Kirk Dunn

Chief Executive Officer Kurrent (formerly Event Store)

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Kirk Dunn is Chief Executive Officer of Kurrent, the event-native data platform company previously known as Event Store, whose KurrentDB product stores data as an immutable sequence of events rather than as current-state rows. He was appointed in October 2024 specifically to build out the enterprise business, which is the job he is best known for having done before: as Chief Operating Officer of Cloudera from 2011, he helped take the Hadoop pioneer from around fifty people to more than two thousand. His career is a long arc through the commercial side of infrastructure companies — IBM sales, Inktomi field operations during the first web boom, chief executive roles at PowerFile and Bang Networks — and Kurrent has hired him for the same transition Cloudera needed: turning a technically admired open-source project into something large enterprises buy.

Career Highlights

• Appointed Chief Executive Officer of Event Store, now Kurrent, in an announcement dated 9 October 2024, alongside David Wang as Vice President of Engineering.
• Chief Operating Officer of Cloudera from 2011 to 2015, helping scale the company from roughly 50 employees to more than 2,000 through its growth stage.
• Chief Executive Officer of PowerFile, which was sold to Hitachi-LG Data Storage.
• Chief Executive Officer of Bang Networks.
• Executive positions in sales, marketing and professional services at Network Equipment Technologies.
• Vice President of North American Field Operations at Inktomi.
• Began his career in senior sales positions at IBM, working with Fortune 200 accounts and leading international expansions.
• Active investor and adviser to data-platform startups including Synadia, Cerebra Technologies and AlgoLift.

Professional Journey

Dunn took a B.A. in Mathematics/Applied Science at UCLA in 1983 and began in enterprise sales at IBM, working with Fortune 200 accounts. That grounding — large, complex, slow-moving enterprise buyers — is the thread that runs through everything afterwards, because it is precisely the capability that infrastructure startups lack and have to buy in.

He was Vice President of North American Field Operations at Inktomi during the period when the company’s search and caching technology underpinned much of the early commercial web, then took executive positions in sales, marketing and professional services at Network Equipment Technologies. He subsequently ran two companies as chief executive: PowerFile, an optical storage company that was sold to Hitachi-LG Data Storage, and Bang Networks.

In April 2011 Cloudera hired him as Chief Operating Officer. Cloudera was then a small company with an outsized reputation, commercialising Hadoop at a point when “big data” was becoming a category, and it needed someone to build the go-to-market machinery around the engineering. Over his tenure the company grew from roughly fifty employees to more than two thousand and moved decisively toward a public listing, which followed in 2017 after he had left. It remains the defining entry on his record.

After Cloudera he worked as an investor and adviser across data-platform startups, with positions in Synadia, Cerebra Technologies and AlgoLift, which kept him close to the infrastructure market without running a company in it.

In October 2024 Event Store appointed him Chief Executive Officer, announcing him alongside a new Vice President of Engineering and framing the hires explicitly around scaling the enterprise business. The company has since rebranded as Kurrent, with KurrentDB, Kurrent Cloud and associated tooling as its product line, positioning event-native storage as infrastructure for real-time AI, application development and analytics. The mandate is recognisably the one he took at Cloudera thirteen years earlier.

Education

University of California, Los Angeles

B.A., Mathematics/Applied Science, 1983