Adam Storm, a database nerd, shares his journey from working on DBMS development at IBM to joining Cockroach Labs. He started with memory management and autonomic computing at IBM before moving to distributed transactions and commodity hardware. He then worked on incorporating column stores into existing relational databases and built a hybrid transaction/analytical processing system. Finally, he led the creation of an IoT-optimized cloud-native database. After working as an executive, Storm left IBM to join Cockroach Labs due to its strong technology, mature product, and talented team. He shares advice for those starting in the database industry, emphasizing being a generalist, avoiding the money trap, and making one's own luck.