO(1999 to 2002)

What Are Spencer Kimball's Key Achievements?

Co-founder & CEO of Cockroach Labs

Co-founded Cockroach Labs and leads the company in its mission to build and support CockroachDB, a cloud-native, distributed SQL database renowned for its scalability, resilience, and data consistency.

Co-creator of GIMP

Developed the initial version of the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) with Peter Mattis as a student project. GIMP has since become a cornerstone of the open-source software ecosystem and a powerful free alternative to Adobe Photoshop.

Key Engineer on Google's Colossus

As a senior engineer at Google, he was a major contributor to Colossus, the successor to the Google File System (GFS), which is a foundational piece of Google's vast data storage infrastructure.

Co-founder of Viewfinder

Co-founded and led the development of Viewfinder, a mobile application focused on private photo sharing and organization, which was subsequently acquired by Square Inc.

What's Spencer Kimball's Educational Background?

Bachelor of Arts (B.A.), Computer Science

University of California, Berkeley - Year 1992

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Company Overview

Cockroach Labs
Total employees646
HeadquartersNew York
Founded2015

Cockroach Labs is the company behind CockroachDB, a cloud-native, distributed SQL database designed for building modern, data-intensive applications. CockroachDB provides next-level consistency, ultra-resilience, data locality, and massive scale to organizations that need to manage transactional data reliably. It is architected to survive disk, machine, rack, and even datacenter failures with no manual intervention, making it ideal for mission-critical services that must always be available.

Cockroach Labs Funding Information
$633.1M - Total Funding Raised
$278M - Most recent funding amount
7 - Number of funding rounds
Dec 7, 2021 - Latest funding round
Lead Investors:
Greenoaks Capital
Altimeter Capital
Tiger Global Management
Lone Pine Capital
Benchmark
Index Ventures
Redpoint
Sequoia Capital

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