October 02, 2022

Ahmed Elsamadisi, Narrator CEO, is a roboticist by training and one of the first engineers at WeWork. Now he's changing how the world tells stories with data.

52 minutes

Ahmed Elsamadisi built the data infrastructure at WeWork before realizing every company could benefit from his team’s innovation. Traditional star schemas aren’t the best way to manage data. Ahmed instead pioneered a new approach using a single-table column model better suited for real questions people ask. He launched Narrator in 2017 to make it easier to turn data questions into answers and has since raised $6.2M from Initialized Capital, Flybridge Capital Partners, and Y Combinator. Ahmed received his BS in Robotics from Cornell. Hear from a pioneer (and tech provocateur) how new data wrangling techniques are making it easier for mere mortals to get more value out of their data.

Listen and learn…

How a roboticist who got his start building self-driving cars and designing missile defense systems ended up redefining how data is stored
Why traditional approaches that require SQL to access data are broken
How a single-column schema eliminates the complexity of joining systems and tables
Why it’s easier to tell better stories with data using temporal relationships extracted from customer journeys
Why Snowflake, Redshift, and BigQuery are really all the same… and data modeling is the place to innovate
What it means to replace traditional tables with activities… and why they’ll eliminate the need for specialized data analysts
How to reduce data storage costs by 90% and time to generate data insights from weeks to minutes
Why data management vendors are responsible for bad decisions made using your data
What is data cleaning and how you should do it
What is a racist algorithm
Why querying data with natural language will never work
Is the WeCrashed version of Adam Neumann’s neuroticism accurate? Hear from someone who lived it...

References in this episode:

Google’s LaMDA isn’t sentient
Chandra Khatri from Got It AI on AI and the Future of Work
Derek Steer from Mode on AI and the Future of Work
Barr Moses from Monte Carlo on AI and the Future of Work
Peter Fishman from Mozart Data on AI and the Future of Work
Ahmed on Twitter

...more

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By Dan Turchin

4.9

3030 ratings

October 02, 2022

Ahmed Elsamadisi, Narrator CEO, is a roboticist by training and one of the first engineers at WeWork. Now he's changing how the world tells stories with data.

52 minutes

How a roboticist who got his start building self-driving cars and designing missile defense systems ended up redefining how data is stored
Why traditional approaches that require SQL to access data are broken
How a single-column schema eliminates the complexity of joining systems and tables
Why it’s easier to tell better stories with data using temporal relationships extracted from customer journeys
Why Snowflake, Redshift, and BigQuery are really all the same… and data modeling is the place to innovate
What it means to replace traditional tables with activities… and why they’ll eliminate the need for specialized data analysts
How to reduce data storage costs by 90% and time to generate data insights from weeks to minutes
Why data management vendors are responsible for bad decisions made using your data
What is data cleaning and how you should do it
What is a racist algorithm
Why querying data with natural language will never work
Is the WeCrashed version of Adam Neumann’s neuroticism accurate? Hear from someone who lived it...

References in this episode: