I happened to know RedPanda founder back in the days he was at Concord.io (as a founder and a main dev). The level of obsession with performance and optimization of this guy was insane. He's not only extremelly skilled with C++, but also very passionate about rethinking large and complex systems and rebuilding them to enable 10-100x speed improvements. It's like his personal hobby – take a piece of software everyone use, and optimize it to the limits of physics, usually by implementing better version from scratch himself :) Plus, he's an excellent communicator. Watching their team working I was always thinking that successful companies can be built only with that level of passion and expertise in a single package.