AI, Market Cycles, and the Systems Built to Outlast Them with Cockroach Labs CEO & Co-founder Spencer Kimball
Wed Jan 21 2026
Most databases are designed for success cases. Real systems fail– the difference is whether they’re built and tested for it.
In this episode, David sits down with Spencer Kimball, co-founder and CEO of Cockroach Labs, to explore the architectural and testing decisions behind CockroachDB, and why validating systems under worst-case conditions is essential to building reliable infrastructure at scale. Spencer shares the origin story of CockroachDB, tracing it back to his time at Google, where working on large-scale data systems and helping build Google Spanner exposed the limitations of existing database technologies. Motivated by the limits of existing database designs, Spencer and his co-founders left Google to build a resilient, scalable, open-source database designed for a world where failure isn’t an edge case, it’s the norm.
Plus, Spencer and David discuss how emerging AI workloads are reshaping expectations for database infrastructure by increasing scale, stressing latency budgets, and raising the cost of failure.
Join us as we discuss:
How Google Spanner inspired the creation of CockroachDBDesigning a database that assumed failure by default What resilience means at massive scaleHow AI is changing the demands placed on modern databasesHow the Cockroach Labs–IBM partnership reflects a broader shift in enterprise modernization Spencer’s futuristic vision for databases, from AI automation to outer space
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Most databases are designed for success cases. Real systems fail– the difference is whether they’re built and tested for it. In this episode, David sits down with Spencer Kimball, co-founder and CEO of Cockroach Labs, to explore the architectural and testing decisions behind CockroachDB, and why validating systems under worst-case conditions is essential to building reliable infrastructure at scale. Spencer shares the origin story of CockroachDB, tracing it back to his time at Google, where working on large-scale data systems and helping build Google Spanner exposed the limitations of existing database technologies. Motivated by the limits of existing database designs, Spencer and his co-founders left Google to build a resilient, scalable, open-source database designed for a world where failure isn’t an edge case, it’s the norm. Plus, Spencer and David discuss how emerging AI workloads are reshaping expectations for database infrastructure by increasing scale, stressing latency budgets, and raising the cost of failure. Join us as we discuss: How Google Spanner inspired the creation of CockroachDBDesigning a database that assumed failure by default What resilience means at massive scaleHow AI is changing the demands placed on modern databasesHow the Cockroach Labs–IBM partnership reflects a broader shift in enterprise modernization Spencer’s futuristic vision for databases, from AI automation to outer space