The Story of InfluxData: Building the Future of Time Series Data

Most startup stories begin with a technical founder’s eureka moment. InfluxData’s journey starts with two unlikely ingredients: a mountain guide and a CrossFit gym.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, CEO Evan Kaplan revealed how his path to tech leadership began far from Silicon Valley. “I have a very different background than most entrepreneurs and most other folks. I don’t have a computer science degree. I have an environmental science degree. I spent most of my formative years, my late 20s, climbing and skiing around the world, guiding, working for different organizations.”

After transitioning through aerospace program management and business school, Evan found himself as an executive in residence at Trinity Ventures. There, a chance encounter at a CrossFit gym would shape the future of time series databases.

The meeting was with Paul Dix, who had a vision born from his Wall Street experience. As Evan explains, “Paul had worked on Wall street, he built time series databases… And he had built for a number of wall street firms on top of other databases, like postgres or cassandra. And he just realized it was what he would call as a bit of a yacht shape, which is basically, you have to do a ton of work just to do a ton of work.”

Paul, deeply embedded in the open source community and running New York’s machine learning meetup, saw an opportunity. Through Y Combinator, he launched InfluxData with a clear mission: build a time series database that would eliminate the redundant work plaguing developers.

The timing couldn’t have been better. As Evan notes, “We want our systems to be smarter and smarter, but we want them to be, at a minimum, correctable. Then you want them self healing, and then you want them autonomous. Well, it turns out every stage of that journey is about instrumentation over time.”

This vision has manifested in remarkable ways. Today, InfluxData processes data from Tesla Powerwalls, Lucid cars, and Salesforce’s APIs. Their technology handles “billions and billions of points a second, writing from hundreds of thousands” of sources.

But the journey hasn’t been without challenges. In 2016, facing an existential threat, they made the controversial decision to move their clustering feature from open source to their commercial offering. The decision sparked backlash but proved crucial for sustainability.

The company’s resilience through these challenges stems from what Evan calls “enrollment” – a leadership philosophy that emphasizes bringing people along rather than dictating direction. “If I have to tell somebody to do something, I’ve already lost. So my view is I have to enroll people in whatever we’re doing, whatever big change, whatever pivot, whatever dynamic we’re doing.”

Looking ahead, InfluxData is positioned at the intersection of two massive trends: the explosion of sensor data and the rise of AI. As Evan describes their future: “The thesis here is really simple… We want increasingly intelligent systems, and it all starts with instrumentation.” This vision has attracted 1,900 customers and positioned InfluxData as the largest time series platform in the world.

Yet despite their success, Evan maintains a refreshingly pragmatic view: “I think we have something special… I feel like the opportunity is really large. Even in these tougher markets, we’re not using less data. The AI stuff is very real.” Rather than chasing glory, he’s focused on stewardship: “At this point in the game, I care less about the glory, but I care more about delivering as a steward for my investors, my employees, my customers.”

In a tech world obsessed with overnight success stories, InfluxData’s journey offers a different narrative – one where thoughtful leadership, technical excellence, and resilient execution create lasting value. For founders navigating their own challenges, it’s a reminder that the best companies often grow from unexpected beginnings and succeed through consistent, deliberate evolution rather than dramatic disruption.