The founders of Ockam and InfluxData, Paul Dix and Mrinal Wadhwa respectively, decided to rewrite their respective products from C and Go to Rust due to issues with the current coding languages. Both Ockam and InfluxDB have undergone significant rewrites in Rust, with Ockam's rewrite being a full transition from C and InfluxDB 3.0 offering improved performance tools such as Apache Arrow, Apache Parquet, and DataFusion. The choice of Rust was driven by its high performance capabilities, fearless concurrency, borrow checker, and async/await tool, which allowed for more efficient and secure development. However, the rewrites came with challenges, including a steep learning curve and lengthy compile times, which required developers to adapt their coding styles and optimize their code for better performance.