Spencer Kimball

Spencer Kimball is the co-founder and chief executive of Cockroach Labs, maker of CockroachDB, a distributed SQL database designed to survive the failure of entire data centres. Long before founding the company, Kimball had already made a mark on open-source software: as a University of California, Berkeley student in 1995, he created the first version of the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) alongside classmate Peter Mattis, software that remains a widely used free alternative to Photoshop three decades later.

Kimball earned a bachelor's degree in computer science from Berkeley in 1996 and went on to co-found WeGo, an early web community tools company, before joining Google in 2002. Over a decade at Google, he worked on infrastructure including Colossus, the successor to the Google File System, giving him a close, first-hand view of the distributed systems, Bigtable and Spanner, that underpinned Google's scale.

In 2012, Kimball co-founded the photo-sharing startup Viewfinder with Peter Mattis and Brian McGinnis; the company was acquired by Square in December 2013. Frustrated by the limitations of existing databases when building distributed applications, Kimball began designing CockroachDB in January 2014 and released it as an open-source project on GitHub the following month, drawing inspiration from Google's internal Spanner database but built for the open-source and multi-cloud world.

Kimball, Mattis and fellow ex-Googler Ben Darnell founded Cockroach Labs in 2015 to commercialise the project, and CockroachDB quickly won recognition, including Black Duck's Open Source Rookie of the Year award, for its resilient, horizontally scalable architecture. The company shifted its licensing from Apache 2.0 to the Business Source License in 2019 to balance open development with a sustainable commercial model, and has since raised hundreds of millions of dollars in venture funding.

As CEO, Kimball continues to contribute directly to CockroachDB's codebase, an unusual level of hands-on technical involvement for a chief executive, and has positioned the database as critical infrastructure for applications that cannot tolerate downtime, from financial services to logistics. His trajectory, from pioneering consumer open-source software to enterprise distributed databases, has made him one of the more distinctive technical founders in the data infrastructure space.