Braze for Impact

Jesse Halpert from our Sales org and Taylor "The Creator" Gibb from Success join me to discuss the recent acquisitions of data visualizations tools Looker (by Google) and Tableau (by Salesforce). How do these products stack up? What does this mean for the martech landscape? Listen in to learn more!

 

 

 

TRANSCRIPT:

[0:00:18]

PJ: Hello again. Welcome back to Braze for Impact, your MarTech industry discuss digest. And this week I am accompanied by two very special guests returning for her third or fourth I think from our success org, Taylor Gibb, welcome.

 

[0:00:34]

Taylor Gibb: Well thank you so much. Happy to be here. I didn't know if you guys knew its National Eat Your Vegetables Day.

 

[0:00:40]

PJ: Oh really?

 

[0:00:41]

Taylor Gibb: So I just assumed I was going to be talking vegetables. Is that not the case today?

 

[0:00:46]

PJ: I think there's always room to fit vegetables-

 

[0:00:49]

Taylor Gibb: Okay.

 

[0:00:49]

PJ: Into the talk track-

 

[0:00:50]

Taylor Gibb: All right.

 

[0:00:50]

PJ: And I think you're good at finding creative ways to segue. So...

 

[0:00:53]

Jesse Halpert: Solid plug.

 

[0:00:54]

PJ: Absolutely. To my left, I have a very good friend Jesse Halpert from our sales org. He's joining us today. Jesse, how are you?

 

[0:01:03]

Jesse Halpert: I'm doing great BJ. Thanks for having me, first time in a long time.

 

[0:01:06]

PJ: Yeah, first, I mean I literally came to him this morning and was like, hey would you be willing to jump in here? And the reason I did that is because today's podcast is all about two companies that got acquired recently, both data visualization companies, Tableau getting acquired by Salesforce, and then also Looker getting acquired by Google. Jesse Halpert previously worked at Tableau. Isn't that right Jesse?

 

[0:01:28]

Jesse Halpert: Sure is.

 

[0:01:29]

PJ: So Jesse's going to be here to be able to give us the inside scoop. Tell us a little bit more about, you know, how they frame the selling of Tableau and maybe how it stacks up against Looker. But yeah, pretty pumped for this one. Me and Taylor had to do a lot of research on data analytics for this.

 

[0:01:44]

Taylor Gibb: Oh yeah. Boned up big time on my understanding of Tableau as well as Looker, which we use here at Braze. Shameless plug there and I'm a big evangelist for Looker across my clients, but obviously want to hear more about Tableau as well. Both are great tools, much like eating your vegetables. It's certainly not as much fun but very good for your organization to have a great data visualization tool. So always love to learn a little more about that.

 

[0:02:12]

Jesse Halpert: Were you paid off by the vegetable lobby prior to this podcast?

 

[0:02:15]

Taylor Gibb: I actually was under the table. Sesame Street is paying me big time.

 

[0:02:19]

PJ: We're two minutes in and you already had a vegetable comment, so pacing well for the day.

 

[0:02:24]

Taylor Gibb: Brace yourself.

 

[0:02:27]

PJ: All right, cool. Let's jump into this first article. Salesforce buying data visualization company Tableau for 15.7 billion dollars on the heels of Google buying analytics startup Looker last week for 2.6 billion. Salesforce announced a big piece of news in a bid to step up its own work in data visualization, and more generally tools to help enterprises make sense of the sea of data that they use and amass. And also, I hear now that they're going to be taking over Tableau's HQ in Seattle as well.

 

[0:03:00]

Jesse Halpert: HQ2!

 

[0:03:02]

PJ: HQ2, which a I guess has been kind of coined by Amazon when they were doing their search in New York for their HQ2. Yeah, I mean it's pretty cool. I mean, I guess the idea is the West Coast is really getting beefed up for tech and we kind of like have New York as this lone capitol of the tech world on the East Coast. Yeah. I'm interested to hear a little bit more. Jesse, when were you there at Tableau?

 

[0:03:25]

Jesse Halpert: I was there for nearly two years and I finished up in March prior to Braze. But you know, worked primarily as an account executive and account manager there.

 

[0:03:36]

Taylor Gibb: Jesse, would you have been swept up in all of this Tableau, you know, purchase excitement had you been there or are you getting a little FOMO right now?

 

[0:03:44]

Jesse Halpert: Definitely a little bit of FOMO when I read it and definitely wish I had held onto more of my shares. But yeah, it's you know, incredibly exciting for, you know, people that have been there for awhile.

 

[0:03:54]

PJ: But Tableau, it has a more of a beefed up product suite than Looker. Is that, is that right?

 

[0:04:01]

Jesse Halpert: Yeah, I'd say beefed up in a sense. I think what was always a big value prop that I would communicate at Tableau was the ease of use and you know, like intuitiveness that it would take to really use the product because they have a patented drag and drop technology that makes it really easy to take the different, you know, attributes or events that you want to measure and you know, put it right into a canvas to view.

 

[0:04:23]

Taylor Gibb: Wow. Oh, that's interesting. That sounds a little bit familiar here at Drew's events canvas. [crosstalk] You just slid right into our lingo. And I'd also be interested to hear a little more about that just because Looker, I think touts itself perhaps even more so as being an accessible kind of platform. And I know at least some of my friends who work with Tableau and their suite, it's oftentimes kind of a point of pride to be able to navigate. So, you know, I'm very good at Sequel. I can use Tableau very well, is something that you see pretty frequently on Linkedin, on a resume as a skillset.

 

[0:04:55]

Jesse Halpert: It's like a cert almost.

 

[0:04:56]

Taylor Gibb: You can take classes for it. Yeah. Oh 100% whereas I feel like, I mean I'm going to be shooting myself in the foot here a little talking about how little I know, but Looker I think is intuitive for someone like me to be able to pick up on and to use pretty effectively and I know that our data BI team right now is face-palming because they think of how many questions I asked them on a daily basis. But still, did you find though that when you were at working with accounts, when you're selling into these accounts that there was a general consensus that this was the easiest way to be able to query and use your data?

 

[0:05:30]

Jesse Halpert: If you're in any of those organizations, I think you get exposed most to your product and you get comfortable and familiar, so I think it's easy to say. I haven't used Looker enough frankly, to really give that impartial of an opinion on that.

 

[0:05:45]

PJ: Fair.

 

[0:05:46]

Taylor Gibb: Yeah, a very-

 

[0:05:47]

PJ: You don't want half-informations here. It's like eating half of your Brussels sprouts.

 

[0:05:52]

Taylor Gibb: No, not something that we do here at Braze.

 

[0:05:54]

Jesse Halpert: Yeah, we go full sprout.

 

[0:05:55]

Taylor Gibb: Full sprouts 2019.

 

[0:05:57]

Jesse Halpert: I mean another aspect to this is, you know them moving into Seattle and the West Coast, obviously something that I hadn't really thought much about before until the whole Amazon thing is like, you know with that comes certain tax breaks and with that comes the expectation of giving back to the community in some way.

 

[0:06:15]

Taylor Gibb: That's interesting.

 

[0:06:17]

Jesse Halpert: And so, I mean traditionally Tableau and Salesforce, they're pretty philanthropic. They're kind of like all about giving back to the areas that they have offices. So I'm actually interested to see how that unfolds in the coming months and if there'll be any big initiatives. Mr. Benioff I'm sure has some big plans for Seattle.

 

[0:06:37]

Taylor Gibb: I'm sure, whether Seattle wants it or not, maybe. One thing I was going to say, but maybe it's a segue for another time here is I'm interested just in the fact that salesforce already had an in-house BI tool and SBI suite that they were using that they were all about, right? This was what they built their data systems on and as a company that typically does buy and, something we've said before, "Frankenstein" in software, interesting to make this move for a completely outside data tool when they've already got this built in house. So one thing I'm curious about, other than whatever Seattle kind of grabbed that they're making there, do you suppose that this is coming mostly as table stakes for Google having purchased Looker?

 

[0:07:24]

Jesse Halpert: Yeah, I think a lot of it, they probably had plenty of time to self reflect and see that either the tool wasn't beefed up to the point that they needed it to be, that they weren't seeing themselves in a lot of competitive situations, or probably a combo of both. And I think a lot of that might be similar for what Google went through too. I think they both had, you know, some sort of, I don't want to say half baked, I don't think that's a good way to put it, but probably not like to the full power of something like a Tableau or a Looker or even, you know, Microsoft has Power BI, which they're able to sort of throw in a with their Microsoft suite. And I think by way of Google purchasing Looker by way of a Salesforce purchasing Tableau, it probably will make it a bit more of an arms race between those three, you know all having something that's a little bit more powerful to sell to their clients.

 

[0:08:15]

PJ: Yeah, good point. And you know what we're going to do is we'll get into kind of the details of each one and obviously we're not here to rip on any products, but well more just kind of like highlight the benefits of each. But before we get down and dirty with that, Taylor, you want to take us into the Looker situation?

 

[0:08:32]

Taylor Gibb: Just in terms of the purchase of Looker? How Looker works? Our use of looker? I mean, I'm ready to speak to all of it from a very-

 

[0:08:41]

PJ: You gotta be more specific.

 

[0:08:42]

Taylor Gibb: Come on, man. You coming at me with Looker. Alright. Again, BI Team, I apologize, I may butcher it. But I want to first of all frame this as coming from someone who uses Looker who benefits greatly from Looker and our team using it. And my use, as you know, I'm a Success Manager is primarily being able to share with our clients the results that they're getting from campaigns that they send out. So it's so easy to be able to use things like Look ML, which is kind of the Looker language, to share things that others have built to be able to visualize. So Google to acquire analytics startup Looker for 2.6 billion... Basically Thomas Kurian, who's the man who was handed the reigns to Google Cloud at the end of last year, sees the two companies bringing together a complete data analytics solution for customers. So it's end-to-end analytics platform to connect, collect, analyze, and visualize data across Google Cloud as your AWS on-premises databases. So one thing that I took away from this, from this quote that they've decided to pin their PR on is that they're looking to make this a connective kind of grab, right? So they've got Looker now and they're doing so because it's a tool that allows you to connect all sorts of different data. I think that's important when you're thinking Google Cloud, because so often the pain points with a big juggernaut like Salesforce are that you're having to go through crazy hoops and loops to be able to get all of your products to mesh together seamlessly. Google is saying, don't even worry about that pain point. We've picked Looker specifically because it makes it easy to connect to what they need. And so I think that that's something that really stands out. Google was also the first in this... You know, arms race was a good way to put it, earlier. They were the first to make this acquisition. I think that it really frames them as being a forward thinking organization and it'll be interesting to see kind of what comes of this in terms of the Google suite, in terms of what we as consumers are able to glean from Looker, but also what they do with their data internally.

 

[0:10:43]

PJ: I'm interested to see how that will affect Looker's company in general. Kind of like their, you know, product roadmap, their priorities and stuff. Like I'm sure Google have big plans for them.

 

[0:10:53]

Taylor Gibb: Big time.

 

[0:10:54]

Jesse Halpert: Yeah, I think that's a big piece of it too, the data consolidation. I think it'll just make it really, really easy for any company regardless of the size to just be able to take all of their data and put it into a visual analytics platform, which was probably a little bit more of a difficult process, you know, prior to these purchases I think. So I think at the end of the day it's gonna benefit the end user and the companies that are, you know you're a Google house or Salesforce type of house.

 

[0:11:18]

Taylor Gibb: Totally. And I love that all of this is about the demystification of data to your average user. They're saying that they want everybody from their actual BI analytics team to people like myself, a Success Manager who may not be as in the weeds with data, to be able to glean the important information from the data that's being pulled in. Because so often you see with these older legacy, some of my clients working with a ton of super valuable data but like unable to do anything with it because it's hidden in all these folders that only certain people know how to access and use and pivot on. So definitely a good thing for the end user, if anything.

 

[0:11:55]

PJ: Well the end user is the real winner today, I think. All right, now the Looker versus Tableau smack down, all this information has been helpfully provided to us by SelectHub. Thank you, SelectHub. And so now we're just going to go over some of these different facets of the product to give you their perspective on which company has the advantage. So data visualization, you know, data is presented visually for easy interpretation. The winner there, Tableau over looker. I'm sorry, Looker, and I thought that was actually Looker's big.

 

[0:12:28]

Taylor Gibb: That's what I thought too going into this. But again, we could see that in the Google acquisition, that wasn't necessarily what they pinned everything on, but I'm with you. I thought that Looker, I mean it's about looking at things. So you would think visualizations.

 

[0:12:43]

PJ: Well you know what they do have the edge on, though? Analytics. Information is quantified and evaluated for a portrait of company trends and future possibilities.

 

[0:12:52]

Taylor Gibb: Future possibilities.

 

[0:12:54]

PJ: Point to Looker. Very nice. This next one, online analytical processing. This is OLAP.

 

[0:13:02]

Taylor Gibb: Shout out to OLAP.

 

[0:13:03]

PJ: Shout out to OLAP.

 

[0:13:03]

Jesse Halpert: People don't talk enough about OLAP.

 

[0:13:04]

Taylor Gibb: Maybe you should talk more about it Jesse.

 

[0:13:06]

Jesse Halpert: I'm good.

 

[0:13:09]

PJ: OLAP functionalities provide access to databases and web based analysis, and so this goes to Tableau.

 

[0:13:15]

Taylor Gibb: Not only does it go to Tableau, but apparently Looker, at least at the time of this publication, had no means of OLAP-ing.

 

[0:13:22]

Jesse Halpert: It's daunting.

 

[0:13:23]

PJ: Yeah, that's a big, big... But it's also, you mentioned that it's kind of an old school...

 

[0:13:28]

Jesse Halpert: Yeah, it's probably more of like a box checking thing.

 

[0:13:31]

PJ: Yeah. Gotcha. And then next up, document management. Convert reports into different file formats and share analytical findings, both very strong there, which is nice.

 

[0:13:42]

Taylor Gibb: And this is something that we do with our clients fairly frequently. Again, democratizing data across both processes and companies. So the ability to send a PDF of a certain chart that we've created to an end user, a marketer who just wants to have something on their boss's desk to say numbers are up, it's huge to be able to just press a button and do that export. Cause I know so many other times I would even have to go into something like Keynote and create a separate chart. So not sure what tableau has to offer there, but I can say it's a simple but super effective tool for again, someone like me who's an end user but not necessarily savvy enough to be doing a lot of this stuff my own.

 

[0:14:19]

PJ: Yeah. And that's a big pattern we see right, with democratizing these tools and making it easy for a marketer to really get their hands dirty into data. And so looking forward to seeing how Tableau continues to push the envelope on that. I think Looker is already on a great path for it.

 

[0:14:33]

Jesse Halpert: Yeah. I think one thing you'll see in each is that it's really easy for somebody who's a power user to, you know, again like you said, democratize the data and share it with people who are end users and don't have that type of analytical savvy and just make it really easy to serve up like one off visualizations and reports that they might receive regularly.

 

[0:14:50]

PJ: Just like some veggies.

 

[0:14:52]

Taylor Gibb: Just like veggies, you knew it! PJ just gave me this look like don't you dare mention vegetables again.

 

[0:14:58]

PJ: Serving it up hot. Next, decision services. So financial management features provide analysis of monetary information. Both also very strong in this area. Integrations, the ability to connect with other systems provides multiple sources and functionalities.

 

[0:15:15]

Taylor Gibb: Big win fir my buddy Looker and remember, that's what they were saying at Google. That's why they purchased this solution in the first place, which is really huge in terms of like market value for Google in general, that they're thinking about things like this. Because Salesforce does everything and they do it pretty well, but when you're trying to get data from one point to another? It's difficult.

 

[0:15:36]

PJ: It's all about making that a fluid process and like, and that kind of lends itself as well to like future-proofing, right? Because you know, we talk a lot about being channel agnostic. If you have that kind of flexibility, I think you're, you're opening yourself to the future and you're giving yourself the ability to be agile, whatever channel should show itself.

 

[0:15:53]

Taylor Gibb: Absolutely. It's that- [crosstalk 00:15:55].

 

[0:15:58]

Jesse Halpert: So motivational.

 

[0:15:59]

Taylor Gibb: At this motivational podcast, listen to it before you go to sleep and you will be successful. But it's like that Woody Allen quote, right? That's like "relationship is a shark; if it's not moving forward, it's dying." This is another thing, right? Google is like, we got to keep buying more stuff like, and Salesforce of course has to follow suit, but maybe more thoughtful on-

 

[0:16:16]

PJ: I have been called the Woody Allen of Big Data, so.

 

[0:16:18]

Taylor Gibb: I knew it.

 

[0:16:19]

Jesse Halpert: I don't know if that's something you really want to hang your hat.

 

[0:16:21]

PJ: Yeah, you're right, you're right.

 

[0:16:25]

Taylor Gibb: Gonna take that out in editing, you think?

 

[0:16:27]

PJ: Hey, Midnight in Paris, shout out to y'all. It was good! Owen Wilson!

 

[0:16:32]

Jesse Halpert: Wow.

 

[0:16:33]

Taylor Gibb: Wow.

 

[0:16:35]

PJ: Wooooow. Last one, Big Data integration. Access to Big Data programs for comprehensive analysis. And this ad goes to Tableau. So thanks again SelectHub for facilitating the Looker v. Tableau smack down. It sounds like a WWF event. [inaudible] Oh, it literally is. That's right.

 

[0:16:58]

Taylor Gibb: Speaking of vegetables, PJ, I got one more hot take to kind of take us out here. So we've been speaking in a very high level, obviously, again kind of a layman's view of these very powerful data tools and these very powerful companies, right? Salesforce and Google. We've been talking about these bigger companies and the ways that they're going to be using, the ways that this gives a competitive advantage. There's also a take to be made here that a few pundits are talking about and that this feels almost like an act of desperation, right? Because this is a hot sector right now. Data visualization, data in general as it becomes more and more accessible for people like us, it really sets your company apart as being future proof, something that you said earlier "a forward thinking company." Could it be that this grab wasn't so much, you know, thinking about the best ways to be using tools like this, but was perhaps an act of desperation, a grab for table stakes here?

 

[0:17:54]

Jesse Halpert: I don't even know if it's a hot take.

 

[0:17:57]

PJ: Yeah, I think it's a lukewarm take.

 

[0:17:59]

Jesse Halpert: Its a lukewarm take. Yeah, I think they were just able to see that their products weren't as strong in this market and this is a market that applies to every line of the business. Not only is it future proofing companies, but it's something that, again like we talked about earlier, democratizes the data across an organization. And they were losing ground and they were able to acquire two really forward looking products and were able to bolster their line a little bit in a place where they were probably hurting.

 

[0:18:29]

PJ: Yeah, I think we can call it like casual desperation if that is a thing and makes sense, you know? Because they're at the top of their game, right? It's like, like let's look at the cautionary tale of Blockbuster. If you're not like looking ahead to like either your business and how it will evolve or potentially other businesses that you can loop into your revenue streams, then you know you're really not thinking about the future health of your business.

 

[0:18:55]

Taylor Gibb: You're gonna get Blockbuster-ed.

 

[0:18:56]

PJ: Don't get Blockbuster-ed, y'all. Come on, now.

 

[0:18:59]

Taylor Gibb: Look into OLAP, don't get Blockbuster-ed

 

[0:19:02]

PJ: Exactly. Good for them acquiring Looker. I think Looker has a bright future, but I wonder what they stand to lose by trying to assimilate Looker into their product suite. Because looker is so good right now at what they do, when you try to, we said it on a previous podcast, you mentioned it again, Frankenstein-ing products-

 

[0:19:24]

Taylor Gibb: I'm gonna trademark that.

 

[0:19:25]

PJ: We need to, because you know, Salesforce is just creating the Frankenstein of all these products and as long as you can do it in like an agile way and really mold them together in a way where they speak well and it's architecturally enabling, as long as you can create it in that way, I'm all about it. But if you're just purchasing to stay relevant and slap-sticking it together, you know, Looker's got a lot of fanfare as far as our industry goes right now. If you're just doing it for that and you haven't thought about the execution, maybe rethink that bad boy.

 

[0:19:55]

Taylor Gibb: Oh yeah. At the cost of several billion, I mean worth a second look.

 

[0:20:00]

PJ: I think that was a steal, 2.6 billion. Like I think Looker is going to be, I mean it generates a ton of money.

 

[0:20:06]

Jesse Halpert: I do think the integration will be fairly seamless for companies that already do have Google cloud.

 

[0:20:12]

PJ: Yeah, good for them. So you companies that have Google cloud, you are in luck.

 

[0:20:17]

Taylor Gibb: Oh very good point. And actually I really liked that as well.

 

[0:20:21]

Jesse Halpert: And I think that's what both organizations are ultimately looking to do. Kind of you know, push this new product on them.

 

[0:20:28]

Taylor Gibb: That's exciting news for my clients. You guys out there like using Looker? Good news! I have a feeling there's going to be some announcements on the books here.

 

[0:20:35]

PJ: Absolutely. And for those listeners out there that aren't as familiar with the MarTech landscape, do some research. There's all sorts of products from engagement tools to attribution tools and you could say the analytics portion of that is like eating your vegetables. You get to eat your vegetables first and then you get the steak. Getting into visualizations and data and having it inform your strategy, that's just how you move forward. That's how you improve.

 

[0:21:02]

Jesse Halpert: What's the baked potato in this analogy?

 

[0:21:04]

Taylor Gibb: Attribution, I think.

 

[0:21:06]

PJ: Yeah. Cause that's like nice. And I mean, I love a baked potato with a little butter on it.

 

[0:21:10]

Taylor Gibb: You're telling me. Well, you know, after you've had this potato, this steak, these veggies, you know what these companies got to do, don't you? They gotta get that bread.

 

[0:21:18]

PJ: Oh ho-ho!

 

[0:21:19]

Jesse Halpert: I thought it was going somewhere else and, yeah.

 

[0:21:22]

Taylor Gibb: Yeah.

 

[0:21:23]

PJ: On that note, do your research. Look into both of these companies, both doing fantastic things. Eat your veggies, eat your bread, eat your baked potato. And for those of you who don't know, we are Braze. Braze is a customer engagement platform. If you don't know what that is, head to braze.com. I'd like to thank my guests Jesse and Taylor. Thank you guys so much for being here.

 

[0:21:45]

Jesse Halpert: Thanks for having us.

 

[0:21:46]

Taylor Gibb: Anytime!

 

[0:21:48]

PJ: And you too. Thanks for stopping by guys. Take care.

[0:21:50]

Self-proclaimed scooter experts, Cody Thornton (Digital First AE) and Pat Forquer (Enterprise AE), give myself and Spencer Burke (VP of Growth) their views on the proliferation of e-scooters in major cities, the safety risks involved, and the competitive landscape for micro-mobility talent.

 

 

 

TRANSCRIPT:

[0:00:18]

PJ: Hello again. Welcome back to Braze for Impact, your mar-tech industry discuss digest. I'm thrilled today to have with me Spencer Burke, VP of growth. Spence, how we doing?

 

[0:00:28]

Spencer Burke: Doing Great, thanks PJ.

 

[0:00:30]

PJ: Also, Patrick Forquer from our sales org here in the east. Pat?

 

[0:00:34]

Patrick Forquer: Oh, PJ. Doing excellent. Thanks for having me.

 

[0:00:37]

PJ: And first time ever having a remote guest in from LA from our sales org on the west coast. Cody Thornton. How you doing buddy?

 

[0:00:45]

Cody Thornton: PJ, I'm fantastic. Thanks for having me. Excited for this.

 

[0:00:50]

Spencer Burke: Coast to coast.

 

[0:00:51]

PJ: Coast to coast. It feels good. I mean, also this is the scooter episode. We have a lot of articles that we're going to digest today all around scooter sharing companies. Cody Thornton is a big scooter guy.

 

[0:01:03]

Cody Thornton: Big. I am so pro scooter. It's not even funny.

 

[0:01:06]

PJ: One of the biggest. Before we jump into the content, let's just start with a little disclaimer. The company Braze, we work with plenty of scooter sharing companies. All the comments you're going to hear today are just personal opinions. Braze does not promote or disparage any scooter app. We are advocates of all of them. So Patrick, I feel like you have a strong opinion perhaps.

 

[0:01:27]

Patrick Forquer: Ugh, love scooters. Like I'm so onboard with scooters. I'm fully ... I don't know how you call being on a scooter, but I'm on scooter on board.

 

[0:01:37]

PJ: Both.

 

[0:01:37]

Patrick Forquer: Both feet. Left foot, right foot, gripping tightly signaling with traffic, the whole thing. I'm onboard.

 

[0:01:45]

PJ: Spencer, where do you lie?

 

[0:01:46]

Spencer Burke: I have a confession. I've never ridden a scooter.

 

[0:01:49]

PJ: Wow.

 

[0:01:49]

Spencer Burke: Escooters are brand new to me, so I'm a blank slate. I am happy to hear PJ's perspective. Cody and pat, try and convince me. All righty. So Cody, you are a huge advocate for the scoot scoot. Am I right?

 

[0:02:01]

Cody Thornton: Yes. I am a major advocate. I feel like ... I'm from Los Angeles, live in San Francisco., I feel like two great markets for the scooter industry and these companies. I'm just a big fan of micro mobility from the accessibility and practicality of it to the environmental benefits. I think there's a lot of short distance transportation that is much easier and quicker with, per se, a scooter rather than using an Uber, driving your car, filling parking garages. So I will admit I think there's a lot to figure out from safety to legislation in the space, but overall I am a big fan of scooters. I think it's pretty promising.

 

[0:02:44]

PJ: Well, let's just kick it off. Our first article of the day, Byrd is launching a two seater electric vehicle to become more than a kick scooter startup. Byrd has just unveiled the Byrd cruiser, an electric vehicle that is essentially a blend between a bicycle and a moped. The Byrd cruiser can seat up to two people, and depending on the market, the cruiser will either be pedal assist or just have a peg. Also equipped with hydraulic disc brakes. Very exciting. They can stop. 52 volt battery, and many ebikes have it as well. It's designed to handle hills. So off-roading is an option. I mean it gets pretty hilly out in SF, so you must be thrilled about it, Cody.

 

[0:03:24]

Cody Thornton: The two things I'm most excited about are definitely the hills and the hydraulic disc brakes. I was in Austin last week riding a scooter that the brakes were definitely not working, so I was worried I would end up in one of our later articles about injuries, but yes. San Francisco being quite hilly., I think this is a big opportunity. Honestly, it's pretty interesting as well. I think too Byrd launching this cruiser has been able to categorize it as an ebike rather than a scooter, so they've been able to avoid a lot of the local legislation and government policies and politics around it. So, I'm personally super excited about this. I cannot wait to throw Patrick on the back of my Byrd cruiser and just launch up these SF hills man.

 

[0:04:09]

PJ: What a dream. It reminds me of Dumb and Dumber. I can get 70 miles to the gallon on this hog.

 

[0:04:16]

Cody Thornton: We are going to be the first people that take a Byrd to aspen.

 

[0:04:19]

PJ: We can only do it in Aspen. That's the best obviously. I mean does this open the door for like other vehicles where they're going to come out with a whole like series?

 

[0:04:28]

Spencer Burke: I think we will continue to see more diversity because to Cody's point right now it's scooters are fantastic for like last mile delivery of like point A to point B, you know, 10 minute ride, 15 minute ride, but you're not going to be doing your daily commute unless you live and work in Santa Monica where Byrd is located, which is my dream, just saying. It's like taking a scooter to work. I mean, [crosstalk 00:04:50].

 

[0:04:50]

Cody Thornton: I don't know. Once they're in New York why wouldn't you?

 

[0:04:53]

Spencer Burke: I mean can you imagine riding a scooter in New York? That is literally my nightmare.

 

[0:04:57]

Cody Thornton: Oh my gosh.

 

[0:04:58]

Spencer Burke: I'm so scared. I can barely ... I'm afraid to walk in New York [crosstalk 00:05:00].

 

[0:05:01]

Patrick Forquer: Yeah, you got to wear a helmet while you're walking in New York.

 

[0:05:05]

PJ: You got to wrap yourself in bubble wrap to get on that scooter. There's a lot of precautions.

 

[0:05:10]

Patrick Forquer: Is that a thing yet? Is there an aggressive scooting community?

 

[0:05:14]

PJ: In?

 

[0:05:15]

Patrick Forquer: Anywhere? Like you know ...

 

[0:05:17]

Cody Thornton: You're talking to it right now.

 

[0:05:17]

Spencer Burke: Yeah, I was about to say exhibit A over here. Cody I think is the president of a local advocacy groups for scooters.

 

[0:05:24]

PJ: Let's talk a little bit more about Byrd because Apple announced his support for Apple Pay and this is relevant to Byrd as well as Bonobos and a handful of other companies. Cody, you want to, you want to speak to this one a little bit? I know you were pretty jazzed about it.

 

[0:05:37]

Cody Thornton: Yeah, definitely. I thought this was really interesting. I actually recently got a new iPhone, had to go through the whole registration process for Byrd again and when I went through you buy it and pretty much the number of rides you want right now, so they have a 20 package ride. If you want to buy, that's their most popular one. You click it, you go through the checkout process, etc. I'd like to think I'm a little bit more technically savvy than the mass market out there, so just going through this process, I saw a larger opportunity for them to make this more seamless. From firsthand experience when I was in San Diego last year, I had a really interesting epiphany I guess. Because I was there around Memorial Day weekend and there was a ton of people who I'd say not your target demographic for scooter riders, older men and women, younger girls and boys, etc. But everyone was just wondering how to get onto the scooter. So I haven't had to download the app. And you know, I just saw it as a big organic growth vehicle for them. So I think partnerships like this with Apple Pay's NFC technology only lower the barrier of entry for all these people that are trying to figure out how to get on these scooters or ride and conversely in San Francisco right now, Lime and Byrd are not allowed in San Francisco. So I believe it's Spin, Jump, and Scoot are the three brands there, right? So most people, if you're an avid scooter goer like myself, Patrick, etc, you're most likely going to use a variety of different services depending on the city where you are. So I think technology like this, partnerships, just makes it way easier to get up and running and ultimately become a user of these different companies' services, or the scooter.

 

[0:07:22]

PJ: So Cody, what is the reason that like Byrd and Lime are barred in SF versus these other companies?

 

[0:07:28]

Cody Thornton: To my knowledge, it is all local legislation. So it was a pretty guerrilla-esque marketing tactic when these companies first started going. So you would just wake up one morning and there was just dozens of these scooters on the street and no one had any idea of where they came from, what to do with them. And again, these thoughts are our own and I am not entirely sure, but I'm pretty confident that Byrd and LIme were two of the first that went out to market in San Francisco specifically. So these scooters just were all over the street. And I remember it was a mess honestly. It was crazy. You all know San Francisco is a relatively condensed city. So you were just walking to work. There's scooters everywhere, scooters in trash cans, scooters all over the sidewalk, scooters leaning up against buildings. So, they wanted to put some legislation in place, one, to have a little bit more of a framework to operate in the cities specifically, but also limit the amount of sheer scooters that were there. I'm not sure exactly what the process was of how they determine the three vendors that were for the initial shared scooter rollout in San Francisco, but Scoot, Lime, and Spin were of the first three that got rolled out. So I'm speaking with various people that work at these organizations. They are extremely optimistic that they will be back in San Francisco sooner rather than later, but they're just going through the necessary to making it "more legit" if you will.

 

[0:08:59]

PJ: Got you. Got to make it legit.

 

[0:09:01]

Cody Thornton: Too legit to quit.

 

[0:09:02]

Spencer Burke: Obviously. I mean that does kind of speak to one of the articles we're going to talk about later, PJ, about around the consolidation and kind of like partnerships happening within the scooter industry right now. It makes sense for someone like an Apple who maybe doesn't know excel in scooter production, right, to partner with someone like Byrd, just to kind of get their foot in the door so to speak, but also lead to a better overall user experience. So I use the Apple Pay on the Byrd app as well. It works. It's incredible.

 

[0:09:29]

Cody Thornton: Nice.

 

[0:09:29]

PJ: Have any of you guys a bit the dust on a scooter yet? Pat, Cody?

 

[0:09:36]

Patrick Forquer: I'm clean. My record's clean so far. I'm going to LA tomorrow, so check back with me in a couple of days.

 

[0:09:43]

PJ: Yeah, Spencer, I know you have yet to ride. So I think we know your answer. Cody, what do you have over there?

 

[0:09:51]

Cody Thornton: Oh, I most definitely have. I have a few battle wounds that I'm quite proud of myself. Can't wait to tell my kids about these one day. Some pretty awesome scars. But no, in all seriousness, it happened in the time that I actually fell in Santa Monica. I'd like to think I'm ... You know, I like to snowboard, I like to skateboard, I like to surf, all that jazzy stuff. So I feel like I'm inclined to riding these things more than your average consumer, if you will. And so I was riding one morning in Santa Monica, I'm still not quite sure what happened to be completely honest, but it just beeped twice, went, "Beep, beep," real quick and just ejected me over the handlebars. And luckily I didn't get to seriously hurt, but I was honestly laughing. I looked like Gabby Douglas in the Olympics just mounting the handlebars. I had a puffy jacket on. I slid for like 20 feet. People ran over to make sure if I'm okay, I'm just laying there hysterically laughing. I'm like, "How did this just happen?" But yeah, I got a nice little raspberry on my hip, on my elbow. And so you know, I'm kind of in this weird middle ground of the injury topic we will talk about because it's inevitably dangerous. You can move quickly, very nimbly. People do not obey the sidewalk laws, the bike lane laws, random freak of nature accidents similar to the one I went through. That said, I mean I could wholeheartedly say I fell because of an issue with the scooter. I think most of the time in a lot of the injuries that are happening, they are rider induced so people are not riding responsibly. They're potentially under the influence of, say, alcohol potentially. But yeah, I guess we can get into that. But that is my story of how I really ate it on a scooter.

 

[0:11:51]

PJ: I mean, why don't we just get into right now? This next article here is the boom in electrical scooters leads to more injuries and even fatalities. So as stand up electric scooters have rolled into more than 100 cities worldwide, many of the people riding them are ending up in the emergency room with serious injuries. Others have been killed. There are no comprehensive statistics available. But a rough count by the Associated Press of media reports turned up at least 11 electric scooter rider deaths in the U.S. since the beginning of 2018. Nine were on rented scooters and two were on ones the victims owned. Spencer, you have some thoughts on this [crosstalk 00:12:34].

 

[0:12:32]

Spencer Burke: Yeah, this article is pretty frustrating for me because it doesn't add any context. They're clearly trying to sensationalize the fact that people have been hurt and killed, which is terrible. Don't want to minimize the impact of that to anyone. But I think there's a bigger picture issue here that it's really challenging to be a pedestrian, to be a cyclist, now to be a scooterist, or whatever the official term is, in really dense cities. It's not safe. In New York City, in many cities in the U.S. there's something called vision zero which is getting pedestrian deaths to zero as a result of traffic fatalities. So I've got some stats here that I pulled up, but every year 4,000 New Yorkers are injured and 250 are killed as a result of traffic crashes. And it's the leading cause of injury related death for kids under 14, so cars in cities are dangerous and people who are not in cars tend to get hurt. Even people in cars get hurt. So I would have liked to see in an article like this, and generally in the coverage, it is not just unique to this one article, more of an understanding of what it's like to be someone who's commuting not in a car and not in public transit, and how we can make that safer and more accessible.

 

[0:13:50]

Patrick Forquer: Yeah. I think when you look at it to this articles from the Santa Monica Daily Press, which if you've ever been to Santa Monica scooters are a very polarizing topic there. Just like they are my hometown of Atlanta. When I go home, people are either ... It's very polarizing, one side or the other. You either love them or hate them. And what I don't understand about the hate part, especially in a place like Atlanta where if you need to go half a mile, you get in your car and drive there, right? It's like, they're all over the sidewalks there, you know, people are just leaving them parked.

 

[0:14:24]

Spencer Burke: When was the last time you were on the sidewalk?

 

[0:14:25]

Patrick Forquer: Yeah, exactly. Like when was the last time you walked anywhere in Atlanta? Zero times have you walked anywhere that wasn't like your backyard. But the interesting stat to me from this article was a vast majority of the injuries were after, I think, 6:00PM or 7:00PM so I think we can all use our imagination there.

 

[0:14:44]

Cody Thornton: People are just super tired, just crashed on the scooter after a long day.

 

[0:14:48]

Patrick Forquer: Right, exactly.

 

[0:14:49]

Cody Thornton: Exhausted, 6:30, just exhausted. But I think we will continue to see like a maturation of the regulatory environment around this, which is probably warranted and needed, but at the same time, I think if it was kind of wild west to start, we're kind of moving towards a place that's much more controlled in a safer environment. So hopefully you get some kind of guardrails in place and people can scoot and peace.

 

[0:15:13]

Spencer Burke: It's the same for bicycles. Like this hate isn't unique to scooters. People get upset that they're building bike lanes in their neighborhood and it's taking away parking. So bikes have been around for a couple of hundred years. I think that the regulatory environment could maybe be improved. But I think we're just seeing the repeat of some same problems people have with making dense, urban areas less car friendly.

 

[0:15:36]

PJ: Do you think they're gonna start making it legal in New York City? Do you think that's going to happen?

 

[0:15:41]

Cody Thornton: I sure hope so.

 

[0:15:42]

Spencer Burke: Yeah, I feel like New York is such a interesting market because it's so crazy. Could you imagine just an onslaught of scooters just coming into Manhattan? Oh my gosh.

 

[0:15:52]

PJ: I mean where I live-

 

[0:15:55]

Spencer Burke: The Santa Monica Daily press will have a few thoughts about it.

 

[0:16:00]

PJ: I mean in Brooklyn where I live it would be fine, right? But like midtown Manhattan on a scooter-

 

[0:16:04]

Spencer Burke: Like where we work, yeah.

 

[0:16:05]

PJ: Yeah.

 

[0:16:06]

Spencer Burke: It would be a nightmare.

 

[0:16:06]

PJ: Like where we are right now would be tough.

 

[0:16:10]

Cody Thornton: Yeah. I had a interesting ... Because that was actually one of the primary storylines out of South be y Southwest this year in Austin, Texas was the number of emergency room admissions they had or scooter related injuries and it was a pretty interesting thread on Twitter that I was following about all these injuries and different people that were there covering the conference that were going into the emergency room for scooter related accidents. Yeah, I think to Spencer's point, there definitely needs to be, whether it's better onboarding ... In San Francisco there's the service, Scoot, if anyone is familiar with that. So it's similar to the Byrd scooter we talked about, but they're more moped like so I'm not sure what they top out at miles per hour, but they have a helmet in the back you get on, you can take them up hills, you can ride them across the city. It's like an electric moped. But prior to getting access to the application once you go through onboarding, it requires you to watch a 20 minute video. So I don't know if something like that will happen with these scooter companies in terms of like educating their riders more. But back to the Austin point and South by Southwest, similar to what Patrick said, 90% of the injuries were reported to be after 6:00 PM, so again, we can use our imaginations of what is happening then. Like Spencer said, bikes have been around for hundreds of years. We see the Go bikes popping up everywhere, the Jump bikes, like we're not just going to get rid of bikes. Bikes are inevitably dangerous as well, but I think we just need to have a little bit more understanding on both sides. But yeah, it's a complex issue and I don't have the answer. I'm just going to go ahead ride with my AirPods in and let my hair flow in the wind on those bad boys.

 

[0:17:54]

PJ: Cody. I don't have the answer. I'm just a dude.

 

[0:17:57]

Spencer Burke: Just a guy.

 

[0:17:58]

PJ: Wait, Cody, do you need to wear a helmet or is that not even a thing?

 

[0:18:03]

Cody Thornton: Man, you're really hitting all my scooter knowledge today. That's another a soft spot for me that you do not need to wear a helmet. I will not disclose which one, but I personally worked with one of the scooter companies to bring them on board to become a customer Braze. And the example that I gave them is last year in 2018 Memorial Day weekend in San Diego, I was riding and my friends and I around eight in the morning were ushered over to the side of the road by a group of police officers. And we were cited for not riding with helmets. We had no idea that you even had to wear a helmets when you were riding these scooters at the time. So we get our citations. It was very, you know, cordial, fine experience, frustrating to say the least. But we go away and this older woman says, "Haven't you been watching the news? They have been handing out tickets to everyone not wearing helmets on the scooters." And I'm like, "No, I'm not watching the San Diego Daily News on my vacation. I'm sorry." But so we talked about using geo-fencing technology that we have here at Braze to run a notification to these people saying, "Hey, they're issuing citations in this area. Make sure you're wearing a helmet." Since then, I believe it was January 1, 2019 a statewide law has been passed that helmets are no longer required to ride scooters in California. I don't know how I feel about that. I don't want to wear a helmet when I wear these things.

 

[0:19:29]

PJ: Based on personal experience.

 

[0:19:30]

Cody Thornton: I also want people to be safe too.

 

[0:19:32]

PJ: That's so California. "Hey man, you going to ride a scooter?

 

[0:19:36]

Spencer Burke: No helmet needed. Just a slip tank in the summer months.

 

[0:19:40]

Patrick Forquer: For what it's worth ... This doesn't apply to scooting since you're not doing any work, but I think there have been some studies in Australia where they looked at the net benefit between the increase to injury of not riding with a helmet and the health benefit of riding your bike every day for commuting, and on the whole it's better for you if you're every day riding a bike, getting to work, getting some exercise. So, that's been a lot of the influence for just increasing people's mobility, giving them access to these kinds of things, even if they don't require a helmet, which is the same for city bikes here in New York.

 

[0:20:13]

PJ: All right, well you guys one more to go left. We're tight on time, but let's get to it. So scooter sharing startups slug it out in a war for niche talent. On demand scooter sharing startups are competing to hire from one another as they struggle with a limited talent pool chasing niche skills. These startups fast emerging as alternatives to last mile mobility require people with experience around internet of things based supply chain, design, and manufacturing. These are specialized skills as the technology itself is relatively new. So, it sounds like there's just not enough people to go around that know how to do this stuff right now, especially in your-

 

[0:20:49]

Cody Thornton: Yeah, I mean, they know where to find me. [crosstalk 00:20:52].

 

[0:20:54]

Patrick Forquer: The one thing that surprised me most when I first rode a Byrd was just how like the product is great. It looks great, it works really well. The check-in process, seamless. Offline, online, the whole thing was fantastic. So, I could imagine this like this is a booming space. Five years ago, no one was talking about last mile scooter delivery. So, not surprising and it's like that's the most kind of Silicon Valley thing ever is like competing for scooter talent.

 

[0:21:27]

Spencer Burke: What about all those guys at Razor that were in the market 10 years ago?

 

[0:21:31]

PJ: Razor. Throwback.

 

[0:21:34]

Patrick Forquer: Getting crushed

 

[0:21:35]

PJ: Yeah. Where's razor and all of this? Huge missed opportunity Razor.

 

[0:21:38]

Patrick Forquer: Totally.

 

[0:21:39]

PJ: To Pat's point, I thought it was pretty interesting when working with a few of the scooter companies myself. I didn't really realize it either until like ... In all seriousness, like five years ago, no one was talking about like this mass mobility or the scooter phenomenon that is going on, right? And to Pat's point as well too, I think from the onboarding experience and signing up and aside from realizing how great of a product it was, obviously first and foremost, how liberating riding a scooter is. Like that is just the greatest feeling in the entire world. I felt like I was a 10 year old kid, again. It's interesting. They're pretty well built products honestly. And you know, they have a very functioning mobile application that's powering these things. They have the actual physical scooters themselves. A lot of these companies are poaching talent from the likes of Lyft and Uber that not only from, you know, like on the mobile side of things but also from the legal side. Like these companies have massive battles in front of them on local government, statewide government, federal government and having experience with that. So I think, one to, obviously the consolidation aspect is pretty interesting from a manufacturing and supply chain perspective as well. But also I'm sure there's going to be a lot of acqui-hires in this space as well by these companies that will emerge as the juggernauts and I guess it's yet to be determined who those companies will be. And to anyone out there looking to have a career change, maybe look into last minute mobility tech. I don't know. It sounds like there's a need. Spencer, Cody. Patrick, thanks so much for being with me, you guys.

 

[0:23:13]

Spencer Burke: It's my pleasure, PJ.

 

[0:23:14]

Patrick Forquer: Thanks, Peej.

 

[0:23:15]

Cody Thornton: Yeah, it's my pleasure. Be safe out there people. Don't be afraid, but be smart while being dumb.

 

[0:23:20]

PJ: Absolutely, and for all those first time listeners out there, we are Braze. Braze is a customer engagement platform. If you don't know what that is, go to Braze.com. Find out. Thanks again for being with us.

I joined Tanner McGrath, Head of Growth Engineering and Product Analytics at Amplitude, in San Francisco to hear about the circumstances that brought about the need for Amplitude's product. Tanner also shared his personal story of making moves from video game development to Postmates product manager to the tech renaissance man he is today at Amplitude.

 

 

 

TRANSCRIPT:

[0:00:17]

PJ Bruno: Hello, again. Welcome back to Braze for impact, your Martech industry discussed digest. Thrilled to have with me today for a partner spotlight, Tanner McGrath from Amplitude, their head of growth engineering and product analytics. How's it going, Tanner?

 

[0:00:31]

Tanner McGrath: It's great. Happy to be here.

 

[0:00:33]

PJ Bruno: Yeah man, I'm looking at your Linkedin here, and you're a real Renaissance man. Product Manager, Developer, Data Engineer, Data Scientist, Growth Marketing, UX Designer. I mean, do you have any other hobbies that we need to know about right now upfront?

 

[0:00:50]

Tanner McGrath: Yeah, been lucky enough to be involved in a lot of different aspects of making a company grow.

 

[0:00:58]

PJ Bruno: I love it. I guess it touches every part of the company, too. Well, before we get into your journey that led you here to Amplitude, I love the tagline, and I heard this first. We were doing interviews, and I think it was someone on the partnerships team for Amplitude that said, "Helping companies build better products." It just is such a clean description, but for people out there who might not know more specifically what Amplitude is doing, can you break that down for us a bit?

 

[0:01:26]

Tanner McGrath: Yeah. The way we look at building better products here at Amplitude is, really, if you look at how everything's been changing in the industry, is product is now the revenue center for most companies. Building a better product means building a better company. Here at Amplitude, we see people spending 200 plus minutes within these products ever day. It's like the world is being eaten alive by the digital revolution.

 

[0:01:55]

PJ Bruno: Right.

 

[0:01:56]

Tanner McGrath: What we see is, building a better product is not only helping those companies be more successful, but it's also helping everyone out there be more successful in their everyday life. That's the mission here at Amplitude.

 

[0:02:07]

PJ Bruno: That makes sense. I mean, that's usually the place that people get most exposure to the brand, right? Is living in the product, so it tethers back to every single department, right?

 

[0:02:16]

Tanner McGrath: Yeah, absolutely.

 

[0:02:18]

PJ Bruno: Cool. Well, let's rewind, let's take a step back, because one thing that interests me and made me want to talk to you more was the fact that you started off as a client of Braze, back in the day when you were at Postmates. What year was this back at Postmates, when you started there?

 

[0:02:32]

Tanner McGrath: Yeah, 2015.

 

[0:02:34]

PJ Bruno: 2015. Seems like eons ago. So what did the Postmates stack look like when you started there? What kind of set up did they have?

 

[0:02:42]

Tanner McGrath: They had the standard start up, setup. Query and off your production data bases, no AB testing. It really was that standard loading CSVs into MailChimp and it was-

 

[0:02:55]

PJ Bruno: That really does date it doesn't it? Talking about it, its only four years, but Jesus. So no analytics outside of your product database at all?

 

[0:03:04]

Tanner McGrath: Yeah, there was nothing trustworthy in the organization. I really remember coming in, we were having a really, really big delivery volume day, and the whole team was trying to see if we were going to break our previous record, and that meant query in the production data base, and we actually caused an outage from querying in the production data base too much monitoring that. Yeah, it really was no analytics outside of that.

 

[0:03:34]

PJ Bruno: Do you guys hold that up as a victory, when you make something crash like that?

 

[0:03:37]

Tanner McGrath: I don't know if we hold it up as a victory, but definitely a learning.

 

[0:03:41]

PJ Bruno: And that's a victory in some token, sure.

 

[0:03:43]

Tanner McGrath: Yeah, yeah. Definitely made us rethink how we were looking at our growth and our analytics, and really lit a fire in that direction.

 

[0:03:53]

PJ Bruno: Totally. And the stuff that you were doing in Postmates, this was kind of not much competition was around you at this time, right?

 

[0:04:00]

Tanner McGrath: Yeah, yeah, this was pre-competition. This was when everything is up and to the right. I work with a lot of startups here as well, and they're often in cases like that, where this pre-competition, things are up and to the right. You don't ask many questions when you're hitting your growth targets every week.

 

[0:04:16]

PJ Bruno: There's no real need for pushing the envelope on innovation or really big bets.

 

[0:04:22]

Tanner McGrath: Yeah, if you're not taking a close look, everything you're doing is what you're attributing to you making the company successful.

 

[0:04:30]

PJ Bruno: What were the factors that brought Amplitude and Braze into the marketing strategy for Postmates?

 

[0:04:36]

Tanner McGrath: Yeah, it really came down to competition. As the environment becomes more competitive, you're really looking to find an edge and to keep that edge.

 

[0:04:47]

PJ Bruno: So this was 2016, 2017?

 

[0:04:48]

Tanner McGrath: Yeah, yeah, we start to see Uber Eats, DoorDash, other people entering the market, and the space is blowing up. With that, growth becomes a little bit harder when you're not the only one there really creating your category, you really need to know what's working. It's like when you're at a casino, and you're the only one playing a slot machine that's weighted in your favor. And then, all of a sudden the casino starts to be filling up because everyone's winning, but the house is only going to let so much out. You need to become a better gambler. That's what really brought Braze and analytics into the strategy, was we needed to start making more systematic bets as a company, to really keep that competitive edge.

 

[0:05:35]

PJ Bruno: Yeah, that makes sense. It's gotta be tough though, too, because there's just so many different product services and directions you can go, whereas you're given a budget, you need to keep those numbers going up and to the right, how do you choose the right products even? You said systematic bets, I love that. Can you say more about that?

 

[0:05:54]

Tanner McGrath: Yeah. When we think about ... Especially when I think about building better products, it's not just the product you need to improve, it's the team you need to improve. That fundamentally comes down to understanding and learning. You're really only able to do that with certain products. There's many products out there in the landscape that will let you understand what happened. "Was this email, what was its open rate? What was its conversion? Did it actually accomplish that end goal?" But, usually the end of that questioning is, "Why? Why did it have the highest open rate?" Or, "Why did it have the highest conversion?" Or, "Why didn't it?" Being able to answer that "Why" question is not only how you improve your product, but it's also how you improve your team, because your team had a hypothesis at the start, and they're trying to understand why was I right, or why was I wrong, and that's how the team gets better. When the team gets better, the product also gets better. That's really what was the driving force between how do we actually balance getting things done as quickly and efficiently possible, but also making sure that we learn and get better while we're doing that, so that it compounds over time.

 

[0:07:08]

PJ Bruno: So, getting Amplitude and Braze in the mix of your stack, did that inform the makeup of your team? You're saying it takes the right team, so did that service things for you guys?

 

[0:07:19]

Tanner McGrath: That was one of the biggest driving factor for us building our stack, was being able to answer that why. If we can't, as a team, understand why we were actually living or losing, we couldn't get better over time. That was something where we actually tried many different software vendors out there, probably, almost that whole MarTech landscape we gave a try.

 

[0:07:43]

PJ Bruno: It's kind of nice to do a sampling, right? A little tasting.

 

[0:07:45]

Tanner McGrath: Yeah. What we found was that no one really let us offer that why. Then we came across Amplitude, and that really enabled what we called frictionless curiosity at the company, was really being able to be curious about what your customers are doing in your product, and why they're doing that. And then Braze built out currents for us, and that really unlocked a whole new world of being able to answer the why that was not possible in any other tool that we had ever used before.

 

[0:08:17]

PJ Bruno: And the competitors, you adding those two pieces to your stack, that was spurred on by competition. As you guys moved forward, people were copying your approach along the way, right? That was kind of ...

 

[0:08:28]

Tanner McGrath: Yeah, and that's the biggest piece of flattery out there, is when you come up with something creative, and then someone else replicates that, it just adds to that pressure to constantly innovate. That's why we're actually seeing better and better products.

 

[0:08:44]

PJ Bruno: Yeah, these stacks got to be turning into Megazords at this point, just huge transformers.

 

[0:08:49]

Tanner McGrath: Yeah.

 

[0:08:53]

PJ Bruno: Autobots. Talk to me about the transition from client to tech partner, because now your role here at Amplitude is quite different than it was at Postmates.

 

[0:09:03]

Tanner McGrath: Yeah, it's very different and very, very similar in the same way. I spend about 50% of my time, really, thinking about what is the future of product analytics and how can we help companies really set a strategy, set goals, really understand customer health, and really model out their business. It's a lot of things I've been doing in the past, but with a lot of different companies now, which is great. It's almost like what I was doing before, but at scale. There is a slight change, of course, from going from consumer marketplace growth to B2B growth. Definitely a set of nuanced complexities, building out an enterprise B2B Growth Engineering team right here at Amplitude. But, it's great. It's been an awesome transition.

 

[0:09:54]

PJ Bruno: That's great to hear. Let's move onto Amplitude. Amplitude has surfaced, and it's the noise as a best in class product analytics tool. From your experience, what gives Amplitude that competitive edge? What's the differentiator.

 

[0:10:10]

Tanner McGrath: Yeah, the differentiator is, it really goes back to what I was talking about before, is frictionless curiosity, as that the best teams are curious. It's really, really painful to be curious today. Think about what it takes to be curious about your customers, we're talking hundreds, thousands of lines of sequel, ETL jobs, and you've gotta wait a couple days for that compute job to come back, you've got to ask an analyst or a data scientist. It really differentiates by completely flipping that whole paradigm on this head. It's "would you rather hire a product engineer on your team or a data engineer?" With Amplitude, you can invest in your product, and you can enable that team building, that product to really understand what's going on with their customers, so that you actually let your data scientists and analysts use their PhD to actually answer a differentiated question.

 

[0:11:09]

PJ Bruno: That's smart, that makes sense. I was going to ask, what is that a-ha moment for clients and prospects, when it actually hits them, the power of the tool? You mentioned curiosity, so I have to assume that plays into it a little bit.

 

[0:11:23]

Tanner McGrath: Yeah, I think all of that curiosity, what it really results in is people being able to actually better model out, understand their business, and understand customer health. When you talk to a lot of teams today and you ask them, "How do you grow?" You'll get 10 different answers. With Amplitude, what you're able to actually do is, you're enabling the team to see the inputs, measure the outputs, and actually start to understand and model that system over time. That's really the a-ha moment, is when you actually can go into a company and talk about, "Well, how do you grow?" And the teams actually know.

 

[0:12:05]

PJ Bruno: What are some of the best uses of Amplitude that you've seen in your time here?

 

[0:12:09]

Tanner McGrath: Oh, so many. We can go from personalization to even just some of the lowest hanging fruit. I'll call out two things that I always love seeing, one is, especially with user acquisition teams, is when I think about great user acquisition teams, they're doing all the stuff that good user acquisition teams are doing. Good user acquisition teams, they actually optimize ads, change images, change copy, all of the things that are table stakes, they're doing all of that. But, when you meet a great user acquisition team, they actually go a couple steps further. When they have an ad that's not performing or a channel that's not working, they start to answer the question why, "Why is it not working?" If I have a lot of engagement in this ad, I remember this happening at Postmates. We had a lot of engagement on iPhone charger ads. We knew iPhone users, high value users, retained very well. We also saw some of our best customers were purchasing accessories for their iPhones. We'd take some ads out, worst performing ads we've had. The team, good team for user acquisition, they would change the copy, change the images, do a couple cycles of that, and then probably throw it to the side. A great team looks into the product, they understand why is this happening, and turns out, didn't have item search at that time. People actually wanted to purchase these things, they literally just couldn't find it.

 

[0:13:48]

PJ Bruno: Oh, they just didn't have the means.

 

[0:13:49]

Tanner McGrath: Yeah, they couldn't find it in the product. They didn't realize that they needed to search for a Best Buy or an Apple Store, and then go and find the charger. Yeah, what's the team do? They do a quick test, they actually pull together a very proof of concept item search for this specific ad, takes you right to the item, becomes some of the best performing ads. It's like, that's what a great team does, but without that frictionless curiosity, if those people on that UA team actually had to ask a data scientist or an analyst, "Hey, what's going on with my ad?" They probably would have never gotten to the bottom of it. But, with that frictionless curiosity, they're able to actually help transform and build a better product.

 

[0:14:35]

PJ Bruno: So, Amplitude quite literally facilitates teams asking questions.

 

[0:14:40]

Tanner McGrath: Yeah.

 

[0:14:40]

PJ Bruno: Because otherwise, you might not have the means to go inside, and actually dig, and see what's going on.

 

[0:14:45]

Tanner McGrath: Yeah. I'd say that it elevates the level of questions that people are actually asking. One of my favorite Einstein quotes is him saying that if he had an hour to solve a problem, he'd spend the first 55 minutes on actually figuring out the question that he was trying to answer. Last five minutes just answering it. I think that that's really what I mean when I say "frictionless curiosity," is being able to actually ask the right question. The first question you ask is never the right question. I hear people asking me all the time, "How did that experiment perform?" That's not a real question. No one should ever ask that question. "What was your hypothesis and did it actuality accomplish your learning objective?" Usually, that's the 10th, 20th question that someone asks, so without that frictionless curiosity, the right questions never get asked. You see this at scale with companies, and the whole organization is asking better questions, and that compounds over time. Instead of taking 20 questions for you to get there, you're now asking that two questions away from the actual right question.

 

[0:15:52]

PJ Bruno: And I guess you just get better and better as time goes on.

 

[0:15:54]

Tanner McGrath: Yeah, something people often miss is that this concept of learning actually compounds over time, just like interest. The more you invest in it, the more you invest in your team, the better your team's going to be over time. The same with your product, too.

 

[0:16:13]

PJ Bruno: That's good stuff. I gotta remember that. Throw away the first question, because it's no good.

 

[0:16:18]

Tanner McGrath: Just make it smarter.

 

[0:16:20]

PJ Bruno: All right, cool, let's get into some final thoughts here with you. As tech evolves, companies often pivot their main focus based on innovations in the competitive landscape. We've already talked a bit about competition here today. Do you see a new frontier for Amplitude to expand into?

 

[0:16:37]

Tanner McGrath: Yeah. The way I see the space playing out is that today, really smart people leverage Amplitude to get to causal inference, to really understand what's [causaling] their product. I think tomorrow, we'll be able to help do that a lot faster, so that anyone can do it, or maybe it's done for you. On top of that, that really enables, when you understand what's causal, especially for different people, different cohorts, that really enables this emerging space of personalization. I think one of the biggest challenges that's often not talked about, related to personalization, is "How do you do the analytics for personalization?" If everyone gets a different version of your product, how do you actually make sense of that?

 

[0:17:21]

PJ Bruno: Yeah, that's a good one.

 

[0:17:22]

Tanner McGrath: Yeah, I think Amplitude's got a whole new landscape to build out there, and that's really the future.

 

[0:17:30]

PJ Bruno: Yeah, especially because personalization is quickly becoming the norm. If you're not using that, then your message is getting lost in the sweep, right?

 

[0:17:39]

Tanner McGrath: Yeah. Helping people understand how to do that at scale is something that is definitely needed, because there's a lot of teams experimenting with personalization, but very few teams actually understand it.

 

[0:17:52]

PJ Bruno: You guys are set up to provide the right analytics on personalization, on real times, on all this stuff?

 

[0:17:58]

Tanner McGrath: Absolutely.

 

[0:17:59]

PJ Bruno: Al light, well, I'm excited to see what's next for you guys. Tanner, thanks for joining me today, buddy.

 

[0:18:04]

Tanner McGrath: All right, thank you.

[0:18:12]

Our very own Kevin Wang, VP of Product, sat down with me in our San Francisco office to discuss some of the recent SaaS IPOs (Zoom, Slack, PagerDuty) as well as the latest emerging channels and what the future may hold.

 

 

 

TRANSCRIPT:

[0:00:17]

PJ Bruno: Hey again. Welcome back to Braze for impact your MarTech Industry Discuss Digest. I have with me a very good friend today. Kevin Wang or Kevin Wang. Both are correct?

 

[0:00:28]

Kevin Wang: Both are correct enough. I like it pronounced right, but I also like it spelled right and so we can go with either.

 

[0:00:35]

PJ Bruno: That's W-A-N-G for all you listening. This is Kevin Wang on Kevin Wang, VP of product at Braze. I'm so glad we finally got to do this man. This has been a long time coming.

 

[0:00:43]

Kevin Wang: I know, I know it. Really excited to be here.

 

[0:00:45]

PJ Bruno: Well, we're kind of coming off MAU. Both of us are a little bit tired, but we needed to get ourselves together for this. The communications episode, some sass IPOs that went on in April, all around communication. So our first up is Zoom. Now I know, Kevin, this one was a really interesting IPO for you, right?

 

[0:01:04]

Kevin Wang: Yeah. Zoom, I think it's fascinating. So in addition to just being an incredible business, I think one of the things that's really neat about zoom is the fact that they've been so successful. Essentially just literally building the proverbial better mouse trap. It's the thing where they already had a really powerful captive audience that's actually growing, in a large way as remote work continues to get more popular, where we've got all these folks who need to do video conferencing and the existing tools, I mean, we've all used them like a lot of the tools out there, just not that good. And Zoom literally just they knew all about the system. A lot of them are ex Cisco folks and they looked at the situation, just said, "We know how to do this better." And so, I think that, as a product person and as someone who thinks a lot about how we build products and how one makes products, I think there's a very strong pull in the industry to try to be completely out of the box, off the wall innovative. And I almost say, "Air quotes, innovative." With the idea of people wanting to build things that were never seen before. So let's look at a company like SpaceX, like reusable rockets. There's not a cottage industry of reusable rocket launch and orbital delivery products out there. And zoom looks at it from a completely different way. It would be like if they were looking at Honda civics or something like that, and they were like, "We can just build a Honda civic that's like the same price, just 20% better." In what way is it better? "It's just better." And I have a huge amount of respect for that because there's already that huge market there, and they knew exactly what they want. You just do it better. And delivering on that I think is really impressive.

 

[0:02:39]

PJ Bruno: Right. I mean, do you think that also makes them equally vulnerable for someone to come along and create a Honda civic that's 40% better or?

 

[0:02:48]

Kevin Wang: I think it isn't. So I've read a bit about zoom, especially in the wake of how successful their IPO has been because you look at the numbers, it's pretty eye-popping and at least in their case, they actually had a lot of knowledge of the space at a very, very high technical level, but also had the ability to execute really rapidly product wise. And I think that that was a huge advantage for zoom. And that's not something that's particularly easy to replicate. There are perhaps other teams out there that could do that, but it's not like there's tens of thousands of teams who could just try, and make a better version. So it's a very interesting, almost pure technology, defensible mode. Because one thing that's pretty common, I think, in the tech industry is that companies end up very able to defend their place in the market because they have a huge network effect and that gives them more data that gives them more customers. So Facebook, Google, they're both examples of doing this. In zooms case, that's not necessarily the game that they're playing. It's literally just knowing the problem and the technology better and then executing really, really well. A very interesting contrast to that would be PagerDuty, which is another one of these recent tech Ipos.

 

[0:04:00]

PJ Bruno: PagerDuty, when I took a look at this outline, this is the only one that I didn't know. So PagerDuty, it has to do with pagers? It's bringing back pagers were going to go retro and we're...

 

[0:04:10]

Kevin Wang: Yeah, they go out there and they just sell pagers just door to door and it's, they're really cool. There are at ease and all like wood and a little bit of gold plating.

 

[0:04:17]

PJ Bruno: Bringing back the door to door salesman too.

 

[0:04:20]

Kevin Wang: Yeah. It's everything. PagerDuty's business is that they essentially help an operations team for technical operations, running servers and things like that run better and they will page you in the old school sense. They will actually page folks saying, "Hey, this server, this system is down. You need to go in there and fix it." Because when we're talking about these really large distributed technical systems, you have hundreds or thousands of servers, they're running all sorts of code and the universe is just a big scary place. It's a big scary place to be running a lot of code and stuff breaks, things happen. And when it happens, you need to very often get somebody to go in and verify what's wrong or fix the problem. And PagerDuty just automates that. But the genius of Pager duty I think is that, often when these systems break, when these very complex systems, a server goes down, it can break in such a bad or catastrophic way that it can't even scream for help. And so there's a huge amount of value in PagerDuty, just literally not being you, the customer just running on their own system because that gives you that additional level of reliability. And additionally, they've done a number of clever things around how you actually run the responses to these incidents that can happen. And so PagerDuty in contrast to zoom is, is really playing more of the game of saying, "Here's how you run your operations better around your servers and your technology." Whereas zoom is just saying, "Hey, you want a video conference, wouldn't it be nice in the video conferencing was better?" And that in itself adds a lot of value and of course assumes that it has added a number of other features on top of it. But their core really did come from almost a very, very pure quality standpoint.

 

[0:06:01]

PJ Bruno: Got you. So PagerDuty, effectively it's a third party flag razor. Right? And then it helps a little bit with the next step after the flag is raised. Like who needs to know what step is.

 

[0:06:16]

Kevin Wang: Exactly. And they've got some other features there. I'm not doing either of these products, quite the justice that they deserve in terms of the different things that they've added on. But a large part of it is really that communication and inter mediating the communication between whatever is going on with your servers and your team who are actual human beings who need to actually make a decision or take some form of action.

 

[0:06:41]

PJ Bruno: Something that I found a little strange as I was doing a little research on Zoom. They're whole thing that the CEO talks about his happiness. He just keeps using it in their pitch happiness, happiness. He says delivering happiness is what we do at zoom. And that just tells me nothing about the product. I love amplitudes, we help companies build better products. Just like these taglines that are like really removed from what actually is going on. I love happiness, don't get me wrong.

 

[0:07:10]

Kevin Wang: Yeah, it's a great thing.

 

[0:07:11]

PJ Bruno: It's a good thing. But I'd love a little more information. A nice tagline that's really buttoned up and putting it a little boat for me.

 

[0:07:19]

Kevin Wang: Yeah, I agree with that. And I think if anything just says something about the state of brand marketing today that really, really enormous visions play quite well in a lot of ways. I mean, just look at car ads. I mean, if you look at a vehicle ad for like a Lexus versus how somebody actually buys a car, it's so completely detached, because people buy cars off of spreadsheets, they buy them basically off of spreadsheets. But the car ad is like, this is the lifestyle represented by whatever vehicle it is that their marketing, it's also like the same lifestyle for all of them or the same two lifestyles. Sunsets on the highway or just like in the mud, and this thing works in the mud.

 

[0:08:07]

PJ Bruno: I think my favorite one is the Lincoln commercials with Matthew mcconaughey.

 

[0:08:11]

Kevin Wang: Oh those are incredible.

 

[0:08:12]

PJ Bruno: Those are great. Right? And it makes you want to hang with mcconaughey because he's being all like, "I was driving a Lincoln way before I was paid to drive one."

 

[0:08:19]

Kevin Wang: But the incredible thing is, I am convinced that that's actually what hanging out with Matthew Mcconaughey is like. These commercials...

 

[0:08:26]

PJ Bruno: Jumping into a pool wearing all of your clothes, an amazing three piece suit.

 

[0:08:30]

Kevin Wang: This is like, he does that like twice a day. Like that doesn't even own a shower. Just like, "I just jump in my pool. It's just a great day."

 

[0:08:38]

PJ Bruno: So the next one here, we have Slack. You want to open up on this one Kev?

 

[0:08:42]

Kevin Wang: Yeah. Slack is again, phenomenal business. These are all phenomenal business.

 

[0:08:46]

PJ Bruno: Phenomenal product, I live in it. I live in Slack.

 

[0:08:49]

Kevin Wang: The amount of time that I've spent in Slack, I mean, we set this time up in Slack. It's so pervasive. I think one of the real challenges I have with Slack though is just that, Slack has some of the properties of email. Like I have something to say. I take that thing I have to say, I sent it to you and it's in a place where you can find it, but just the volume of traffic that goes through Slack, warps it into a completely different beast. I find this isn't maybe the most flattering characterization, but I think of Slack as almost like a screaming river of voices that's constantly flowing by you and occasionally you hear your name and you stick your head underneath the water and you just hear even more voices and it's madness. And then if you walk away, you don't know even what flowed past you, "Did I miss something important? Did I miss nothing important?" I think this is one of the real challenges of modern life speed of modern life, speed of electronic communication and Slack is not necessarily causing that, but there are certainly privy to that transformation and reduction of attention spans and all of that. But on the other hand it's really effective. It's really efficient. I rarely look at Slack and think, "Wow, this is impeding me from doing something." And so I think that their future is incredibly bright. They just need to figure out a way to help people manage the world in which they were created.

 

[0:10:15]

PJ Bruno: I think you're right. I think we just need that layer of like how to manage Slack and not get lost in it. But yeah, I think it's also since the barrier to initiate conversation is way lower. It's just like the simplicity of it, that makes the communication volume much higher. And then the importance of the message is often decreased. I mean, I send plenty of messages on Slack that are not that important. To me, I chalk it up to culture ads, giving kudos to someone, like making someone feel comfortable. Giphy obviously like...

 

[0:10:51]

Kevin Wang: I love Giphy.

 

[0:10:51]

PJ Bruno: I mean, what an amazing creation that is.

 

[0:10:53]

Kevin Wang: Yeah. Genius. Something like printing press.

 

[0:10:56]

PJ Bruno: I know.

 

[0:10:56]

Kevin Wang: Exactly.

 

[0:10:57]

PJ Bruno: [crosstalk] get better please. But yeah, no, I mean, but at the end of the day, it's just a matter of convenience. And because it is so convenient, it's just so easy to put your time into it. And earlier I liken it to the Jewel, right? As opposed to smoking cigarettes, you need to walk outside, you need a lighter, you need to light that up and the jewel and vapes have made it so easy to just smoke wherever you are. And usually it's fine to be indoors and so you're doing it a lot more. And so I think there's that pendulum swing, when it moves to the left, as it moves to the right, it gets more and more convenient and it makes your life easier but at some point you're utilizing it so much because you think that convenience makes it more available to you to use as often as you want. And so then you use it, maybe when you don't actually need it.

 

[0:11:47]

Kevin Wang: Yeah. I completely agree with you. And I think one of the interesting things with Slack is that, it doesn't devolve to madness because of the tool itself. The tool is just the tool and it's a high quality product. It starts this descent into madness because of social constructs or more broadly the lack of social constructs around Slack. Because I mean the way that I view it as, we're all still mammals using this product Ed. We're all still just social animals, but all of the restraint that comes from not wanting to just go and tap someone on the shoulder and bother them and look at the look on their face of, "Who are you and why are you tapping me?" Like that just completely disappears in Slack. I mean, one of the things that I almost wish you could see in Slack was in a large channel, I wish you could just see that face of every single person that a message was about to go to because I think that the range of nonessential communication that goes on there would not be nearly as broad as it is. I mean, it's the equivalent of going into an auditorium and just tapping on the mic and say you declaring some large funny Gif to this entire audience, nobody would do that. And this ties into something else that I'm really excited to chat about, which is this idea of when we're looking at these new communication methods, when we're looking at these new channels, how do we actually decide, or how does one know what's going to be successful and what's not going to be successful? So this is a question that we ask at Braze. All the time on the product team. We're a product that crosses many different channels, many different ways of reaching end users or customers of a particular brand. And really our raison d'etre, our reason for being, is very much to help to bridge that gap and allow brands and their customers to have these much tighter, more personalized, richer experiences. But the question that we are constantly asking as a result is when there's some new technology announced like a magic leap, for example, something very next level augmented reality. What's going to make sense? And what's going to just be another palm pilot? And how do you time the market around these technologies to figure out where you're going to invest your time and your energy researching. And one thing that I always come back to, just from almost a first principle standpoint, is what are our brains actually evolved to handle? What are our brains good at? Because if we look back historically, that tends to be a major impact of the technologies that ended up succeeding. Humans are very visual creatures. So we like having really big TVS and we've just seen TV's get bigger and bigger and bigger because we like looking at stuff. I'm humans are also very auditory creatures like we speak to one another. That's one of our primary communication methods. And so that I think explains a lot of the success historically of radio now of podcasts and audio and things like that. And also to a lesser extent, we're also very tactical creatures. Like we have really fine grained motor control. That's how we can handle so much of the world's input in the business context is now handled via typing whether on a phone or whether on the keyboard of just because we have that control. And those are the sorts of trends. Those are the sorts of kind of universal truths that are going to continue to carry forward with us. Because we see now technology's changing so fast that within a single career, let alone a lifetime, you will see multiple technology waves crash and crest over you. But the brain and the raw tools and material that we're using to interact with these technologies is exactly the same. It's going to be the same now, it's the same with our kids and our children's kids. And so that is I think, a really strong leading indicator in terms of what is going to be successful and what is not.

 

[0:15:32]

PJ Bruno: And so real is the idea. It's funny because it's an idea that's been around for a while and that's when our technology has far surpassed, the evolution of our minds and have like our social constructs. Now we're really getting into that place, aren't we? Where technology is going to exponentially be zooming past maybe what we're able to handle as human beings.

 

[0:15:55]

Kevin Wang: Yeah, I think so. And as a result, everything that zooms too far is generally speaking, going to just not be that successful. And so I think part of the challenge that we have in the challenge that a lot of businesses, a lot of brands have, it's figuring out for your brand, for your use cases, what actually makes sense given that the raw materials of humanity aren't going to change. But everything that we can do to those raw materials is changing and expanding. One example that one of the engineers on our team likes to bring up is that, I don't know if you've seen the movie minority report? Minority report has the scene where they basically,[inaudible] yeah, that huge iPad. And Tom Cruise...

 

[0:16:34]

PJ Bruno: Yeah paint the picture for us, for those of you at home who haven't seen the film, this scene.

 

[0:16:39]

Kevin Wang: It's got Tom Cruise, he spends the whole time during the Tom Cruise thing where he alternates between looking really serious and looking like he's in a real rush. The whole movie, that surprised but hurried expression. Like you're bothering them a lot at McDonald's or something. And so there's this whole scene where they have basically a huge touch screen and it looks just incredible because it's flashing lights and it's flashing colors and like beeps and boops and people love that stuff. When I saw, I was like, "This is the greatest thing ever. I want it. I don't know why. I just want it." Like watching an apple keynote, like I want it and I've no reason for this. But suddenly this engineer at our team like to point out, I'm not sure if he thought this or he'd just read somewhere else, but I think it's a great salient point, is that nobody wants to go and poke a UI that's on the wall because nobody has arms are physically set up to just be stuck out pointing at stuff all day. Like that would just be an exhausting thing. And that's just a mechanical aspect of your arm, that like your arm is just not good at being fully extended or even partially extended for a long period of time with you standing up, especially without you getting really annoyed. And that's something that helps you predict something about technology. But you almost didn't even need to know anything about the tech. He didn't even need to see it. You just needed to know about like body position and purpose.

 

[0:17:57]

PJ Bruno: What does it take physically to use it?

 

[0:17:59]

Kevin Wang: Exactly. And it's the same reason that there've been jokes about like smellovision TVs forever, but no one cares because like human beings have a terrible sense of smell. Like this is why dogs are but men or women's best friend because dogs are really great at smelling, they're really good at tasting things and deriving information from that, their auditory range is fairly different from ours. So they can pick up on different cues than we can and as a result smell is like a useless thing to us. There's no iPhone for smell. There's not going to be, in my opinion.

 

[0:18:31]

PJ Bruno: Probably not.

 

[0:18:33]

Kevin Wang: Let's hope not. That'd be gross.

 

[0:18:36]

PJ Bruno: What about touch?

 

[0:18:38]

Kevin Wang: Yeah. I think touch is a really interesting one. Like your brain devotes a pretty decent chunk of its size to touch and management of touch. But I think what's kind of interesting about that one is that these very fine grade motor skills are something that you can learn and you can adapt to. Like, everybody I know who first got a touchscreen smartphone a little bit later on in life. Everybody liked that, struggled with it initially but was able to learn it because I mean, and I think that maybe this is getting a little too Scifi fantasy out there, but I think it's literally just because in an evolutionary sense, if you weren't able to, as a cave person, learn how to use very fine grained motor skills and train very fine grained motor skills that was like just not good for your overall evolutionary prospects. And so we all in the modern world retain that and we're really, really good at that. But I think that what's interesting with touch is that we're ultimately somewhat limited in that we can only gather so much data out of a particular situation because something like reading or hearing allows for much, much faster structured information input. Which is why those are the two channels which have just by far outclassed everything else in terms of the overall interactions.

 

[0:20:02]

PJ Bruno: And so I mean, for the sake of getting Scifi fantasy, because I know you like Scifi and I do too.

 

[0:20:08]

Kevin Wang: Of course just pass me the fourth. So very timely.

 

[0:20:13]

PJ Bruno: So I mean obviously we're not talking product roadmap, we're not talking about what's on the future for Braze product. But when we talk about data inputs, like once you surpass the channel or the device I mean, is it like physical augmentation like chips and like to contact lenses? Is that the next for the way we are going to be receiving our messages?

 

[0:20:41]

Kevin Wang: Yeah. So my own personal belief is that some form of onboard augmented reality is the future in the sense of being the next step for displays. And that just comes from a few core beliefs. And this being a potential logical conclusion from that. So the first one is that at any given point in time since basically the printing press and even before that, any visual communication method has been really, really important. So we've got printing press, you've got newspapers, TV, books, computers, smartphones. This is just a way of engaging in information that is really, really popular with people. This is obvious stuff.

 

[0:21:23]

PJ Bruno: Right. Groundbreaking.

 

[0:21:25]

Kevin Wang: Yeah, exactly. People like their eyes. It's like, not really changing anything now, but I think what's also interesting in terms of being very relevant to AR is that the way that people, that a lot of the capabilities that will be possible, I will hope, with augmented reality, add new dimensions to that and accentuate the ability to which we can use vision. So, two of the main ones are that, so you can imagine more sophisticated augmented reality systems that track where your eyes are looking because the actual amount of the actual area that's really tightly in focus of your visual field is very, very small. Relatively speaking. Most of it is peripheral, and it's not as focused in. And so augmented reality that's has the ability to take advantage of that. Because this is literally just more information into a system. And then the other thing that I think is interesting is that we tend to find experiences that are broader and take up more of our peripheral vision are more immersive. I mean this is why people still go to the movies. This is why people care about like retina screens and just big 4k TVs. And so there's clearly an aspect of human sensation and perception that's drawing us towards those more immersive experiences. But the other thing around AR that I think is really exciting is that it opens up, and this goes to your question about touch, it opens up a number of really interesting use cases around touch because it essentially frees up your hands if your monitor is always on, and it's on your face, and it's everywhere. And so again, we're evolved to handle it very physical and visual world. And so you can now imagine that we can have experiences for like educational technology where kids are looking at something and learning about or even learning to read, but they can actually physically touch something. Like you learn what a rock is, and it shows you how to spell a rock, spell the word rock or the type of rock that you're looking at, but you can actually pick it up and that just gives you all these different ways to imprint that learning. And the other thing is collaboration. So like something that I think is really valuable in the future is, when we're thinking about a presentation. This is something that should be fully interactive and can be fully interactive with augmented reality. PowerPoint should be something where I can point and like a laser pointer comes out of my finger, and I point at exactly what it is that I want to show you or I could zoom in or zoom out. All of that starts to become possible when we're getting into a world where everyone's display is on them or just the fact that, I mean something I think we talked about the other day, is that just physically the act of pointing is trying to get you PJ to see through my Kevin's eyes and with augmented reality or certainly hypothetical future versions of it. That's something that becomes directly possible. You could literally see what I'm seeing, and I think that it starts to go down a very powerful and very interesting road. If I had to pick, I'd also say probably apple is the best suited to really make a lot of this reality just because apple stuff is always really cool. And people like cool stuff.

 

[0:24:34]

PJ Bruno: That makes sense. And so I guess I got one final question for you and that is, is inception possible?

 

[0:24:41]

Kevin Wang: I also can't tell if that's a facetious question, but I'll just answer it dead serious, which is that, I mean I think that the true Scifi future that gets people all excited and if you really want to get the tech crunch articles running, you start talking about like what Elon Musk talks about with neural links, and literally that company, I think it's called Neuralink that he started, or he's saying he's going to start. And I think that that idea of how close, how bare to the metal can we get in terms of communication, like digital communication and hooking it up to your brain. This is the obvious conclusion in a certain sense of your brain should just be able to be extended in a digital fashion. But just to bring it back. I think that aspect of things in many ways goes back to the human aspect and that the blending of humanity and technology, which is that, if you have a system that requires doing surgery, if you have a system that requires very invasive procedures, this is just not something people like doing, like people don't like necessarily going in and doing very invasive things to their bodies. Even for these shorter term forms of entertainment or even or longer term forms of communication. So it'll be really interesting to see where that gets bridged. I mean, I know people who don't use contact lenses because that's something that they just find to be an uncomfortable experience. So at what point does society change enough that people are willing to accept that? I don't know. And I think that that's a really interesting question around both pure technology but also around uses of technology. Like things like privacy and security. So to what extent does a generation, five generations from now where they have, not only have they always had social media, but everyone who they ever meet their entire lives has always had social media? How does that person view the interaction between social media and social technology and their lives? It's probably very different from us, and that in turn is probably very different from folks would have a hundred years ago.

 

[0:26:45]

PJ Bruno: Kev, thanks for joining me on the communication episode.

 

[0:26:48]

Kevin Wang: Thanks so much.

 

[0:26:49]

PJ Bruno: You guys come visit us again? Take care.

[0:26:51]

For International World Cultural Diversity Day, I was joined by many members of our EMEA team to share their experiences with culture clash. At Braze, we hope that sharing our stories will promote understanding and curiosity of cultures less familiar to us. The team wraps things up with a few tips when traveling through various countries.

 

 

 

TRANSCRIPT:

PJ Bruno: My mom told me I was special as a kid and unlike anyone else. And I hope someone told you the same, because you are. Your unique in every way. And yet we're all the same. We're literally made of all the same stuff. But one of the things humans do best is trying to make sense of the world around them by identifying, and labeling, and comparing. And it's a thin line between taking into account someone's background to accommodate for cultural differences and making a sweeping generalization about a person based on their accent or appearance. It can be a polarizing topic to discuss where the world is going and if it's in our best interest collectively. While there is always more work to be done, we can at least recognize the boom of diversity and inclusion initiatives in the work place. Today we'll hear from our own people at Braze about their experience with diversity and the times they felt a rift between them and someone from another place. I started making my first European friends in my teens, and I didn't quite understand the kiss on the cheek greeting. Am I supposed to do it with people I just met? Do I do it with other boys too? How many kisses? Do I kiss teachers too?

 

[0:01:11]

Speaker 2: So the kisses on the cheek thing is actually a really funny one for me because in Switzerland people give three kisses. In Germany, they often give two or they don't give any. And in the U.K. I found that sometimes people don't like to give kisses or they give one or they give two.

 

[0:01:27]

Speaker 3: Well I'm quite posh, as you can probably tell from my accent. And Posh people kiss on two cheeks as well. But not everyone in the U.K. Does and I find there's a bit of a north south divide. So my fiance is Northern, and all his family and friends kiss on one cheek, but I kiss on two cheeks. And then we face this awkwardness every time I see them, because I want to be considerate of how they greet people, but they are being considerate of how I greet people. So then we end up in this scenario where I go for one and they go for two. So I actually just have abandoned kissing at all and I just hug everyone and I find it works. Hugging is the way forward.

 

[0:02:10]

Speaker 4: I'm Swedish. And you know in Sweden we don't really kiss. People are kind of afraid of one another. I'm not sure, people might have seen there is this image floating around the internet where Swedes are waiting at the bus stop for one another and they basically stood two meters apart from each other. So I think the whole kissing on the cheek thing, that's not really common in Sweden. Personally, I'm a hugger, so you know people get a little bit like "Oh, whose this guy" when I approach them.

 

[0:02:42]

Speaker 5: I mean coming from Brazil and having this affectionate culture obviously my first instincts is like I'm gonna hug you and I'm gonna kiss you. And usually it is a two kiss. So one on each side of the cheek. Depending on who it is. So if it is someone very close to me I might go for full on kiss on the cheek rather than just putting side to side faces.

 

[0:03:06]

PJ Bruno: We're lucky enough to have a collection of cultures at Braze.

 

[0:03:09]

Speaker 6: I'm half Irish and half Italian.

 

[0:03:12]

Speaker 7: I feel British I am British, but yet I'm of Indian heritage.

 

[0:03:17]

Speaker 4: Being from Sweden.

 

[0:03:19]

Speaker 8: Being a German when I move to Mexico.

 

[0:03:22]

Speaker 9: Growing up in Scotland.

 

[0:03:23]

PJ Bruno: Everyone of them with a different understanding and expectation of the social code that mediates all human interactions. The fact is most of us mean well and want to have positive connections with one another but sometimes our intentions don't get through. They can be obscured, different cultures have different expectations of professional behavior and if you're not careful you could find yourself offending someone unintentionally. I got the opportunity to talk to some member of our London team to hear about their experiences with culture clash. Our hope is to dig into some of these stories to provide some more understanding, and hopefully more understanding makes for better connections.

 

[0:04:02]

Speaker 3: I think that the biggest learning curve I've had at Braze is working with different cultures, when I work with the sales team and they hand an account over to me, it's like one of the first things that we'll talk about is what kind of culture are they, because in APAC, if I'm working with someone who's based in Singapore or they might be based in Thailand or if they're based in Israel you know the Middle East they're all going to be so different to work with. For example, typically in Asian cultures they're very polite and won't speak up in a room. So I've had with some clients a hesitation to even introduce themselves in a room, it's been interesting because we're up in the office there. I've been getting some tips from the team about how to work with customers there and one of the tips that Sam - who's an account manager out there- gave me was that Asian culture love to talk about food and it's very central to their culture. So apparently if I'm struggling to get clients talking I should try and talk about food, like "Hey I've heard that the food scene's amazing in Singapore, where do you get the best chicken satay?", because that's like a big dish out there, and so probably that's a good tip. I guess when I'm working with Israeli's I've found it a bit of a culture shock because they're very direct and in British culture directness can sometimes be a sign of rudeness, but for them that's just the way that they work and they want to get stuff done, so I think there's an element of me understanding their approach to business and not being offended by it.

 

[0:05:33]

Speaker 7: I think diversity inclusion is a big buzzword, if I look back I've been in sales twenty years, I know I don't look it, but it's true. And if I just look back at my last company there was a lot of older men and I think in sales, when you don't have a diverse range of people then the thinking can be one way. You know we've moved on from selling the way we used to sell, on the phone getting people's credit cards or selling double glazing, you know the way they were thinking wasn't flexible or agile enough and because they thought they'd been doing it for the last 50 years. This is the process that works rather than looking to new ways of adapting.

 

[0:06:16]

PJ Bruno0: In one of my previous jobs I was working closely with the engineering team. And there I struck up a friendship with a Russian guy, he was quite different and I think a lot of people first misunderstood him for being quite brazen. Because he just said exactly what he thought all the time and he would come in in the morning and he would just make some off the cuff comment and talk really loud and people would be quite offended. I think especially comparing it to the people who have been living in the UK for longer, who are a bit more quiet, a bit more composed. And he would just say really funny things that would rattle people at times but that was just his character. I kind of liked that about him because it was a bit refreshing. As the weeks went by that he had joined the company, people started understanding that was just his cultural background as well and it became a bit of a joke too like, I bet he's gonna make a joke about this or that. It was a nice addition to the team at the end of the day.

 

[0:07:20]

Speaker 8: Germans are always on time and they stress themselves a lot to be on time. Let's say if I'm about to run late I would not necessarily run over a red light but I would stress, if that makes sense. That is not good on your health and for so many other reasons it's not really nice, but it results in people being on time and being time efficient. Coming to the UK, not that they're really delayed or people just show up 2 hours late, but they take their time and a tolerance of 15 minutes is absolutely acceptable. I picked that up here because I quite like that, because even if you run late you don't stress yourself, you still take the next tube to work or whatever and coming back to Germany makes me feel really stressed all the time, because people just stress for no reason, like my mum she's working half=time and she would rush home and there's nothing waiting for her. If I'm queuing up in the supermarket and somebody is taking too much time to pay, here in the UK people would just be really patient and wait, whereby in Germany people would be like why can't you pay faster and whatever. I shouldn't really talk so bad about the Germans.

 

[0:08:43]

PJ Bruno: Speaking of cultural differences, I did all of these podcasts in London this morning and only the German woman was direct enough to tell me that I had salad in my teeth this whole time, just great.

 

[0:08:56]

Speaker 9: Growing up in Scotland in an Italian household, I would behave in quite an Italian way, I think, without realizing it, to my Scottish friends. So something that's really common in Italy is to be very honest but in a nice way. I'm quite direct but again in a nice way, not in a confrontational way so it wasn't unusual to say to someone, you look awful today, you look really tired, you look really really tired. But in a really nice way as in are you okay?, is there something that I can do to help you (laughs). You just don't look yourself, what's going one, but someone did turn around to me and, I won't use exact words because we're recording, but did say is it because I look terrible today and I said no no I'm just really concerned about you. That offended them.

 

[0:09:53]

Speaker 6: The first time I went to a physio in London, it got really embarrassing because in Italy it's normal when you go to see a doctor or an osteopath or a physiotherapist to take your clothes off. The physiotherapist left the room and said okay I'm going back in 2 minutes just get ready and lay down and so when he came back I was wearing just my underwear. He was like oh no please can you put your clothes back on. And then I find out that in the UK it's not needed. (Laughter)

 

[0:10:28]

Speaker 5: I have one of my best friends, her name is Flo.

 

[0:10:37]

Speaker 8: So one of my best friends is Brazilian.

 

[0:10:39]

Speaker 5: We used to struggle a little bit with some of our cultural differences.

 

[0:10:42]

Speaker 8: In her culture it's quite normal to ask a question several times because people might not feel comfortable saying yes. Say like you offer a snack or a dinner or whatever.

 

[0:10:53]

Speaker 5: In Germany, from my understanding, when people give an answer that's their final answer. Whereas in Brazil being the persuasive kind of Brazilians that we are, we don't take a no for an answer.

 

[0:11:05]

Speaker 8: In her culture it is polite to say no initially and be asked again, in Germany it's the opposite, if you say no and you get asked again, people get pretty annoyed for the reason for example of like didn't you listen that I just said no.

 

[0:11:19]

Speaker 5: It's just because I really want you to be part of whatever I'm asking. So let's say tonight like lets go out and have a drink, oh no Pria I'm tired. Oh but come on let's just have one drink, no Pri I've already told you, oh but just one come on it's Thursday. She's like Pri I said no, and I said but why, what else you have to do?

 

[0:11:38]

Speaker 8: That was a friction in our friendship but we addressed it quite nicely by stating where we're coming from in terms of in my culture it's that way and in her culture it's that, so let's just try to work together.

 

[0:11:52]

Speaker 4: I've been in London now for the past nine years and I guess I'll be perceived as very non Swedish, so going back to Stockholm this must have been 4 or 5 years ago and I met with a friend and we went to a bar. I was going up to the bar, it's busy I'm ordering and while we're waiting there I'm waiting to be served I look over to my right and there's a bloke there, he's also waiting for a drink, waiting to order, so just out of nowhere I say hey how's it going how's your night? And he just looks at me like why are you talking to me. Because again going back to what I said earlier Swedes don't really take well towards strangers coming into their circle and disrupting their groove. So I think that I actually properly offended him, he looked at me big eyes and then just turned away.

 

[0:12:44]

Speaker 8: When I think about an experience that has shaped me quite a lot and thinking about diversity was when I was roughly 20 years old and I moved to Mexico for 3 years. The thing that I found most shocking was when they tend to say things making other people feel comfortable as opposed to actually meaning it, that could be as let's meet up on Fridays and hang out, but then they never really follow up and me as a German I took that really seriously. Just to give you a concrete example, I organized a dinner, invited a couple of friends, of the friends that I made there, they basically never showed up. Living in the culture for another 2 years I really learned how to deal with that and in that scenario, if I had to relive that situation again I would make sure to remind them a couple of days before. Like a confirmation and continue the conversation and that's one thing that really struck me and almost was quite painful, because having set up the dinner and people not turning up that was quite weird at the time.

 

[0:13:50]

Speaker 5: When I moved from Brazil to Portugal I was about a month into the country and I was in school so just like hearing people referring to other kids as putos, it was interesting to me, because in Portuguese and I guess in many other languages, when a word finishes with an O or with an A it means that an O is a masculine and A is a feminine. So there's me there in this group of friends, acquaintances at school and I thought to myself, why not try to be Portuguese about it and show them that I am actually, you know guess what I'm getting to know your culture and I want to use your words I want to use your sentences. So I start to tell them my story and I wanted to refer back to my past when I was a small kid and there was me hearing this like all those putos, and obviously putos means a boy. What did I think immediately, oh when I was a puta forgetting exactly that puta actually means the same thing in both languages , well in both accents lets say in Portugal and in Brazil. But it was very embarrassing because everyone started looking at me and I had the whole innocence on me to refer to myself as a kid, but using the female version of puto baputa without thinking of the actual meaning of it. So it was very embarrassing, everyone just looked at me.

 

[0:15:20]

PJ Bruno: What's the meaning of it though?

 

[0:15:21]

Speaker 5: Prostitute.

 

[0:15:22]

PJ Bruno: Oh Okay. See I don't speak either language so.

 

[0:15:27]

Speaker 5: Can this be on the podcast?

 

[0:15:28]

PJ Bruno: I think so, I'll try to work it in.

 

[0:15:31]

Speaker 5: Okay.

 

[0:15:32]

PJ Bruno: So you referred to yourself as a prostitute.

 

[0:15:35]

Speaker 5: Exactly.(Laughs)

 

[0:15:40]

PJ Bruno: How can we dig deeper to find out what someone else's values are and what they see as acceptable and familiar. Pellegrino Ricardi cross cultural expert encourages us to ask anything as long as it's with curiosity. Step 1 ask a simple question Step 2 listen to the answer, pick a word and follow up on that word. The only caveat, this will only work with people who are from cultures that like to verbally express themselves. How do you greet new people?

 

[0:16:10]

Speaker 3: I like people to be really casual, I find the formality of meeting new people so awkward and I really freeze with small talk. I hate small talk and actually I think the thing I admire people in terms of the art of conversation is being able to talk about something other than the weather or where you're from or how you got into work that day. And I love it when people just bring really random questions into conversations like, if you were a color what color would you be. I mean it just can be so random but it catches you off guard and you actually find out more about people. I think on the first day it's always nice if you meet someone, or you meet a client for the first time just to be polite but then also get the conversation going around something else as well.

 

[0:16:52]

PJ Bruno0: I think when I wanna include new people I usually just try to hang out with them a little bit. What's really nice in the UK specifically is that you just go to the pub after work, so I try to make an effort and invite people to come along to that. Usually that's been received quite well but depending on who it is, sometimes people are a little bit more shy and they don't feel comfortable doing that kind of stuff, which is fine as well.

 

[0:17:17]

Speaker 4: A nice thing might be a little bit overwhelming, what I tend to do when I speak to someone is also to pull in others around me and sort of help that new person, to introduce them to the wider group and I think that comes back to what I said previously where some people might not naturally want to approach people, so to bring them into a conversation while sort of being there and safeguarding the communication. I think that's typically something that I would do.

 

[0:17:45]

Speaker 3: I think just smile, honestly especially now I work the middle east territory and can you imagine it's really again male dominated. I'm working Israel, I work Dubai, you know these companies all have their own culture fit and I tell you what just a smile goes a long way. It just lets people know as soon as they see, that you're friendly you're approachable. It's a language that everybody speaks, no matter where they're from.

 

[0:18:11]

PJ Bruno: Today is the world day for cultural diversity for dialogue and development. A sanctioned international holiday. The need for diversity and inclusion can take may shapes, but it exists everywhere. Our EMEA team would like to leave you with some helpful tips when working or playing internationally.

 

[0:18:30]

PJ Bruno0: One thing that I would recommend for people visiting Germany or Switzerland is don't be put off by people who are a little bit harsh maybe or who are a little bit direct. Oftentimes it can be harder to make friends, if you let yourself get scared off by the first contact which might be not as friendly or as polite as you would imagine. But just be open to people, somebody doesn't react the way that you're used to that's probably got nothing to do with yourself, it's probably just the culture. Just make sure that you keep trying to interact with people and try not to take offence.

 

[0:19:14]

Speaker 5: So [inaudible] could be not to wait for your turn to talk, because you might never get the chance to speak.

 

[0:19:19]

PJ Bruno0: No just talk.

 

[0:19:20]

Speaker 5: Just if you have something to say just say it.

 

[0:19:23]

Speaker 9: Also touching, touching is [inaudible] it's not unusual when you see someone to rub their arm and be like hi how are you

 

[0:19:33]

Speaker 5: Or you want to get their attention while you're talking because you want somebody to listen more, you would grab his arm.

 

[0:19:40]

Speaker 9: Yes, just give them a wee hit.

 

[0:19:44]

Speaker 3: So I'm going to give my tips for the UK and I think the number 1 thing in the UK, which we're known for is queuing and you really just have to get that down. If you come from an Asian culture where queuing, you might see a picture of it and there's 100 people and it's like first come first served, get in there. If you try and do that in the UK, people will be pretty angry. But the other thing is that people are very un-confrontational in the UK so you won't get like a Hey Man This is My Place In The Queue, you'll just get a dirty look or even nothing, you'll just get a nudge, you know they'll get real angry. People don't like that.

 

[0:20:23]

Speaker 4: Move out of your comfort zone a little bit because ultimately I believe that people are nice, just exposing yourself to other people that you don't know is hopefully going to open up a new world to you.

 

[0:20:36]

PJ Bruno: Happy cultural diversity day, go learn about someone different.

Adam Biehler, VP of Partnerships and BD at mParticle, and Matt McRoberts, SVP of Global Alliances at Braze, join me in San Francisco to discuss the current state of the marketing ecosystem. Matt and Adam provide a brief history on the evolution of data platforms and the shift toward customer-centric strategy.

 

 

 

TRANSCRIPT:

[0:00:18]

PJ Bruno: Hello again, welcome back to Braze for Impact, your MarTech Industry Discussed Digest. This is PJ Bruno, and I'm also with two titans. Adam Biehler, VP of partnerships and BD at mParticle. Adam, how's it going buddy?

 

[0:00:32]

Adam: Great, how you doing there PJ?

 

[0:00:34]

PJ Bruno: I'm doing real well. And also our very own Matt McRoberts, SVP of global alliances at Braze. Matt, thanks for sitting down with us buddy.

 

[0:00:41]

Matt McRoberts: PJ, always a pleasure.

 

[0:00:43]

PJ Bruno: And now here we are a week out from MAU. How did it go all-in-all Adam, you felt good about it?

 

[0:00:48]

Adam: Yeah, it was definitely a fire conference this week. Not a fire festival, though.

 

[0:00:54]

PJ Bruno: Right. Not a fire fest, let's not confuse those. You guys were the presenting sponsor, right? That's kind of a big deal. That's the top-top.

 

[0:01:01]

Adam: Yeah, yeah I mean ... You know, we want to make sure our brand is associated with some of the more up and coming businesses for consumer experience, right? And from our standpoint we look at, you know, the attendees of MAU and ... Really just the thought leadership that comes out of that conference as blazing a path for mobile and for what the next generation of the day-to-day and how we as individuals interact with digital technology and devices.

 

[0:01:31]

PJ Bruno: It was buzzing in there, man. There was a lot of great energy. And also as the presenting sponsor, what are the perks with that, is it dinner with Diplo, did you get anything, do anything?

 

[0:01:40]

Adam: Oh, you're looking for that type of perk.

 

[0:01:43]

PJ Bruno: Fun times. All right well what this really is, this is a partner spotlight episode. So we're really eager to kind of like get into it with Adam and mParticle. Adam I'd love for you to just kind of like give us the backstory. Like I've heard a little bit about the Cats brothers, how you guys are kind of forging the way with CDP. I'd love to hear a little bit about that story, what took you guys here.

 

[0:02:01]

Adam: Yeah. I mean I think that the team here all kind of come from the same belief system around, you know, a couple core aspects of what's going on in the industry today. Data is kind of at the core of everything. What we're also seeing is as cloud and SAS are just continuing to manifest themselves in multiple capacities from like, an application standpoint, that the number of silos that get created just continue to proliferate. And so we've got, you know, a team of people that just believe that business users should be able to take advantage of this wealth of customer data to create competitive advantage; as opposed to being in its place where they know they've got these tools that they potentially could be taking advantage of, but because of some of the past investments or legacy investments you may have made, you're actually more hamstrung and you're watching other businesses that are smaller, more nimble, just pass you by. So ultiMattely, kind of simplifying all that. It comes down to like we want to empower business users to take advantage of customer data they have access to, and we want to allow the developers and engineers of businesses to focus on the core competencies of their business, not worrying about building and maintaining integrations, which are, you know not necessarily the core of their business.

 

[0:03:10]

PJ Bruno: Right. Just Band-Aids all the time.

 

[0:03:12]

Adam: Yeah.

 

[0:03:13]

PJ Bruno: Was that the vision pretty much from the start?

 

[0:03:15]

Adam: I mean, again, I think like even when you look at us in day one we were mobile-centric and, you know, really most of our customers were only doing things on mobile at that point. And, you know, people talk about all the other use cases and, you know, [inaudible] and all this stuff. And it's not about that. It was about the ability to collect customer data for our customers for their ability to collect their customers' data from the place that's as close to the customer as possible, and the most relevant, and to use that to power marketing with great tools like Braze,. And the story is evolved because the channels have evolved. And, you know, web has always been there, but we saw the next generation of customer experience really stemming from mobile. And so you see a lot of investment around OTT and voice. And so all of these other places that, you know, are the next generation, the modern customer experience that we want to be delivering.

 

[0:04:03]

PJ Bruno: It's an exciting time and people are finally starting to catch on, I think.

 

[0:04:06]

Matt McRoberts: Yeah, no, they very much are. Very much.

 

[0:04:09]

PJ Bruno: So Matt, this article you wrote recently "The Six Pillars of the Ecosystem", is there a reason that data and infrastructure is number one? Was there a method to the madness there, or?

 

[0:04:19]

Matt McRoberts: Great question. And Adam addressed a lot of the rhetoric. It's like the idea of silos and keeping your data beholden to different legacy systems. It's prohibitive to really the times of transforMattion. It's now about speed to market, speed to insight, speed to business value. Where CDPs have assumed this position within the new ecosystem it becomes quite critical. Because what they allow in concert with the Brazes of the world is this idea around agility, and agility, it obviously is synonymous with speed. Being able to be agile and focused and democratize that data across all those systems. So if anyone's putting together an ecosystem strategy, they have to look at "How do they standardize data?" "How do they break down the silos?" "How are they able to pump that data into the key parts of their business?" And I think the place, the position, the power that CDPs provide is quite impressive in terms of where they sit today in this ecosystem.

 

[0:05:18]

PJ Bruno: And last we spoke you mentioned about us being in a wash of data. And I guess a CDP could be number one because you need to get that stuff in order, you need to clean house.

 

[0:05:26]

Matt McRoberts: Yeah, I mean think about the integrations, the depth of integrations that a provider like mParticle is going to need to promote. You know, you've got ad ecosystems, you've got martech ecosystems, you have proprietary data warehouses. And to be able to, again, is get that data to work together in concert so you can get to market faster, you can uncover insights, drive business outcomes. Without that layer within the ecosystem it becomes quite difficult. So you can see, like, you know Adam and I joke quite a bit, is the legend and lore and thought leadership and content that is come ... It's a brand new category, it didn't exist, right? And so I think it shows just how quickly this idea around breaking down silos becomes the future is here, and it's now, and we're in a wash of data.

 

[0:06:17]

Adam: Yeah. It, I mean, putting a pin in some of this, like what the CDP ... The Brazes of the world in today's ecosystem are enabling, it's instead of building your business based on what, you know, the technology that you've decided to use, unlocks for you, it's more about build the customer experience that you want to deliver. And then, you know, work into the technology that supports your use cases. So it kind of flips the paradigm for how you actually think about what's important to your business. Not just tech for techs sake, it's tech because it supports an outcome that we know we want to go deliver. And, you know, I think, again, it's all about data, so [inaudible] CDP, CRM, whatever acronym you want to use, I don't care. Let's talk about what you want to do and which tools are going to get you there. And there's always going to be a great tool that can get you there. You know there's this notion of foundational CDP which is where ourselves and a couple others in this space play, and yeah, I think essentially it, again it kind of comes down to we're never going to have an application. We're all about making it super easy for business users to take advantage of data associated to a customer. Because that's what unlocks true business agility.

 

[0:07:22]

Matt McRoberts: Spot on.

 

[0:07:22]

Adam: I talk about customer data agility as a big aspect of where, you know, we help businesses kind of put this foundational piece in place that they now can respond to changing consumer behavior and not have to go, you know, unpack you know, twenty years of legacy investment. They are able to operate nimbly, kind of on top of their stack and bring in the technology that's going to get them to the next generation of growth and compete with, you know, a startup that doesn't have that legacy investment. Like, I don't care what the acronym you want to use is, like what are you here to do? Right. What's the job you perform? What are you unlocking for the business, and it's infrastructure. Some of the guys in the CDP space tend to say that like they've got built in modeling and use cases. That's great. I mean are you really unlocking agility or are you just solving a point application for somebody? And that's a lot of what we say. You know, are you focused on the right systems, the right outcomes for the business that's like ... That's what it all starts with, so let's not talk about tech for tech's sake. I'd kind of just like to get away from that in my perspective. Ecosystems are important because there's so much technology but, you know, they've got to be the right partners and they've got to be the right use cases and the right outcomes that you're trying to drive.

 

[0:08:29]

Matt McRoberts: To Adam's point, being consumer, customer-focused, business outcomes focused, you hear about the retail apocalypse, you hear about disruption, you hear about transforMattion. And then just the associated fear mongering around that, I think we all get our fair share of subject lines that are quite startling in nature, you know, every category is under some massive disruption. And I think with any disruption comes opportunity. And I think, to Adam's, is helping customers understand and educate themselves on these literally new age paradigms around the idea of an ecosystem. I mean we've long talked, I loved Adam's point around what's the acronyms come with a tremendous amount of equity, and they also come with a tremendous amount of debt, right? CRM, right place, right channel, right time, has been around for generations, right? Decades. People have been talking about the construct of what CRM really is. I think Adam hit it on the head is like you can't deliver against that in days of old. Batch data, not in the right channel, not orchestration across channels. And now you have this expectation, especially from the consumer, is like there's all the importance of getting it right, but there's also the importance of getting it wrong, as well, as we will all talk about experiences as consumers, as well as business professionals, where we feel the experience was broken. And Adam hit it on the head. If you're data strategy is standardize, is uniform, is agile, then you're just inherently going to be able to deliver against these higher expectations with, as it relates to consumers. And so I think there is fear, right? It's like we've all seen the social amplification of a poorly executed campaign that consumers will again, is will very much put you out into their domain and talk about what went wrong. There's the idea of the death of retail and how over-pronounced that is. The evolution of direct to consumer brands, is like all that can be quite startling and scary to the traditional marketing organizations. So I think the opportunity for, that I think is incumbent upon out organizations, "How do you educate customers in a really powerful way?" "How do you make them feel informed, derive insights, so that they can start to make the best decisions, the best investments?"

 

[0:10:54]

Adam: It's an interesting dynamic, too. Because, you know, as we look at just how this all plays out, you know. There is so much noise. And, you know, our opinion on all of this is like, we've got to just cut through the noise. Like we're going to help these businesses understand that this is not a threat or a risk, this is actually your opportunity to take your business to the next level and become the leader. It's' a competitive advantage, if done right. And so from us it's about how. We all know, that everybody wants their customer 360. You've got data silos, that's been around forever. The reasons are because the channels continue to proliferate. The platforms are continuing to proliferate. So what do you need? You need to have people that have really good understanding of the data that powers these different pieces, and great technology that can scale with your business, and then that can help you get to the end state that you want to get to. Label it whatever you want to.

 

[0:11:42]

Matt McRoberts: Now it's a really good point is where CDPs have assumed a position of prominence is in the fallout of DMPs, right? Like [crosstalk]

 

[0:11:50]

Adam: Take us back there.

 

[0:11:51]

Matt McRoberts: Yeah, and like Adam, I'll kind of borrow from his story, right? Like see whether it's customer data platform or see whether it's customer relationship management. Like customer's at the forefront of that, and I think where DMPs lost their way was third party data. The world has very much calibrated around the power and the prominence of first party data. And I think, the idea of probabilistic models, that it's like "Ahh, I think maybe PJ is this person?" Is very much moved into this idea of really deterministic, and like the lifeline of that is literally around first party data. And so whether it's a CDP or a, you know, a new-age CRM tool like a Braze, is the literal lifeline is the ability to leverage first party data and it's been startling to see how quickly the concept of a DMP has distilled away into, again, the power of a CDP and again the juxtaposition is the data set. Like, how do you start to really leverage first party data, as opposed to make assumptions off dated antiquated third party data, which was historically the foundation of the DMPs of the worlds.

 

[0:13:01]

Adam: The stakes if you do it wrong are just too high at this point. Like we talk about CX and customer experience, you know it definitely starts there. And that has business impact. But when you start talking about, you know, compliance and regularity impact and how you market to customers. And you look at GDPR and CCPA and just [inaudible] that's not going to stop either, right? So, again, when you kind of talk about the customer ... Centricity aspect of it, you have to have data at the core of how you build your business. And DMPs, they just didn't have those challenges. And again, they were great, and they still have some very applicable use cases. Not going to say like, you don't need a DMP for a lot of things. Like there's a lot of things they do do really well, but they weren't built to give you a framework for how you associate customer data to a user profile and to dynamically be able to use identities that are those customers that are provided in a compliant and regulatory safe way, with your first party marketing systems. It's' a very different challenge. And they're also not built in a way where it's like "That's going to change again". Like, what you got today is absolutely going to be different six months from now [crosstalk], twelve months from now. And so, do you want, yeah, kind of like your insurance layer, to a [crosstalk]. You've got to future proof, right? That's the move.

 

[0:14:14]

PJ Bruno: Right on.

 

[0:14:14]

Matt McRoberts: Yeah, no, I mean picking up on that, you know the kind of ongoing compliance environment is again is that in itself to be scary, right? Because it comes with the consumerization of that. There's a more pronounced understanding at the literal consumer level, right, like I know "Hey listen, as a consumer I want to be sensitive to what type of data is being tracked regarding me." And then you have this regulatory fear that if you get it wrong is like there's tremendous fines associated with that. So I think that kind of fear mongering, you can flip that and make that empowering and how do you help enterprises understand this ongoing onslaught of compliance evolution. And how are we all good corporate citizens to advance an all boats rise philosophy. We're dropping it.

 

[0:15:00]

PJ Bruno: Dude, you guys are just firing shots across the table right now. So since we're in the way back machine a little bit here talking about DMPs, Adam I'd love to hear a little bit more about ... You know, what brought you to mParticle? Some of your time at MuleSoft, how did that world compare to this? Even like, three or four years ago, it seems like it was an entirely different business, right?

 

[0:15:18]

Adam: Yeah. I mean if you look at even, yeah, probably the last eight years at this point. If you go back, this notion of you know, API led approach for how connectivity is accomplished for businesses, you know some companies were thinking about it, APIs were starting to be more proliferated in the ecosystem, but you weren't seeing the rapid adoption, you weren't seeing standardization around how people build APIs and all that. So, you know, we'll go back to that world where, you know, there's a lot of on premise technology and it's very much the world we still live in. So when I say go back, this is very much ongoing. I came from a place where as an operator I'd actually, I was doing a little bit of the marketing, we were 25 people, I was doing some of the sales, I Was doing some of the post sales. And I'm working across our marketing autoMattion system, Amarcetto, and then I've got Salesforce. Again, this is like almost pre-MuleSoft at this point. We've got ZenDesk for case management. And so I'm thinking about all these things, and, you know, I'm 24 years old, kid out of college, I don't really know what's going on here. I'm like "There's got to be an easier way to get the data to flow versus me manually sitting here." Fast-forward a couple years, I'm at MuleSoft, talking to these companies about how the challenges they have at scale, like you're an enterprise you have, you know, 50,000 people that are using employee management systems, Legacy SAP on prem ERP, right? You might have a custom database from IBM. And those challenges are very very different than the world we live in today. That challenge still needs to be accomplished. Nobody's ripping out those, you know, billions of dollars of investment where your data sat on premise and you've fell like you've got, you know, the right level of control over it. But you need to be able to augment that and compliment that. But I look at MuleSoft and you know, I think that they were kind of paving the way for what customer experience can be today, and they still do, right? Like they are helping businesses that have traditionally been very much kind of these on premise oriented businesses that didn't have a digital presence, you know, digitize their offline assets and you know make them available to the cloud through APIs. And what ends up happening is now you have a new breed of developer in the world. And the developers of today can take advantage of the assets that are in these systems that a 21 year old kid out of college would have no idea how to go program against this on premise system, to build a new cool cloud app. But because you've got these APIs that are exposed from the back end, you can now start doing that. Use that data to expose new applications. You know, fast forward a couple of years, you start thinking about "Okay, well there's this next generation of what is the customer experience connectivity challenge look like?" Because the proliferation of all the on prem systems and then these SAAS systems in the platforms that are actually where customers are engaging, it's the same kind of variation in terms of like where data's coming from, where data needs to get to. But the differences now we're thinking about it from a very customer-centric perspective. It's not about just developer re-usability. You know there's a, absolutely a place where [inaudible] compliment a company like that. Like, they're not even in the same space from this standpoint. Like, I know this better than anybody. But I get asked this all the time. Like, they're an unbelievable company and where we think about it it's about "Okay, how do you take it a step further and break down the customer data connectivity challenges?" And so insuring that the integrations that you're unlocking are oriented around the notion of a customer.

 

[0:18:27]

PJ Bruno: It's just, it's just as silly to talk about customer centricity as kind of a new thing or like a pivot for companies as a focus. But ...

 

[0:18:36]

Matt McRoberts: And that's been our thing, we've been saying that for years now, haven't we? You know that's been our-[crosstalk]

 

[0:18:41]

PJ Bruno: I remember the first breakfast we had, it was like week one. Talking about customer centricity.

 

[0:18:45]

Matt McRoberts: It seems so [crosstalk] two point, it seems so simple. Yeah. Literally our first breakfast talking about, we're BD guys, like how do you help kind of effectively, again, build an ecosystem strategy manager channel. And I thought, you know I'll give Adam the credit. It was like "Hey the lens should be what's best for the customer." Everyone wins. That's the reality. That's what's driving this growth. This kind of constant evolution of tech and kind of where it sits is like if you run it through the lens of the customer, you know, provides a natural north star, a natural compass for success.

 

[0:19:15]

Adam: Yeah, otherwise we just make our own consumer experience shit. [crosstalk] Frankly, right? [crosstalk] Like the term CDP sounds big, it sounds scary, you know at the end of the day it's not about the acronym it's about the outcomes you can deliver for our company. And like [crosstalk] we just, we think about it very much from that standpoint. And ... You know everybody can build software today. Like, there'll be another CDP tomorrow that's claiming it. It's not about that. It's about what're you here to solve for the customer, you're here to unlock the ability to take care of data. That's ... That's what we're here to do. You know I think we've kind of blazed the trail in terms of how for this next generation of consumer facing brands they can do that. Buy you've got to start small, too.

 

[0:19:55]

Matt McRoberts: I think you're right, though. The idea of transforMattion is a journey. It's going to be measured, and it's like it gets back to your point around agility, is like the concept of a platform allows you to fail face to iterate SAAS just inherently, because it's high growth, it's sell sell sell. But you also have to be quite realistic in terms of some of these transforMattive agendas are three, four, five years long. They're being driven by a new age services organization [inaudible] management consultancies, the next iteration of SIs. And I think you're right, you know. Again, I'd go back to that customer centricity. But being agile, being realistic, helping people to make those right decisions. Because you're right, if it's about understanding a CDP it's not the right dimension, it's about understanding how you can make your business more flexible, more agile, in these transforMattive times.

 

[0:20:46]

PJ Bruno: Adam, Mattt, thanks for being with me today.

 

[0:20:48]

Adam: All right, thank you.

At MAU 2019 in Las Vegas, we set up our Tell All Zone for members of the martech community to give us their confessions. Hear about the biggest mistakes they've made as well as what they learned along the way. Bill Magnuson (CEO and founder of Braze) and Mike Molinet (COO and founder of Branch) give their insight on the need for mistakes and making them a foundation for growth and agility.

 

 

 

TRANSCRIPT:

[0:00:18]

PJ Bruno: Hi. Welcome to brace for impact. I'm your host, PJ Bruno. This week we brought our mics out to Las Vegas for MAU 2019 at MGM Grand, and we were able to gather some confessions for this weeks episode, when shift hits the fan. When you're running a marketing campaign, it's like having a global megaphone at your fingertips. The power of hitting launch, and communicating with hundreds of thousands of people at once can't be undervalued. However, that power can also be terrifying. One fall step can have far reaching impact on customer engagement and faith in your brand. But making a mistake is a hallmark of what it means to be human. So, the sooner we can embrace the idea that mistakes are a given, this sooner we can perceive them as what they actually are. Opportunities for growth. After all, true innovation isn't possible without taking a risk. The following are a series of confessions from various employees in the Martec community. We've given them a safe space to share some of their blunders and the learnings that came along with them. These are their stories.

 

[0:01:23]

Speaker 1: So, I'm Dante Ledbetter. I'm the senior marketing manager at Fintech company. One experience that is really sort of embarrassing for me was, so I was running a campaign, and you know there's like first name personalization where you can sort of test it and see what it looks like with your name in it. And I accidentally put my fist name in an email and sent that email with my first name to about 3000 people. So, yeah that was pretty horrible.

 

[0:01:53]

PJ Bruno: So, you called 3000 people Dante.

 

[0:01:55]

Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, essentially. And My coworker...I actually didn't know about it but my coworker got the email and she was like "hey, Dante" I'm like "what, what?" Luckily...

 

[0:02:09]

Speaker 2: So, my name is Beth. I work in product marketing for a tech company that makes API's. I messed up last year when I sent out a press release before it was officially approved. I had sent it out for a time and a date that we had previously agreed on before there were changes that came down from the powers that be. And so, because I didn't change the time and the date, guess what happened? It went live. Not the end of the world, but I got a little hand slap. Always double check your times and your dates.

 

[0:02:42]

PJ Bruno: Always, right?

 

[0:02:43]

Speaker 2: Always, always always.

 

[0:02:46]

Speaker 3: So, my name's Will Cracker. I run our customer experience team at Braes. To protect the innocent, PJ, I hope you understand I can't use names here, you know?

 

[0:02:56]

PJ Bruno: It's an admirable thing that you're doing, I appreciate it.

 

[0:02:59]

Speaker 3: It's important. A customer decided to send out...have you ever gotten a test notification from internally at store

 

[0:03:08]

PJ Bruno: Sure, with the brackets "test" in big letters?

 

[0:03:11]

Speaker 3: Now, imagine if you were the person in the company that accidentally sent that out to, I don't know, forty or fifty million people all at once. That's one horror story I've seen, where we've had tests go out and push notification to the entire user base of this major media brand. And of course internally we're all like "oh God, this isn't good. Like they're going to be really upset" but low and behold it was really funny because this brand actually came back to us and we were like "we're so sorry, we're so sorry this happened. What can we do?" And they're like "actually it's all good." We're like "what? Why was it all good?" And it turned out it was their best performing campaign of that half of the year because so many people engaged with it because they were like "what the hell's going on? This is weird "Test" from this company? Are you kidding me?" And so many people clicked on it and engaged with the app that it actually worked. The take away from that one is that, you know so many times, so many brands out there are just like so afraid of tweaking their customer experience a little bit, or tweaking their branding or tweaking the way they talk to their customers and that just shows that, especially in a one off basis, you can get away with a lot. You can get away with just really coming out of left field and trying something new and different and really standing out from the crowd matters. Should you use just the word "test" to do it? Probably not, but uh...

 

[0:04:28]

Speaker 4: I'm Maddie. I am an associate communications director at a mobile shopping app. Okay, so it's hard to choose just one over the years, but one that definitely sticks out is a dormancy email campaign that we were sending to people who lapsed after 45 days I believe, and we had a server side bug come up where the campaign started triggering over and over again for our dormant users and the subject line of the email was "First name, did we do something wrong?" And we literally sounded like a psycho ex that was hitting people up over and over again. We sent it to some people I think over a hundred times in a row. So, it was just like "Maddie, did we do something wrong? Maddie, did we do something wrong?"

 

[0:05:21]

PJ Bruno: Did anyone respond "Yes".

 

[0:05:23]

Speaker 4: Yeah

 

[0:05:24]

PJ Bruno: You had a lot of those?

 

[0:05:25]

Speaker 4: Oh like social media, everybody was posting it and they were like "yeah, you are doing something wrong, like leave me alone. We didn't feel like it was appropriate to send more emails to them apologizing to them, but we apologized to the app itself and gave them a little extra bonus in there and said "our bad, we didn't mean to sound so crazy there." It doesn't hurt to put some additional safety guards on your campaigns, so frequency capping for example, you might not thing that it's going to trigger a lot of times within a small period of time, but it happened so, Coding in any liquid and putting on some filters just to allow for some buffering in those situations that you don't necessarily expect is something that we learned from that. So, adding that to more campaigns moving forward.

 

[0:06:09]

Speaker 5: yeah, my name is Donald and I'm a CR Manager for a delivery service app based in Austin Texas called Favor and we had a bit of a fun snafoo in the last 6 months with a little Q/A targeting issue with a push campaign before where there was a campaign that was supposed to be going to people who had received another campaign and the filtering got flipped and it actually went to, was targeting people who did not receive. So, we're talking you know, a 50K audience turned into about a 600K audience. So luckily though the campaign was pretty generic and would have been open to any of our customers regardless, but we definitely lost out on some of the learnings from the campaign that it was supposed to be targeted to on the incrementality side, but it was a good learning on just with all the 10-20 campaigns we're trying to launch in a day, make sure you meticulously look at each on in the filtering for sure before you're hitting launch, so.

 

[0:07:08]

PJ Bruno: Was the engagement decent on it?

 

[0:07:09]

Speaker 6: I'm Adee. I'm an engineer turned sales engineer. So, the first time I was at an event my boss told me that we should probably get some customers to eat dinner with us and it was my first event, first time talking to customers, wasn't an engineer before and I was like coming up to people, talking about my company and asking if they wanted to go out to dinner, and I approached this girl and I said the whole shpeal of this is what we do, if you want to come for dinner and she was like thinking that I'm hitting on her and just ran away.

 

[0:07:43]

PJ Bruno: Jesus. And so what was the big learning moment from that. What was the take away that you

 

[0:07:49]

Speaker 6: not to ask people for dinner.

 

[0:07:54]

PJ Bruno: Do it in email.

 

[0:07:57]

Speaker 7: I'm Cody. I sell software at a fast growing company. I guess the time I had a blunderous mistake, one that really really sticks out to me is y young and early in my sales career, which was I guess just 4 years ago, I was working in consulting prior. Just got in, moved up to San Francisco, got a job, thought I was really ready for this. 2nd day on the job we were tasked with leaving voicemails, you know just giving the pitch. And they've pretty much curated this list of people that were surely not to answer the phone, you can leave, you can you know just run free on this and just, you just give a great pitch. And of course I go in a phone booth, get the call list, first guy I call, I'll never forget, I won't disclose the company but it was the CMO at a pretty important company for I don't know why the were on this list but, ring ring ring, hey this is Tyler, and I just completely froze and I actually thought I saw a ghost and I'm like "uh uh..." click and just hung up and I was so scared man. You told me this guys not gonna answer. And he answered sure enough and it was pretty PRST but my take away from that I think we talked about was 1)in life I just like to grab the bull by the horns I think honestly, I probably would have done a lot better of a job if I'd have tried rather than just hanging the phone up and next always prepare. Be prepared in this life and don't just, even if it's you know, in hind sight I think I could have done a little bit more instead of them telling me what to do, I think I could have don't a little bit of work on my own, and maybe just not hung up like an idiot.

 

[0:09:39]

PJ Bruno: So, do the ramifications of a mistake vary depending on the product? Kevin Wong, VP of product at Braes offered me some of his insights.

 

[0:09:50]

Kevin Wang: I think one of the really interesting things about product is that you tend to release things with a lot more early pre thought going in them, I think than say like any mail newsletter. Like, everyone knows if you're sending out a newsletter, you write this content pretty frequently. Or if you're sending out like a particular promotion, you're probably running a lot of promotions, and so it's bang bang bang and these things are going out fast. Whereas for product, you know we release fast, we build quickly, but there's a lot more pre thought that goes into it. And so what that means though is that when a mistake comes out, if there's an issue, in the court of public opinion, you're just not standing on the same ground that you would have been with that newsletter with the weird typo, where you know, hello--first name because you know that email is a femoral but that product, you got a while to look at this, like everyone kind of knows that in the court of public opinion that you are thinking about it going in. And so, and the other thing is that when the wrong communication goes out, that communication goes out there but, but then its' gone and it's sort of you're already in that mode of it being a little more femoral and it's already in your past once you see it. As opposed to a product where its like that's just sitting at you, you know all buggy not rendering right in front of you, and so I think back to some of the times earlier in my career, no names to protect the innocent, but you know those times when you launch something and everything looks good for a few hours then you get that phone call in the middle of the night and when that phone call comes in, you know you see who it's from and you just know that you're not good enough friends but they want to hang out. You know what's coming before you even pick it up. Before you even look at the text and what could be really fun about a deep product bug or like a deep engineering bug, especially a rare one is that like finding a weird leak in your house or like finding out that you know the sewage system in your house is having a problem where you know what the problem is, you can see the symptoms really obviously, but like what's actually going on, I don't know. Gonna need some gloves and a wrench and we're just gonna have to kind of figure this whole thing out an night, and so it's a different sort of exciting sort of problem and of course it comes with the business, but I think that the main thing that you learn is that each mistake that gets made, I mean something that they say often about senior engineers is that like all senior engineers have seen a lot of stuff and over time I think you just get that osmosis and that wisdom and you sort of become the old grisold lion on savanna that's just seen so much crazy crap happen that you can kind of see around corners.

 

[0:12:31]

PJ Bruno: So, the more mistakes we see, the better equipped we actually are to trouble shoot problems in the future. My high school soccer coach always used to say "you learn a hell of a lot more from losing than you do from winning." I sat down with tech founders, Bill Magnuson of Braze and Mike Molinet of Branch to hear their thoughts on mitigating risk and the merits of error.

 

[0:12:53]

Mike Molinet: As a founder you guys know that things go wrong all the time and that's pretty much what your job is, to fix all those things and catch them. Especially when you're moving really quickly. I'd say one of the most probable ones was in late 2014, early 2015 when we were still relatively new and still ramping up, we had a small team, and we were starting to scale and started to close some big customers, but our infrastructure couldn't really handle them so we were constantly going down, constantly apologizing and then going and putting things back up. I remember one day we were about maybe 10 employees and a large customer went live and it totally took down our entire infrastructure and we were just sitting there, you know 3 people, trying to figure out what the hell to do, how to get this thing back up. We had a guy, and engineer who's still with us, who was interviewing at the time and we had him break out his laptop and help us troubleshoot in the middle of the interview, trying to get the infrastructure back up. We ended up you know, getting through it and I think there's a number of learnings that came out of that. One is things are always gonna go wrong and as long as you move quickly to fix them, that's okay. 2nd, try, you're gonna move fast but try not to hurt your customers too much or take them down with you. But I think the 3rd that really came out of it afterwards was, people are okay and accepting of issues or bugs, or challenges as long as you take ownership over them. As long as you work quickly to fix them and resolve them and are honest and transparent about it and I think that was one of the biggest things that we did, which was we took full ownership over it, we were honest and transparent about it and we apologized and we told them exactly what we were going to do to prevent it in the future and people actually value that a lot, vs. if you try to hide or you try to blame someone else your or don't tell them.

 

[0:14:37]

PJ Bruno: Right. Try to cover it up with something.

 

[0:14:38]

Mike Molinet: Yeah yeah, people do not appreciate that, so it helped definitely rebuild the trust and I think we came out stronger in the end because of it.

 

[0:14:47]

PJ Bruno: Bill what do you think, does that spark any thoughts on the early days?

 

[0:14:49]

Bill Magnuson: Yeah, definitely, you know ours was really a story of starting to the learn the responsibility that you have when you have a really big system operating on the internet. We have a future called connected content and what it allows you to do is, when you're sending out a message at send time, we can reach out to another web service or 3rd party or a partner or something in our customers eco system and pull back content in real time to template into the message. SO we had a customer early on that wanted to use a translation service and they had you know, a pretty complex email that they were building out. They wanted to be able to translate different parts of it based on the you know, hundreds of different combinations of languages and locals. And when our system gets up and running, it sends messages very fast. It's what it was built to do and we actually in the process of sending this campaign, we hit the translation service so quickly that we took it down. And not only did we take down the API, but this poor company hadn't isolate their API's from their own website. SO we actually took their website off the internet. And you know this was a scenario where they also didn't, they thought they were under attack, and so it was like you said the transparency there and taking ownership over it. We reached out to them and told them what happened and we actually went back and modified the campaign but it was an interesting experience for us because we realized that the scale that we were operating at, we needed to be a good citizen on the internet, basically. We couldn't have our customers being able to point kind of the massive machine gun of our system at you know random services and potentially taking them down. And so we actually over time also then developed automatic backups. If we see a service start to slow down while we are using it, we will slow down. If we see a service start to respond with errors, we'll completely stop, take our foot off the gas. We'll alert people and you know its' not the only service we've taken down and we learn every time on how to mitigate that potential in the future, but it was definitely an interesting learning experience for us.

 

[0:16:50]

PJ Bruno: Nice. Had to put up a lot of safe guards after that I bet, right?

 

[0:16:53]

Bill: Absolutely

 

[0:16:53]

PJ Bruno: That's a lot of power you're working with.

 

[0:16:55]

Mike: That reminds me of a time not too long ago where we made an update to one of our link services and for a brief period we found that accidentally in some cases all the traffic when people were clicking on links was re directly to the branch website, which was great for our website traffic for you know, a good 30 minutes, but for our customers who were using

 

[0:17:14]

Bill: Marketing [inaudible] through the roof

 

[0:17:16]

Mike: Yeah exactly. For a specific type of link that redirecting was not so good. So, I think the lesson there learned was it wasn't an engineer that pushed the change, it was somebody else that modified the change and pushed it to get up and we rolled it out into production even though we had tested it, but we had to pull back really quickly. That was pretty fascinating.

 

[0:17:38]

PJ Bruno: So when it comes to, I mean obviously you two, you guys have high expectations of your team and their performance. How do you balance that, like having those high expectations on a performance, but still creating that culture to where it's okay to make mistakes and realizing the merit of risk and stuff.

 

[0:17:54]

Mike: Yeah, I think working in a fast paced start of up like ours you have to be okay taking risks, you have to take risks, you have to make mistakes and I'll tell you that no one makes more mistakes than me and my co founders, we make the most mistakes out of anyone. I think there's a couple things, those 2 things aren't necessarily mutually exclusive, they you can really create an environment where you can have strong results and have good high expectations but also have a place where people are okay taking risks. I think there's a couple things that we do. The first is we try to set very clear expectations. So yo can have strong results but strong results really come from what are the expectations and are you meeting them. And by setting very clear expectations and also holding accountability, you can push people to really perform at a very high level, but when people do screw up, in a way you have to celebrate learnings, you have to celebrate the mistakes, you have to celebrate what went wrong. You have to make sure people know it's okay, you have to tell them it's okay. If you do need to correct something, you should do it private. This is something we've gotten a lot better at, not in a public slack channel saying "why the hell did you do this" but rather privately having a discussion and saying "what lead you to this" and also I think asking them how you can help them and trying to trying to actually understand why they made that decision, and telling them in the future, this is how I might think about it and I think that's gone a long way. Because I thin we've read a lot of studies and there's lot of studies about this but basically around the highest performing teams and the most common trait between them and it's psychological safety and having a place where it's okay to make mistakes and people feel psychologically safe, allows them to take risks and to move really quickly and to feel okay about making mistakes because if they don't have that psychological safety, they're never going to and you'll find that you slow down a lot and you no longer are iterating or innovating as quickly as you used to.

 

[0:19:40]

Bill: And I think for us from high level starting point, one of our values is conviction and what that is, or the way that that comes into being is that it's a charge to, our employees that if they find that hey are not able to operate with conviction, that they, you know, raise their hand, they go to their managers, if they need a new skillset if they need new resources, if they need more training if they need better access to data, you know all of these are ways that kind of people get that confidence to be able to operate within uncertainty and a fast growing start up environment, you've got a lot of dynamic conditions, you've got a lot of uncertainty and you know that ability to follow through and execute on something and be able to take action and get it to the finish line, despite all that uncertainty and despite those dynamic conditions, I think is one of the few properties that start ups really have as a strength against established incombants that have much more scale like many more resources and I think when things then go wrong, you know it's important that everyone is able to understand that they were operating in uncertainty, that you know, we don't have perfect information, we can't always predict the future and we need to create an environment where you know we can approach those things and say did the process, you know, lets set aside the outcome, and let's set aside judgements about the outcome. Let's look at the process and the approach, you know, did the person that took the risk, did they do it in a way that was balanced, did they have access to the resources that would have given them a good chance at being successful and really kind of analyzing it from that perspective as opposed to only looking at the outcomes, because I think that you want people to be confident that if they've got the right ingredients in place, if they you know have that certain level of you know conviction or confidence, that they should be able to take an action in an uncertain environment and if the outcome ends up negative, that what we judge is the process and the contributions in the approach.

 

[0:21:24]

PJ Bruno: Any final words to tech founders out there that might be starting off from the road that you guys have come so far?

 

[0:21:32]

Bill: I mean, one of the things that I think about a lot, you know we're around 350 employees, we're approaching that right now. And one of the things that changes quite a bit as you go from the early days you know when you're, you've got a runway that's, you're fast reaching the end of it, you know you don't necessarily know where your next meal is going to come from and you've gotta just survive, is that in the early days, fragility in terms of not having redundancies in place is being really lean, being really efficient is the only option because you're competing against a landscape of other people that are willing to be fragile. But then over time what you need to do is understand when you need to shift from that to becoming and enduring institution and one with durability. And so an interesting, just a simple example is that having multiple people responsible for one thing in and early start up that's only 10 people could be the difference in your cash burn between you making it to the next financing round or not, whereas when you're a few hundred people, only having 1 person doing something is potential risk of the business because you've got too much key person risk there and knowing when you can actually accept those types of risks and knowing when you need to build an environment that is durable to them and making sure that you're making that transition at the right times as your company grows, I think is vital to being able to scale an enduring institution.

 

[0:22:52]

Mike: I think that's spot on. I would definitely agree with that and we're approaching 300 and we're going through that right now. Some other things, I think 1, especially for founders, I think 1 biased for action, just always take action. Don't sit there and analyze things too long. Some momentum even if it's in the wrong direction is actually than not even starting in the first place, and then the 2nd thing to be aware of is you know, we're talking about starting a company that you start as a couple founders and then you grow to a couple hundred employees and what I've found is, as a founder if you, in the beginning you want that, you want to be big. You want to raise money, you want to have a bunch of customers, but really as you go through it, you actually realize a lot of it sucks and I think the most important part is you need to have the psychological, or the mentality oft you need to constantly be reinventing yourself as a founder because as a founder of 4 people or a 4 person company, you're job is very different that when it's at 50 people, which is very different than when you cross 100, which is very different then as you approach 200 and 300 and beyond, and so you not only have to change your responsibilities and what you do, you need to reinvent yourself and your psychology and your mindset and actually figure out what you enjoy doing, right, because in the beginning, I never had to do HR meetings, I never had to do one on ones, I never had to like sit with people. I just like was at my keyboard all day and same thing with Alex, right. He was coding everything. And as the company has grown, he's no longer coding, I'm no longer at my desk anymore. I spend all day in one on ones and with customers. Alex spends all day managing his folks, and so it's a totally different job and I think as a founder you need to be mentally prepared for that, where if you actually are successful, your job is going to be very different 6 months, 12 months, 18 months and years down the road and so just be prepared for that and always reinvent yourself as the company grows.

 

[0:24:34]

Bill: Yeah and I think that at a meta level, as a founder and as a just a leader in general in a dynamic environment, what you need to do is be able to embrace the change for the changes sake as well. You know I think one of the reasons that I love technology and working in technology is that you're constantly solving new problems with new tools. You know you're able to kind of build on the shoulders of giants, like take new innovations, multiply them with your own creativity and drive and really drive toward and impact. And a growing company is exactly the same thing. You are getting new capabilities, new teams, new people, new specializations, new skillsets and you're able to go and solve new problems and it's exciting to be a part of that change. But you need to appreciate that it is in fact constantly changing.

 

[0:25:17]

PJ Bruno: New teams and new tools will always breed new problems.but we can't let that fear of the unknown hinder our momentum or stifle our innovation. We must enter the void headstrong, prepared to reinvent ourselves as new frontiers expand far beyond our view. In a highly competitive landscape with constant advances intact. Playing it safe has become a more dangerous play than taking a chance. Just be sure it's a calculated risk and a documented result. We'll see you next time.

[0:25:48]

Dan Head (CRO) and Robbie Matthews (Director of Integrations and Onboarding) join me in foggy Londontown to chat about the evolution of marketing, from old world email and DMPs to flexible architecture that is channel agnostic. Learn the nitty gritty of why new school tech is leaving legacy clouds in the dust. Dan also hints at a future of talking toothbrushes and Robbie shares his data dreams. 

 

 

 

TRANSCRIPT:

[0:00:17]

PJ Bruno: Hello again. Welcome back to Braze For Impact, your weekly tech industry discussed digest. This week, we're here in London, in our London office and I'm thrilled to have with me two close friends, Dan Head, Chief Revenue Officer at Braze. Hey Dan.

 

[0:00:33]

Dan Head: Hey PJ. It's good to see you.

 

[0:00:35]

PJ Bruno: And also, Robbie Matthews, Director of Integrations and Onboarding. Robbie, how you doing?

 

[0:00:40]

Robbie Matthews: Good, how are you?

 

[0:00:41]

PJ Bruno: I'm quite well. And I know it's a bit of a canned response, but I got to say, the weather's unbelievable here. I've been getting all this bad intel about bad weather and this is unreal.

 

[0:00:51]

Robbie Matthews: You got a British tan?

 

[0:00:52]

PJ Bruno: Yeah, exactly. I don't know how. I literally got sunburnt yesterday. It's ridiculous.

 

[0:00:57]

Robbie Matthews: It's all lies. Fake news.

 

[0:00:59]

PJ Bruno: Well, you know, coming into Easter weekend, how you guys feeling? Happy Easter, by the way. I don't know if you guys celebrate. Plans for the weekend? Any...

 

[0:01:08]

Robbie Matthews: We tend to celebrate confectionary throughout the year, anyway. So, we can eat chocolate eggs this weekend, too.

 

[0:01:13]

PJ Bruno: I notice in the lobby, there. You guys are loaded up. What we're going to talk about today, really, it's kind of like the evolution of marketing technology and more than that, we want to demystify a lot of the things. Because you hear a lot of snap terminology, a lot of jargon, but let's actually break it down and understand what we're talking about, using the facts. And, before we jump in, I love... you know, Robbie, I know you eat, sleep, and breathe data, or so says your girlfriend.

 

[0:01:42]

Robbie Matthews: I thought you may bring this up.

 

[0:01:45]

PJ Bruno: Yeah, can you just give us that anecdote really quick?

 

[0:01:49]

Robbie Matthews: So, Dan's already smiling at me.

 

[0:01:53]

Dan Head: I'm not familiar with this one.

 

[0:01:54]

Robbie Matthews: So, I was sleeping the other day and I woke up and my girlfriend was just staring at me, like a puzzled face. I was like, "Why are you looking at me whilst I'm sleeping? Firstly, that's a bit weird." And she was like, "Do you realize what you've been talking about for last two minutes?" And I was like, "What you talking about?" She said, "Oh, you've just been sleep talking about, like, piping data into various places and where you should send data to, and this is how you send data." And I was like, "I need to get some better dreams."

 

[0:02:23]

Dan Head: Need to cash in that brace therapy reimbursement.

 

[0:02:25]

Robbie Matthews: Or she needs to find a new boyfriend, is what she needs to do.

 

[0:02:29]

PJ Bruno: Well, that's her journey and that's for her to decide. But, anyway, I'm glad you were able to share that with us, thanks bud.

 

[0:02:35]

Robbie Matthews: Thanks, PJ.

 

[0:02:36]

PJ Bruno: Yeah. So, let's jump right into it. Best place to start, where we came from as far as marketing tech. You know, Dan, you're old. Why don't you tell us...

 

[0:02:48]

Robbie Matthews: Everybody says that.

 

[0:02:51]

PJ Bruno: But you still look so good. We were saying, "Tell me your moisturizer, because I need to get some of that."

 

[0:02:55]

Robbie Matthews: What's a face care regime?

 

[0:02:56]

Dan Head: I'm embalmed.

 

[0:02:57]

PJ Bruno: Yeah. I just let snails crawl over my face every night. It's a beautiful thing. So, how do we move from email to the concept of a stack, or an ecosystem. Do you think you can talk about this a little bit, Dan?

 

[0:03:10]

Dan Head: Yeah. I think it goes back to the perspective that businesses have had on just these technologies from the ground up. Historically, I think companies have looked at providing communications on channels like email as being a utility. You know, you set up a business, I need seats and chairs and desks. I need water coming out the taps and electricity. And I need a way of sending email. And, when the marketers have wanted to have these tools to communicate to their customers, they've asked the IT teams to provide this technology, and the IT teams have gone out and procured that technology. So, over time, a stack of tech debt has built up, if you like. By acquiring these utilities, acquiring technologies for these channels and finding ways to stitch all of that together. Which is, if you like, a ground up, let's just go get the bricks and build the house, sort of thing. But, unfortunately, the world's different now, because every year, CES throws millions of new channels at us, you know? It's connected wind screens, it's connected forks and toothbrushes and all sorts of other crazy stuff. And, businesses just can't keep acquiring channel specific tech anymore. It needs to be data centric, it needs to be customer centric. Because, all of us as individuals have got our preferences about how we want to communicate with brands. And so, now we're moving away from a utility plumbing based approach, to a customer centric data oriented approach. And, that is how, I guess, the modern concept of a vertically integrated stack has been born.

 

[0:04:55]

PJ Bruno: Yeah. And, obviously there's these advances in technology, we're going way more mobile, right? But, there has to be those that are lifting up the torch and kind of pushing us forward. And putting that pressure on legacy, right? You called them the role models, yesterday.

 

[0:05:12]

Dan Head: That's right. Because there are businesses that have been born into this new environment. When you order your on demand taxi, or you order your on demand pizza take-away, whatever, when you're looking for a date, these are technologies and services that haven't existed previously. They've been born into the device. And, you look inside those companies, and the teams and the people and their KPI's and the technology, it's completely different from a legacy enterprise business. And, if those companies don't get customer orientation and data driven communication correct, it's an existential problem for them. They haven't got another business model to fall back on. And so they become, and this is why I see them as role models, they become role models for more classic enterprises. And, that would be my advice to any long standing enterprise, is to go look at those companies and see how they do it. It's a good place to start.

 

[0:06:10]

PJ Bruno: Do you think they're actually, these bigger legacy companies, do you think they're actually interested in completely reworking their tech? Or does it feel like stitch up solutions to stay relevant?

 

[0:06:23]

Dan Head: I think in big companies, big enterprises, I think there are a bunch of political reasons why it makes sense and it's safe to stay with the status quo, you know? If the CEO or CIO says we're going to do this one particular way and we've got our IT standards. And, I work in the CRM team and I know the tech doesn't work, well, I'm only going to have so much appetite to stand up against those folks because at the end of the day, I want to get paid.

 

[0:06:48]

PJ Bruno: Right, right.

 

[0:06:48]

Dan Head: Right? But, I think at some point, and I appreciate the political importance of standards and doing what the bosses say. But at some point, the political importance of customer experience and the political importance of driving outcomes with those customers, I think, is more important than the politics of IT standards, and so on. And businesses eventually figure that out. It's just part of their evolution. And one of the factors that we see, which I think is a good indicator is, where businesses have taken the CMO role and the CTO role and then they've sort of adapted it. And now you see this emergence of the CCO, or the chief customer officer role, where the customer officer has got a greater stake and influence on tech decisions. Because it is literally customer oriented. That tends to be a good indication of that evolution is fairly well progressed.

 

[0:07:39]

PJ Bruno: Yeah. You mentioned customer experience. It's funny that now it all kind of just comes back to that. It's like there's this strength in tech, but really it's ideating towards the customer. And so, my question, I guess, to you is, what is customer experience actually mean now?

 

[0:07:57]

Dan Head: Yeah, just use some examples. We all use these role models, these new technologies, and so on. But, I'm reminded of a quote from Keith Weed, the current, or perhaps former, because he's leaving, CMO of Unilever, he had this expression, "You know, our job as a brand is to get to the future first, and welcome our customers as they arrive." And most enterprises-

 

[0:08:23]

PJ Bruno: That's a great quote.

 

[0:08:23]

Dan Head: Yeah.

 

[0:08:24]

PJ Bruno: That's a strong one.

 

[0:08:25]

Dan Head: I dig that one up a lot. Yeah, I like that one. Most enterprises, I think, are just trying to catch up with the current world. Let alone the future world, so just as an example: If I'm driving down the highway and maybe I would fancy a coffee. And let's say, the folks at Costa Coffee, this business acquired by Coca Cola, they want to send me a notification to say, "You're coming up on a service area and there's a Costa and you can get a deal on a cup of coffee there." Well, I'm driving, there's no point in them sending that to me on my phone. But, as we saw at CES, there are technologies like connected windscreens and there's more connected computing in cars now, anyway. So, there are opportunities for Costa to send that message to me on these new devices. Which would be a more appropriate way to deliver it. But, brands just aren't ready for that. Because brands are channel centric, they're not data centric, they're not customer centric. They're not able to make the most of these technologies as and when they emerge. And, as a result, therefore, they can't be customer oriented.

 

[0:09:31]

PJ Bruno: Right. And since it's all about the customer experience, right, you want to make sure that you're not abusing that use of data, right? So, we live in now, this world, it's a wash of data, right? It's all over the place. It can be collected. So, why is effective and responsible use of data important to what you do?

 

[0:09:51]

Dan Head: Yeah, I mean, of course we've had laws like GDPR and then there's going to be the California Data privacy laws coming in. And the world is realizing that this is... Brand connection with customers is about trust. And that comes through the responsible use of data. So, it's not that there are just new legislative frameworks, which make it law that we have to be responsible. But it's just the basis of good marketing, anyway. And so, the technologies that need to be adopted here, need to enable the marketer to use data effectively, at the right place, at the right time, to seek permission. And to act on that permission and behavior that is being granted and communicated by the customer. It's like a conversation. There have been studies, like the one Forrester released on the brand humanity index about the effect of, and the positive effect of talking to your customers in a human way. And what talking in a human way actually consists of. So, it's not just law and legislation that makes us a necessity, these are the ingredients of delivering positive outcomes.

 

[0:11:03]

PJ Bruno: Right. A human touch is super important. And, now also, more than ever, the stack and the technology is really important. And I remember, you said yesterday, the term you used is, "Architecturally enabling", right? And so, Robbie, you're a little more on the technical side. So, from your perspective, from these role models perspective, even, what are the fundamental engineering building blocks that are architecturally enabling versus those that are somewhat prohimitive.

 

[0:11:38]

Robbie Matthews: Yeah. If we start at looking at these traditional enterprise businesses, and typically they're built on relational databases as a foundation. And then we take an example of what Dan's mentioned of these role models, which are using document based storage as a foundation. We can look at what those are and then how they actually enable what you need to send to customers. So, firstly, just what is a relational database? It's essentially a storage of data that's organized into tables. And each of those tables has a very rigid, defined schema. And what you need to do with that, is be able index it, to be able to say, "Okay, I've got this data in one table, how do I join it to another data in another table." And Dan mentioned tech debt, earlier. And that's a big issue. So, if we take a client like Deliveroo, you can say, "Okay, what sort of data have they got?" They've got their user data, they've got all their purchase data. Maybe have reviews that they've left about you. Favorite restaurants. And that all exists in different tables. And as the landscape becomes more complex, you're going to only increase the amount of data you want about users and the environment they're operating in. And that's going to create tech debt. So, what does that actually mean for a brand, when you come to wanting to send messages and target and talk to your users in a human way? And, really, the first thing is agility. If you've got an ever increasing amount of data that you need to join together when you want to create a segment to target those users. That becomes a much, much harder piece to actually stitch those data tables together, access the data in a quick way and define the messages and the audience that you want to send to your users. So, what do brands actually want to do? They want to use that data. They want to define customer audiences. They want to send individualized messages based on any kind of behavior around a customer, like demographics, location data, contextual data. And as soon as you need to index all those tables, or predict what a customer is going to want to do with your platform, which is the tough thing. We can't predict what customers want to do, that changes every day, as new technologies get introduced. As breaking news happens, you're going to want a segment or an audience that we just can't predict. And as soon as you need to rely on the indexing and the schema to access that data, we lose the ability and the agility to do that, in such a rigid manner, which is what the databases in these relational databases require. So, how, I guess a MongoDB or document based storage actually solves that, is, firstly, it's a schema less database. So, we can define exactly how we want to structure data to support these customer requirements. Using documents, as opposed to a relational schema let's us model very complex objects. And then, due to the structuring of that data, we don't need to make those joins and stitch all the data together in this increasingly complex landscape. So it means customers can make a heap of customized segments, off the cuff, and really give them the agility to create these audiences, send out campaigns as they wish.

 

[0:14:57]

PJ Bruno: And that's all around like free flow of data, right? Because, relational is a lot more stringent. It needs to be set up in a way... I mean, that's kind of what I'm hearing, is...

 

[0:15:10]

Robbie Matthews: I guess there's two parts to that question. There's one is speed in the context of a database. And then, I think when you're talking about free flow of data, that's probably where we want to look at more around ETL processes and Kafka. So, maybe let's touch on the speed in relation to relational and document based storage and then we can come onto Kafka and ETL processes.

 

[0:15:31]

PJ Bruno: Okay.

 

[0:15:31]

Robbie Matthews: So, in speed... As you say, customers just demand customer engagement platforms to run fast. Customers demand it. If you need to send out a break in push, ABC wants you do that as fast a possible. And, really, that's about read and write throughput on your database. So, let's take an example where you have to, like in a relational database, where you need to make a number of individual queries, join different tables, and that could take days to produce the results. Whereas, a no seek with MongoDB style database allows you to run queries in parallel, break up your dataset, run higher number of queries, and get that data back almost instantly. So you get those audiences that you want to target much, much quicker. Yeah, so that's the speed element on the relational database versus MongoDB. The second part of your question about ETL versus Kafka and the streaming is, again, like, "How do I actually access that data, or upload my, data into my data warehouse?" Think previously, Dan mentioned utility. Like they way that brands store data has just changed. Various data from different DB's could be loaded into a master data warehouse, once or twice a day. And that's fine. However, let's take the example of Deliveroo. I don't care to admit how many Deliveroo's I order a day. But, they need to know if I've made two this morning, or one this afternoon. And they don't want that upload of data to happen 24 hours later. And to get told that I actually made three orders in the last day. They want to know about that as soon as it happens, be sent to them as that event takes place.

 

[0:17:19]

PJ Bruno: Right, but you don't want to know that you've ordered three times in one day?

 

[0:17:21]

Robbie Matthews: My waistline doesn't want to know that I've eaten three times in a day, but that's a different story.

 

[0:17:27]

PJ Bruno: It's for another podcast.

 

[0:17:30]

Robbie Matthews: So, ETL versus parallel stream processes. And, what that parallel stream processing does, is essentially sets up a queue of events as and when they happen. Then you can listen to those events, publish those events and then essentially subscribe and act upon those events as and when they happen. So, let's take an example of a train booking company, a UK train ticketing company. Where, if I make a purchase for a journey later today, in the ETL world, that upload may happen tomorrow. In which case, I've already missed my train. I've missed all of the communications around it. It doesn't help. In the Kafka world, as soon as that event purchase takes place, you, as a business can act on that purchase immediately, send information about when the train is, any delays about that train. And make sure that user has a good experience with your brand. But, like I said, in the ETL world, I've probably already missed my train because it left the station 30 minutes late. And then the data was only sent to you as a business, to act on the next day.

 

[0:18:34]

PJ Bruno: Yeah.

 

[0:18:38]

Dan Head: This term, real time, I think is sort of used and abused and misunderstood. Like the examples that Robbie just used about travel, timing, of course it has to be real time. It has to be in the moment, otherwise, you're going to miss your train. You're going to miss your taxi, whatever. And, those examples apply to all other businesses, as well, right? Because again, this interaction between a brand and a customer, in order for that to be human, it has to be current. It has to be up to date, based on information that is relevant right now. So, as an example, let's say, I'm on the train and I'm on the way to work and I'm browsing for some sneakers on my mobile web, on my phone. And I add some things to my cart, but I don't transact and then I get to work. And I nip out for lunch and I actually go an buy those sneakers in store. But, maybe there was an abandoned cart email scheduled for 2:00 PM. And that abandoned cart email is still going to come out at 2:00 PM, it's not going to be cognizant of the fact that I went into the store and I bought those sneakers at lunchtime. So, that is a bad customer experience.

 

[0:19:52]

PJ Bruno: Right.

 

[0:19:53]

Dan Head: Or, just to continue that example, if I'm one of those companies that does sneaker drops, and there's a limited amount of inventory at a particular location. The communications can and should be based on that inventory dropping, you know? Create that exclusivity and that need and that excitement, which is what the sneaker drop is all about. And, I guess what Robbie's talking about is, unless you've got a database structure that can make and broadcast, or make available data in real time elsewhere in your technology ecosystem. Unless that data's being distributed in real time, you can't enable those use cases and you can't satisfy that need for a good, premium customer experience.

 

[0:20:38]

PJ Bruno: And the value of that is just less and less as time goes on, right?

 

[0:20:42]

Dan Head: Yeah, exactly. So, I don't really want to know tomorrow that the sneaker drop inventory has run out, you know?

 

[0:20:50]

PJ Bruno: Just creating the opposite of good experiences?

 

[0:20:52]

Dan Head: Right.

 

[0:20:53]

PJ Bruno: It's just frustration. I'd rather just get nothing, right?

 

[0:20:55]

Dan Head: Right.

 

[0:20:55]

PJ Bruno: I'd rather not even see it. All right, cool. Why don't we do something fun and round up with, I mean, you were talking a little bit, Dan, about toothbrushes that talk to you. I want my toothbrush to talk to me so badly. I have to just talk to myself at the time. But, what's the future hold? What kind of last words do we want to put out about, maybe predictions we might have, or a word to the wise about a good strategy, or just some advice to keep in mind moving forward.

 

[0:21:29]

Dan Head: I think there's two angles, to look at it from a customer's perspective. Speaking about myself, I mean, there are always new devices and new technologies and some of us are going to be quicker on the adoption than others. But, as a population now, we are more tech savvy than ever before. More willing to try technologies more than ever before. We have an expectation of being delighted more than ever before. We're willing to kind of experiment and try stuff. And, from a brand's perspective, how on earth are you going to deal with that? So, brands just need to future proof themselves, they just need to be data centric. They just need to have the engineering horse power. They just need to have the developed muscle groups, the ways of working, the team structures based around what's possible with real time data. And then, whether it's that toothbrush talking to you, or the fork telling me that I'm eating too quickly, you know? Whatever it is, the brand can deal with that. And, I think ultimately, where brands are trying to get to, is there should be this ability to be creative and playful with technology. We shouldn't just be worried about the plumbing, "Oh no, I've gotta send a message on this channel now, rather than that channel because of this new device's come out." If we can use any channels, anywhere at anytime, based on current data, then we can really use that as a creative canvas for just amazing, delightful, surprising marketing. And, that's the kind of thing that we, as a population, kind of enjoy. We don't enjoy stuff that's irrelevant, we don't enjoy stuff that we haven't opted in to. But we are willing to be surprised and we are willing to be engaged if we think the brand is making an effort to do so.

 

[0:23:22]

PJ Bruno: I love it. Robbie, you got anything?

 

[0:23:25]

Robbie Matthews: I think that, I'll bring it back to the architecture, to Dan's point around what brands want to do. You want you customer engagement platform at the point you're ready to use sort of surprise and delight strategies that Dan's talking about in reaching customers. You want your engagement platform to be ready to allow you to do that. And not still be developing itself. And, the way its architected, and the way it's able to meet the marketplace's changes is going to be crucial. So, I mean, WWDC happens, Google IO happens, there's a heap of changes to how you can send messages to users. And your engagement platform has to keep up to date with that. So, how they're architected, how they're able to be flexible to meet the new abilities of these OS's, is crucial. And when you look at, again, going back to the sort of, if you want to make joins, create new tables, that's tough to do. And then you have to look back at your current architecture and work out how you stitch that onto the end. Whereas, we take this example of something like a push carousel, where you send a push and you can swipe through a number of images to that. That came out last year. And just the way we were architecting meant you're able to immediately respond to what is new in the market, and give the brands the ability to go out and use that, as and when they're ready.

 

[0:24:48]

Dan Head: Yeah, and we've talked about food quite a bit here. Maybe it's because it's coming up to lunchtime and it's all on our minds, right? But, an example that just brings all this together for me, I think some of us have seen it, which was recently Burger King ran a campaign where they hijacked McDonald's branches and if you got within 600 yards of McDonald's, you would get a message on your Burger King app saying, "You can now redeem a Whopper for one cent." And it would direct you to the Burger King. And it was this cheeky, creative, just technology embracing campaign that got so much attention, they got to the top of the App Store. I mean, how crazy is that? That a burger app can be higher than Instagram and YouTube on the App Store. It's just-

 

[0:25:37]

PJ Bruno: Well, burgers are future proof, Dan.

 

[0:25:39]

Dan Head: They are. And, particular popular where you're from, huh, PJ? But what a great example of creativity with technology. That campaign wouldn't have been possible unless you had the technology in place that Robbie was talking about. And then, once you've created that surprise and delight, now you've got so many more people that are engaging with your brand, that have downloaded the app. And now you can really start to go and have fun with them.

 

[0:26:04]

PJ Bruno: Totally. Well, Robbie, Dan, thank you guys so much for being here. And thank you all for joining us. Just remember Shift is happening. And Legacy Clouds, in the words of Dan and Robbie, don't miss the train.

[0:26:17]

Longtime buddies Will Crocker (Senior Director of Customer Experience)  and Spencer Burke (VP of Growth) chat the return of Game of Thrones, a ban on the government from creating free tax-preparation software, and a potential ban on crypto mining in China. Also, Prince Harry calls for a ban on Fortnite?! 

 

 

 

TRANSCRIPT:

[0:00:17]

PJ: Hello again. Welcome back to Braze for Impact, your weekly tech industry discuss digest. This is PJ Bruno, and I'm thrilled to have with me two very close buddies. I have Will Crocker, senior director of CX, that's customer experience. Hi, Will.

 

[0:00:32]

Will: Hey, how you doing, PJ?

 

[0:00:33]

PJ: And also, of course, my good friend Spencer Burke, the head of the House Growth. He's here with us today.

 

[0:00:40]

Spencer: Hey, hey, it's good to be back.

 

[0:00:42]

PJ: It is good to be back.

 

[0:00:43]

Will: You guys grew a house?

 

[0:00:46]

PJ: I'm just trying to rewatch more Game of Thrones, and I had that moment where Melisandre's like, "Robert of the House Baratheon." And I wanted to do something similar for Spencer, but I don't know if it hit.

 

[0:00:57]

Spencer: PJ of the House Bruno.

 

[0:00:59]

PJ: Exactly. Just makes you sound more special, I think.

 

[0:01:02]

Will: So Game of Thrones is coming back real soon, right? What do you guys think?

 

[0:01:06]

PJ: Oh, yeah. Sunday night. I'm thrilled. I'm gonna be in the UK, so I'm trying to find people there that ... For a watch party, because as you know, Game of Thrones takes place in England. Or so it may seem. I'm pumped. I'm so freaking pumped for the last season. Spence, any predictions?

 

[0:01:25]

Spencer: I feel so far behind. I'm up to date, but my wife, Jenny, like you, is rewatching. She rewatched everything.

 

[0:01:33]

PJ: You have to.

 

[0:01:33]

Will: Everything? That's a lot.

 

[0:01:35]

Spencer: Over the past couple months. Yeah. And so I'm going through, and I'm like, "All right, who's this again? What did they do?" And since she's been rewatching it, I'll come in at season four and be like, "Oh yeah, that's the guy who ..." And she's like, "No, that hasn't happened yet." And then when she got [inaudible], I was like, "Oh, but that's the guy who did this." She's like, "No, that was three seasons ago."

 

[0:01:54]

PJ: Right.

 

[0:01:54]

Spencer: So I'm just totally discombobulated, but I know once it gets started, there's the action, there's the dragons. We have a big battle coming. Gonna get straight into it.

 

[0:02:03]

Will: Yeah, and you have a cheat sheet that's going to tell you what's going on in the new episodes.

 

[0:02:07]

Spencer: Exactly.

 

[0:02:07]

Will: Meanwhile, I am my girlfriend's cheat sheet, and I am in the same place as you, so I'm just gonna start making things up. I'm just gonna go out there and just say, "That's the secret Stark over there, that one. Just pay attention."

 

[0:02:21]

PJ: They're gonna need to level up those recaps. That's gonna become a five to 10-minute thing of just, "Okay, wait, what ... There's all the sub-threads."

 

[0:02:30]

Will: I'm actually shocked HBO didn't release a pre-episode which was a condensed, 30-minute explainer of what happened in the last season. They should've done that this week. They could've gotten a ton of views on that.

 

[0:02:40]

PJ: Dude, tell me about it. I really ... I need something like that. I need-

 

[0:02:43]

Spencer: That must exist somewhere. A supercut.

 

[0:02:45]

Will: I'm sure YouTube has created that.

 

[0:02:47]

PJ: There's a fan out there that's made that, for sure.

 

[0:02:49]

Will: My main prediction is that HBO is gonna make a lot of money.

 

[0:02:52]

PJ: And then they're gonna go back, they're gonna do a prequel, right? I think there's already talk about some sort of ... Around the time of Aegon and the Mad King. [crosstalk]

 

[0:03:01]

Will: There are apparently four or five in production right now.

 

[0:03:04]

PJ: Jeez.

 

[0:03:04]

Will: Yeah.

 

[0:03:05]

Spencer: Wow.

 

[0:03:05]

PJ: It's a cash cow. What're you gonna do?

 

[0:03:07]

Will: Got to milk it.

 

[0:03:09]

PJ: That's what you do with a cash cow, man.

 

[0:03:11]

Spencer: Did you guys watch SNL this past weekend?

 

[0:03:13]

PJ: I didn't, no. Was there-

 

[0:03:14]

Spencer: Kit Harington was the host.

 

[0:03:15]

PJ: Oh, nice.

 

[0:03:16]

Will: Yeah, he looked like he's 12 years old when I saw that ... The photo. It was really weird.

 

[0:03:20]

PJ: When he's clean-shaven, he does look very young.

 

[0:03:22]

Spencer: He also has a very laddish accent compared to his Jon Snow character. But they had a skit that was a parody of all of the spin-offs, so they had a Game of Thrones that was a Law & Order ripoff, just all of these different versions taking characters and then putting them into a sitcom or a drama or whatever. It was really funny.

 

[0:03:41]

PJ: Classic. Yeah, I mean, I wonder ... Those guys ... You would think you just have a calling card to any job you want after you were on Game of Thrones, but I don't know. It's tough to break out of that when you've made a role for yourself.

 

[0:03:54]

Will: Yeah, you can get pigeonholed pretty easily, I think. I think some of the other characters like that, like Robb Stark, who died seasons ago, what's he been in? Who knows?

 

[0:04:03]

PJ: I don't know. I just see flashes of his face in different-

 

[0:04:06]

Spencer: Actually, I do know.

 

[0:04:06]

PJ: You do know?

 

[0:04:06]

Spencer: He's in that Bodyguard show.

 

[0:04:08]

Will: Oh, really?

 

[0:04:09]

Spencer: I forget what ... Is it Netflix?

 

[0:04:12]

Will: Is Sean Bean at a Starbucks now, shilling coffees? Is that where he is after he said "No, I need more money," and they were like, "Well, we'll kill you in season one. It's fine."

 

[0:04:20]

Spencer: Yeah, he was in the Bodyguard on Netflix. Check it out.

 

[0:04:24]

PJ: Check it out. We're plugging it. Plugging it here. All right, guys, we could talk about Game of Thrones forever, we might as well move on. But in light of Game of Thrones coming up and all the exiles that happen throughout Game of Thrones, this is the Banishment Episode-

 

[0:04:40]

Speaker 8: You are banished!

 

[0:04:42]

PJ: -of Braze for Impact.

 

[0:04:46]

Spencer: Dun dun dun.

 

[0:04:47]

PJ: Exactly. Dun dun dun dun dun dun ... We're really thrilled about it. We're gonna talk about some bans and some tentative bans that are on our radar right now. Starting off with number one, the House of Representatives on Tuesday passed a bill that includes language that would permanently bar the Internal Revenue Service from creating a free, electronic service for Americans to file their taxes, advancing a primary objective of the industry of for-profit companies like Intuit and H&R Block. Companies like Intuit, which produces TurboTax, which I use, and H&R Block allow most Americans to file for free as long as they earn less than $66,000 for the year, but most eligible Americans don't take advantage of that, with just three percent filing for free. Are you guys TurboTaxers? Do you-

 

[0:05:37]

Will: TurboTax, yeah, regrettably.

 

[0:05:38]

Spencer: TurboTax.

 

[0:05:39]

PJ: We subscribe over here. TurboTax. Yeah, I was one of those late bloomers for doing my own taxes. It was kind of like you'd check off things as becoming an adult. "Oh, got to do this. Got to do this." Taxes was the last thing. It was like my dad did it, and I paid a guy to literally handle all of it. Now I'm TurboTax-ing, and I'm a grown, grown man now.

 

[0:05:58]

Spencer: Consider yourself an adult?

 

[0:06:00]

PJ: I thought ... For me, that was the last bit of criteria to say, "Okay, I've made it. I'm an adult."

 

[0:06:05]

Will: It's truly ridiculous that we have to file like that. It's crazy. No other country in the world does it that way. Apparently, I think, in the UK, you have to make ... This number might be a little bit wrong, but it's something like 125,000 pounds a year to have to file. Other than that, what happens is the government just mails you your tax return, because they've got all the data like the IRS does. And they say, "If you want to contest this, go for it. Otherwise, here's your check."

 

[0:06:32]

Spencer: Good to go.

 

[0:06:33]

PJ: Yeah. Super easy. Why are we making it so hard on ourselves?

 

[0:06:37]

Will: It also really screws poor people as well, here, because people have this idea in America that paying taxes ... You are always paying your taxes, right? Filing taxes your taxes is synonymous with paying your taxes. When in reality, if you make $30,000 a year, you're almost certainly going to get a refund. They're leaving money on the table, and if the IRS isn't automatically doing it, they don't get the refund, and IRS doesn't call them to complain, either.

 

[0:07:03]

PJ: Yeah.

 

[0:07:06]

Spencer: They have the information. Especially for a simple filer. You're just getting your deductions, you worked at the same place, you've lived in the same state. They know ... They know it. They could just do it. Estonia does this. Estonia. But apparently, I was reading-

 

[0:07:24]

Will: They have e-citizenship, too, though.

 

[0:07:25]

PJ: It just would ... Is it ... What's the reasoning? It's just it would take a lot of work for that to happen?

 

[0:07:30]

Spencer: Well, there's a couple of reasons. One, these companies spend a lot of money lobbying our Representatives.

 

[0:07:35]

Will: Tens and tens of millions of dollars every year.

 

[0:07:38]

Spencer: The second is the party that prefers to remove taxes, they tend to do it for the people with the most money. But that aside, they think that if it's too easy ... Too easy to pay your taxes, it'll be as a result too easy for our Congress to increase taxes. So they try to make it harder so that people have to go through the pain and we all hate taxes. So there's-

 

[0:08:08]

PJ: So wait, the thinking is that taxes will be increased if we did less work?

 

[0:08:13]

Will: They want you to associate misery and pain and nonsense with taxation every year, and they've been highly successful, I would say.

 

[0:08:21]

PJ: Yeah, tell me about it.

 

[0:08:23]

Will: So, it's ... I don't know. I hope that someday we get there, but this bill that's about to go through with the tax free preparation software, banning all that stuff, it's, I believe, a bipartisan-supported bill, which just makes me really, really ask virtually everyone in Congress, "Guys, what the hell's going on?"

 

[0:08:49]

PJ: I mean, it's just they're making money, right? Is it just-

 

[0:08:52]

Will: Yeah. I think it costs the IRS more money to deal with these external agencies, too. Because you have to imagine on the technical side, they're building integrations and accepting all these form factors from all these different places. If the IRS just built this internally, or some other service built it that was easy to use and free, everyone would start using that, and then all of a sudden all of the overhead costs and all that starts to go down, too.

 

[0:09:20]

PJ: Well, let's hope there's a different future for us, because I think that should be a free tool, hands down.

 

[0:09:26]

Spencer: For sure. Have any of you guys had to deal with cryptocurrency and paying taxes on that?

 

[0:09:33]

Will: I have, yes. It was pretty damn confusing. That might be the exception for where you might have to file something yourselves.

 

[0:09:43]

Spencer: Yeah, right. Here's this new, sketchy asset that I made some money on.

 

[0:09:47]

Will: Yeah, I made ... Not, I would say, a well-informed investment on it, because I don't think virtually anyone's investment on it is well-informed, unless you're a Ph.D. Mathematician who's dug into the source code. But yeah, I'd go as one of the lucky ones and got out while I was sensible, so I had to figure out where the hell to put that in TurboTax. It was weird.

 

[0:10:06]

PJ: I'm sure it was. Did you, as well, or-

 

[0:10:08]

Spencer: Yeah, this year. I'm almost embarrassed to admit it now, but-

 

[0:10:13]

PJ: Well, since you're mentioning crypto ... Nice segue. Appreciate it. Onto our next ban. China considers ban on cryptocurrency ... Mining, that is, because it's a stupid waste of energy. Regulators in China are considering a ban on cryptocurrency mining as an undesirable economic activity, according to a government document released Monday. Basically, the whole thinking is that it's a huge waste on valuable resources because it takes so much energy to do this crypto mining. According to a recent report in Nature Sustainability, crypto mining emits anywhere between three million and 15 million tons of carbon dioxide globally. China making a decision that's good for the environment? I'm a little confused.

 

[0:10:59]

Will: Yeah, although they've actually been getting a lot better about that. I think they won the race to the bottom in terms of environmental impact, and then realized how awful the bottom was and are trying to desperately claw up the other side now.

 

[0:11:12]

Spencer: Yeah, I think with the Olympics, when they had to just close factories so that it wasn't so polluted that people were hacking up a lung while running a marathon.

 

[0:11:21]

PJ: Jeez.

 

[0:11:21]

Will: Yeah. It's still not good there, but they're doing a lot more, I think. Anyway, on the crypto subject, I just don't know. It's just like ... I see the potential, maybe, of something like this in the future, but right now, I read some article ... This was a year ago, that said that a year ago, Bitcoin itself was taking as much electrical energy every month as the nation of Germany.

 

[0:11:51]

Spencer: I think it's one percent of global energy consumption is going to Bitcoin mining.

 

[0:11:55]

Will: Yeah, and they kept saying that it's gonna go up. And that's only Bitcoin, too. There are, what, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of other cryptocurrencies? If you assume Bitcoin is maybe half the market, probably? Something like that? Or maybe it's a third. Who knows? Anyways, that means a huge portion of global energy is essentially right now going to give people another store of money. Banking's a hell of a lot cheaper. Do you know how much energy J.P. Morgan probably spends? I don't know what it is, but I guarantee you it's not one percent of energy.

 

[0:12:31]

PJ: Right.

 

[0:12:31]

Spencer: Especially since most of the mining happens in China, and they're still pretty reliant on coal for a lot of that energy consumption, so not great with the whole global warming thing and the future of humanity, but who knows?

 

[0:12:44]

PJ: Yeah, but I mean, you mentioned it, Will. Maybe sometimes you need to hit the bottom first to know that you need to dig yourselves out.

 

[0:12:52]

Will: I just want to thank you guys as the hosts of this podcast for picking really uplifting topics. [crosstalk]

 

[0:12:57]

Spencer: Do you have a story about hitting rock bottom you'd like to share with us?

 

[0:13:01]

Will: No, that's coming in an upcoming episode of When Shift Hits the Fan.

 

[0:13:03]

PJ: That's true. Look forward to our Rock Bottom Episode, starring Will Crocker.

 

[0:13:07]

Spencer: Will, didn't you ... You were telling me before the show a little bit about graphics cards and how the changing and use in mining was affecting the prices.

 

[0:13:17]

Will: Oh, yeah, there was a point where I ... I play computer games, so I own a graphics card, and there was a point where I bought a graphics card, and usually any piece of technology you buy depreciates over time. It's just because newer stuff comes out, and it gets better. But the market for GPUs, which are graphical processing units, was so nuts because of Bitcoin a couple years ago that I realized my graphics card had appreciated almost 50% at one point. And there just came a point when I was like, "Should I just sell this thing and wait for a while and get out of the market?" But it's absolutely insane how much the prices were fluctuating based upon that. If anybody who's an nVidia stockholder, you rode that wave right with everyone else.

 

[0:13:59]

PJ: The graphics card biz. I see you, Will.

 

[0:14:03]

Will: I'm long on the graphics card biz. They have real applications, too, like neural net processing and a lot of the kind of things that you see people doing, like libraries like TensorFlow to do understanding complex deep learning problems in computer science. All of that requires GPUs, essentially, so it's gonna come forward, but it's gonna fall a little bit for the crypto.

 

[0:14:26]

PJ: Will, since you are such a gamer, and I am as well ... Spencer, were you a little bit in your heyday, probably?

 

[0:14:32]

Spencer: A little bit.

 

[0:14:33]

PJ: I mean, I think given that, Will, you should probably take some beef with Prince Harry, because this next article: Prince Harry calls for a ban on Fortnite. I know that's not your top game, but still, I mean, let's take a look at this.

 

[0:14:47]

Will: Yeah. Fortnite's all right.

 

[0:14:49]

PJ: Ahead of one of the biggest nights in the gaming industry, Prince Harry has called for a ban on Fortnite due to its supposed addictive qualities. Harry said, "That game shouldn't be allowed." In a British accent, of course. "That game shouldn't be allowed. Where's the benefit of having it in your household?" And then, also, Harry suggested Fortnite, a shooter game focused on survival, was responsible for tearing families apart. "It's like waiting for the damage to be done and kids turning up on your doorstep and families being broken down."

 

[0:15:24]

Spencer: Is this real?

 

[0:15:24]

PJ: This is real. This is a legitimate quote.

 

[0:15:26]

Spencer: No.

 

[0:15:26]

PJ: Yeah, yeah, yeah, no.

 

[0:15:27]

Will: You're tearing me apart, Lisa!

 

[0:15:30]

PJ: "You're tearing me apart, Prince Harry!" Yeah. So that's where he stands on it. Ironically enough, he feels the same way about social media, feels like it's real poison in general. And I guess a day later, him and Meghan Markle started their own Instagram page, so you can follow them on that, which is nice.

 

[0:15:51]

Will: Oh, yeah, which also isn't destroying society at all, right? That's just totally fine that everyone's addicted to Instagram and those things.

 

[0:15:58]

PJ: Exactly. I mean, ban on addictive substances, i.e. Video games. This is ... We're addicted to our tech, obviously, right? But thoughts on video games? To me, my argument was always: video games, yes, they can suck time and everything, but to me, it was always ... It's like an interactive art form. I'm witnessing somebody's art they've put together. Especially MMORPGs, massive multiplayer online role-playing games. Anything that has a big, big, huge world, and I just want to run around all of it, I just really appreciate the design and thought that goes into all of it. That's my feeling.

 

[0:16:33]

Will: It's like a concert in some ways, right? Like at a concert, you're coming to watch music, but you're also coming together to experience that with everyone else around you, and I think multiplayer games are the same way. You're creating that human interaction, which creates the art around it.

 

[0:16:44]

PJ: Yeah.

 

[0:16:46]

Will: Yeah, I don't know about this. I wonder if EA bribed Prince Harry to pick on Fortnite. It was like, "Epic Games needs to be taken down a notch." Because couldn't you just make this claim about most games?

 

[0:16:58]

Spencer: Yeah, why Fortnite, Prince Harry?

 

[0:17:01]

Will: Just because it's the big target. I don't know.

 

[0:17:03]

PJ: Yeah, that's probably what it was. He was thinking about it, and it's just-

 

[0:17:06]

Spencer: It's the only video game he's heard of.

 

[0:17:07]

PJ: I mean, for a guy who smokes as much pot as Prince Harry, I would've thought that video games would be right ... What do you do, then, when you're stoned?

 

[0:17:13]

Will: Is he a toker? I didn't know that.

 

[0:17:15]

Spencer: Yeah, if we want to talk about tearing families apart, how about the royal family of the British Empire?

 

[0:17:20]

PJ: Oh, man. Dude. Counterargument in your face.

 

[0:17:24]

Will: Whoa, guys. Whoa, guys. We have EMEA customers here.

 

[0:17:28]

PJ: Of course, we're just playing. This is all in jest. But no, I think it's a genuine thing. I'm sure plenty of parents are concerned when their kids are spending hours and hours in their room. I'm sure they also don't understand how social gaming actually is.

 

[0:17:42]

Spencer: Especially Fortnite.

 

[0:17:43]

PJ: Especially Fortnite. But what I will say, if you want to ban Apex Legends, you can just go ahead and do that as far as I'm concerned, because I can't even get in a session without throwing the remote against the wall, everyone's so good.

 

[0:17:54]

Spencer: Talk to this guy.

 

[0:17:55]

Will: It's just because you're bad. But it's just the ... Real talk. I'm sorry. Don't just run around in the open and just flail about. Hide behind things. Shoot people.

 

[0:18:04]

Spencer: You should get a lesson from Will.

 

[0:18:05]

PJ: I thought that when you run out in the middle of the board and you kind of scattershot and spin in circles-

 

[0:18:10]

Spencer: He can't be taught.

 

[0:18:11]

Will: I need clay to mold.

 

[0:18:14]

PJ: I'm too old. I'm too old. This old sponge is dried up. There's not much I can learn left.

 

[0:18:18]

Spencer: "This Old Sponge," that's our new show.

 

[0:18:21]

Will: On the subject of ... "This Old Sponge," with PJ Bruno. But on the subject of addiction and games, I do think it's a problem. It is something that ... it's not great for kids to spend infinite hours on these sort of things, but I think there's some interesting, far less intrusive ways than banning the stupid thing. I think ... I've seen some things I think in Vietnam or China, somewhere in Asia, there're some countries now which have stipulations that if somebody has n hours of consecutive play time, that they then have to pop up a message that says, "Hey, are you sure you want to keep playing? Maybe it's time to go take a break or go outside."

 

[0:19:00]

PJ: That's pretty cool.

 

[0:19:00]

Spencer: I like that.

 

[0:19:00]

Will: Or I think some of the games also have something where you have to ... you get reduced experience or something like that after you play for too many consecutive hours.

 

[0:19:10]

PJ: Interesting.

 

[0:19:11]

Spencer: In-game punishment.

 

[0:19:12]

Will: So the game ... Yeah, so you basically get decreasing rewards in the margin.

 

[0:19:17]

Spencer: That's smart.

 

[0:19:18]

PJ: That is really smart. Or if they could have a feature that causes your parent to care more and actually put some restrictions on how much you're playing the game. That's just me. Anyways, we're at our time. Will, thank you so much for being here.

 

[0:19:35]

Will: Thank you, PJ. I hope you find yourself in the game someday, and stop hating the game. Hate the player.

 

[0:19:43]

PJ: That's true. And I'll never stop searching for myself in-game. Spencer, thanks for coming along for the ride.

 

[0:19:48]

Spencer: Thanks, Peej.

 

[0:19:49]

PJ: And you, too. Thanks for joining us, guys. You take care.

[0:19:52]

Braze's Director of Data Jesse Tao and Tech Alliances Manager at Looker Erin Franz graciously break down BI tools and the value of data for the rest of us civilians. They walk through the marketization of data and the power of Looker blocks. 

 

 

 

TRANSCRIPT:

[0:00:17]

PJ: Hi there. This is PJ Bruno. Welcome back to Braze For Impact, your weekly tech industry discussed digest. And I'm thrilled today to have two very good friends of mine, Jesse Tao, our director of data, the man about data. What's the title Jesse? It's just data person?

 

[0:00:33]

Jesse: Well my Slack title is just data stuff.

 

[0:00:35]

PJ: Right. So we have Jesse Tao, data stuff-

 

[0:00:38]

Jesse: Official title is, Head of Data Strategy.

 

[0:00:41]

PJ: Head of Data Stuff, Jesse Tao, and also our very good friend joining us from Looker, that's Erin Franz. Hi Erin.

 

[0:00:48]

Erin: Hi.

 

[0:00:49]

PJ: Good to have you here.

 

[0:00:50]

Erin: Yeah, glad to be here.

 

[0:00:51]

PJ: How's the day been so far? You guys have been doing workshops right?

 

[0:00:54]

Erin: Yeah. Flew in last night. Just starting the day early, east coast time. Feeling great.

 

[0:00:58]

PJ: Awesome. Not too jet lagged yet? You're feeling good?

 

[0:01:01]

Erin: So far.

 

[0:01:02]

PJ: Hitting our stride. That's what I like to hear. So we're here today to talk about data, about insights. I'm sure as you two know, over the past 30 years there's been monumental strides in what that means to companies, and the value that it can add. So let's start really, really general, where we are today. Erin, can you speak to some patterns that we've since in data, since the beginning of it? I guess from relational, to non relational databases, to the kind of stuff that you work with right now?

 

[0:01:34]

Erin: Yeah. I mean, I can speak to ... Since I've joined Looker about four years ago, sort of how the landscape's changed and how we've seen sort of the product evolve with the technologies that have become available. So I think when Looker was founded six years ago or so, Redshift was just emerging as this modern analytical data warehouse. And those technologies didn't really exist before. And what this enabled, was the ability to actually expose large volumes of data across an organization in a way that multiple people could be accessing at the same time, and really using it to make data-driven decisions. Luckily, Looker took a bet on SQL being kind of this language of querying that would scale with all these different technologies that have come out. And luckily, that's been the case. With Redshift, we've also seen other databases like Snowflake and Google has BigQuery, that have really enabled organizations to become data-driven and self-serving when it comes to making decisions based on data.

 

[0:02:37]

PJ: And making it more accessible to people like me, like pedestrians, plebs, who just don't really understand kind of the technical side of data. It's like-

 

[0:02:47]

Erin: Exactly.

 

[0:02:48]

PJ: Democratizes it a bit.

 

[0:02:49]

Erin: Right. Making it accessible in a way that it's not just accessible to technical folks, to data analysts, to people who understand SQL and know how to code, to people who just want to click and drop and create reports and explore data on their own, products like Looker make that possible.

 

[0:03:06]

PJ: And Jesse you work with Looker pretty regularly at this point?

 

[0:03:10]

Jesse: Yes, almost every day.

 

[0:03:11]

PJ: Almost every day. And I mean we wouldn't call you a pedestrian, you're pretty deep in data, you understand it well enough.

 

[0:03:16]

Jesse: Yes I do.

 

[0:03:17]

PJ: Why don't you talk to us a little bit about the marketization of data. This is something that's-

 

[0:03:22]

Jesse: Yeah, you know, I think today we collect a lot of data. And in my opinion, data has more or less become a commodity now, rather than the hot topic. And what the hot topic of today is, it's insights. Because you're thinking about it, we're collecting a lot of data. We have data coming in from IOT and all these other sources, and most of the data that's collected, isn't being used. So, how useful is something that's sitting in the data of our house, kind of just collecting dust? So, very low value there. The value is from the insights, from actually analyzing the data, getting the data and figuring out what you want to do with it, to drive business decisions. And this is kind of where Braze comes in, and Looker comes in. We're providing the data and also providing the framework and the tools for people who are not using data, to get insights out of it and actually use that data. So I think in terms of the marketing pressure in the industry, we're moving ... We're going to still collect a lot of data, but more of the focus is going to be on how do we actually use that data faster and more efficiently?

 

[0:04:21]

PJ: Right. Because if you're not using that data and you're not taking action on it, you're going to be left in the dust, more or less, right? Is that the ...

 

[0:04:27]

Jesse: Yes. To put it in Marie Kondo terms, data just sitting there, brings us no joy.

 

[0:04:33]

PJ: And you're all about sparking joy.

 

[0:04:36]

Jesse: Sure.

 

[0:04:38]

PJ: All right then. Okay, well what sorts of data, insights are available to day that wasn't available in the past? Obviously this is kind of a big sweeping generalization, but what can we speak to currently?

 

[0:04:49]

Erin: I think some common themes that we've seen emerging are, people are collecting data from tools that they are using in their business, whether that's a Salesforce as a CRM's index as a support system and centralizing all that data in one place. So you're not just accessing one data set, not just your transactional data set, but also the data sets that define your whole business and your whole customer journey. So you're actually able to create kind of that 360 view of the customer that we're all sort of striving for, from as many sources as possible. And that's become possible because of these data warehousing technologies that are now available.

 

[0:05:27]

PJ: It's all about that 360 degree view these days, isn't it?

 

[0:05:30]

Jesse: Absolutely.

 

[0:05:33]

PJ: Because I'm still kind of just getting my feet wet with my understanding of the eco system of products right? You have your attribution, you have your CDPs, Braze is in there somewhere-

 

[0:05:44]

Jesse: Mm-hmm (affirmative)-

 

[0:05:46]

PJ: Engagement. So Looker is the analysis, it's less the visualization and more the business intelligence right? Because I feel like on our call, we talked a little bit, it's not just graphs right?

 

[0:05:57]

Erin: Right. Part of it is graphs for sure-

 

[0:06:00]

PJ: Right.

 

[0:06:00]

Erin: You need to be able to visualize your data, but much more than that, of course we always say the starting point for Looker is a dashboard, or a visualization. You can really drill into that visualization, see the components that have built that. If you're technical, you can even see the SQL that is being written to the database to supply that result set. And then you can modify that report, you can drill down into the granular level data that's supplying the data for that visualization. So let's say you're looking at event count by day on your application, you can see what those events are just by clicking into one of those data points.

 

[0:06:36]

PJ: Gotcha. And that data, that belongs to the company effectively, or that belongs to the user?

 

[0:06:45]

Jesse: I have a point of view on that. And before I share my thoughts, I'll preface it by saying I'm not a lawyer, so do not use this as legal advice.

 

[0:06:53]

PJ: Okay, thanks for that.

 

[0:06:55]

Jesse: I think the data ultimately belongs to the end user, but the company is basically the custodian of that data. Because without the end user, there is no data but without the company, there's not way of collecting or storing that data. So, the company is more or less using, collecting that data on behalf of the user. They're creating some sort of value from it, either from messaging or personalization or just understanding the user a little bit better. Some way of using that data to create insights into the level of value to that user. But ultimately, it is that user's data and the user should own that data. I think that's the point of view that many countries and regulatory bodies are holding as well. If you look at GDPR as well as the upcoming California privacy laws, the focus is really on the end user and their ability to control the data that they collect, the accuracy of it and the right to be forgotten. So, I think there is a common theme where the view point is the end user owns the data whereas, the companies are the ones who are using it to provide value both to the user and to the marketplace.

 

[0:08:03]

PJ: That makes sense. And the California protection, that's going to happen at the end of this year right?

 

[0:08:11]

Jesse: I don't know the exact timeline. We'll have to refer to our legal team about that.

 

[0:08:14]

PJ: Okay. Well we can patch that up later if we need to. So Erin, let's dig more into Looker a little bit. What's the real differentiator for you guys? What do you guys kind of hold up as a torch? This is kind of who we are and what makes us stand out-

 

[0:08:29]

Erin: Yeah.

 

[0:08:30]

PJ: Amongst the other tools.

 

[0:08:31]

Erin: I think luckily, the core Looker product has been fundamentally the same since its inception. With the core differentiators being that it's entirely in database. So as we talked about, the ability to access all of the data, down to the granular ... Most granular level that you're collecting it and exposed that across your organization. And the way that we're able to do that while still providing standards governance, so users are not creating their own one-off definitions of revenue, something that's incredibly important to reporting, is through our modeling layer, which is called LookML. So that's where you define all the business logic that your end data consumers will be using, whether by just exposing them to pre-built dashboards, visualizations or having them build their own content. And the way this works, while still leveraging the database, is it's really just an abstraction of SQL, or the language that you're using to create those database investments. And then finally, it's a web-based modern application. So that makes it really easy to share, collaborate and extend into plenty of other users. We have a fully baked API where you can serve data from Looker elsewhere to bring it into the tools where you need it.

 

[0:09:46]

PJ: So LookML, you said it's your own language-

 

[0:09:50]

Erin: Yup.

 

[0:09:50]

PJ: It's built on another language-

 

[0:09:53]

Erin: Mm-hmm (affirmative)-

 

[0:09:54]

PJ: And so if you know LookML, it actually is useful outside of Looker as well.

 

[0:09:59]

Erin: It's proprietary to the product, but it's very ... What you're doing is modeling the components of SQL, which is a core skillset of any data analyst. It really just makes it easier because instead of writing one-off queries, you're writing the components of those queries so they can be reused, by not only the data analyst, but also by all the data consumers.

 

[0:10:21]

PJ: Gotcha. Cool. Well let's talk Looker Blocks. This is what I really want to get into because I first heard about it at LTR 2018, because we announced our first Looker Block right?

 

[0:10:34]

Jesse: Two Looker Blocks actually.

 

[0:10:35]

PJ: Thank you Jesse. Fact checking on the go. Do you want to talk about that? That was kind of a big release right?

 

[0:10:43]

Jesse: Yeah, it was a pretty big release because it was still pretty early on in our relationship with Looker but we saw the immediate value pretty early on, so we decided to move quickly in that direction. And I'll let Erin talk a little bit about what our Looker Blocks, but the two Looker Blocks that we released back in November, are based around our currents data export and it focuses on market engagement and user behavior. So marketing engagement on the Braze data side will be things like email sends, push opens and at message clicks, stuff like that. And user behavior includes things like session starts and app purchases, so the behaviors of the users. We take all of that information together to create really useful insights around how campaigns are performing, user retention, if campaigns are improving your driving purchases, things like that.

 

[0:11:32]

PJ: Gotcha. And Looker Blocks for those of us who don't actually know the definition-

 

[0:11:39]

Erin: Yeah.

 

[0:11:39]

PJ: Are basically ...

 

[0:11:40]

Erin: They're basically templates for LookML. So LookML is a text-base modeling language. So we can model expected data sources upfront. So, data sources that are going to have a common schema, so common tables, columns, fields, within that. We've created a bunch of these for sources that are commonly used across our customers like Salesforce, Zendesk, as I mentioned before, Google AdWords, Facebook ads. The sources we're seeing most often, and then also the sources that we want to model proactively with our partners like Braze.

 

[0:12:12]

PJ: Cool. And so these two Looker Blocks, these are the first of many.

 

[0:12:16]

Jesse: Yes.

 

[0:12:18]

PJ: Cool. I mean, do you know what's on deck? Do we know what's coming up or do we want to save that for our next episode?

 

[0:12:24]

Jesse: We can save that for the next episode, but I actually want to talk a little bit about why we decided to make these Looker Blocks. And I think it's because we saw in it, the common vision with our product, which is data agility, or what we call, data agility. And that means basically speed to insight for us. As I mentioned before, the value of data is not in the data itself, it's what you can do with it, and how you can actually gets insights out of it. And with Looker Blocks, it acts as a template where we are predefining all the data fields and relationships, and providing those fundamental building blocks for us and out customers to build on top of. So, what would historically take a data engineer or a BI developer weeks, days, potentially even months to model, we do all of that leg work for our customers so they can just drag and drop in those Looker Blocks and be ready to find insights within minutes or hours.

 

[0:13:20]

PJ: So that's huge. That's going to save time.

 

[0:13:22]

Jesse: Absolutely.

 

[0:13:24]

PJ: It's exciting. All right, let's move on down to data tech changing roles. How is data tech ... How is it changing the way people are doing their jobs and what will the change for real expectations be in the future?

 

[0:13:39]

Jesse: Sure. Now, I think that people are becoming a lot more data-driven, and thinking about how to both collect and use data in their every day lives. Well not just their every day lives, but every day professional lives. They're using data to not just justify their decisions, but also to understand what the implications are in areas that they may not have seen before. And I think that's going to be a point of differentiation for customers, for our companies, because if you can actually use the data in a very insightful way, you can understand more about your users, your competitors, the marketplace and be able to confidently act in a way that will set you apart. And I think in terms of the data collection, the aspect of privacy is going to be more and more important as well. As I mentioned before, there's GDPR, there's the California privacy laws. I think people are just going to be ... Sorry. I think people are going to have to be more careful about what they collect because in the past, you could collect everything. And now with the privacy breeches you've been seeing at big tech companies, big banks, people have to be careful about both what they're collecting and how they're using it.

 

[0:14:49]

PJ: What's the most insightful way you've collected data to make a decision about your life? Putting you on the spot Jesse. I'll start.

 

[0:14:58]

Jesse: Okay.

 

[0:15:00]

PJ: Mine will have to be using Rotten Tomatoes to decide to not watch movies. That's probably it. That's probably saved me several hours of viewing time.

 

[0:15:11]

Jesse: Okay. So I actually have a script that I write, that scrapes lottery websites for the winning numbers, as well as the pay out. And I modeled out something where something like Powerball or Mega Millions, the optimal time to buy is a jackpot of around 3.25 to 3.5 million because at that time, there are not so many buyers where you have to split the pot. So you basically maximize your payout that way. So, we have office lotto pools here and I don't really partake in them up until a certain point where I think there's a higher payout.

 

[0:15:49]

PJ: I'm going to keep that in mind Jesse. That's a good one. That was a really good one.

 

[0:15:52]

Erin: Yeah, saving time, stress. I'm more on the Rotten Tomatoes path.

 

[0:15:59]

PJ: Yeah?

 

[0:15:59]

Erin: Yeah.

 

[0:16:00]

PJ: Do your homework, do your reviews, leverage the data available.

 

[0:16:03]

Erin: I guess restaurants also.

 

[0:16:05]

PJ: Yup. Yeah.

 

[0:16:07]

Erin: Avid Yelp user.

 

[0:16:08]

PJ: I'm a latecomer-

 

[0:16:09]

Erin: Not a reviewer but-

 

[0:16:10]

PJ: Not a reviewer, right. I'm a voyeur. I hide in the comments and I watch.

 

[0:16:13]

Erin: Yes.

 

[0:16:14]

PJ: I'm a-

 

[0:16:14]

Jesse: Lurker.

 

[0:16:15]

PJ: What's that?

 

[0:16:16]

Jesse: A lurker.

 

[0:16:16]

PJ: I'm a lurker. I'm a lurker, that's right.

 

[0:16:18]

Erin: Yeah, I rely on those people who are letting people know their opinions.

 

[0:16:22]

PJ: And I'm a latecomer to Reddit actually. I kind of just joined the bandwagon because I needed information on a certain thing. I was like, wow, this isn't just funny comments, there's a lot of really useful information here. Who knew? Anyways, so what were some trends, some hot ideas in the last few years that really didn't deliver on its promise? What are some current trends or hot ideas you think do have promise in the future? Erin, you want to weigh in?

 

[0:16:48]

Erin: Well, getting back to technology here, I think that as companies starting becoming more digital, and they were collecting so much more data and they wanted a place to put it, a data lake, and I think you know, I don't know how long ago it was, but Hadoop technology has emerged as kind of this place where you could be putting all your log data, all of your transactional data, all of this data. And it was easy to collect potentially, but not easy to actually self serve. So you were collecting all this data, but you didn't know ... There was no way to expose it to the organization. So I think that these analytical data warehouses have really filled that void and actually made that possible. And we've only seen that within the past five years or so.

 

[0:17:33]

PJ: Can you tell me the different between a data warehouse and a data lake? Because I've heard data lake around this office over the past eight or nine months, and is there a big different that I'm missing?

 

[0:17:45]

Erin: I can give the high level and then I think Jesse might want to comment on the more details. But you can think of a data lake as more like a file system. So you're putting all these files of data in this place for storage, but that doesn't make it necessarily accessible to the people who need it.

 

[0:18:02]

PJ: But the warehouse, you can actually do more with it?

 

[0:18:05]

Erin: Right. In a more performant way.

 

[0:18:07]

Jesse: Yeah, I mean the way I would kind of think about it is a little bit more literally if you will. A data warehouse you can image as potentially a physical warehouse that you can just put anything in there. In this case, it's going to be data. And a data lake, you can think of as a warehouse that has a giant pool in it. All that data is kind of just swimming around in a, I wouldn't call it a liquid form, but there's ... It's potentially unstructured, it's very fluid, it's just there.

 

[0:18:31]

PJ: Makes sense.

 

[0:18:32]

Jesse: And then people can go into that data lake with buckets or whatever tool to extract the data that they need.

 

[0:18:40]

PJ: That's a good metaphor. And so data lakes versus data ponds, is there ...

 

[0:18:45]

Jesse: There have been some ... I've heard the term data ponds before-

 

[0:18:48]

PJ: Really? Okay. I thought I was just messing with you, but I guess I wasn't-

 

[0:18:53]

Jesse: No I've heard it before. I don't think we're currently using that though.

 

[0:18:56]

PJ: All right, Jesse, hot shot, will data proficiency be a core skill for talent in the future? What do you think?

 

[0:19:05]

Jesse: Yeah, I think absolutely. I think here at Braze, and just at other companies, just reading the news, you hear more and more about how companies try to be data-driven. If you just look at our job descriptions, by the way we're hiring, and job descriptions of other companies you see, the requirement of understanding the different data warehouses, technologies, how to use data. A move from Excel to more complicated analytics technologies like Looker for example, becoming more and more popular. So it's absolutely going to be more important in the future. And you know I think for data analysts, that's ... Their role has kind of changed over the recent years and will continue to change as well. I think for the data analysts that I see, it's moving more and more towards a full staff knowledge. So before, you would see people focusing on one element of the data pipeline, whereas analysts today tend to have more visibility over how to bring data in, how to clean it, how to do the app analysis and the visualization, everything. And I think there's going to be more focus on the domain knowledge as well because data and insights out of context, is not going to be terribly useful to the organization. So we need to know how to appropriately analyze and interpret enough information in a way that the business or the end users can actually use. Also, I think in terms of the marketplace, you're just going to see more and more technologies. Some better, some worse than others, within the visualization space. Looker is pretty new, they're a ... I would call them a challenger, again something encompassing the place and they're doing very well. But going further upstream, you're seeing a lot of new database, data warehouse technologies, a lot of new ETL technologies. So I think the data analysts of today and tomorrow, are just going to be more familiar with these technologies and how to use these technologies. And then flipping a little bit to the non technical people, so the end consumers of the data. I think you're going to see changes there as well, especially as data becomes more democratized, and easier to use and consume. We're definitely seeing a trend towards self service. So, drag and drop analysis of data rather than actually going into the data warehouse to write the code and analyze it. We're seeing more sophisticated alerting, so we know when data isn't looking the way we think it should be looking. And that's just going to allow people to move a lot more quickly and more confidently as they try out experiments, they do AB tests and iterate quickly.

 

[0:21:37]

PJ: Brave new world.

 

[0:21:38]

Jesse: Yes.

 

[0:21:40]

PJ: Erin, you want to weigh in? What does the future hold for Looker? You don't need to show your full hand. I know you guys have stuff. But anything you want to leave us with?

 

[0:21:49]

Erin: Yeah, I think beyond sort of self service, the core BI use case, Looker's really trying to position itself as a data platform. So, not just for internal analytics and reporting, but also serving data elsewhere to other applications, to deliver data where it needs to go, like the action hub integration that we built with Braze. So, basically connecting the dots when it comes to doing analysis and taking action on it. So, building your list of users you want to target a campaign to and not just having to export that and then upload it into a tool, but creating that link directly to that product you're using.

 

[0:22:32]

PJ: Awesome. Cool. A lot stuff to look forward to then.

 

[0:22:35]

Jesse: Mm-hmm (affirmative)-

 

[0:22:35]

PJ: Thank you guys so much for being here with me, and thank you guys for joining us. This has been Jesse Tao, Erin Franz and PJ Bruno. Happy visualizing.

[0:22:45]