Cockroach Labs was founded in 2015 by ex-Google employees Spencer Kimball, Peter Mattis, and Ben Darnell. Kimball and Mattis had been key members of the Google File System team, while Darnell was a key member of the Google Reader team. While at Google, all three had used Google-owned DBMS’s Bigtable and its successor, Spanner.After leaving Google, they wanted to design and build something similar.Spencer Kimball wrote the first iteration of the design in January 2014, and began the open-source project on GitHub in February 2014, allowing outside access and contributions.