joining me to discuss is the ceo, jay kreps. seen a lot of direct listings and spacs lately. why take the traditional apa route and why no? jay: it is pretty simple. if you're going after a $50 billion market and we wanted to raise capital, we wanted the opportunity to do that. it made a ton of sense for us and we are happy with the outcome. emily: confluent has developed streaming technology that helps process massive amounts of data online. this was critical during the pandemic, but now that the world is coming out of lockdown and people going back to work, will we need that kind of technology as much? jay: absolutely. no company in the world is looking at the digital side of the business and thinking, hey, this isn't so important. even with people going into in-person experiences, if you look at retail and many other businesses, digital and in-person is really blinding. there's a whole software side of businesses that demand real-time access to data, real-time processing and that's what this . is all about. that is what we ena

confluent set its sights on a $50 billion data management market, joining us now live from the nasdaq is jay krepsions on this milestone. you started as an in-house project at linkedin. when did you decide to go it at your own as an independent company? >> we saw most of the companies building around it were thinking about how to store data. at linkedin, a big part of the problem was how do you connect the systems, act on it real time, harness data in motion that was the opportunity we saw that was what we founded the company to go after and really taking that out to all the other companies in the world, that's the mission of confluent. >> and, jay, whydid you decide to go the traditional ipo route over direct listing? we had mark on, he calls it an ipo pop tax. >> both are great options. we were raising money at the same time. that's something only just being figured out as we were starting this process direct listing wasn't as great of an option for us. we're happy with the outcome it worked out great. >> jay, talk to me about your growth strategy and particularly given that megascale cloud prov