[1] Prior to his work at Cockroach Labs, he worked for tech companies that include FriendFeed, Facebook, Brizzly, Dropbox, Viewfinder, and Square, Inc. Darnell entered North Carolina State University in 1998.

[4] A few months later, he left to work for startup Brizzly, a third-party interface for Twitter and Facebook[6] that was later purchased by AOL.

[7] During his time at Brizzly, Darnell took over Tornado, an open source real-time web framework based on FriendFeed.

[10] They later formed the company Cockroach Labs after launching the software as an open source project on GitHub.

[1] Darnell serves as the company's chief architect and also contributes to the source code development of CockroachDB.