Tristan Handy has been curating the Analytics Engineering Roundup newsletter since 2015, pulling together the internet’s best data science & analytics articles. Tristan and co-host Julia Schottenstein now bring the Roundup to real life, hosting biweekly conversations with data practitioners inventing the future of analytics engineering. You can view full episode summaries and read back issues of the Roundup newsletter at https://roundup.getdbt.com. The podcast is sponsored by dbt labs, maker ...
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Building a data team from the beginning (w/ Daniel Avancini)
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50:12Daniel Avancini is the chief data officer and co-founder of Indicium—a fast-growing data consultancy started in Brazil. There are a lot of data consultancies around the world, and a lot of them do great work. What has been so fascinating about Indicium’s journey is their HR model. Rather than primarily hiring experienced professionals, they decided…
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Data engineering at Snowflake (w/ Rahul Jain)
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44:04A look inside at the data work happening at a company making some of the most advanced technologies in the industry. Rahul Jain, data engineering manager at Snowflake, joins Tristan to discuss Iceberg, streaming, and all things Snowflake. For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://…
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The intersection of UI, exploratory data analysis, and SQL (w/ Hamilton Ulmer)
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50:37Hamilton Ulmer is working at the intersection of UI, Exploratory Data Analysis, and SQL at MotherDuck, and he's built a long career in EDA. Hamilton and Tristan dive deep into the history of exploratory data analysis. Even if you spend most of your time below the frontend layer of the stack, it is important to understand the trends in both the prac…
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Making data movement as reliable as electricity (w/ Taylor Brown)
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46:40Fivetran recently passed $300 million ARR and has over 7,000 customers globally. Taylor Brown, the cofounder and COO of Fivetran, joins the show to talk about Fivetran’s moat, the impact of AI on the data ingestion space, and open table formats and catalogs. For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newslett…
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Data as an assembly line (w/ Cedric Chin)
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51:11Cedric Chin runs Commoncog—a publication about accelerating business expertise. He joins Tristan to talk about the analytics development lifecycle, how organizations value (or misvalue) data, and why “data teams are not some IT helpdesk to be ignored.” For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, he…
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The data jobs to be done (w/ Erik Bernhardsson)
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42:55Erik Bernhardsson, the CEO and co-founder of Modal Labs, joins Tristan to talk about Gen AI, the lack of GPUs, the future of cloud computing, and egress fees. They also discuss whether the job title of data engineer is something we should want more or less of in the future. Erik’s not afraid of a spicy take, so this is a fun one. For full show note…
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Coalesce 2024 edition: What’s next for data teams? (w/ Scott Breitenother)
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44:23Show description: Scott Breitenother, founder of data consultancy Brooklyn Data Co., joins Tristan at Coalesce 2024 in Las Vegas to discuss the early days of dbt, the evolution of data teams, and what's next for the dbt community. For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.…
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The current state of the AI ecosystem (w/ Julia Schottenstein)
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45:44Former co-host Julia Schottenstein returns to the show to go deep into the world of LLMs. Julia joined LangChain as an early employee, in Tristan’s words, to “Basically solve all of the problems that aren't specifically in product and engineering.” LangChain has become one of, if not the primary frameworks for developing applications using large la…
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Creating value from GenAI in the enterprise (w/ Nisha Paliwal)
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45:20Nisha Paliwal, who leads enterprise data tech at Capital One, joins Tristan to discuss building a strong data culture for in the world of AI. She is the co-author of the book Secrets of AI Value Creation. For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com. The Analytics …
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Developer productivity on GitHub Copilot (w/ Eirini Kalliamvakou)
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53:59Dr. Eirini Kalliamvakou is a senior researcher at GitHub Next. Eirini has built a career on studying software engineers, how to measure their productivity, how developer experience impacts productivity, and more. Recently, Eirini has been working on quantifying the impacts of GitHub Copilot. Does it actually help software engineers be more producti…
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The rapid experimentation of AI agents (w/ Yohei Nakajima)
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45:55Yohei Nakajima is an investor by day and coder by night. In particular, one of his projects, an AI agent framework called BabyAGI that creates a plan-execute loop, got a ton of attention in the past year. The truth is that AI agents are an extremely experimental space, and depending on how strict you want to be with your definition, there aren't a …
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Funnel analytics and AI models for event sequences (w/ Misha Panko)
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44:09Misha Panko has worked in data for a long time, including on high performance data teams at Uber and Google. Today, Misha is the co-founder and CEO of Motif Analytics, a product focused on helping growth and ops teams understand their event data. In this episode, Tristan and Misha nerd out about the state of the art in computational neuroscience, w…
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Eric Avidon is a journalist at TechTarget who's interviewed Tristan a few times, and now Tristan gets to flip the script and interview Eric. Eric is a journalist veteran, covering everything from finance to the Boston Red Sox, but now he spends a lot of time with vendors in the data space and has a broad view of what's going on. Eric and Tristan di…
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Barry McCardel is the co-founder and CEO of Hex. Hex is an analytics tool that's structured around a notebook experience, but as you'll hear in the episode, goes well beyond the traditional notebook. We're big fans of Hex at dbt Labs, and use it for a bunch of our internal data work. In this episode, Barry and Tristan discuss notebooks and data ana…
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The 2024 Machine Learning, AI & Data Landscape (w/ Matt Turck)
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36:22Matt Turck has been publishing his ecosystem map since 2012. It was first called the Big Data Landscape. Now it’s the Machine Learning, AI & Data (MAD) Landscape. The 2024 MAD Landscape includes 2,011(!) logos, which Matt attributes first a data infrastructure cycle and now an ML/AI cycle. As Matt writes, “Those two waves are intimately related. A …
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How the Media Covers Gen AI (w/ Matthew Lynley, Supervised)
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48:15Matthew Lynley is a bit of a hybrid. He's been a long-time journalist covering enterprise tech, currently in his fantastic AI and data newsletter Supervised, and he's also been a hands-on data practitioner. Matthew has covered the analytics tech stack, but this time Tristan turns the tables to get Matthew’s perspective on the rise of Gen AI as a to…
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AI's Impact in the World of Structured Data Analytics (w/ Juan Sequeda, data.world)
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48:18Juan Sequeda is a principal data scientist and head of the AI Lab at data.world, and is also the co-host of the fantastic data podcast Catalog and Cocktails. This episode tackles semantics, semantic web, Juan’s research in how raw text-to-SQL performs versus text-to-semantic layer, and where we both believe AI will make an impact in the world of st…
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The End of the Modern Data Stack (w/ Benn Stancil, Mode)
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45:46Benn Stancil, cofounder and CTO at Mode, returns to The Analytics Engineering Podcast to discuss the evolution of the term "modern data stack" and its value today. Tristan wrote on this idea for The Analytics Engineering Roundup in Is the Modern Data Stack Still a Useful Idea? For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's…
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Data Mesh Architecture at Large Enterprises (w/ Moritz Heimpel and Ben Flusberg)
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46:07Moritz Heimpel from Siemens and Ben Flusberg from Cox Automotive have very similar jobs. They both act as stewards of the data strategies at large, complex companies. In this episode, we get into what it’s like to collaborate with data at scale. Ben and Mortitz share their experiences adopting a data mesh architecture and what that looks like at th…
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Let's Talk About Data Vault (w/ Brandon Taylor and Michael Olschimke)
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44:04If Data Vault is a new term for you, it’s a data modeling design pattern. We’re joined by Brandon Taylor, a senior data architect at Guild, and Michael Olschimke, who is the CEO of Scalefree—the consulting firm whose co-founder Dan Lindstedt is credited as the designer of the data vault architecture. In this conversation with Tristan and Julia, Mic…
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Navigating AI Complexity (w/ Jonathan Frankle)
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46:20Jonathan Frankle is the Chief Scientist at MosaicML, which was recently bought by Databricks for $1.3 billion. MosaicML helps customers train generative AI models on their data. Lots of companies are excited about gen AI, and the hope is that their company data and information will be what sets them apart from the competition. In this conversation …
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Career Growth in Data Roles (w/ Hubspot's Kasey Mazza at Coalesce 2023)
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29:17In this conversation with Tristan recorded at Coalesce 2023, Kasey Mazza, an analytics engineering manager on the RevOps team at HubSpot, discusses the roles of data analysts and analytics engineers, the importance of building internal data communities, and the evolving landscape of data teams. Watch Kasey’s Coalescse 2023 presentation The career g…
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Operationalizing Your Warehouse, Streaming Analytics, and Cereal (W/ Arjun Narayan of Materialize and Nathan Bean of General Mills)
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42:23It turns out data plays a big role in getting cereal manufactured and delivered so you can enjoy your Cheerios reliably for breakfast. We talk with Arjun Narayan, CEO of Materialize, a company building an operational warehouse, and Nathan Bean, a data leader at General Mills responsible for all of the company's manufacturing analytics and insights.…
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Roche’s Data Transformation Journey (w/ Yannick Misteli)
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40:05Yannick Misteli is the head of engineering for the go-to-market domain at Roche, a $250 billion multinational pharmaceutical and diagnostics company. Roche was an early supporter of dbt Cloud, and Yannick helped move his team of 120+ engineers to a modern data stack. He always finds a way to push the boundaries to make a large company founded in 18…
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The State of Databases Today (w/ Andy Pavlo)
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48:28Andy Pavlo is a professor of databaseology (he says it's a made-up word) at Carnegie Mellon and currently on leave to build his own company—OtterTune, which uses AI to figure out the settings to get the best performance out of databases. He is one of the preeminent minds on databases and a die-hard relational database maximalist. We talk about the …
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Bring Your Own Data to LLMs (W/ Jerry Liu of LlamaIndex)
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42:53Jerry Liu is the CEO and co-founder of LlamaIndex. LlamaIndex is an open-source framework that helps people prep their data for use with large language models in a process called retrieval augmented generation. LLMs are great decision engines, but in order for them to be useful for organizations, they need additional knowledge and context, and Jerr…
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Ramp's $8 Billion Data Strategy (W/ Ian Macomber and Ryan Delgado)
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49:19Ian Macomber, head of analytics engineering and data science at Ramp and formerly the VP of analytics and data engineering at Drizly, and Ryan Delgado, a staff software engineer at Ramp, have played pivotal roles in establishing Ramp's data team from the ground up and are spearheading the development of their comprehensive roadmap. In this conversa…
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Daniel Le is the CFO at dbt Labs where he has built multiple teams. He is also the former head of FP&A and operations at Zoom, and he helped scale FP&A as the former finance director at Okta. In this conversation with Julia, Daniel shares his view as CFO on the challenges SaaS companies face and the importance of finance teams creating a holistic v…
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The Arc of Data Innovation (w/ Bob Muglia, former CEO of Snowflake)
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47:59Bob Muglia likely needs no introduction. The former CEO of Snowflake led the company during its early, transformational years after a long career at Microsoft and Juniper. Bob recently released the book The Datapreneurs about the arc of innovation in the data industry, starting with the first relational databases all the way to the present craze of…
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It's 2023, and Privacy Is Now Fun! (w/ Ian Coe of Tonic.ai + Abhishek Bhowmick of Samooha)
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47:39Advances in ML have transformed data privacy from a regulatory necessity into an opportunity to improve the work of data people. Synthetic data for modeling + testing is one example of a hard thing that's now easy - and in this conversation with Tristan and Julia, Ian + Abhishek cover many other ways that privacy can actually be a skill that propel…
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Julia, Pedram Navid + Taylor Murphy Recap Data Council
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42:03Julia just got back from Data Council in Austin, a conference organized by Pete Sonderling, where lots of startups share what they're building, data practitioners go to learn in hands-on workshops, and of course investors go to spot the next big trend. In this episode, Taylor Murphy (Head of Product & Data at Meltano) + Pedram Navid (Founder, West …
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Cloud Warehouse Cost Optimization (w/ Niall Woodward + Brad Culberson)
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45:54Brad Culberson is a Principal Architect in the Field CTO’s office at Snowflake. Niall Woodward is a co-founder of SELECT, a startup providing optimization and spend management software for Snowflake customers. In this conversation with Tristan and Julia, Brad and Niall discuss all things cost optimization: cloud vs on-prem, measuring ROI, and tacti…
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dbt Labs + Transform Join Forces on Metrics (w/ Nick Handel + Drew Banin)
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43:09Nick Handel, as co-founder at Transform, helped develop the popular open source metrics framework MetricFlow. Drew Banin, a co-founder at dbt Labs, helped build the initial version of the dbt Semantic Layer, which launched last year. Transform was acquired in February by dbt Labs, and in this conversation with Tristan, they talk through their colle…
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What Can Generative AI Do for Data People? (W/ Sarah Nagy + Chris Aberger)
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48:29Sarah and Chris are both at the forefront of bringing the promise of gen AI to our actual work as data people—which is a unique challenge! Precise truth is critical for business questions in a way that it’s not for a consumer search query. Sarah Nagy is the CEO of Seek AI, a startup that aims to use natural language processing to change how profess…
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Auren Hoffman currently serves as the CEO and Chief Historian at SafeGraph, a data-as-a-service company he founded, which provides primarily location data. In this conversation with Tristan and Julia, Auren shares how truly few companies are making use of 3rd-party datasets today, how opening up more datasets to public research could help us solve …
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A Romp Through Database History (w/ Postgres co-creator Mike Stonebraker + Andy Palmer)
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47:44Mike Stonebraker is a veritable database pioneer and a Turing Award recipient. In addition to teaching at MIT, he is a serial entrepreneur and co-creator of Postgres. Andy Palmer is a veteran business leader who serves as the CEO of Tamr, a company he co-founded with Mike. Through his seed fund Koa Labs, Andy has helped found and/or fund numerous i…
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What Does Apache Arrow Unlock for Analytics? (w/ Wes McKinney)
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47:08Wes McKinney is the creator of pandas, co-creator of Apache Arrow, and now Co-founder/CTO at Voltron Data. In this conversation with Tristan and Julia, Wes takes us on a tour of the underlying guts, from hardware to data formats, of the data ecosystem. What innovations, down to the hardware level, will stack to lead to significantly better performa…
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Product experimentation is full of potholes for companies of any size, given the number of pieces (tooling, culture, process, persistence) that need to come together to be successful. Vijaye Raji (currently Statsig, formerly Facebook + Microsoft) and Sean Taylor (currently Motif Analytics, formerly Facebook + Lyft) have navigated these failure mode…
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The Data Generalist's Vision Quest (LIVE w/ Stephen Bailey)
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26:37The first LIVE IRL episode! Stephen Bailey, data engineer at Whatnot and writer of an incredibly entertaining data substack, joins Tristan for a follow-up conversation to Stephen’s Coalesce talk, “Excel at nothing: how to be an effective generalist.” You can read Stephen’s writing at https://stkbailey.substack.com/. For full show notes and to read …
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Why You'll Need Data Contracts (w/ Chad Sanderson + Prukalpa)
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48:42WARNING: This episode contains detailed discussion of data contracts. The modern data stack introduces challenges in terms of collaboration between data producers and consumers. How might we solve them to ultimately build trust in data quality? Chad Sanderson leads the data platform team at Convoy, a late-stage series-E freight technology startup. …
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How Does Data Drive Growth in Practice? (w/ Abhi Sivasailam)
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49:53Abhi is a growth and data leader, and an excellent Twitter follow. Most recently, he was Head of Growth and Analytics at Flexport, where he helped the company to grow 10x over the past 3 years. Previously, Abhi led growth and data teams at Keap, Hustle, and Honeybook. In this conversation with Tristan and Julia, Abhi explains his methodology for se…
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Katie Bauer: Data Scientists Are Not Pizza
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43:25Katie was a founding member of Reddit's data science team and, currently, as Twitter’s Data Science Manager, she leads the company’s infrastructure data science and analytics organization. In this conversation with Tristan and Julia, Katie explores how, as a manager, to help data people (especially those new to the field!) do their best work. For f…
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Data Activation Everywhere (w/ Julie Beynon of Clearbit)
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43:30As Head of Analytics at Clearbit, Julie serves as a data team of one in a 200+ person company (wow!). In this conversation with Tristan and Julia, Julie dives into how she's helped Clearbit implement data activation throughout the business, and realize the glorious dream of self-serve analytics. For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issu…
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The Personal Data Warehouse (w/ Jordan Tigani of MotherDuck)
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51:39Jordan Tigani is an expert in large-scale data processing, having spent a decade+ in the development and growth of BigQuery, and later SingleStore. Today, Jordan and his team at MotherDuck are in the early days of working on commercial applications for the open source DuckDB OLAP database. In this conversation with Tristan and Julia, Jordan dives i…
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Matt Bornstein and Jennifer Li (and their co-author Martin Casado) of a16z have compiled arguably the most nuanced diagram of the data ecosystem ever made. They recently refreshed their classic 2020 post, "Emerging Architectures for Modern Data Infrastructure" and in this conversation, Tristan attempts to pin down: what does all of this innovation …
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Building an Open Source Company (w/ Aaron Katz of ClickHouse)
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38:44ClickHouse, the lightning-fast open source OLAP database, was initially released in 2016 as an open source project out of Yandex, the Russian search giant. In 2021, Aaron Katz helped form a group to spin it out of Yandex as an independent company, dedicated to the development + commercialization of the open source project. In this conversation with…
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"To Move, or Not to Move" (Data). That is the Question.
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40:21Justin Borgman is the co-founder, Chairman and CEO of Starburst, and has almost a decade spent in senior executive roles building new businesses in the data warehousing and analytics space. In this conversation with Tristan and Julia, Justin dives into the nuts and bolts of Trino, the open source distributed query engine, and explores how teams are…
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Amit Prakash is Co-founder and CTO at ThoughtSpot. He has a deep background in search, having previously led the AdSense engineering team at Google and served on the early Bing team at Microsoft. In this conversation with Tristan and Julia, Amit gets real about the promise of AI in data: which applications are being widely used today, and which are…
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Automating Away Your Work w/ Configuration-as-Code (w/ Sarah Krasnik)
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43:52Most recently leading a data engineering team at Perpay, Sarah has built and managed data platforms end to end by working closely with internal engineering, product, and operational teams. She recently left her role to pursue a wide variety of endeavors, including writing on her Substack (https://sarahsnewsletter.substack.com/). In this conversatio…
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The Hard Problems™️ of Data Observability w/ Kevin Hu of Metaplane
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43:10As a PhD candidate at MIT, Kevin (and friends) published Sherlock, a data type detection engine (a surprisingly bedeviling problem) for data cleaning + data discovery. Now as co-founder and CEO of Metaplane, a data observability startup, Kevin applies these same automated data discovery methods to help data teams keep their data healthy. In this co…
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