A Software Company as Resilient as Roaches

You can try stomping them, sucking them up with a vacuum, or even depriving them of food and water, but cockroaches won’t go down without a fight. This is why Spencer Kimball and his co-founders Peter Mattis and Ben Darnell chose to name their multimillion-dollar software company, Cockroach Labs.

“They’ll colonize the available resources and are nearly impossible to kill,” Kimball, CEO, wrote in a community forum in 2016.

Kimball wrote in the forum that he came up with the idea for Cockroach Labs after experiencing continual frustration with other databases. The company provides a cloud-based, scalable, transactional database that allows for data, which is stored in multiple locations, to be accessed and managed anywhere.

According to Forbes, where the company was listed as one of 2020’s Next Billion Dollar Startups, “its databases are super resilient — like notoriously tough-to-kill cockroaches — and shield its nearly 100 clients, including Bose, Comcast and Netflix, from outages or system failures.”

Maria Taft, director of demand generation at Cockroach Labs, told PCT, “We, Roachers…definitely love and embrace our Cockroach logo and name. Just like the cockroach, you can’t kill our database, CockroachDB.”

So, even though cockroaches are a tough pest to manage, their unyielding reputation inspired a resilient product that provides its users with comfort and dependency; much like the comfort PMPs provide clients when ridding their structures of the pesky roach.

The author is an editorial intern with PCT magazine and can be reached at eross@gie.net.

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Something Wonderful

Aptive Environmental, Provo, Utah, ranked #7 on this year’s PCT Top 100 list, with annual revenues approaching $200 million.

In June, the Aptive team posted a congratulatory video via Cameo from Canadian businessman and television personality Kevin O’Leary (aka, “Mr. Wonderful”), best known as the acerbic Shark on ABC’s “Shark Tank.”

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In commenting on Aptive’s Top 100 ranking, O’Leary said, “Look, that’s entrepreneurship. That’s success. That’s longevity. That’s service. That’s customer service. It has to be all those things if you have gotten that big.”

O’Leary added that he was really impressed by Aptive’s commitment to growing the business. “So keep up the amazing work. And literally, I guess I should say, spray them dead in 2020.”

Fun (or Wonderful) fact. Although his on-screen persona is that of the abrasive Shark who is blunt with financial advice, Mr. Wonderful has a sensitive side that can best be seen in his photography. According to a 2013 Maclean’s article, O’Leary was a member of his high school’s photography club and his early career aspiration was to become a photographer. While O’Leary eventually chose business as his career path, he continues his interest in photography as a collector. According to the Maclean’s article, O’Leary’s portfolio is “heavily skewed toward Canadian photographers,” including works by Edward Burtynsky, Barbara Cole, Joshua Jensen- Nagle and Astrid Kirchherr. — Brad Harbison