Outside of Excel, you've seen and heard multiple data platforms on this newsletter and podcast. Everything from commercial data platforms to open-source platforms driven by communities. In this episode, you'll hear the other side of the data platform ecosystem. David Yakobovitch is a general partner at DataPower Ventures, a venture capital firm that invests in early stage data science, applied AI, and machine learning startups. I don't normally hear or read about the investor's perspective in the data space, so this episode was quite the learning opportunity. You'll also hear about some of the data startups David's firm has invested in and what their unique value propositions are.

Mainframes, Tableau dashboards, and the modern data stack

David started his career in actuarial science and finance information systems. He originally worked at Aflac on their mainframes. At the time, the "modern" data stack included tools like Qlik, SAP Crystal Reports, and of course, SQL. David eventually moved to Tableau and was building dashboards for his team. After stints in the banking world at Citi and Deutsche, David moved to NYC and started working a lot with Python and R. He was a lead data science instructor at General Assembly and eventually landed at Galvanize as the data science team lead. I've been an instructor and have gone to events for both GA and Galvanize and encourage you to check out both organizations if you would like to up-level your data skills.

Galvanize co-working space. Source: ERIC LAIGNEL

David currently works full-time at SingleStore as a senior manager of technical enablement. Saying he works "full-time" for SingleStore is not an accurate characterization of what David does day-to-day since he wears many hats. He is also runs a venture capital fund called DataPower Ventures and hosts an artificial intelligence podcast called HumAIn. As a believer in side hustles, I think David shows no side hustle is too small or big to take on!

Evolution of the modern data stack

David shared his perspective on the modern data stack and the key takeaway is (surprise surprise) Excel is not going anywhere. Old and new platforms still have integrations with Excel. David rattled off a few including Refinitiv, Quickbooks, and Bloomberg. As an analyst, you have so many tools in the data stack that allow you to work with data. With ETL or ELT, you can import/export your data tables and schemas into another tool (like Excel) to do the actual analysis. This is where tools like Fivetran and dbt really shine to help you get your data into the right destination. The data can be in a low-code tool where you drag-and-drop tables and schemas or even in a Jupyter notebook. Once the analysis is done, you have visualization tools like Power BI and Looker to help you communicate your findings.

Source: David Jayatillake

The above modern data stack diagram comes from David Jayatillake's substack newsletter. To hear about other tools in the data stack, I'd recommend listening to David's episode or this episode with Priyanka Somrah from Work-Bench.