Bill Jelen, known to many as Mr. Excel, was one of the first Internet Tech Celebrities. He turned his online resume into a highly recognizable brand and is a legend in the data community. We get his story, in his own words.  We hope you'll enjoy this candid conversation with Mr. Excel, Bill Jelen   Buy Bill's book Mr.Excel 2021: Unmasking Excel, containing his favorite Excel tips!   Stuff We Mentioned: Hipster Ipsum Copy Filler Tool Dax Studio We Report Space-Bill's Other Website! Rob's Wheel Of Inquisition   Episode Timeline:

• 3:15 - Mr. Excel's Origin Story
• 18:05 - The Excel vs Power BI user base
• 35:35 - Dax is Badass!
• 47:25 - Lambda Functions in Excel, Mr. Excel asks some Python questions, and Rob gets cynical
• 1:16:50 - Bill's other passion We Report Space and the story of Tickling Keys
• 1:28:30 - More on Lambda functions and Let functions and the immense potential there

Episode Transcript:

Rob Collie (00:00:00): Welcome friends. This week, we have the one and only Mr. Excel himself, Bill Jelen. Chances are, if you're listening to this, you have been to Bill's site, mrexcel.com via search engine more times than you can count. You might have read some of his books because he is factually the most prolific author of Excel books in history. One of the things that I find most fascinating about Bill is that every technical community, these days, is a community. We're familiar with the idea of, essentially, celebrities, MVPs, community figures, advocates, internet stars.

Rob Collie (00:00:35): And Bill was doing that long before that was a thing. He was doing this in the 1990s. When websites still looked like the old Windows help files. He might have been the only person that I'm aware of doing this thing that early. He's absolutely a fixture in the data community as far as I'm concerned. And just also a phenomenal person. He's been a really good friend of mine for a number of years. We'll sometimes talk early in the morning when I'm still up and he is already up. We had a great time, wandered all over the place as you'd expect. I hope you enjoy it. So let's get into it.

Announcer (00:01:13): Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please?

Announcer (00:01:17): This is the Raw Data by P3 podcast. With your host, Rob Collie, and your co-host, Thomas LaRock. Find out what the experts at P3 can do for your business. Go to powerpivotpro. com. Raw Data by P3 is data with the human element.

Rob Collie (00:01:35): Welcome to the show, Bill Jelen.

Bill Jelen (00:01:38): It is great to be here. Holy smokes.

Rob Collie (00:01:41): How you doing today, man?

Bill Jelen (00:01:42): It is a beautiful day down here in sunny Florida. 73 degrees.

Rob Collie (00:01:47): It sounds awesome. A little sort of Oceanside experience for you. We have freezing rain today.

Bill Jelen (00:01:54): That's special. Freezing rain. That's that Indianapolis thing. A little bit further south from Cleveland, the snow changes to freezing rain.

Rob Collie (00:02:02): Yeah. I highly recommend it.

Bill Jelen (00:02:03): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:02:04): I don't even know what freezing rain was when I ... I didn't know it was a thing when I lived in Florida.

Bill Jelen (00:02:10): Great.

Rob Collie (00:02:10): Oh, it's just wonderful. The things that ... What was it, the Jimmy Buffett Changes in Latitudes?

Bill Jelen (00:02:16): Yes.

Rob Collie (00:02:16): That brings you freezing rain. I think he might have been referring to going South.

Bill Jelen (00:02:22): Yeah. It's something else.

Rob Collie (00:02:22): With a latitude change, it might have been-

Bill Jelen (00:02:24): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:02:24): So Mr. Excel, you might be, if not the first, one of the sort of original, the OG internet tech celebrity figures. Everyone's trying for that today. That's a thing today. That's the lifestyle. A whole generation is attempting that right now.

Bill Jelen (00:02:44): Right, yeah.

Rob Collie (00:02:45): But you, I mean, you were doing this long before it was cool.

Bill Jelen (00:02:49): It was easier when there was no competition.

Rob Collie (00:02:51): Well, I-

Bill Jelen (00:02:52): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:02:52): I agree.

Bill Jelen (00:02:53): Yeah, right.

Rob Collie (00:02:54): But at the same time, there's a reason why there was no competition. Because no one else thought to do it, or had the energy to do it, or thought that there was ROI. So in some sense, it was harder to start early, right? It was harder to be one of the early people otherwise there would've been more. But yeah, once you're going, it's different. So let's go back to the origin story. The Marvel comic book, or DC, if you prefer-

Bill Jelen (00:03:18): Right.

Rob Collie (00:03:19): Origin story of Mr. Excel. You were not always Mr. Excel. You were once just Bill Jelen.

Bill Jelen (00:03:25): That's true.

Rob Collie (00:03:26): Where does it all begin?

Bill Jelen (00:03:28): And the nasty secret is that I was originally Mr. Lotus 1-2-3.

Thomas LaRock (00:03:32): Oh.

Rob Collie (00:03:32): Oh my God.

Bill Jelen (00:03:33): Yeah, it wasn't until 1995, when the company I was working for switched over from Lotus to Excel. And then Mr. Excel started in November of 98. So I only had three years of Excel under my belt. Before that-

Rob Collie (00:03:44): Whoa, you were three years in before you became Mr.

Bill Jelen (00:03:48): Mr. That's right. Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:03:50): So were you literally Mr. Lotus 1-2-3? Did you call yourself that at one time?

Bill Jelen (00:03:55): No, the whole thing is, I was the guy at the company. There's one of these at every company who knows everything about spreadsheets. Originally Lotus, and then Excel. And it wasn't because I was a spreadsheet geek. It was because we had a miserable tool. They paid $100,000 for a reporting package that did not work. But thank God it had the most important button in the world, export to spreadsheet. Yeah, right? And so then there ... I'm supposed to be using this $100,000 tool, but I'm back in a cube in the back of the finance department. We're using Lotus 1-2-3 to turn everything around. Right?

Rob Collie (00:04:31): We think of that button now as, export to Excel. Did they have the foresight in the Lotus 1-2-3 days to call it export to Excel? Was it already called export to Excel, because they knew sort of where it was going?

Bill Jelen (00:04:41): No. I'm going to geek out here. It wasn't even an exported .WK1. It was a .WKS. A Lotus 1-2-3 version 1 file, which was limited 2084 records, or some crazy low number like that. Yeah. So the first thing we do was convert that to proper WK1 file with a 16,384 records. Woo!

Rob Collie (00:05:02): Get out of here.

Bill Jelen (00:05:03): Yeah, right. How would you ever fill that up?

Rob Collie (00:05:07): That's too many.

Bill Jelen (00:05:07): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:05:11): Yeah. That's great. So I've heard this story before, by the way. This expensive reporting package that doesn't do what you want it to do. But usually there's more zeros on the price tag. 100,000. That's-

Bill Jelen (00:05:26): Yeah, that was 1990. I don't know. That was 1995, 1996 dollars. So-

Rob Collie (00:05:28): Oh, so in today's dollars it'd be like a million?

Bill Jelen (00:05:31): Probably. Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:05:32): Yeah. Great. Was that really sort of the origin of your spreadsheet engagement?

Bill Jelen (00:05:38): That's how I became really, really good at spreadsheets. Just using this $100,000 tool and then secretly a $99 spreadsheet to produce everything. So that trial by fire taught me a lot.

Rob Collie (00:05:49): I'd always thought that, and I've known you a long time now, I'd always thought that you were just sort of in the accounting world. And of course you use spreadsheets in the accounting world and you got good at it. But to hear you tell the story ... Seriously for me this is, I think, the first time I've heard this, that this really started out for you, the primary driver anyway, was a need for reporting a BI need essentially.

Bill Jelen (00:06:13): Essentially. Yeah, that's right. And it was ad hoc. I mean, we were never running the same report. It was always ad hoc, which I loved. I loved ad hoc. I loved every day. You'd show up to work and see what fire is burning and what fire you could put out by being the guy who could get the data from the mainframe into, well, spreadsheet.

Rob Collie (00:06:31): We have a name for that kind of workflow in the industry. At least at P3 we have a name for it. What fire's burning every day, the different questions every day, the things that twists and turns and all that, we call that reality.

Bill Jelen (00:06:45): That's a great name.

Rob Collie (00:06:47): You like that? I mean, that's just life. That's just how the world works. That's really, really cool. Seriously, I did not expect, at least this early in the conversation, to be learning something new about the Bill.

Bill Jelen (00:06:59): Right. That was it. So I'd been at this company for 10 years and I'm the first generation, I think, that you didn't go someplace and work for your whole life. My dad showed up at a place and worked there for 35 years until retired. And so this place I was working at, they fired people every Friday. HR coming towards your office with a box. It's like, "Ur"

Rob Collie (00:07:19): It's just part of the ritual.

Bill Jelen (00:07:22): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:07:23): It's like Stalin. It just goes down the row of officers and just shoots every 10th one.

Bill Jelen (00:07:26): Right. Right. And you were just hoping that you were not the one that would be let go that Friday. And then they announced. They called everyone out to the parking lot. They made a big announcement that there was a hostile takeover bid. And our hated competitor, our dreaded competitor, was trying to buy us out. But don't worry, we're going to find a white night. We'll find someone else to buy us. Because we hate those guys. And I'm like, "Oh man, this is bad. I'm going to have to go look for a job." I haven't interviewed in 10 years. I don't even have a resume. So in my twisted mind, it was the Friday for Thanksgiving in 1998, I launched Mr Excel. I said, "Send me your Excel questions." And the website said, "I'll write up the best one every week here on the website."

Bill Jelen (00:08:08): And the best ones will show up in a book. But what I was secretly thinking was if I could get 50 people to send me Excel questions, then when I lost my job in a couple of months after the hostile takeover, I would have 50 places to send a resume. I mean, anyone who sent an Excel question in, clearly was using Excel. So-

Rob Collie (00:08:24): That's right.

Bill Jelen (00:08:25): It was a job. It was a job hunt. But then they backed out of the deal. They didn't buy us. They didn't buy us. So now, all of a sudden, I got people sending me Excel questions every day. What am I going to do with this? So that's how it started.

Rob Collie (00:08:38): Oh my God. I love that. So that's why I started Power Proof at pro.com originally. Was like an online resume in a way, and had no idea. I mean, I kind of had an idea, but it was a squishy motivation. I love how the accidental things like this-

Bill Jelen (00:08:53): Yeah, absolutely. Right.

Rob Collie (00:08:54): Yeah I know.

Bill Jelen (00:08:54): Right.

Rob Collie (00:08:55): It didn't even turn out to be real. The takeover wasn't even real.

Bill Jelen (00:08:58): They did come back and get us two years later. And that actually is really lucky, because in those two years ... They say the way to build traffic, you can either buy your way or ... It takes time or money. Either buy ads or just slowly grow organically. And those two years give us a lot of time to grow organically. And then when it came time that they offered us a buyout, I said, "All right. Well, I got six months' severance package here. Let me see what I can do. Let's just hang a shingle out to see if I can get Excel consulting gigs." And I had to wake up and hope that something would come in. There was only one day that nothing came in. So yeah, by the end of the six months, it was a go.

Thomas LaRock (00:09:31): See that part has always fascinated me. The fact that, until I met Rob, I had no idea anyone could make a living as an Excel consultant.

Bill Jelen (00:09:42): It's amazing. It's amazing. And it certainly requires some VBA. Back then you had to do some VBA. And they were tiny little VBA jobs, like 250 bucks or something like that. But you string enough of those together and you're replacing the old corporate salary. So yeah, it was good.

Rob Collie (00:09:59): So When did the book start?

Bill Jelen (00:10:01): The book. Okay. Here's the worst part about working from home. First off, the cafeteria at home is last night's dinner, right? Whatever's left over from last night's dinner. There's no choice whatsoever. And I missed not having anyone to talk to. There was no one to talk about last night's game, no one to go golfing with, no softball teams in the summer. There's nothing. And so I started joining the Chamber of Commerce, just to have someone to go talk to. You could go out to breakfast once a month at the networking thing. And this is so weird. There was an event called ... It was the Women's Network. I don't qualify for that, but they said, "It's okay, come on anyway."

Bill Jelen (00:10:41): So I would go to the Women's Network thing and there was a lady there who did a presentation and she says, "Yeah, I'm a marketing consultant. I just got started. I want to triple someone's business." And I went up to her afterwards. I said, "Well hey, things are going really good. I'm satisfied with where we're at. But yeah, if you want to triple my business, let's do it." So I explained the business model. I said, "I got all these people coming. They post their questions at the message board. 99% of them get their answer for free. And that's it. They never come back. And I'm counting on one out of a hundred to actually hire me and pay me 250 bucks." And she's like, "Wait a second. You're either charging people $250 or zero?"

Bill Jelen (00:11:20): I'm like, "Yes." And she says, "You're missing an important price point. You need a $20 product. If people love you, if you had a $20 product, they would be handing $20 over to you handed fist." So I wrote the first book. The print run. Rob, what was our last print run? Our last print run was thousands, Right?

Rob Collie (00:11:38): Yeah.

Bill Jelen (00:11:38): It was just some crazy number. My first print run, on Whipple avenue in Canton, Ohio, at the office, Max Printing store, was 10. I printed 10. Cost $10 each. I sold them for 20. Cool 100 bucks right there.

Rob Collie (00:11:53): Humble beginnings.

Bill Jelen (00:11:54): I took that profit, I printed another 10. And eventually the day I got to print a hundred, it was like, "Woo! Wow, moving up."

Rob Collie (00:12:02): You were self-published from the beginning.

Bill Jelen (00:12:06): From the Beginning. That's right. Because I hated rejection. I didn't want to go to the publishers. So I just printed, myself. And then once I started getting five star reviews, and then the publishers came to me. And great news, even at Taylor, the marketing consultant, she wanted to triple someone's business. Within 18 months, the book sales had outpaced consulting 5 to 1. And I said, "Oh, look at this." I just write a book once and sell it for 20 bucks.

Bill Jelen (00:12:29): I don't have to worry about writing VBA for someone. And the VBA always worked until that person left. And then the new person who took over the job. Yeah. Like, "Hey, your program doesn't work." "What do you mean my program doesn't work? It worked fine for six months. Where's Shelly?" "Oh, she's not here anymore." "When did it stop working?" "Right when she left." I was like, "Ur." And just having to deal with that ongoing tech support was no fun. No fun at all. And the great thing about a book, I've hardly had anyone ever call and say, " Bill, the book won't open." There's just ... That never comes up. That never comes up.

Rob Collie (00:13:08): Yesterday, there were words on the page. Today, there's no words.

Bill Jelen (00:13:11): Right. Yeah. I had a back cover that got scratched once. So I had to replace the book for that. But it's very, very low probability for bugs to pop up once the book is out.

Rob Collie (00:13:22): Yeah. Not a lot of support calls.

Bill Jelen (00:13:24): No.

Rob Collie (00:13:24): For a book that ... huh.

Bill Jelen (00:13:26): And I'm going to whisper this part. I'm not sure I want anyone to know this. I've always said, if you have a great cover and about 10 pages of content, 90% of the people will be happy with that. Because they never actually read the book. They buy the book and they put it on their shelf. So if you just have enough stuff at the front, and then you could just put 190 pages of white space, most people wouldn't complain at all.

Rob Collie (00:13:44): Yeah. I think Salvador Dolly, or one of those artists said something similar back in the day, which was like, "Once you've made a name for yourself, once you've established it, after that, it's all just production. Just churn it out. People will buy anything. Once you've started, you just slap some paint on the canvas. And its more important to get quantity than quality." Really cynical, but you kind of get the sense he was speaking from truth. Wasn't he?

Bill Jelen (00:14:09): So now, just in the last 30 seconds, I've hatched this grand scheme that I'm going to get a word cloud of all the Excel terms and then use some huge TEXTJOIN function in Excel and just start generating content automatically. Random. Use ram between in the word cloud, and frequency distribution. I bet I can just start, yeah, knocking out.

Rob Collie (00:14:29): Have You seen the HipsterIpsum site?

Bill Jelen (00:14:31): No.

Rob Collie (00:14:32): So you know about Lorem Ipsum, right?

Bill Jelen (00:14:34): Yes. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:14:35): Fake Latin text that you fill in on a design, like a webpage, before you're ready to write the actual copy. Well, there's a website, it's HipsterIpsum. and it is so funny. It's like, I'm for loco, farmed a table, sustainable.

Bill Jelen (00:14:53): That's it. That's it. I just need to hack their website and put my Excel terms in instead.

Rob Collie (00:14:57): Yeah.

Bill Jelen (00:14:57): And we're good to go.

Rob Collie (00:14:59): SpreadsheetIpsum. Or GridsterIpsum.

Bill Jelen (00:15:01): GridsterIpsum.

Rob Collie (00:15:02): Something like that. I'm VLOOKUP cross reference relative name range.

Bill Jelen (00:15:09): Yeah.

Thomas LaRock (00:15:10): It's like you're trying to give yourself a rapper name.

Bill Jelen (00:15:12): Yes.

Rob Collie (00:15:12): Yeah. It is. And a really bad one at that.

Thomas LaRock (00:15:14): VLOOKUP.

Rob Collie (00:15:17): Yeah.

Bill Jelen (00:15:18): There was a service, I don't know, 15 years ago, that you could put a website in and it would translate it to Snoop Dogg. You could send that link ... I said, "Hey, I rewrote my website. What do you think?" You're not serious. Are you?

Rob Collie (00:15:32): All right. So you started essentially in BI. Excel is, even today, the BI tool of choice for the entire world. I think Power BI is slowly colonizing that space. And this is sort of the core of what our business does. So at some point though, it seems like you became not ... Once you went sort of solo, the majority of the work you were doing for people and the topics covered in your books and everything, doesn't have that same heavy analytical slant. I mean, there's still some of that for sure. You've written books 100% on Pivot Tables for instance, but you've become a lot more, I think, general purpose in your focus over the years. Would you agree with that?

Bill Jelen (00:16:15): And that's because of the questions that are coming in. At this point, the next YouTube video is just going to be the last good question that came in, whatever it happens to be. That certainly goes from taking massive amounts of data down to a one-page summer report to whatever crazy problem someone's having today.

Rob Collie (00:16:32): Yeah. There's a lot of that, especially in the early blogging days, right? Right now I'm scrolling to see if there's a function in Excel that starts with MC, MC something. Oh, there's only MD. Nope. There's no MC Excel function. We're going to have to keep looking for our rapper name. If we ever assembled the brain trust to pick the Excel rapper name, this is it. This is the chamber where that happens.

Bill Jelen (00:16:53): Sometimes in Excel, you'll use our rapper function. On the video, have a little call out there of some famous rapper. And it's like, not this. This.

Rob Collie (00:17:01): Yeah.

Bill Jelen (00:17:04): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:17:05): So we are, tangentially anyway, this podcast is usually ... It ties back to Power BI somehow. You haven't really had to make that shift. You have been. I've seen you. You've been dabbling, especially on the Excel side, like the Power Pivot and especially the Power Query side. You've been dipping your toe into those pools. But some of the Excel crowd of yesterday have sort of fully migrated. They now identify as Power BI people.

Bill Jelen (00:17:34): I can tell that from book sales. If you go out to Nielsen and look at book sales, the Power BI books are just outselling Excel books by a huge margin.

Rob Collie (00:17:44): Really?

Bill Jelen (00:17:44): Right. And I-

Rob Collie (00:17:44): Across the board.

Bill Jelen (00:17:46): That doesn't mean that there's more Power BI people than Excel people. It's the Excel people already know what they're doing. And the Power BI people, the people who are migrating to Power BI, they're the ones who need help. If you've been using Excel for 20 years, you don't need another Excel book. But the people who are just switching to Power BI ... When you said it's slowly moving, I think it's ... Whatever that rate is, that rate is increasing. That's a great thing.

Rob Collie (00:18:06): There's also more leverage on Power BI skill than on Excel skill. It's not to say that Excel skill is less valuable, because even I today, I'm constantly throwing together spreadsheets because there's no substitute for a blank canvas that you can compose in any way. And for example, if you want to build yourself a wheel of fortune type app that picks a random person that is then forced to ask a question of you on the spot in a team meeting, there's only one go-to, and that's Excel.

Bill Jelen (00:18:35): You're definitely not going to go to Word or PowerPoint for that.

Rob Collie (00:18:37): They're not Power BI either, as it turns out. But in terms of institutional impact, a single person effectively applying Power BI can be worth millions of dollars to the bottom line annually. It's crazy, right? A single person applying Excel isn't going to have that kind of leverage. You kind of need a whole culture of people applying Excel simultaneously. You don't get this one to many with that kind of impact, typically. I mean, except for the famous stories where someone messed up a spreadsheet, right? In which case you can subtract. You can subtract millions of dollars from the bottom line in an eye blink if you want. So I think there's, in essence, sort of a higher premium on Power BI learning. I guess what I'm really saying is, is that it's not just the people who know Excel and there's all that. People are more willing to pay for Power BI expertise than they are willing to pay for Excel expertise. At the same time though, there's still many, many times more people who are interested in acquiring Excel expertise even today, relative to Power BI.

Bill Jelen (00:19:43): Do you think that there'll ever become a tipping point where the Power BI user base is more than the Excel user base, or will it always be-

Rob Collie (00:19:51): No.

Bill Jelen (00:19:52): Is there some limit? And you're 40%

Rob Collie (00:19:54): I think there's definitely a limit. For the same reason as that leverage, right? You just don't need as many people in an organization slinging Power BI. You need more people in your organization than what IT can provide, but less than what you need from Excel. So It's somewhere in between there. So I think maybe the Power BI audience might be 10 to 30% the size of the Excel audience at equilibrium. That's just me pulling a number, but that's a gut feeling that I've got.

Bill Jelen (00:20:24): That's still a ... That's going to be a massive number though.

Rob Collie (00:20:26): Yeah.

Bill Jelen (00:20:26): Right? So-

Rob Collie (00:20:27): If you think of another way it's, take the fraction of Excel usage that is making sense of reports. That's that same origin you had back in the 90s of exporting from one size fits all reporting systems, but we answered no questions. The Excel as BI backstop is a significant percentage of Excel's total usage. It's double digit percentage. It's 10 to 30%, right? That's the space that Power BI is on its way to colonizing. But I still think that's early. I still think it's early. In fact, I would predict that the sales of Power BI books, the sales rate of them is still ... We have not yet seen its peak.

Bill Jelen (00:21:09): I would definitely agree with that. And my anecdotal evidence for that is just the number of Excel people that I run into. So up until this year, I was on the road, right? Doing Excel seminars. And so you'd show up in a city and you'd have 100 people from around the city show up, who were all working in accounting. There to get their continued education hours. I would always try engage. When I got to the Power Query point of the day, show of hands, how many of you have used or heard of Power Query? And it was early on, it'd be one or two out of 100. And even at the end, it was 10 or 12 out of 100. So the number of people who still have no clue that Power Query is there ... And for me, power query is the gateway.

Bill Jelen (00:21:54): Once you realize that Power Query is there, then you take that Power Query knowledge and move over to Power BI. Because now you can take that data, and instead of spending an hour to clean it, you'd spend 10 minutes on day one and then zero minutes, just click refresh, on day two through day 50,000. Once you learn that you can do that, then to me, the natural next step is, do that with really cool visuals on top.

Rob Collie (00:22:18): Yeah.

Bill Jelen (00:22:18): Through Power BI.

Rob Collie (00:22:19): We're trying to track down one of the originators of Power Query. One of the shadowy figures behind the scenes at Microsoft and get them on the show. Stay tuned. Fingers crossed. We're hot on the trail.

Bill Jelen (00:22:32): I would love to be a fly on the wall for that. With a really large megaphone, Right? And just-

Rob Collie (00:22:37): That's a fly.

Bill Jelen (00:22:38): To shake them and say, "How did you manage to get this product in Excel with no one realizing that it's there?" Excel 2013, it was an add-in. And then Excel 2016, they moved it to the data tab. But if you look at the group, the Get and Transform group, and the group that it replaced, if you're not looking at them side by side, you would swear it's the same thing. Right? So if someone comes along, they look at the data tab, oh, this looks like just what we used to have.

Rob Collie (00:23:05): Yeah. The Power Query team didn't achieve that. Don't worry. The Excel team takes care of hiding it.

Bill Jelen (00:23:10): Okay.

Rob Collie (00:23:10): And that is actually a really tough challenge. Dave Gainer, my old mentor, who was my boss when I was on Excel, he's not here to defend himself. So let's pick on him. He had this thing. I'm not really picking on him. I think he's right. And this is the challenge. I would always want to introduce things into Excel that looked different, kind of stood out, that were their own thing, that did something. It was almost like self advertising in its difference.

Bill Jelen (00:23:33): Okay.

Rob Collie (00:23:34): And he was always macking me around saying, "No, we're custodians of this product. And we are not going to turn it into some tourist trap of garish signs all up and down the road." Little hole in the wall, firework stands and all these one off things, right?

Rob Collie (00:23:49): Those things have a cumulative cost to the product that really adds up. And so you get this legitimate and well intentioned, integrative, holistic philosophy as a side effect of that. You can't tell that anything is new. The things that should be screaming at you, for example, the 2013 awful, awful aberration that we all are pledged to never talk about, but we're going to talk about. When they renamed measures in Power Pivot to be calculated fields for an eye blink in time, right? And you and I know that calculated fields were an existing feature of Pivot Tables and they weren't very good. They were like less than 1% as interesting and powerful as measures.

Rob Collie (00:24:34): I mean, I can't even put it on a numerical scale. It's thousands of times less powerful, thousands of times less relevant. But out of consistency, oh, we'll just call it calculated fields. It's the new calculated fields. But when that ends up happening is, you give it the same name as the boring old crappy thing that everyone always hated. And now why would I ever click that button? Instead, that button should be glowing. Three dimensional, jumping out of the screen and grabbing you by the nose saying, "I am the best thing ever. Click me." But if you've got 40 things in Excel saying.

Rob Collie (00:25:03): Click me. But, if you've got 40 things in Excel saying that, what is it on the Incredibles? "When everybody's special, nobody will be"

Bill Jelen (00:25:12): No, I've always said there should be a red neon arrow pointing at certain features, and that certainly is one.

Rob Collie (00:25:19): I've got an idea. It'll be almost like the Amazon rating system. User enthusiasm for features. Data driven, light up. So now it's first of all, it's factual. The market's deciding.

Bill Jelen (00:25:35): That's beautiful.

Rob Collie (00:25:36): And you can turn it on and off, and-

Bill Jelen (00:25:39): No, no, no.

Rob Collie (00:25:40): ..Right there. Microsoft, I hope you're not listening because I just gave one of my best ideas ever to you for free when really you could be paying me large amounts of money every year to generate two ideas like this per year.

Bill Jelen (00:25:52): It sounds beautiful. But I just followed it through through its logical conclusion. And what we would have in an Excel user interface is a button that consumed 98% of the space with Autosum, just based on what the users use that's, Would, The whole home tab would just be Autosum. That would be it there'd be nothing else.

Rob Collie (00:26:10): You're saying this would drive us to the bottom, this would drive us to lowest common denominator?

Bill Jelen (00:26:15): It would have to be user usage of the people I like, I would get to nominate the 100 people that actually control what gets on there.

Rob Collie (00:26:23): I like it, a curated, an MVP curated system?

Bill Jelen (00:26:28): Just my friends.

Rob Collie (00:26:29): Do we want Ken in charge of that?

Bill Jelen (00:26:31): Everything would Be shouted then.

Rob Collie (00:26:34): Very intelligently though. Like the most intelligent, booming voice ever met, We need to get Ken on here too. Don't we?

Bill Jelen (00:26:41): You do need to get Ken on here.

Rob Collie (00:26:42): All right Ken, we're coming for you. Hey Tom, I'll tell you an interesting... If we're going to keep wandering whatever we want do. I'm going to tell you an interesting detail about our business relationship with Bill. So it's a fact that in terms of retail dollars, our book deal between P3 and Bill has done millions and millions of dollars in retail sales. It's a cool thing to say. Right? I don't think it's eight figures, but I think we're somewhere in the seven figures of retail sales.

Bill Jelen (00:27:13): Retail sales. That's right.

Rob Collie (00:27:15): And we've never had a contract.

Bill Jelen (00:27:18): It's a handshake.

Rob Collie (00:27:19): Yeah. I don't think we even shook hands. I think we were you know, Email. It was a distant handshake.

Bill Jelen (00:27:25): I think at one point you said, just in case something happens, we should write all this down. And I said, oh yeah. And then we never did. And that was like four or five years in.

Rob Collie (00:27:34): It's just like that voice that comes into your back of your head like, oh come on, we're really being irresponsible. But then the short term incentives, they straighten you right out, we were never going to Sue each other.

Bill Jelen (00:27:46): Your book is the best selling computer book that I've ever seen by far here. Of all the books I've I published, you've outsold every book.

Rob Collie (00:27:53): It was a good handshake.

Bill Jelen (00:27:54): It'd be interesting to go out and find the best selling computer book, something back from the day and see if you've eclipsed that.

Rob Collie (00:28:02): I'll tell you what let's do that offline. And if the results look good for us, we'll circle back. If, they don't look good. We just won't bring it up again.

Bill Jelen (00:28:14): Let us just cut this part [inaudible 00:28:14]

Thomas LaRock (00:28:14): I don't know why you don't just say how good they are.

Rob Collie (00:28:16): We just bluff it. It's optimistic. We'll say it now on the podcast. And then if it turns out to not be true, then we'll cut it.

Thomas LaRock (00:28:21): If you say it enough times, it becomes true. Isn't that the lesson that we've learned?

Bill Jelen (00:28:25): What a horrible lesson it is, but yes.[crosstalk 00:03:27]

Rob Collie (00:28:29): My book is more popular than the Bible.

Bill Jelen (00:28:32): Rob's book has sold more copies than the DaVinci code...For example.

Rob Collie (00:28:39): In parentheses, for Excel.

Bill Jelen (00:28:42): You know, that would be another great book. The DaVinci code for Excel. And that's the one where you only need 10 pages of content and 90, 190 pages of Blank stuff.

Rob Collie (00:28:49): And 90% of the production cost is just licensing a picture of Tom Hanks for the cover. Right?

Bill Jelen (00:28:54): That's it. And most of the sales will be people who accidentally, they were trying to buy the real DaVinci code and they bought us instead.

Rob Collie (00:29:00): Tom's sitting down at a computer with a spreadsheet on it and he's asking the photographer, why are we doing this photo shoot? What is it again? He's like, "don't worry about it you're getting paid".

Thomas LaRock (00:29:10): So how'd you two meet? We haven't talked about that yet.

Bill Jelen (00:29:13): Cleveland, Ohio,

Thomas LaRock (00:29:15): You have this incredible non-handshake deal, but what's the origin story for the two of you?

Bill Jelen (00:29:21): It was Cleveland Ohio. When David gainer was in charge of the Excel team, I got a note from David. I'm living in Akron, Ohio. He says, one of my guys is relocating to Cleveland, Ohio. You two should go to lunch. Know what I got from Dave gainer? I reached out to Rob and I went up to Cleveland and had lunch. And it was the best conversation I think I've ever had because I, sitting in Akron, Ohio have hatched all sorts of conspiracy theories. I was the Qanon of Excel. You guys on the Excel team, you did this because. And then Rob would say, well, you know the story there is, and then he would give me some boring story about why it made sense to do that. And I hated that because my story was so far, much better. My made up conspiracy theory was better than yours, but it was just great to have someone who was almost equally as frustrated with things as I was, You could tell me the backstory behind it.

Thomas LaRock (00:30:23): Does knowing the backstory, did that make things better for you?

Bill Jelen (00:30:27): It made me less angry I think. Sometimes.

Rob Collie (00:30:30): So many mundane reasons for things, right? Just normal big company, hands are tied type of stuff. It's just, On one hand it's reassuring because it's not nefarious. We weren't hiding in the basement of a pizza parlor in Washington, DC, but at the same time, it's kind of depressing in a way, because those sorts of forces are durable. If they were acting yesterday to do things we don't like, they're going to be acting tomorrow to do the same things. Like you'd almost prefer it to be some sort of one off, twisted thing, because tomorrow's going to be different. But when the causes for things are corporate, well corporate's not going anywhere. And we see it over and over again.

Bill Jelen (00:31:13): The other thing I've realized is you cannot be angry when a version one feature doesn't do what you want because at any other company, they wouldn't have put it out. They would wait until they had version five and then put the finished thing out. But Microsoft, especially in Excel, they'll put something out just to kind of get the feedback and they'll send it to the insiders fast, and so it's going to some small percentage and they'll react. People will say, Hey, this would be better for you, do this. And they're not afraid to change things. So it used to be like, that's so stupid, That new feature. And now I'm just like, hang on it'll come around, this five years from now this will be the greatest thing ever. But right now, this is what they have done. And they're letting us play with this part. So.

Rob Collie (00:31:53): Let's go back to the origin story of us meeting from [inaudible 00:31:55] I think the statute of limitations is the now expired on us needing to keep this secret. So you were writing about the time that we had lunch that first time you were writing a Power Pivot book, you had one in the works.

Bill Jelen (00:32:08): That's right.

Rob Collie (00:32:10): It wasn't called Power Pivot yet the name hadn't been released,

Thomas LaRock (00:32:13): was it still Gemini?

Rob Collie (00:32:14): It was still project Gemini. You had gotten basically to the end of this book or close to it anyway. And your book was loaded with screenshots, from project Gemini where the field list said project Gemini at the top and all kinds was project Gemini everywhere. And then out comes the real name, Power pivot. And you're like [Spanish 00:32:37]

Bill Jelen (00:32:41): That had to be a very unhappy day.

Rob Collie (00:32:42): Do you remember what followed? I can fill it in if you don't.

Bill Jelen (00:32:46): Yeah. Tell me what followed.

Rob Collie (00:32:47): So the problem was, is that you had to be done with the book by a certain deadline for printing, but you weren't going to be able to get a hold of a beta of the product with the proper names in it, with power pivot in the UI for like another month or so maybe six weeks. It was, You had a real timing problem. It wasn't so much that you had to redo the screenshots cause that wasn't going to take you too long. It was just the fact that you didn't have anything to screenshot. And so the black market came through for you. Right? Shady Rob Collie said, Hey, in the spirit of benefit to my baby power pivot and to Microsoft, I'm going to give you access to my internal build of power pivot that already had the right names in it. You didn't come to me asking for me to do that. You were just like, Rob again, curses!, What kind of evil star chamber has decided to convene at Microsoft and decide to screw me, Bill Jelen personally.

Bill Jelen (00:33:41): Yes, Cause that's always what it was. It was just trying to get me.

Rob Collie (00:33:46): That's right.

Bill Jelen (00:33:46): That's what everyone thinks.

Rob Collie (00:33:47): I said, Hey, I got a solution. So we met up again at that sort of sketchy, suburban bonefish grill, parking lot. And I handed you a disc, and your power pivot book was able to go out with the proper on time and with the proper UI screenshots.

Bill Jelen (00:34:05): I owe You a bottle of Rum for that or something.

Rob Collie (00:34:08): I mean, I'm sad that you've forgotten this because to me, this is what cemented our friendship. The lunch was fun, but it was just going to be fun. But from that point forward, you owed me.

Bill Jelen (00:34:18): I remember the lunch, you just had so much power pivot knowledge. Like you would just throw an offhand sentence out and I'd be like, holy smokes. This is something I completely don't understand, and then furiously, at least in my head scribbling notes of things I needed to go back think about in the book.

Rob Collie (00:34:35): And, that's how my book was born. At least part of the story for it was that your book gave a comprehensive tour of all the things you could do in Power Pivot, sort of like each what all the different graphical elements do. But you largely had to take a pass on the Dax language because that was a whole universe of its own, and that's how the world's worst book title ever came to be Dax formulas for Power Pivot because it was originally, My book was meant to be a compliment to yours. That's how it all started.

Bill Jelen (00:35:10): Why didn't we go with Dax-Vinci code with Tom Hanks and Rob Collie?

Rob Collie (00:35:15): We just didn't have the budget back then. We weren't the multimillion dollar international conglomerate powerhouse we are today.

Bill Jelen (00:35:23): Let's talk about Dax, let's, just for a second. If we go back to that tool I was using in finance that started the whole thing, a little bit of Dax in that tool would've solved the problem because it was the calculation on the total row that that tool couldn't do. And the fact that total that Dax can basically say, if this has one value, then do this other thing, That ability is I think why Power Pivot and Power BI didn't get caught in that problem of being able to create reports that no one wanted the fact that you can customize that through Dax. It's just phenomenal.

Rob Collie (00:35:59): Look at Bill, just so casually throwing out the if has one value, like the ability for a DAX formula to inspect its own filter context and say, I'm over here now, I'm going to behave differently, I'm going to do a different aggregation at the total.

Bill Jelen (00:36:14): That's badass. The fact... that is really badass, that one measure can change its behavior depending on whether it's on the parent [inaudible 00:36:22] or whatever.

Rob Collie (00:36:24): There's your pull quote, Dax is bad ass.

Bill Jelen (00:36:27): Dax is bad ass.

Rob Collie (00:36:28): It is, isn't it? Well that in Power Query, are the two of them combined or something else?

Bill Jelen (00:36:34): You know what the Power Query, So in my early life in Excel, I was always doing things in VBA, it was VBA. I don't have to do VBA at all anymore because Power Query gets me 99% of the way there. And some of the worst data nightmares that people have shown up in my seminar, I get there early and I walk around and see people have questions and they'll show me their data, some of the worst data nightmares ever you can solve in Power Query in minutes. And the fact that so many Excel people have no clue that it's there hiding back on the data tab.

Rob Collie (00:37:06): So for certain aspects of what you used to do, you're now officially or unofficially retired from doing them. You were the seminar workhorse, man. You were like the hardest work in rock band in America, all over the place doing these seminars. How many seminars would you do a year sort of at peak?

Bill Jelen (00:37:25): The goal was 35 a year. I was trying to do 35 a year, sometimes a little bit more than that. And as Mrs. Excel would point out 35 seminars a year, doesn't mean that you're gone 35 nights. It means that you're gone 70 nights, 70 days, and 35 doesn't sound like a lot, but 70, all of a sudden sounds like too many. And after doing that for 17 years, it was too much. And I'm glad that I made the decision to stop at the end of 2019 because had I had 35 seminars scheduled for 2020, everything would've been canceled. It just would've. But it, Like now in retrospect, we can say everything would've been canceled, but early on you would be like, oh yeah, this is still going to happen, we're going to make it.

Rob Collie (00:38:05): We were touch and go for like our early March public class. It was scheduled for Charlotte. It came down to like, if it had been two weeks earlier, if it had been scheduled for two weeks earlier, or maybe even a week earlier, it would've happened. It was that close. But yeah, we canceled it. It was right when everyone decided, no more travel. So that was kind of a relief because I didn't want to put everybody at risk and it was nice to not have to make the decision, so that's it. That was the last in person thing that we did as a company, It was a year ago.

Bill Jelen (00:38:39): I think the same thing for me because I was still going to do things in Florida. So I think I went up to Gainesville last January or Orlando probably early enough for half the seminar or something.

Rob Collie (00:38:47): I Got to see on the biggest stage, one of the biggest of these sort of seminar dates, where were we? Tulsa?

Bill Jelen (00:38:53): That was Tulsa, I think.

Rob Collie (00:38:55): I got to see you in full high priest. I mean, this is a room with hundreds of people in it, it was a big room and-

Bill Jelen (00:39:03): 300 people in Tulsa.

Rob Collie (00:39:05): ..And there's more than that in the town. Just so you know.

Bill Jelen (00:39:11): Some were busy that day I guess.

Rob Collie (00:39:13): They didn't all make it. They all RSVP'd, the whole town. I think of myself as a reasonably good public speaker. I got to go before you, so I thought I killed it. And then you got up there and it was like this is next level, you have a lot of funny stories.

Bill Jelen (00:39:28): Yes I do. So when I'm on stage in front of accountants, that was my favorite thing to do, because we were going to have fun. We, they had to be there. They had to get their CP credits, but we were going to have fun along the way. And people, if they start to doze off a little bit, it's time for a good, funny story, and I had all kinds of stories and I would love that eight hours, 8:30 to 4:30 being in front of that room. It was just getting there and then getting home that was miserable and the flights and everything. It was definitely fun. Definitely just so much fun.

Rob Collie (00:40:05): Can we hear a couple of your favorites? I mean, do we need to pay extra? Do we need those chart, paying appearance fees? If we get some.

Thomas LaRock (00:40:11): What happened to the handshake? Come on.

Rob Collie (00:40:13): Well, we can make a deal right here.

Bill Jelen (00:40:15): So almost always, I would start off with a story, Again these are accountants, these are accountants or finance people. And so I would almost always start the story about when I was sitting up in accounting and I got a call from a woman down in the marketing department, and I go down and she had been in a trade show and they handed her a floppy disc with a list of all the people who had been at the trade show, area code in column A phone number in column B. And she over in column C was typing open parenthesis, area code, closing parenthesis, space, phone number. And she had been doing this for like an hour and Had thousands, thousands to go through. And she doesn't use Excel every day. This is probably the first time she's opened Excel this year. And one of her coworkers walks up behind her and says, what are you doing?

Bill Jelen (00:41:04): And he said, I have area code in column A and phone number in column B. And now that guy who was also from the marketing department, he doesn't know either. Because he never uses Excel, but he knows me. Let's call bill Jelen upstairs in the accounting. And there must be some fast way to do this. so then I go down to the marketing department, I show her how to create a formula to concatenate those things together. Then double click, the fill handle and bam!, All 5,000 are done and she's just thrilled. so then I walk back up towards the accounting department and unbeknownst to me, I'm whistling a little happy tune because I know that I've just saved her eight hours worth of work. So I get up to the accounting department and I barely sit down and my phone rings and it's this lady.

Bill Jelen (00:41:42): She was so happy. The data she had over there in column C, she says, I don't need this data. And of course people were watching me live, so I click on a drag to B and then right click. I don't need this data anymore. And of course, because I hadn't changed the formulas to values, everything is gone, It's all hash rough errors all the way down. I mean that story. And in the course of that story, you're going to learn how to use concatenate. You're going to learn how to double click the fill handle. You're going to learn how to several different ways, eight different ways, how to pay special values, including rob the way. My favorite trick of all time came from Dave in Columbus, Indiana. So just 75 miles south of you right now, Dave and in Columbus, Indiana showed me a way to copy and paste special values without ever doing the copy in some secret menu that was somehow built into Excel that I had never seen in 25 years of using spreadsheets. But somehow Dave in Columbus, Indiana, and knows how to do this trick.

Rob Collie (00:42:35): Well that's, I mean, I don't even know what the feature is, but I know the committee that was in charge of hiding it. We would periodically meet at the pizza parlor, smoke filled room and say between puffs, we'd go. Okay. So we're the coolest things in Excel that we're going to hide this week.

Bill Jelen (00:42:56): We have reports of users finding this and we need to put the stop to that.

Rob Collie (00:43:00): That's right, it's just a matter of time before Bill sees this and it puts a smile on his face. So we can't have that. Now can we?.

Bill Jelen (00:43:10): Like that story from Dave, he's Dave in row one of Columbus, Indiana that all of these people who gave me these tips, I remember them like Derek from row six in Springfield, Missouri, they give me these awesome tricks and it's like, how did you ever discover this? But it doesn't matter. There's 750 million people using a cell. Someone is going to accidentally, discover something. And then I run into that person and they give me that trick and then it's off to the races because I'm going to take that trick, And I'm like the Johnny Appleseed of Excel, you know, I'm going to take it from city to city, to city and make sure that people know, that that's there.

Rob Collie (00:43:43): I remember one time I was trying to explain to you, In the early days, one of the cool things about Dax, was distinct count, the ability to get count of unique values and, you agreed that that was really cool, but you disagreed with something else I said in which I said, this wasn't possible in Excel before now. And you said, oh contrary [inaudible 00:44:06], and I said, I was like a bar bet. And I was like you can't do that. And you said, yeah, I can. And then you go through the most elaborate series of Rube Goldberg, gymnastics that I have ever seen. And I knew as you were going through it to not even bother committing it to memory, I could just tell that this was at the end. You had a unique count of something and so now we had a dispute, whether that had actually counted as possible.

Bill Jelen (00:44:33): Well, no, I remember you go to the source data, add a new column, one divided by the count, if right. And so if there's seven of them then each one gets 14%, it adds up it's one, right?

Rob Collie (00:44:44): My brain is still, right now. Busy, not committing this to memory.

Bill Jelen (00:44:48): How could you not know this? You are on the Excel team for God's sakes. But it was, was it, I don't know if it was that same lunch or the other lunch? I was having such a good time because we were resonating so perfectly like everything you said I was, I was absolutely down with that. And then you said the sentence that blew my mind. You said "our internal customers will be really upset with Power Pivot because they can't use Get-Pivot data". And I'm like, what? No, Rob, you don't understand Get-Pivot. Data is the worst thing ever. Everyone wants to know how to turn it off, and you said, "that's the people outside of Microsoft. I'm talking about our internal customers, the accountants at Microsoft". And then you proceeded to show me how they use Get-Pivot data. I'm like, that was Rob from my table in Beachwood, Ohio.

Rob Collie (00:45:36): Yeah. That's right. Row one of the fish grill. Rob in the front row with the long island iced tea, So now I think that we came full circle on this, on the Wayne Winston episode.

Bill Jelen (00:45:54): That God mentioned on Wayne's Wayne's episode.

Rob Collie (00:45:56): we think that the reason why everyone internal to Microsoft was, was using that technique was that Wayne had been teaching it.

Bill Jelen (00:46:05): He said that.

Rob Collie (00:46:07): And I didn't know that until years later. So it's just like, oh my gosh, the power that one person's innovation can have when you share it is intense. It went from Wayne to like this diffuse audience of all these like finance professionals at Microsoft. And I had to go and like sort of circulate amongst them to pick this up, that this was something that they were all doing. It took a long time to sort of absorb that. And then I take that and transmit it to you and you light up and you go, I could imagine there had been some accident where you take Wayne Winston aside one day and say, Hey Wayne, have you seen what you can get? And it'd be like, that's how you'll write your name on a dollar bill and it comes back to you five years later. So if Power BI had existed back in the mid nineties, that's where you would've gone.

Bill Jelen (00:46:58): Yeah. That's true.

Rob Collie (00:46:59): The Excel route took you a lot of different places than what Power BI takes you, but based on sort of your first really intensive collision with spreadsheets, that's power BI's turf today. That's really interesting. Isn't it?

Bill Jelen (00:47:13): It is. It's time and place. When did that happen? When did I happen to end up in that finance department in Akron and need to create those reports and what were the tools available? So yeah.

Rob Collie (00:47:23): Have you gotten deep into Lambda functions yet?

Bill Jelen (00:47:25): Lambda functions are awesome and I want to embrace them, but what's funny is so many other people are embracing them better than I am, The recursion in Lambda functions is just wild. And then the people who we could let inside of Lambda functions.

Rob Collie (00:47:44): Wait. This just came out.

Bill Jelen (00:47:46): Yes.

Rob Collie (00:47:47): Okay. So I only know of them through, through the stuff I've been doing in the past few years with Python. And so when you asked him just now Lambda, I was thinking we're going to start talking Python. I got really excited. So I just did a quick search. It just came out in December or there's a post from December. So it was just released in the latest version.

Bill Jelen (00:48:06): Just released. It's still in beta.

Thomas LaRock (00:48:07): It sounds like it's probably does the same thing because you also said recursion. So sounds like it's similar to the functionality I would guess from Python.

Bill Jelen (00:48:15): We would have to assume it is. The Excel team was excited because they said it makes Excel Turing T-U-R-I-N-G complete, whatever that is now means that you can do everything. Every calculation in Excel, thanks to Lambda functions.

Rob Collie (00:48:28): You can now mathematically provably. If something's Turing complete, you could use Excel as the software language to build literally anything. If you wanted to build windows, the windows operating system, you could build it in Excel now, it wouldn't be a good choice but you mathematically could.

Bill Jelen (00:48:46): So I was wondering why they called it This.

Rob Collie (00:48:49): Tom is lighting us up.

Thomas LaRock (00:48:50): So, I want-[crosstalk 00:23:51]

Rob Collie (00:48:53): [inaudible 00:48:53]...Church.

Thomas LaRock (00:48:54): I'm finding a lot of overlap in this stuff I'm doing with Python. Python uses arrays in data frames, things that we would just consider to be tables. A lot of Python is simply being data janitor. You're going to get all these different data sources and how the data is and you're going to bring it in and you're going to sanitize it for whatever purpose you're going to have down the line, which could be data science, or it could just be building a pipeline. So it outputs in CSV, which then ends up in somebody's Power BI.

Thomas LaRock (00:49:28): Python is just this brilliant little thing, but I see so much overlap because when you guys talk about Power Query, well there's a whole part of Python, which is just scraping the web So instead of using Python to scrape the web what if I just put that into Excel and call it the Power Query and they just did all that stuff for you, you didn't have to even worry about coding, you just pick and choose, so I live in this world where I have enough knowledge of both tools to see the real power of using them together. I try to do some data science machine learning stuff, I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time trying to.

Thomas LaRock (00:50:03): =stuff, right. It's just, I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time trying to clean my data using Python. I'm just going to go to Excel, make it all pretty, figure out from there and then bring it back in as a data frame, and that's going to save me a bunch of time. But anyway, I'm excited now, Lambda functions, this is interesting.

Bill Jelen (00:50:16): The other really weird thing, just weird coincidence, about the Lambda functions is everyone knows the mathematician Turing. His professor was a guy named Alonzo Church and he was the inventor of Lambda calculus. And so the Lambda function is named after this guy, Alonzo Church, and Rob, Alonzo Church ended his career at Case Western University and probably, he died in 1995, he probably ate at that bonefish grill that you and I were at.

Thomas LaRock (00:50:43): Probably. Yeah.

Bill Jelen (00:50:44): I mean we were all within 10 miles of each other at that point.

Rob Collie (00:50:48): You remember that old, it was a BBC history show called, Connections?

Bill Jelen (00:50:53): No, I don't.

Rob Collie (00:50:54): Oh, it was awesome.

Bill Jelen (00:50:54): This would make a great episode, wouldn't it?

Rob Collie (00:50:56): The host of this show would trace these weird coincidental chains and overlaps, like the thing we just talked about. And Wayne Winston was at Microsoft teaching matter. But then it wouldn't be Rob Collie that crossed paths with those people, it would be someone else famous. And then Thomas Edison happened to be brother-in-law to the bla-bla or whatever. Right?

Bill Jelen (00:51:17): Yeah, right.

Rob Collie (00:51:18): And sometimes it would span centuries and I think he would bring it back. He'd actually bring it full circle. He'd connect back to the original. It was insane. It was almost like, he had to be making this up.

Bill Jelen (00:51:29): Well, so with your GETPIVOTDATA trick, you said that came from Microsoft finance. And I was in Australia, having dinner in Australia and a seminar, and this is one where the Excel team sent someone who was Carlos Otero, who was on the Excel team, but had worked in accounting at Microsoft. I said, Hey Carl, so I've heard this story about Rob, did you guys use GETPIVOTDATA this way? He's oh, we do that all the time. Yeah. So it was we are validation. You go, Rob, didn't just make that up.

Rob Collie (00:51:54): Yeah. Bill still not trusting me all those years later, despite our handshake agreement. He's like I'm still going to fact check him.

Bill Jelen (00:52:02): Might just, it came up. All right. So Tom, I appreciate that you could say Python. Python scares the heck out of me, not because of the learning curve, but I think Rob, you call it the learning cliff. I've bought a couple of Python for Excel user type things, and it just seems so intimidating to get up that curve to do anything useful. Have you actually, what are the steps? I'm an Excel guy. I know Excel really well. Just what are the first three baby steps I have to do? So, that way I can say I've done something in Python.

Thomas LaRock (00:52:31): So let me see if I can get this right. I think around 2016 or so, is when I said to myself, I really, I want to make an effort to pivot slightly in my career as a data professional and the pivot I want to go to is data science. So I have a background in math. I have a master's in math and a lot of what I see in data science was stuff that I was doing in school many years ago, with paper and pencil, right. It's just stats. It's a T value Z value. I'm like yeah, I remember this stuff. So, back in the day, I would've, what we call data science, back in the day was getting a job with a big six as an actuary. That's essentially what our data scientists of today are doing, except there's other cool things, because you can apply it to lots of different projects.

Thomas LaRock (00:53:15): So Microsoft and edX had this online courses that you could take. And I blogged about how my journey, where I basically sucked up as many data science certifications I could, through that edX, and a lot of it was at the time heavily reinforced with Azure products. So I got to learn a lot about Azure Machine Learning studio and things of that nature. And there's all sorts of little things in there. For this course, we're going to use Python for this, and they walk you through the one little thing that they need you to learn on that day. Right? So I think I finished in 2017 or 18 or something like that. And since then I've been just trying to apply it. Because how else are you going to learn, except by actually doing it. So I'm all right, so what can I do? So there's some websites there's Kaggle, which has data science competitions.

Thomas LaRock (00:54:05): For example, there's a competition, I think the TSA put some money up where they said, when we put your stuff through the x-ray help us build a better algorithm for detecting objects and things like that. And first prize is $500,000 and I wrote about, and I go, so let me know the next time you make $500,000, tuning a sequel query. Because I'm going to be over here doing this stuff, cause that sounds awesome. So what I did next was I started getting into DataCamp and their online Python courses. They're easily digestible for me and I've been consuming them as fast as I possibly can. Now your original question was, what were the three things? And I've given this long winded answer of how I got involved. How I've gotten to this point, is all of those classes that I've been doing is simply reinforcing similar concepts over and over and over again, but by different instructors.

Thomas LaRock (00:54:57): So I'm learning it in a slightly different way. So somebody says, hey we're going to do data visualizations today. That might be important to you, but probably not to Mr. Excel. But it might be important to somebody and you end up with a similar class, taught six different ways and it just gets reinforced. Because the concepts and the terms become more and more familiar, but they're showing you a slightly different way to do it. So for example, Lambda is really just a short way to do a recursion function or any function. You don't have to do it that way. You could write a whole function if you want and call it from anywhere. But now you get into this thing of, yeah but Lambda functions are actually more efficient in terms of processing and memory.

Bill Jelen (00:55:39): Right.

Thomas LaRock (00:55:40): And so now you start getting, now there's a whole course on, hey you want to tune your Python code? Let me show you this stuff. So for you, Mr. Excel, I would tell you that the first thing I think you should maybe, given all your experiences, you should get into understanding the difference between a data frame and an array, when you would want one versus the other, how are they useful. The other things I would tell you is they do have pivot table. You can pivot your data. I think for you, it would end up being so clunky compared to what you do in Excel, but you would understand the concepts of it. And then I guess, really the question is, what would you want to learn Python for? Why do you think Python is something you would need? For me, it was all about the data science.

Bill Jelen (00:56:26): I need to be able to walk into a bar with a laptop, put the laptop on the bar, get five people around me and do something in Python and have them all go, that's what I want.

Thomas LaRock (00:56:36): The thing with Excel is that it's visual. Python isn't going to have that same visualization. But I do think that there's a Python studio to help with that.

Bill Jelen (00:56:44): Okay. Python studio.

Thomas LaRock (00:56:45): I don't know if that, that's not what it's called, but I think there's some way for you to have that visualization. Otherwise it's just going to be code.

Rob Collie (00:56:52): I've Got a shortcut. Ready? Probably know what's coming. It's going to be cynical. Don't learn it.

Bill Jelen (00:56:59): Oh, come on. All the cool kids, all the cool kids are learning it.

Rob Collie (00:57:02): I know. I know. And yet with the tools you've got, you can do a tremendous amount of the actual valuable things that you would do with Python. And you can do things that you really couldn't really particularly do very well with Python either. Here's a theory of mine. This is more factual, I think, than the previous opinion where I said, don't learn it, right? There's something real here. Just a question to what extent you agree. So there are certain kinds of tools. There are tools that are sort of purpose built and still flexible. And this is funny, a little bit humane, not a lot humane, but a little bit humane. In the same way that Mac, Apple will approach a problem, a consumer problem and solve it in a way that is easier for people to learn and people will kind of want to learn it, at all ages.

Rob Collie (00:57:55): And then Microsoft will walk up to the same problem, for example, signing you in, and end up with a sign in process that is itself super complicated and requires you to sort of anticipate what the machine is trying to do in order to navigate your way around it. Apple would never do that. Now in that same way, Microsoft has a gift of approaching, as a culture, of approaching complicated business systems, complicated business products. And over time anyway, making them approachable to sort of this lower end developer who doesn't think of themself as a developer. The success of Excel under the Microsoft banner is the single greatest example of this. Everyone's slinging formulas in Excel or writing VBA, but even just writing formulas is a programmer, is a developer, but they don't know it. And a general purpose language like Python, is built for and by the computer science set, that was my background, right?

Rob Collie (00:58:58): I'm a computer scientist, right? And so I think a tool like that, because it's meant to be everything, any programming language that allows you to draw visualizations and clean data, is so general purpose that it's going to have one of these steep learning cliffs. And it's going to be a cool kid thing, because everybody that's part of that club, worked hard to get into it, and then kind of lords it over everybody else. It's just sort of how people are. I think that something like Python is something that most people are either going to learn at the very beginning of their career. If you're not a computer scientist, right? If you're a computer scientist, you're going to eat this kind of stuff up every time it comes along. A new programming language being unleashed on the world is like a Christmas present to you. You're like oh my God, I can't wait to try out this new programming language because it gives me some sort of, scratches some itch for me to do these sorts of things.

Rob Collie (00:59:48): Most of humanity isn't like that. If you're not a computer scientist, you might learn Python at the beginning of your career. Almost like when you're still in college, when you're young and you still have time to do that because the rest of the job hasn't consumed you yet. I just don't think Python has that, I can adopt it, 15 years into my career, sort of characteristics to it. In the same way that say something like Power Query does or Power Pivot or the DAX data model. What you do of course is not really the point. The joke that I made about Bill, don't go do this. It isn't really about you at all. I don't have anything against Python and I certainly don't have anything against you going and learning it. It's more for the rest of the audience, that's listening. If you're sitting here going, what do I do with my career right now? And you're kind of in the Excel space, the first, second, third, fourth, and fifth things you should be doing, are getting better at the things that Microsoft is throwing at you and then hiding. You don't need to have this FOMO, dear audience, about Python. I'm not saying you shouldn't learn it. I'm not saying that it's not a good thing to learn, but when we consider that everything's prioritized, if you haven't already, kind of, quote unquote mastered or gotten competent at Power Query, DAX and Data modeling, that's your next frontier. And you're going to be just ridiculously effective as you climb that curve. And without having to run smack forehead first into the Python cliff.

Thomas LaRock (01:01:15): So Rob, I'm not going to disagree entirely because I actually think you are right about almost all of that, except you could just reversed it and talk glowingly about the need to do Python and not worry about Excel.

Bill Jelen (01:01:26): But I wouldn't have.

Thomas LaRock (01:01:28): You could have.

Bill Jelen (01:01:29): I wouldn't have

Thomas LaRock (01:01:31): But bill, if you're looking for something cool, then what you're going to want. You have a unique opportunity, I feel, because your depth of experience with Excel, that you can kind of blend the two together. If you're for example, you could use Python to scrape a website and then say, by the way, this is also available in Excel as Power Query. And here's the difference between the two. Somebody might be impressed by the ease at which you can point Python at some URL and just scrape everything necessary and get data from a Wikipedia article. That's one thing. Another big thing though, is sentiment analysis, right? You, you could go say hook into Twitter's API, pull back a whole bunch. You were talking about a work cloud earlier. You could pull back a whole bunch of stuff and say what's the current sentiment for my book, or something like that.

Thomas LaRock (01:02:21): But that's something you're not going to really do in Excel, but that's going to be something that also has value for another person out there. They're going to be like, you know what, marketing specifically, oh I can get sentiment analysis fairly quickly with a few lines of Python code. That's actually kind of interesting. There's always going to be some type of unique application. Like Rob said, it's general purpose, Python, right? And there's so many aspects of it, but you should be able to find something, that I would say, you can bring together both worlds because you could do the sentiment analysis and then build a power BI dashboard on top of it.

Bill Jelen (01:03:02): Yeah. Right.

Thomas LaRock (01:03:03): One thing my friends had done over at Microsoft was sentiment analysis on movies, specifically Marvel versus DC. And what was funny is you found out through the sentiment, you could kind of use that to predict the amount of revenue a movie might make on opening weekend.

Thomas LaRock (01:03:23): And what was funny was if you had movies that had, if there was much more positive sentiment, it was going to make a lot more money. So I'd be there, they'd be actively collecting data and then I would be on Twitter, tweeting something negative, slightly, about the upcoming movies. And then you found the movie didn't have enough revenue. So I would then tell Disney and others, that for a low fee, I could tweet much more positive things, so you could make more money. Clearly there's a correlation between these two events. My positive tweets or my negative tweets in your bottom line. Now I'm not saying I'm holding it for ransom. I'm just saying, it's a thing that you can show other people, which is kind of cool.

Rob Collie (01:04:04): You're not holding it for ransom. You're just offering it for sale. It's different. So I thought what you were saying now, I was interpreting it as different, which was. I was hoping you were saying, I guess, that it was doing sentiment analysis on the script of the movie.

Thomas LaRock (01:04:20): You could do that too.

Rob Collie (01:04:21): And Michael Salvino, one of our previous guests, he loves analytics in sports, but at the same time he thinks analytics are ruining sports, because it's driving everyone towards this single optimal strategy. And a lot of the interest values being squeezed out of sports, like famously in baseball, it's all strikeouts and home runs. No one cares about anything else anymore and no one's optimizing for it anymore. So there's a lot of the most interesting aspects of the game are gone. And here's where I would whisper, and baseball couldn't afford to lose the interesting things.

Rob Collie (01:04:52): Cause it was already pretty dull. Can't resist, sorry. I have a tendency to say things that are sort of glib and short and dramatic and nasty, in some ways. Even though in my heart, there's something very different. Let me see if I can circle back. So there was a Twitter thread over the weekend that I wanted to Wade into, but decided I didn't, where it involved Chris Webb and Marco Russo and some other people talking about MDX versus DAX. If you don't know what MDX is, it's the precursor to Dax. It was the thing that was in the formula language, expression language of SQL server, analysis services in the old multidimensional format. And there's a lot of diplomatic or partisan team MDX, team DAX, team both sides. But it was all talking about the strengths and weaknesses of the languages in terms of their technical capabilities.

Rob Collie (01:05:48): It was primarily focused on that. Or how tedious they were in certain ways to use. And I wanted to join in and say, well, folks, it isn't about MDX versus DAX. It's not about the technology one versus technology two, it's about their adaptability. So for example, I tried multiple times at Microsoft to learn MDX and I had access to all the people who built it, and I couldn't learn it or I wouldn't learn it. I just rejected it. It was awful. Just hated that thing. 15 minutes into the explanation of how to write an if. And I'm oh, I'm out. I am out, get me out. So that's me and MDX. And then me and DAX, all I do is write a book that sells millions and millions of dollars at retail about tax. That's a striking difference, right?

Rob Collie (01:06:42): To me it was sort of a silly argument. Which one's better is MDX still, blah, blah, blah. No MDX is not going away. But in terms of a percentage of the population, it is going to round to zero in relevance, relative to DAX because of its adaptability. So, that's what I'm really saying. Yes, Python is like, hey it's turning complete. You can do anything with Python. If you learn Python, you in theory, don't have to learn anything else. Whereas with Microsoft, you've got to learn DAX to do this and you've got to learn Power Query to do that. And yet, each one of those things, Dax, for each particular purpose is both better than Python for that purpose and more learnable for that purpose. And so I think the Microsoft ecosystem of users, especially the Excel crowd, is sort of a demonstrated group that will incrementally learn sort of one new thing about their tool set every two weeks, and just sort of incrementally pile that up into the point where they're just monsters.

Rob Collie (01:07:43): They didn't go and learn Python, at some intensive bootcamp, they've been learning these tools sort of in a drizzling rest, never sleeps sort of way, and years later they're gods. And so I'm really just speaking sort of my own ecosystem, that the people that I know. If you are one of the computer science types or one of the types that's looking to completely change careers and things like that, or you just can't help it. And you're just curious about this other tool, not going to make fun of you. I'm going to salute you for going and learning this thing. I'm just saying that most people aren't like that. And there's a lot more people out there who will learn these other tools like Dax and M and that's all I have to say about that.

Bill Jelen (01:08:27): So From the Excel point of view, when you look at the DAX formula language and the Excel formula language, there's so much overlap, that an Excel person can easily just start doing simple things in DAX, and they'll feel like it's their home, they already know 80%. And then you add the good stuff on top. That gives you super power.

Thomas LaRock (01:08:46): Bill, have you played with DAX Studio.

Bill Jelen (01:08:47): No.

Thomas LaRock (01:08:48): Okay. Forget Python, go play with DAX studio.

Bill Jelen (01:08:51): Okay. There we are.

Thomas LaRock (01:08:52): I'm serious.

Bill Jelen (01:08:53): I'm writing it down.

Rob Collie (01:08:54): One of the number one things, the thing you just said, just triggered it for me. One of the biggest disconnects between Excel formulas and DAX, is the inability to step through it. The inability to evaluate step by step. And Excel sometimes you do this just by splitting your formula into multiple columns. You sort of see intermediate steps. So you can sort of see where the error happened. Where did things go wrong? But you also have the, evaluate formula step through, feature. And so much of DAX happens in places that's invisible.

Rob Collie (01:09:25): But DAX Studio allows you to do things, like that filter function that I wrote in the middle of my formula. I can evaluate just that filter function, forget the rest of the formula and just see what the table it looks like that's hidden under the hood in computer memory. And I never see it in my measure formula, but I can see it explode out under the screen. It's not quite the same as a step through. It's not quite as good as that, but Bill, I think, you spend a week with that or less suddenly you'd come back to me and you would be running circles around me in DAX.

Bill Jelen (01:10:01): That's hard to believe, but I'm definitely going to try it.

Rob Collie (01:10:04): Apparently. I really have it in for Python.

Thomas LaRock (01:10:07): You have a thing for Python.

Rob Collie (01:10:09): And R we could, we could substitute R in here and I'd be saying the same things about it.

Thomas LaRock (01:10:14): R to me, is just very focused data science. And it does that very well. Python, I think is just more extensible. Python's more widely adopted. You find it has more modules. So that's why I went Pythons instead of R. This all actually really started when R got brought into SQL server. That's when I was all right, this is getting a little more serious. I should start learning a little bit more about this. And then it was Mark Cuban who tweeted one night, that he was doing some Python for some analysis on basketball and stuff like that. And I, why would you choose Python over R? And a bunch of people, not Mark replied, helped me understand a little bit about the difference. And so that's when I made the pivot to Python.

Bill Jelen (01:10:58): Wow. Right there. I mean, Python was on the list. R was on the list and TikTok. Those are the big three that I [crosstalk 01:11:05]

Thomas LaRock (01:11:07): Oh my God is Python and TikTok a thing. Let me check. Cause if it's not, I want a corner in that market. It has to be.

Rob Collie (01:11:14): Yeah, right.

Thomas LaRock (01:11:15): Bill says, there's someone doing Excel, TikToks.

Bill Jelen (01:11:18): Yeah. 15 seconds or less. And it's impressive. What you can learn in 15 seconds and a TikTok Excel tutorial, two variable data tables. Yeah.

Thomas LaRock (01:11:28): This is known as, not Rob's medium. I'm still in the process of saying hello and time's up.

Bill Jelen (01:11:38): It's a challenge. It's a challenge. How to teach something in 15 seconds.

Thomas LaRock (01:11:41): I'm going to create a new platform called TikTok, TikTok, TikTok. It's this 45 second video.

Bill Jelen (01:11:47): Gives you 45 Seconds.

Thomas LaRock (01:11:52): And even then it won't be enough. That's just the introduction to the lesson. Today we're going to learn this. If you want to see the rest of it, you go to YouTube. So is it a thing, Tom?

Rob Collie (01:12:06): Yeah, there are people. I'm finding there's a lot of Python coding videos.

Thomas LaRock (01:12:11): On TikTok?

Rob Collie (01:12:12): Yeah. On TikTok. Python itself seems to be about actual snakes in addition to some coding. And now I'm more enthralled by these snake videos.

Thomas LaRock (01:12:23): So while we're talking about snakes, let's talk about a statistical concept known as risk. I was reading this on Reddit one day and it's just stuck with me ever since. It's just one of the funniest things. We do it all the time. We talk about this all the time at our house in various forms. They're talking about people who have poisonous snakes as pets. You know how Reddit comment threads go. They're very conversational. It sounds like the same voice is talking to itself. These different people on the internet, but it's the same wise internet voice talking back and forth to itself. And talking about how, whenever you know someone, whenever you meet someone who handles poisonous snakes, they have poisonous snakes as pets. What do you hear? You always hear the same thing over and over again. Oh, it's not that dangerous.

Thomas LaRock (01:13:03): As long as you know what you're doing, right. As long as you know what you're doing, it's perfectly safe. It's perfectly safe. The risks are vastly overstated. In fact, this person would go on to tell you, my father was a snake handler like this, my uncle was a snake handler with this. And then you go, oh yeah. Are they still doing it? Oh, no, no, they're dead. Well, how did your dad die? Snake bites. How did your uncle die? Snake bites. It's like human ability to properly estimate risk, maybe in a single trial. But underestimate it over a large number of trials.

Thomas LaRock (01:13:46): It's kind of the birthday problem. Right? How many people did you have to have in the room, before it's likely that two people share a birthday. It's ridiculously small, right? It's 24 or 30 or something like that. And the chances of two people having a birthday that are the same, are nothing, like oh I'll run that risk, a fraction of a percent. But you keep up in the trial. It's not the same problem. It's not the same as the birthday problem. But the point is, is that over thousands of trials, that fraction of a percent, if you did the math on, are you going to survive thousands of trials? It turns out that no, you are not.

Rob Collie (01:14:21): Well, that was always the thing with the data center, right? If there's a 0.01% chance of a disc failure. So that's one in 10,000, but I've got a data center with 10,000 discs, you know one of them just failed. You just, yeah. That's how it works.

Thomas LaRock (01:14:37): Yeah. And it's 0.01% over a particular period of time. And so in a six month period, I mean a hard drive's only got a one in 10,000 chance of failing, but we run those discs for five years and we've got banks of banks and banks and banks of them. Yeah, exactly. We're having one every second now I don't know what it was that we were talking about that led to that. Oh, Python. The snake=

Rob Collie (01:15:03): Yeah. I don't know what it was that we were talking about that led to that. Oh, python, the snake handly.

Bill Jelen (01:15:04): It's snakes, right? The TikTok.

Rob Collie (01:15:06): I mean, pythons. Yeah. They've got a lower fatality rate than cobras.

Thomas LaRock (01:15:10): Aren't pythons an issue in Florida right now? Don't they have to go hunt them?

Rob Collie (01:15:14): Yes.

Bill Jelen (01:15:15): Yeah. And I think there's a reward if you get them, I think.

Rob Collie (01:15:19): Yeah. And it's gotten to the point where they've realized, of course, that only the females really matter to the reproductive capacity of the species males, biologically speaking, ecologically speaking, males aren't worth very much, right? So they've gotten to the point where if they catch a male, they don't kill it. They radio collar it so that it leads them to the females.

Bill Jelen (01:15:42): Wow.

Rob Collie (01:15:44): Right? A male, a live male is actually more valuable as a weapon against the population than they are a contributor to the future of the population. Killing a male does nothing.

Thomas LaRock (01:15:57): I'm surprised they just haven't reversed engineered their DNA. And inject them with something that they take back to the nest and just wipes everything out.

Rob Collie (01:16:05): Well, and then we get movies like I Am Legend where this engineered thing hops species and just...

Thomas LaRock (01:16:17): But what's... That's a 0.01% chance?

Rob Collie (01:16:20): Oh, I know. I know. Yeah. It's perfectly safe if you know what you're doing.

Thomas LaRock (01:16:27): It's like a one in a billion chance that it'll affect a human.

Rob Collie (01:16:31): And so, because it's so safe, we're going to generate all these kits that you can do at home. You can engineer your own virus at home. I'm sure it'll be fine.

Thomas LaRock (01:16:39): What's the worst that could happen?

Bill Jelen (01:16:42): What's the worst that could happen.

Rob Collie (01:16:45): Only bet as much as you can afford to win. Here's something that's interesting. So Bill, you've diversified. When the phone rings and it's you, every now and then my iPhone decides to put under your name, Bill Jelen, to put under your name, the words "We Report Space."

Bill Jelen (01:17:03): That's hilarious. Yeah. Right.

Rob Collie (01:17:05): I don't think of you as We Report Space, I think of you as MrExcel.

Bill Jelen (01:17:09): MrExcel.

Rob Collie (01:17:09): And holding macro books. That's your alter ego as far as I'm concerned. And then there's Bill Jelen, but now you're also...

Bill Jelen (01:17:18): We Report Space.

Rob Collie (01:17:19): For a podcast about data, there's a strange near-100% Venn diagram overlap with people who are interested in rockets and Mars and things like that, so what is We Report Space? Are you out there running around, checking on the moon? News reports from the lunar surface?

Bill Jelen (01:17:36): I'm going to blame this on Penn and Teller. I was in Las Vegas doing a seminar. You check in, they're like, "Well, can we book you any shows?" I was like, "Hey, Penn and Teller, let's go see Penn and Teller." And then afterwards, Penn and Teller, they talk to everyone in the audience and they're selling their book. And so I buy their book and on a flight home, it says, "You need to go see a space shuttle launch at Kennedy Space Center once in your life." All right. An STS-135, the very last launch. We came down from Ohio to Florida to see that launch and we got there four hours early and we're sitting there just talking with other people in their lawn chairs who were lined up to watch this launch. And some guy next to us says that his friend right now is at the press site, three miles from the launch pad, thanks to some lottery he won on Twitter. I'm like, "What?" Yeah, he says, "Yeah, there's a lottery on Twitter." All right.

Bill Jelen (01:18:23): And so two years later I was just cruising through Twitter and there's a lottery to go see a launch. I'm like, "Hey, yeah, I'm going to sign up for that." It was an early SpaceX launch and they scrubbed, which means they didn't launch. And then, 30 people won this lottery and they showed up to watch this. And then they scrubbed. And then a month later, 20 of them came back, and it scrubbed. And then there was another launch. And by the time they finally launched on their fourth opportunity, there were only seven of us that made it to each one. And three of those seven formed a group that is now We Report Space, right? So I'm here 12 miles away from the launch pads.

Bill Jelen (01:19:01): We actually started working, the three of us started working for another outlet, right? Another website. And the three of us quickly found that our attitude towards life is "we don't give a shit." That's our motto. It's just... And the guy that we were working for was very angry. He was a very angry guy and the three of us all run our own companies and we're like, "We don't really appreciate this, he's not resonating with the 'we don't give a shit.'" So we finally just decided to leave and start our own outlet where our overriding credo is "we don't give a shit." Right? You can't make it? That's okay. Right? Or, it didn't happen? That's okay. There's other people that got to that photograph.

Bill Jelen (01:19:44): But what's really fascinating, it's a techy thing, the ability to leave a camera too close to the rocket for a human to be, and to have that camera take pictures, and the camera's going to be out in the Florida environment for 24 hours or 48 hours. And to engineer this whole thing to work and take the photos right. And just get some amazing photos. It was just a blast and it's a techy thing to be able to get everything to work right. Again, a great group of people out there at the press site. People have been doing this for 30 years. Generally they all share their information. You say, "Ah, yeah, this didn't work." And they're like, "Oh, you should try this." So just a great group of people down here in Florida that cover those launches and are willing to accept new people showing up, I guess. And generally be cool.

Thomas LaRock (01:20:32): I was going to say that, I guess you guys don't know this, I thought, Rob, you knew this, but I did win one of the NASA Tweetups.

Bill Jelen (01:20:43): You were at NASA Social, weren't you?

Thomas LaRock (01:20:46): I was at NASA Social. So yeah. NASA Tweetup is a thing. It's awesome. And now my buddy, who worked for... He did some contract work with Canon who does all the cameras around the launchpad, and he got a nice photo of me watching. It went up. And then I got to see the pictures that they had taken. But as you described, the weather, the acid that comes down from the rocket layer that just destroys these... So they have to be in these boxes and just the entire process of how you can take, like Bill said, a photograph where no human can live.

Rob Collie (01:21:18): And they have to be, those cameras have to be python proof?

Bill Jelen (01:21:21): Oh sure.

Thomas LaRock (01:21:23): The gators by the launchpad, the gators are a thing.

Bill Jelen (01:21:26): And the army...

Rob Collie (01:21:27): Don't worry, the python's reading those.

Bill Jelen (01:21:29): And the armadillos. And it's why... And Tom, I did know that, I knew that about you, that you had been to, the NASA Tweetup is now NASA Social, that you had been to one. I don't know, maybe Rob told me that or something, somehow I connected that dot.

Thomas LaRock (01:21:44): That's awesome that you're... I didn't know you were down there doing work with them. I'm fascinated. I need to learn more now.

Bill Jelen (01:21:49): When we say work-

Rob Collie (01:21:49): You can find Bill's work at his website, we don't give a shit about space dot com.

Bill Jelen (01:21:56): We Report Space dot com, yeah.

Rob Collie (01:21:58): All right. So let's just recap for a moment. You started in Lotus 1-2-3 as the export to Excel BI guy, which I'm still going to call export to Excel, even though it was Lotus 1-2-3 at the time.

Bill Jelen (01:22:09): Of course.

Rob Collie (01:22:09): And then that kind of beautifully metastasized into the entire MrExcel empire that we know today. But along the way, I think we missed something in there. Something really, really unique and important. So I would definitely want to circle back. The first time I had to conduct any business with you that involved money changing hands, I had to make out a check to Tickling Keys.

Bill Jelen (01:22:35): Tickling Keys, Inc. That's right.

Rob Collie (01:22:36): Tickling Keys, Inc. I expected it to be MrExcel or Bill Jelen, or maybe even Holy Macro Books, but no, it was Tickling Keys. And for a while I was just like, "Oh, that's so neat. He's talking about, in that name, he's talking about himself writing his book. He's just sitting there just tickling the keys and just brilliant Excel is flowing onto the page as he tickles those keys." I brought up to you one time after a year of believing that, and the reality behind that name is way cooler than what I'd imagined. So what's the origin of the name, Tickling Keys?

Bill Jelen (01:23:14): Tickling Keys, we didn't start out as an Excel consultancy, or even as an Excel website. I grew up, in our basement there was a player piano from 1920, you know the old player pianos, the things that play themselves? You put the paper roll in there and it holes in the roll, press the keys down. As it goes over the tracker bar using some sort of mechanical vacuum system, you're pumping that whole thing, right?

Rob Collie (01:23:36): I've never seen one in person, but I know what you're talking about.

Bill Jelen (01:23:39): They were cool, but the problem is all the songs were from the twenties. And when I became a teenager, I was more into rock and roll. And there was no one doing Led Zeppelin on player piano roll. And that just seemed like that was something that had to be corrected.

Rob Collie (01:23:53): Terrible tragedy, yeah.

Bill Jelen (01:23:53): Yes, right. So I would arrange the roll in Excel. I would get the sheet music, I would build an Excel file that had all of the data that needed to be punched in the role. And then I found a guy down in Richardson, Texas, that you would send him a data file and he had a machine that would actually punch the holes in the roll. But the deal was you had to get five, right. And what are you going to do with five copies of Stairway to Heaven? So I actually started a company that licensed that music and then would sell the extra roll. So I'd make one for myself and then sell the other four. And that company is Tickling Keys. And when I opened the website, this tiny little website, that was going to be the offshoot of the player piano, rock and roll player piano company, that's when... I didn't bother to reform another corporation. I was like, "Okay, this is the new division of Tickling Keys. People think it's a computer and that's fine. It's going to work fine."

Rob Collie (01:24:52): And then that would've been the thing, right? You'd just be a billionaire today on your player piano rock and roll empire. But if it weren't for Napster, right? Stinking Napster, I mean, the teens all pirating your Tickling Keys player piano music. Kids in dorm rooms, they brought you down, man. So you also told me that, didn't you give one or get it signed by Bruce?

Bill Jelen (01:25:24): I haven't gotten Bruce yet, I've gotten a lot of other people in the E Street Band. The big one was Meat Loaf. So I had a roll of Paradise by the Dashboard Light. And the very first time that I ever got to show one of these rolls to someone who was connected to the roll was: Meat Loaf was in town for a concert at Blossom Music Center up in Cleveland, but he did a charity softball game down in Akron, right. And after the game, I went up to the bus and I had two copies of the roll. And I showed it to him and he knew what it was.

Bill Jelen (01:25:50): He knew what it was, because he even said, "Oh, this is great. I'm going to fire the band, we'll just put a player piano on stage." But he autographed it. And then he yells back to me, I'm walking back to the car, he yells back to me. He says, "Hey! Hey, it's Meat Loaf, two words. Look at the album." And on the player piano roll, I put meatloaf as a single word and somehow, I gave him one copy and someone on the bus said, "Hey, you spelled it wrong."

Rob Collie (01:26:13): Wow. So you said he knew what it was immediately. So you're saying that he recognized it was a player piano roll. He didn't look at it and go, "Oh my God, Paradise by the Dashboard Light!"

Bill Jelen (01:26:26): And you say, I think this is the world's only existing copy of a Meat Loaf tune on player piano. And that gets you in. I was at a dinner with a lot of the E Street Band about three tables away from me. And they had decided they weren't going to sign anything. But when I had a player piano roll, I said, this is if you want a player piano roll of a Bruce song. I got Roy Bittan, who's the piano player for Bruce, to sign that. And Max Weinberg, who's the drummer, he instantly knew. He says, "Ah, yeah, you're just X number of years too late." He knew it was 1922. They were really in their heyday. So it's kind of an interesting conversation piece and I've gotten a lot of, under the pretext of, "Hey, will you sign this player piano roll?" I've gotten to meet Mark Cohn from Walking in Memphis and Bruce Hornsby, a lot of the E Street Band, Nils Lofgren, who was with Neil Young, autographed Our House.

Rob Collie (01:27:13): That's so cool. And what do these spreadsheets look like? I need to see one, I kind of envisioned originally that it was a bunch of columns formatted to the same width and you're coloring in the squares to make the dots.

Bill Jelen (01:27:25): That would've been awesome.

Rob Collie (01:27:27): But, it's not like that is it?

Bill Jelen (01:27:28): So it was measure number, then beat within the measure, which note? So on a player piano, I think middle C is the 40th note or 44th note. I had kind of in my head that the middle C is this number and you type in the number and then how long it was held down for. And then I probably, I don't know, was it a pivot table or some really cool formulas to take that data and stretch it into whatever, then export from Excel to whatever binary format that the guy in Texas needed.

Rob Collie (01:27:58): Yeah I can't stop thinking about this. And then if there's a rest in the music where no notes are being played, do you have blank rows in your spreadsheet, or?

Bill Jelen (01:28:11): No, no. I think if you simply don't send instruction to... So it's a little hole punch, right? So you're telling it when to turn on and when to turn off. So if nothing's happening, I think that you just don't send anything at that time code.

Rob Collie (01:28:24): I see. Okay. So it's each row in your spreadsheet is time coded as to when it happens.

Bill Jelen (01:28:28): Exactly.

Rob Collie (01:28:29): Okay. That makes sense. I'm really excited as kind of as a parting shot, as someone who, my profession, even though I use Excel certainly for lots of one off purposes in my day to day business life, professionally, we're in the BI space. And so Power BI is, that's our thing. We don't use Excel for BI purposes as a company. I think LAMBDA functions though, it's one of those unexplored frontiers, in a way, in terms of what it can do. This is one of those things where I'm actually wishing that I had a bit more time to just go screw around with a technology, and that's Excel LAMBDA functions. And I have a bit of a background with it.

Rob Collie (01:29:12): I worked on an early sort of specification for this feature many years ago, and it wasn't my idea at the time. So it's not like I'm saying, "Oh, they did my thing." No, it was someone else's idea back then. And it's the same idea has been sticking around for a long time, it's just really hard to implement. But if you think about for a moment, a spreadsheet, like a single sheet, that does a lot of calculations, like an income statement type of forecast, it's got columns for month one, month two, month 24. And it's got a handful of variables that go in, like what's our attrition rate of losing customers? What's our rate of new customers per month? How much are we going to spend on marketing? How many employees are we going to add per month? Whatever, right?

Rob Collie (01:29:58): And from these handful of variables, it generates a tremendous amount of intermediate data month to month and it ripples and ripples and ripples along to come up with a handful of outputs. Like, this is how much money this company would be worth if we executed on this plan. What's this internal rate of return? What's its multiple that we could sell it for? How many months until we're cash flow positive? How much money, what's the maximum spend, meaning how much funding do we need? There's a lot of final answers that come out of a spreadsheet like this that you can only to by generating hundreds, if not thousands, of intermediate cells that ultimately then condense down to these numbers, right? Okay. Now, if you want to play with different scenarios, like different sets of inputs, this sucks. What are you going to do? Make a million copies of this sheet and change the variables, or you're going to write some macro that changes the variables and then records the answers on a separate sheet and then goes and changes the inputs again and iterates through like that.

Rob Collie (01:31:03): But with LAMBDA functions, as I understand it, if it's the same thing that I was originally, like I was a long time ago, part of planning something along these lines, you could take that whole worksheet that I just described and turn it into a new function, like equal my income forecaster function. And it takes four inputs and it generates three or four outputs. And now you just create a table of all your different inputs, all your different input scenarios. And then you've got a number of calculated columns sitting next to it that are just calls to this function, this custom function of yours and which are the outputs you want. And you just drag fill that thing down and it uses your spreadsheet, this giant spreadsheet on the other sheet as a function. That's intense. And I think that it's one of those things where until you've played with it a bit, you don't really understand its potential. It so reinvents some of the fundamental rules of spreadsheeting that you're going to find yourself able to perform a type of financial modeling analysis, which by the way, Power BI is not really the right tool for a lot of things like this. The type of scenario I just described is a very difficult thing to do in Power BI. Not that you can't do financial modeling and forecast in Power BI, but that particular kind of very iterative ripple forward through time calculation is hard to do in DAX. And so this might be something that the world has never seen in terms of what it's capable of doing. And it's going to end up creating types of business, believe it or not, that weren't possible.

Bill Jelen (01:32:40): I think the power here is, give this to a million people who are in a hundred thousand different industries and just watch what happens.

Rob Collie (01:32:46): Mm-hmm (affirmative). That's what I'm talking about.

Bill Jelen (01:32:47): So people will come up with uses that no one ever imagined.

Rob Collie (01:32:51): I'm really excited by that. And it's not often that something comes along where you can say that, think about the accessibility of this. Someone who can build one of those income statement type spreadsheets now has the power to do something exponentially more sophisticated and it's not hard, and the Python person could have done it all along, but it'd probably take them longer, even though they were good at Python. But most importantly, there are fewer Python people and they're not deeply embedded in the business in the way the Excel people are. So this is why we've got sort of this really fertile breeding ground for something, I don't know. I'm really eyebrow raised that this one's come to life. I had no idea it was coming. I'm not one of the Excel MVP insiders anymore so when it landed, I was just like, "Holy cow. Oh wow." I need to go make some time just to screw around with it.

Bill Jelen (01:33:43): No, it's cool. The other one is the LET function, LET. L-E-T. Which is, Rob, when you talk about those sub columns, you build your formula and the tiny little columns, the sub columns, and then the final answer out there is the eighth column or whatever. When you start combining that all back into one formula, you find that you're using some of those intermediate results over and over and over again. And so your formula becomes 800 characters because you have to put the LEN of the TRIM of A1 over and over and over. The LET function just, you define that once and assign it into a variable, slap it into a variable right inside the formula, and then can reuse that again. Right and so, yeah, both of those together.

Rob Collie (01:34:22): That's a lot like DAX variables, which they didn't have in the beginning. So you can perform that one calculation, in a way if you'd had LET, you wouldn't have needed IFERROR. But you still would like IFERROR, because it's even simpler. Yeah. There's so many things, there's so many places, even now when I'm writing an Excel formula where I'm like, "If this calculation less than zero, then zero. Otherwise-"

Bill Jelen (01:34:45): The calculation. So now you're doing the calculation twice.

Rob Collie (01:34:50): I just want to scream every time I encounter that, I just want a function that truncates it, floors it at zero. I do that all the time.

Bill Jelen (01:34:59): So how do you do that in DAX? Is there a DAX solution to...

Rob Collie (01:35:02): Instead of LET, it's VAR, like measure name equals, and then you say VAR, then you make a name, like My Variable equals, here's the calculation, and you can have a bunch of variables and you can say, VAR My Variable 2 equals, my tax rate equals this, right? Then you say, return, you type return. Then you write your regular DAX formula after that but you can plug in the variables above.

Bill Jelen (01:35:28): Nice. Yeah. Same thing. That's the LET function right there.

Rob Collie (01:35:30): It's sometimes a little funny in DAX, and by the way, you can even use variables as tables. You can have a filter function as a variable, which is pretty hot. However, you've got to be careful because these variables evaluate the raw filter context of the measure or whatever. And then if you use the variable deeper down in your function, in your formula, in a place where it would've had a modified filter context, it won't pick up the modified filter context because it's already pre-evaluated to whatever it was at the very beginning. So you got to be a little careful with it sometimes, but most of the time it's awesome.

Bill Jelen (01:36:03): That's cool, that's cool. And when I download DAX Studio, will I...

Rob Collie (01:36:08): Oh yeah. You'll be all over this. Yeah. You'll get them. Well, folks.

Thomas LaRock (01:36:12): Oh my God. Is there a DAX TikTok?

Rob Collie (01:36:14): DAX Studio TikTok? DAX TikTok?

Bill Jelen (01:36:17): DAX TikTok, that's it.

Rob Collie (01:36:19): All right. I'm filing the copyright now, DAX TikTok.

Thomas LaRock (01:36:24): You own that hashtag.

Rob Collie (01:36:25): Yeah. I own it. Yeah. We'll just say we own the hat. Just the pound sign. Like the Austin Powers joke-

Thomas LaRock (01:36:32): I invented the pound sign.

Rob Collie (01:36:33): He invented the question mark. He was prone to making outlandish claims, like he invented the question mark. You know, I haven't been wanting to have you on, Bill, but Tom's been insisting, he's like, "When are you going to get Bill?"

Bill Jelen (01:36:48): I think you mentioned this to me before you recorded your first one. But in my head I'm like, "Oh, I should wait a little bit. So that way the show will develop into something."

Thomas LaRock (01:36:56): Yeah. We're still waiting.

Rob Collie (01:37:00): Maybe this is when we arrive.

Bill Jelen (01:37:02): I don't think so. I really don't think this was it. But you know what, I don't give a shit. So...

Rob Collie (01:37:09): That's so good.

Bill Jelen (01:37:14): Thanks guys.

Rob Collie (01:37:15): All right.

Announcer (01:37:16): Thanks for listening to the Raw Data by P3 Podcast. Find out what the experts at P3 can do for your business. Go to Power Pivot Pro dot com. Interested in becoming a guest on the show? Email Luke P, L-U-K-E-P at Power Pivot Pro dot com. Have a data day!

Power BI has altered the course of many people's lives for the better, and that is surely the case with our guest Jonathan Perl.  Coming from a financial background, he was already well versed in the Business Intelligence tools of the past. But the Power Platform spoke volumes to Jon.  So much so that he changed his entire career path in order to share his expertise with these tools with others (and make a few shekels while he's at it).  His data journey is as unique as they come!

Episode Timeline:

• 1:55 - A LinkedIn message turns into an awesome friendship and professional relationship, Jon not only identifies but solves a problem in the Supply Chain, and Jon's new software product NOAH is born!
• 15:25 Jon's ability to extract useful data from the dirtiest garbage is amazing!  Cut and Sold-sounds simple, it isn't so simple
• 30:00 Which backgrounds are the best makeup for C-suite executives
• 54:30 Rob's experience of an orthodox Shabbat observance at Jon's place was eye-opening...and what's next for Jon Perl?

Episode Transcript:

Rob Collie (00:00:00): Hey everyone. Today's guest is Jon Perl. JP we call him. JP's got a very interesting backstory. Jon has managed rock bands. He's worked for Hedge Funds. He started his own successful apparel company and ran it for a number of years before encountering Power BI, and deciding at that moment that data was a better business. So he sold his company in response to encountering Power BI, I'm not making this up. So now, in addition to slinging Power BI on a part-time, nearly full-time basis, he now also runs a software as a service startup in the supply chain and logistics industries fields, domains. Additionally, he's also one of the most interesting paradoxes I've ever met. As an adherent of the Orthodox Jewish faith, he spends a full day every week with no technology, and in the other six days more than makes up for it. Absolutely crushing it. No one navigates technology like this guy, he just takes a day off, one day a week just to rest. Really compelling figure. Fantastic conversation. I hope you enjoy it. So let's get into it.

Announcer (00:01:10): Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please?

Announcer (00:01:15): This is the Raw Data by P3 Podcast with your host Rob Collie and your co-host Thomas LaRock. Find out what the experts at P3 can do for your business. Go to powerpivotpro.com. Raw data by P3 is data with a human element.

Rob Collie (00:01:34): Welcome to the show. JP, Jon Perl. How are you, man?

Jon Perl (00:01:40): I'm great. Thanks for having me. Nice to see you, Tom. Nice to see you, Rob.

Rob Collie (00:01:44): It is a pleasure to have you. I'm glad that we got this queued up. We pulled this together pretty quickly too, so go us. Agile. That's right. We don't do waterfall podcasting here, we run the agile method. So Jon, it's probably three years ago, two and a half maybe.

Jon Perl (00:02:04): Something like that.

Rob Collie (00:02:05): I got what is definitely my absolute favorite LinkedIn message of all time.

Jon Perl (00:02:11): Thanks.

Rob Collie (00:02:12): And it just came in, out of the blue, and it was so heartfelt. It didn't have an agenda other than just being human. It was just such a gift.

Jon Perl (00:02:25): Wow. Thank you so much.

Rob Collie (00:02:27): It was from this guy named Kevin. I'm just kidding. It was from you. Do you remember sort of the gist of what you said in that note?

Jon Perl (00:02:40): Yeah. More or less. I remember I just read your book. I was super jazzed up about Power BI and this whole new power way of [inaudible 00:02:51] data that I had struggled with before. You tried to build all kinds of little duct tape type connectors with different tools, and then to finally see it come together in such a beautiful way. I was obsessed. Yeah, I was in business at the time. I had a company called Andy & Evan. I was in the clothing manufacturing business. I did it for about 10 years until I hit a breaking point in the [inaudible 00:03:15] business, slinging onesies.

Rob Collie (00:03:16): Yeah. I mean, you started with the signature product, right? It was like an Oxford onesie, or something like that. What was it?

Jon Perl (00:03:26): Yeah. We called it the Shirtsie. I was laid off from a Hedge Fund in 2009. I had nothing to do. I started a business with my friend from Synagogue. "Hey, you're unemployed. I'm unemployed. There's no jobs in finance. Let's go sell shirts. Let's go sell custom shirts." Custom shirts are like the worst business in the world, going, selling three shirts at a time, measuring people, it's humiliating. They don't fit. Then my first son was born and I said, "Hey, this is not working out anyway. Why don't we have some fun." I made him a dress shirt with a onesie, snuck a snap closure in the bottom, and we said, "Hey, we have something here." We had $3,000 in the bank. We took $3,000 and showed it at a trade show. Literally went for broke.

Jon Perl (00:04:15): Out of the gate, had some traction, built this business over 10 years, selling to department stores and discounters and really kind of working my way up the chain, or down the chain, however, you look at it, ultimately selling to master retailers and kind of hitting a breaking point, running a small business that's so capital driven and with no investor backing and high cost of capital.

Jon Perl (00:04:37): I was having a really hard time in the business and one of my twice a year, number crunching marathons to plan what we were going to buy for the season. It would always fall out on a Jewish holiday. That Jewish holiday I was in Portugal with my family, having a really nice time. Right afterwards, okay, partner dumps all the buying on me, in the middle of the holiday. I'm on vacation. I was up all night, three nights in a row and slept during the day when my family went and toured in Portugal. I said, "You know what, enough of this." I had your book with me.

Jon Perl (00:05:07): Then on the holiday days where we don't carry a phone, we don't turn on lights, we read, and we hang with our family, whatever, I had your book. I was like, wow. I just spent a week doing this crap. I'm done with selling Shirtsies. I'm going into the data business. I used the technology, the power query and Power BI to create a pitch deck for my company to go and sell it, and met with as many people as would meet with me. Got lucky. Six months later was able to close a deal, sell the business. From then on, it was like a new career, a new beginning. I reached out to you to say, "Hey, what's up? Who is this guy? This guy just changed everything."

Rob Collie (00:05:49): First of all, I love the idea of a Jewish holiday that's dedicated to reading my book. Can we invent something?

Jon Perl (00:06:00): [inaudible 00:06:00] into the holiday, but you know, there's some.

Thomas LaRock (00:06:02): There are a lot of them you, so it's possible. It could already exist.

Jon Perl (00:06:08): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:06:08): You just have to discover it, I suppose. The other thing is, I just love the random stories. It's so typical really. It's a story old as time. Get laid off from a hedge fund, start an apparel business making dress shirt onesies for babies, and then discover power BI and go, oh, I need to sell this business and go do something like this. I mean, how many people share that story? It's probably like two, 3% of the population. Every story is so unique. I love these semi random, zigzag paths. They're just, I think one of the most fascinating and valuable things to me. I don't really know what it is about them that speaks to me, but they really do. Let's complete the picture. Pre hedge fun. Anything interesting in the pre hedge fun days?

Jon Perl (00:07:00): Managed a band. Toured around the world with the Jewish rock band. That's a whole another story for another time.

Rob Collie (00:07:08): I didn't know that, I don't think. Maybe you told me once. I have to hear things like five, six times before they really get cemented.

Jon Perl (00:07:15): I tell you what was very really interesting, post that story. The part that I skipped was that process of trying to sell my business. I went to bigger companies. I was selling to Costco. I went to bigger Costco vendors. It kind of went up the chain to some bigger folks who were doing business orders of magnitude larger than mine. One or two orders of magnitude bigger than my business. What I saw was just fascinating. They didn't have the tools that I had. They had floors full of people, crunching numbers and exporting and uploading and emailing. They were clueless to all this stuff. That's where I really saw the opportunity.

Jon Perl (00:07:57): Like hey, I have this little business operating on such a small scale, but doing the same type of business, more or less. I'm communicating, I'm EDI with trading partners, and sending messages in and out of my ERP. I want to pull all kinds of data from my ERP and measure certain things and watch certain things and trigger certain things. The business is really all the same, regardless of the scale of it, was the same business. I had job offers, when I met with all these people that said, "Who made the charts? You made these charts? These are good charts. Think he's a chart guy. Our CFO just left. Do you want to be CFO?" Literally, I had CFO offers, COO offers, and I chose this path of being independent and start a software business and continue to do consulting in this discipline. Keep my tools sharp.

Rob Collie (00:08:48): Yeah. Tell us about the software business, because when you wrote the mail to me, you wrote the LinkedIn message, I don't think you had the software idea yet. You were data BI, considering maybe some of those jobs that you were being offered, but considering starting a consulting outfit, essentially. But then somewhere along the way, aha, more opportunity. You were able to spot something else. Tell us a little bit about that software pivot.

Jon Perl (00:09:13): Sure. One of my consulting clients at the time, his name is Jackie Deed. He's become my business partner now. Very soon after I closed on this, on the sale, I was able to leave my business without any obligations. Couple months into our consulting arrangement for his company, I was consulting for a few people at the time, and I loved that. I loved seeing different companies, how they operate. A client of mine at the time was a cannabis packaging company, like also that just fascinating business. Jack has an exclusive distributor of Little Tike's baby gear. Again, trading business, bringing in containers, registering your inventory, sending big tickets to the warehouse. It is a comfortable thing. Gave me an offer I couldn't refuse to come and consult for him for this business. Helped with the operations.

Jon Perl (00:10:02): A couple months into it, I said to Jack, I said, "There's another void in this business. It's more of an interactive thing. It's not just like a data gathering thing, but it's a data collection problem. There's this black hole in the land of ERP where you order goods from presumably supplier, perhaps are overseas or some other locale. They have a different system. They're a different organization, and then you receive goods from them at a later point in time. Everything that happens in between there, between the time you purchase goods and the time you receive goods is kind of a black hole. It's tracked with the email, Excel, text messages. Where's my goods, which container, what's happening, where is everything. I noticed that was a big problem. Even at these big companies that I was seeing. They have entire departments full of people, walls of file cabinets, full of customs files, bills of lading and printed out emails, and hundreds of millions of dollars a year of it. They just hire more people and make more documents and there's got to be a better way."

Rob Collie (00:10:56): What's the problem in that black hole? Is it that you don't know if your goods are actually on the way? If they're going to be on time? Is that the problem with the blind spot?

Jon Perl (00:11:05): The blind spot is that purchases that you make from another vendor turn into shipments in from that other vendor, and the purchases and the inbound shipments almost never match. There's a mixing bowl that happens. Some of the shipments go, some of the PO goes early. Some of it goes late. Some of it goes here. Some of it goes there. Some of it's consolidated with other POs or other POs from other vendors, and they go in the same container. It's a big stew. We call it a [chillant 00:11:33].

Rob Collie (00:11:32): Yeah. It does sound like a nightmare.

Jon Perl (00:11:38): Yeah. It's an accounting nightmare. It's a logistics nightmare. So we said, Hey, what if we make a cloud platform where we take your purchasing data, we make it available to your vendors, log into the same platform. We provide that mixing bowl of creating the shipments, and so doing, we're now in charge of all of the invoicing, all of the packing lists, all of the commercial documentation. We're not reliant on someone looking at crazy Chinese packing. I mean, nothing wrong, I have no issues with China. I love China, but sometimes their packing lists are a little funny. You don't have to deal with that anymore. There's a lot of savings in there. There's a lot of time savings, a lot of dollar savings. There's a lot of stakes made, that just things just slip through, and just providing that turnaround of what you purchased into what's ultimately going to come. The costing of it, the landing costing, the process of it is a big void.

Rob Collie (00:12:31): Just to underline, Jon loves China. One time I was trying to get ahold of you. I forget what I was trying to get ahold of you about. I didn't hear from you for a couple days. When I eventually got ahold of you, you're like, "Yeah, you know, I was over in Hong Kong the last few days at some cannabis packaging trade show, or something like that." I was like, "What? How does? What?" It doesn't have anything to do with anything we've ever talked about.

Thomas LaRock (00:12:56): He was on vacation.

Jon Perl (00:12:58): Yeah. Exactly.

Rob Collie (00:13:02): It sounded like you'd decided to go 24 hours before you got on the plane too. It was just something you do. I went to the store to get some eggs, and I went to Hong Kong.

Jon Perl (00:13:12): No. I went to the store to get eggs. And now I'm at Burning Man. How did we get here?

Rob Collie (00:13:22): Exactly. I no longer wish to be called Jon. I am now Desert Flower.

Jon Perl (00:13:33): I spent a lot of time overseas. Over that 10 year period, I was probably in China maybe 40 plus times. I had my own people there. I had an office there. I had staff there. I had people producing packing lists. Collecting data from the factories.

Rob Collie (00:13:48): Wow. All right. So, that's what the software product Noah is, that you're working on.

Jon Perl (00:13:55): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:13:55): You're not just working on it, you've got some deployments now?

Jon Perl (00:13:58): Yeah. We made a beta release just before the end of the year. We have three customers in beta right now. We decided to release the product with a connector to QuickBooks, because it was kind of low hanging fruit for connection, and also our ability to get clients, it's very ubiquitous. We thought it was a good investment because there's ubiquitous, there's a big potential market for it. It's really exciting times. You don't cover a lot of things and you start pulling the sheets off, and people start using it and trying to scale. But yeah, that's where we're at.

Rob Collie (00:14:25): That's something I've told you before that I think is, it's not the remarkable thing about you, but it's this weird detail that stands out to me amongst the rest, which is, as a side note from one time I was visiting a client many years ago and I was sitting in this like oak paneled boardroom. This was a retailer that did, I mean, I don't know, this is at least like a hundred million dollar a year retailer, at least probably more than that. They have hundreds of stores. I have no idea what the revenues are like, but this is not a small outfit. So the president of this giant retailer is sitting in the boardroom and we're all working on various things. It's all Power BI stuff and everything. At one point I kind of like looked up, I was working with one guy and I looked up to ask the president a question.

Rob Collie (00:15:09): And I said, "Hey Jeff, I got a question for you." He's staring at his computer screen. He goes, "Hold on just a second here, Rob, I'm debugging this ODBC driver on this server." I was like, did that actually just happen?

Jon Perl (00:15:25): Wow.

Rob Collie (00:15:25): You, you cannot be kept out. I can invent the most byzantine, horrible, database schema underneath some sort of line of business application. I could walk away and say, that is as good as RSA encryption. It is not crackable. No one's ever getting that data out of there, in any form useful. Then Jon comes along and goes, Hmm, let me see what I can do. You mentioned so casually sometimes, "Well you know, I went and I looked at the schema under it. It's bad, but no big deal." The next thing you know, you've got like working dashboards. I'm just like, wow.

Jon Perl (00:16:12): Thanks. I think we spoke about, one really interesting one. I did some work for a company in Columbia, South America. A large plastics manufacturer. They have some ancient, ancient, Fox pro system. I was not able to get a gateway connection going on it. I was not able to really get any kind of PM to speak of. I wasn't getting in, so I had them do all these exports for me, all these CSV exports. Okay, just as much as it'll let you do. Items, as much as it'll let you do, just as much data as you can. Okay. Sales, like sure. Accounting, yes very good. Deleted sales and not deleted, open, closed, just give me everything. They'd send it and all the headers are in Spanish.

Jon Perl (00:17:00): You have to spend some time with someone just to even understand what the heck you're looking at. Fantastic. Of course, DC sales, Mr. Jonathan. What do I say, what you want to know about? Okay. Great. What about these other like 60 things that I don't know are in Spanish. Well then they have business in the Columbia peso and business in the U.S. dollar and tremendous inflation in the Columbian peso, or was it Columbian dollar? Whatever the case is, tremendous inflation. They wanted to know what their business has done over the last 10, 20 years of data that they sent me, but corrective, adjusted, for inflation with the U.S. dollar, so they could look at dollars and other currencies together being equal. So yeah, I've had some pretty wacky ones.

Rob Collie (00:17:48): Yeah. I think there's another business potential in your future where you're just like this shadowy figure on the world IT scene. You just go by some sort of moniker, they call you The Decoder, or Rosetta or something. Right. All you do is come in and consult to software teams that are trying to crack someone else's database schema. You're paid through a Swiss account, or you're paid in Bitcoin.

Jon Perl (00:18:19): I love it. I love it. Tell me more.

Rob Collie (00:18:22): I'm serious. You have to have both, right. You have to have the belief that you can do it, and then the ability to do it. If you lack either of those, you can't do it, but you believe. You're just insane. You believe that you can do it and then you go and you do it over and over again. I'm just like, I don't know, you should go after SAP next.

Jon Perl (00:18:45): That'd be a good one. Let's do it together.

Thomas LaRock (00:18:47): Rob, one of the first things he said, his comment was, just flat out, I'm going into the data business, right? Who says that? Seriously, who says that? Nobody goes to school to be a data janitor. Right. We all end up somewhere and he's one of the rare few people are like, oh no, I'm totally, I'm just going to go do this. And then he does it.

Rob Collie (00:19:11): Yeah. I agree. That was something that was so validating about the message you sent me on LinkedIn, was that you had gone and done things at that point in your life that I could probably never do. You'd started a freaking apparel brand.

Jon Perl (00:19:25): I wouldn't recommend it.

Rob Collie (00:19:28): I know. Your horror stories sound... They're chilling. But I mean, it's not like the early years of this business were nice and smooth either. So we have some common ground though. We kind of bonded a little bit over the nightmare, whitewater section of growing a business. But you had done that and it was kind of like, you'd now seen so much value and so much on opportunity in the same things that I had been seeing, that you were re vectoring, embedding your career on it. It's not like I could have been more convinced of what I was doing. I was pretty convinced, but at the same time, even when you're locked in on something like I have been, it still feels really good when someone from a completely different, seemingly universe, goes oh my God, and jumps over and jumps into your lane. Of course, you were there for like five minutes and then you were onto software, but you're still slinging a lot of Power BI these days. You haven't gotten rusty.

Jon Perl (00:20:24): Thanks. I try to keep current. You know how it goes. It always starts with a very simple problem. How come we can't know this and this and that. I want to know this. I bet nobody can tell it to me. As you peel back the onion and the layers and all these things, what they're asking presents a hundred different other things that are constructive to address, expensive sometimes, when you start to dive into this. I never look at the front end of the system. I don't even know how it works. I'm just looking at the data, the database. I have a totally different perspective, totally different set of glasses, looking at things differently than the business owners are.

Rob Collie (00:21:05): Yeah. A lot of businesses are like this, but you're pretty deeply immersed in the fashion and apparel business in New York City. You took me to visit a couple of those outfits, and this is a business, an industry with a lot of tradition behind it. It's got a very long history. Looking back, I could kind of feel that history walking through those offices. I didn't bother to check with you, but it was believable that the spaces we were standing in, those spaces have been used for that industry since the early 1900s maybe. By the way, since then, I don't know if you've watched the show, but since then, my wife and I have burned through the multiple seasons of the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Have you seen that?

Jon Perl (00:21:53): That's great. Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:21:54): What is it? It's cut to sell, the acronym that I kept seeing in a bunch of your reports that I had to ask you about. What was it?

Jon Perl (00:22:01): Cut and sold.

Rob Collie (00:22:01): Cut and sold. Right.

Jon Perl (00:22:04): Cut and sold. Yeah. They want to cut and sold. It's very simple. How many did I make, and how many did I sell? How many did I make, how many did I sell? That's it.

Rob Collie (00:22:15): Yeah. What's the actor who plays the father-in-law on Marvelous Mrs. Maisel? He was also in A Few Good Men.

Thomas LaRock (00:22:21): Kevin Pollak.

Rob Collie (00:22:22): Kevin Pollak, right. I could see his character in that show saying that.

Thomas LaRock (00:22:27): So good.

Jon Perl (00:22:31): Right, exactly. To them it's very simple, but in practice, to cut and sold. So cut is a whole universe of purchased goods and the resulting shipments from those purchased goods. How many of them did we receive of that during this period, whatever, and sold, you're looking at the entire volume of sales orders, invoiced goods, netting out the two, and it's cut and sold. These syllables like a universe data.

Rob Collie (00:22:58): Yeah. I think that's a fascinating place to bring modern up tempo BI. On the one hand, that culture, the people who say it's very simple, it's how many did I cut and how many did I sell? You can say this for sure. They are grounded in reality. This is a culture that is not going to lose sight of the important stuff. That sounds like it's a gimme, but I think a lot of business cultures can lose sight of that sort of on the ground reality. Okay. So you got that going for you in that culture, but the deep tradition I would expect as an outsider for it to be a little suspicious of new ways of doing things.

Jon Perl (00:23:44): Oh, absolutely.

Rob Collie (00:23:45): Maybe even more than average. So you get this interesting tension. You're constantly, probably, appealing to that really grounded nature, like saying, look, that metric sucks and here's why, right?

Jon Perl (00:24:00): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:24:00): That metric doesn't actually predict margin or profit. Right. It's the bad thing to chase. I could imagine getting that message across, probably easier than in most cultures, but then saying, oh, and by the way, we're going to bring in this new system. No.

Jon Perl (00:24:20): Exactly. Yeah. The [inaudible 00:24:22] is key and it's a very easy to overlook, because when you come in, you're thinking, I could light up the whole room here with data. I could show everybody something. I could do so much. Then it's very easy, especially when you're doing it as a one man show, which I'll sometimes do, to get lost in it yourself. You need to constantly be releasing the deliverables to the customer and showing them how to use it, ensuring that they're consuming it, giving them the right data to consume and measuring their engagement. It's so easy to overlook that.

Rob Collie (00:25:00): That I think is such an important point. I don't think we've ever talked about this on this show, and so we should. What you just said. So first of all, as the geeked out data nerd in a particular pond, it's so easy to sort of go off in a corner of your own and just have a party with the data. Here's my new imaginary friend, in fact, table three. And in fact, table three is going to have a conversation and we're going to talk.

Jon Perl (00:25:29): Exactly.

Rob Collie (00:25:32): We're going to write some just badass forms. We're going to make all these, it's starting to sound like Bob Ross, painting in his studio. We're going to make a happy little formula over here.

Jon Perl (00:25:40): You become a hoarder. I'm going to make some reports one day. I got that because one day I'm going to make reports. I'm going to be great. You're going to see.

Rob Collie (00:25:47): Yeah. Then there's the other danger. You invent something that you think is awesome, like this awesome report. Then you just, tada, right? And you walk away, just kind of brushing off your hands, like it's miller time, and you leave your audience very confused, frustrated, maybe even resentful, because what you gave them, it turns out doesn't actually help them.

Jon Perl (00:26:13): Oh yeah.

Rob Collie (00:26:13): I have done this. It's kind of like one of those diseases that you're never fully recovered from. You're always having to be wary and on guard for it. This is where one of our principles comes from is, think backwards from the actions that the user of the dashboard, the user of the report, think backwards from the actions that they could take to improve the business and then build something to facilitate that. Don't go build a report.

Rob Collie (00:26:45): If you say that I'm going to go show, take the data and essentially go forward from the data to the report, rather than backwards from not just the person, but like what their workflow could be, what they could do to improve the business, you end up in vast different places.

Jon Perl (00:27:03): Absolutely.

Rob Collie (00:27:05): One of them is really useful, and one of them can actually hurt your reputation with that customer base in a way that you can't recover from, because what you've done is you've shown them, you've confirmed for them their suspicions, that this newfangled system was shit. It could have not been shit, but we happened to build them shit. Now we thought it was cool.

Jon Perl (00:27:28): Well, everybody wants to say that it's shit. I mean, there's always going to be a naysayer. There's always going to be a shit sayer in the room.

Rob Collie (00:27:34): A shit sayer.

Thomas LaRock (00:27:36): It's like suit sayer.

Rob Collie (00:27:37): Yeah. But with shit in it.

Jon Perl (00:27:42): Don't send this link to my rabbi.

Rob Collie (00:27:46): His rabbi's like, he's using the sacred words. He's sharing them publicly.

Jon Perl (00:27:54): The first thing that this shit sayer is going to say, the first thing they're going to do is they're going to compare your totals to their totals. Doesn't match my report. It's the first thing they're going to do. You need to preempt that. If a part of the discovery process before you touch this is like, first show me your report, and then if you're lucky, maybe you can get some sequel behind the report and recreate it in [inaudible 00:28:19] and then you like, do some, here you go.

Thomas LaRock (00:28:23): Maybe decode a little sequel schema here and there. If we're lucky.

Jon Perl (00:28:28): Exactly. Show me what you want, I'll give you a better way to get it. That's the best way to start with the customer of Power BI, I find. The other barrier to engagement that I've seen is just understanding this new way of looking at data that only lives before a folder on a web page, and understanding the limitations of that. Better than understanding the limitations of it, using that. If you can't see it before the fold, it doesn't belong there. Look higher level. Also like, oh well, can I export it to Excel? Well, I need to see it in Excel. There's that guy. Okay, great. You have to also preempt that guy by having make sure that your data model has the measures, the right way for the totals, because when he goes into Excel, there's that bug that they never fixed, it's not going to make the totals. You know what I'm about.

Rob Collie (00:29:11): Yeah. It's those damn humans. There's like a mad scientist off the rails parable here, or something like, if only we could get the humans out of the picture.

Thomas LaRock (00:29:26): Rob, in your professional opinion, would you agree that Jon is someone that has the data gene?

Rob Collie (00:29:33): Oh my God. I think he might have gotten two copies. He's one of those genetic freaks, like Jamie Lee Curtis. He got two. He got two data genes.

Thomas LaRock (00:29:48): Jamie Lee Curtis of data.

Jon Perl (00:29:50): Wow.

Rob Collie (00:29:51): Okay.

Thomas LaRock (00:29:51): Wow. I'm not sure if that's good or bad.

Rob Collie (00:30:01): Well, it's one of those things that leaves you pondering. Yeah. That's what we do here.

Thomas LaRock (00:30:07): I wanted to ask real quick, because you had mentioned, you got offers of being a CFO, simply because you started using Power BI.

Jon Perl (00:30:18): I also have a bunch of accounting knowledge behind that. I worked at a hedge fund underwriting asset based loans. I know how to analyze financial statements. I have strong financial background. That's what I did at my company. I set up the systems and hired people to work with them, and was very hands on. I mean, started a business from the ground up. There was no, I didn't go into some place where there was employees. I did the work and then I had to hire other people and show them how to make a process and figure out what I want from them. Yeah.

Thomas LaRock (00:30:46): Okay. I wanted some clarification because I couldn't believe that somebody said, "Hey, this guy does Excel, put him in charge of everything financial." But I've heard stranger things. My daughter's going into accounting, or she has an interest in accounting. It always pleases me when I hear somebody with a little bit of accounting knowledge and some practical knowledge say of Excel and Power BI, and how it can take them places I think farther and faster.

Rob Collie (00:31:14): I mean, let me be clear. Not just is she interested in accounting, she's interested in forensic accounting.

Thomas LaRock (00:31:19): Yeah.

Jon Perl (00:31:20): Wow.

Rob Collie (00:31:21): Jon knows some people in that world. We can talk about that maybe backstage or onstage, I don't care. I don't want to put you on the spot.

Jon Perl (00:31:28): Accounting's the best business background, period. I mean in my opinion, it's like it's the basis for everything. After learning accounting, until you practice it, I don't mean practice it by working for a firm, practice it by live it. What is a balance sheet? Live your balance sheet. Oh no, I have no money at the bank, but I had tons of inventory, quick. Really understand what a balance sheet like means. I learned all that in the school of hard knocks and was fortunate to have opportunities in that.

Thomas LaRock (00:32:00): That's great.

Rob Collie (00:32:00): You know, at the end of the movie Cocktail, Tom Cruise comes back. I think Michael Caine is the other. I think it's Tom Cruise and Michael Caine. I could be wrong.

Thomas LaRock (00:32:08): But I think you are. I don't think it's Michael Caine. It's the other guy.

Rob Collie (00:32:12): Okay. Well, I don't know. Anyway, there's like the older mentor guy, right?

Thomas LaRock (00:32:16): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:32:16): And Tom Cruise returns to him at the end of the movie, and what Tom sees is just massive success. The guy's living on a yacht, his bar has gone like a city block in size or whatever. It's been a long time since I've seen the movie. Tom is like, oh, he is just wowed. His mentor says, they're sitting alone now on the yacht at the end of the movie, and the mentor says, "Yeah, it's all going down though. I'm penniless. I'm bankrupt." And Tom's like, "What?" He's like, "I was good at bartending. I knew how to run a bar. I knew how to do that, but I was terrible at business." I don't think I even watched the whole movie.

Rob Collie (00:32:51): I think I just remember seeing the end and it was like, 12 year old me or 13, 14 year old me, whatever, when I saw it. It just seemed like some sort of movie cliche. Of course they had to give an explanation, or something like that. Then over time I started thinking of it as more like, okay, yeah, you can be bad at business, but it's simple. How many did I cut, and how many did I sell? Right. If you're making margin on everything that you're doing and you're bringing money in, how can you go out of business? It turns out, very easily.

Jon Perl (00:33:23): Absolutely.

Rob Collie (00:33:23): If you measure things based on sort of those simple, easy to see caveman metrics, you can miss an absolute crisis of timing coming for you, I've been told.

Jon Perl (00:33:38): Yes and no. The guy sitting in the CFO, I introduced you to an old school garment CEO. You saw. There were dozens and dozens of people, high level people. There were people in that office that came out of McKenzie and that came out of PWC, and there's like high level people in there. Well, what's he doing? He's looking at there was a little bit, okay, the total of this. He has it scratched out on a pad and he's got the total of that from last week. Looking at the two. I'm like, these two sticky notes, how come these are different? How come blah, blah, blah, but realizing a lot more now, almost three years into this pursuit of data, as the business, is that you can't underestimate the doing business part. The data is just the tools. Just because you're really good at working the tools, you could be amazing at working the tools, the best tool worker, that doesn't make you a business person necessarily. You have to understand where they're coming from. They're asking the questions that they're asking because they're trying to be protective of their balance sheet. Make sure this business lasts another generation.

Rob Collie (00:34:45): Yeah. I was just taking the long way around to saying that your statement that accounting is probably the best business background. I mean, I would've just been so stinking, dismissive of a statement like that four years ago.

Thomas LaRock (00:35:00): Really?

Rob Collie (00:35:01): Oh yeah, totally.

Thomas LaRock (00:35:03): I was going to question it, but only because I thought, economics. I think for people that did double major in economics and math, that I went to school with, I thought those were the people that were essentially going to run businesses. Right.

Rob Collie (00:35:16): I'm still going to be dismissive of the economics people.

Thomas LaRock (00:35:20): But no, these are the people I look back that I went to school with. I'm like heads on shoulders. They had everything that you need to do to run a business. If they were a good leader, that was somebody that could go and execute and do the proper analysis on stuff. Accounting, I've come to realize, I think so much more so than say, if you went to school for marketing. Okay. And I work in marketing and I don't want to be dismissive of it in any way. I think if you're looking for your next CEO, I bet on average the CFO has the edge over the CMO.

Rob Collie (00:35:53): Oh yeah.

Thomas LaRock (00:35:53): Right? I just do. So when I think about, who are the CEOs, who are the leaders, and what really is their background? I think it comes from two areas. One is sales and the other is accounting. Finance.

Rob Collie (00:36:05): In another show that we've recently recorded, we talked about how, for example, the CIO as a position, has exposure to basically the entire enterprise.

Thomas LaRock (00:36:17): Sure.

Rob Collie (00:36:17): And CFO, they only have exposure to an entire enterprise in the sense of money in, money out, which is basically, again, pretty damn comprehensive. I could certainly imagine by comparison the CMO job, being a little bit more tunnel vision. You don't have to be quite as big picture. I think anything that is forced to be big picture, is going to be fundamentally a more complete background. As you say, it still takes all kinds. I mean, we still need all these things, but if you were going to be an entrepreneur starting your own thing, to have a background that's more like a CFO and less like a CMO, it's probably a good thing.

Thomas LaRock (00:36:58): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:36:59): I've learned the hard way. The analogy I guess I would use is, I just thought of an engine as Hey, you need fuel and you need fire. Right. Let's keep the fuel line unclogged. Let's keep the spark plugs sparking. Even just to take the timing metaphor, like if you're the cylinders aren't firing in the right sequence, you can rattle that car apart and you end up with air gaps in the gas line that you didn't expect and all that kind of stuff. If the engine stops, it stops. I have a whole, a much, much, much deeper appreciation of a statement like, accounting is the best background, than I had before I traversed this path.

Jon Perl (00:37:37): I think so. I wish I'd studied accounting in school. I didn't study accounting in school. I studied finance, which is similar. It's math based. I wish I'd studied more accounting. I wish I'd gone for a CPA and done that. My first job out of college, after my stint managing dance, which I did through college, but my first job working for a hedge fund, I remember I got like a week in. I'm working with this guy who, I mean I guarantee you, he did not study math in college or economics or anything like that. This guy was partying in college. He comes down and he's like, "Okay, we're issuing a term note to this and this client. They have an asset based facility. We're issuing them a term note now for our 1.75 million. They're giving us a building, it's worth 3 million. We're making it. Who knows how to... Perl, you just came out of school. Right? How do you do the amortization on a term note?"

Jon Perl (00:38:30): He was originating this business. He was principle riskee in this 1.75 million dollars that was going out. He doesn't need to know how to calculate the amortization on a term note, It was very illuminating to me, coming out of school, and saying like, "Okay yeah, I know all the formulas. I know how to calculate anything." I had my textbook and all this stuff, and I was like, wait a second. Look where they are. They don't know how to do this stuff. There's obviously like a lot more to it.

Rob Collie (00:38:59): Michael Lewis' first book, before Moneyball, before The Big Short. His very first book was called Liar's Poker. It was about his days at Solomon Brothers. He tells the story about at their orientation, or indoctrination, retreat camp or whatever, where they're attending classes all day long. He divided the room into clans, in his description. There was like the frat boys in the back. All they did was like hoot and holler and bang on the desk every time someone said something about, we're going to go out there and conquer. We're going to make fat coin. They just go bananas in the back of the room. I know which of the clans from that class, the person you're talking about came from.

Jon Perl (00:39:52): He had memorabilia from the movie Animal House on his wall.

Rob Collie (00:39:54): Yep. There you go. Thank you for not doing anything that swayed me from my cliche.

Jon Perl (00:40:03): Yeah. I can't make that up. Constantly using [inaudible 00:40:11].

Rob Collie (00:40:11): When he says, was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor. He might not even know that it's irony.

Jon Perl (00:40:20): Exactly.

Rob Collie (00:40:21): But drives a Lamborghini.

Jon Perl (00:40:24): Yeah. And there's time to be set for both. I mean, one can't have it without the other, vice versa.

Rob Collie (00:40:28): I completely agree. My adult life has just been sort of like a journey in recalibrating what's valuable. Some things that I thought were valuable, not so much, not as much as I thought, and from other things that were, that I was dismissive of and, nope. The real world can't be wrong. You might want certain things to be valuable or more valuable than others, but if the market is just constantly telling you otherwise, you're a fool to ignore that. You've got to come around. I think that's kind of a beautiful thing in the end, but it was hard one lessons.

Jon Perl (00:41:05): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:41:06): What do you think the coolest thing, to the extent that you can tell us, maybe you can obfuscate it, but what's sort of like the coolest thing you've ever either done or found with Power BI?

Jon Perl (00:41:19): That's a good question. I had a client once, I was operating a division of a family business. They operated one division and the parent operated the company. Okay, this is your corner. You're going to operate this part of the business. I can't get more specific than that. The client had come to me saying, "Hey, we don't have tools to measure these things that I want to measure about my business. I think we're really on target for this." If you look at it that way or whatever, asked me to make some data models or reports, and I did, it was a tremendous amount of work. The result of it was that their assumptions were wrong and the business was doing horribly.

Jon Perl (00:42:00): They had brought me in to help them prove their point and say, "Hey, this is why we're in business. Let's show like our performance." We went to measure the performance. The performance wasn't so good, or let's say not good, but different than the client expected. That was one of the more interesting things that I found, because a lot of this is, as we said, it's a personal thing of dealing with the people who are consuming the data, and why they're consuming the data. That put me in a very compromised position. I could take it out on the data guy, obviously at first. No, can't be, no way, ah, no way. It is. Maybe we got to change some things. That also put things into perspective.

Rob Collie (00:42:49): How did that work out? Did they come around to believing you?

Jon Perl (00:42:52): No. They definitely believed me that they had to change some things about the way they operate their business, the things that they invest in as a business, the kind of inventory that they're willing to invest in and hold. As a result of the measurement of the performance, it's a balance sheet, you're taking cash and you're turning it into garments, as it were. Then you want to turn those garments back into more cash than you started with. That's an investment. The money sits in those garments for a certain amount of time. You want to measure your return on that money and the velocity of the turn of that money. I was able to work with them to better their forecasting and better their understanding of their own business and where to focus.

Rob Collie (00:43:31): I think this is something we'll all just agree on. I'm going to say it anyway. I think in that story, the social engineering, the navigation that you had to do of the social framework in that situation, was far more difficult and more valuable and more rare than the ability to produce the reports that told the truth. It's another one of those, oh yeah, this is knowledge that I've acquired in the last 10 years. It's another one of those rebalancing of what's valuable. I have a similar story where we were hired by a very, very, very large liquor manufacturer. One of the biggest. They wanted us to tell them the impact of their gift program that they run at the holidays every year. So you've seen these right. There's a bottle of liquor and a box with like a flask or a couple of glasses or something like that.

Rob Collie (00:44:25): I never knew this, because I never really paid attention. But, those gift boxes are usually exactly the same price as just a bare bottle by itself. The same price. The gifts that are in those boxes are very expensive on a per unit basis. Sometimes like $6 a unit in cost for the gift, because it's a nice glass, it's a nice flask or whatever. And so, margin wise, on a unit basis, these liquor companies are giving up well over 50% of their normal margin.

Jon Perl (00:44:58): Wow.

Rob Collie (00:44:58): On these things. Now of course, they sell them like crazy to a tremendous volume. The old story, we make it up on volume. Okay. So we were hired, they didn't tell us what their intent was, but they just wanted, they said essentially like, okay, you want to be told the truth, right? Yep. Totally tell us the truth. Give it to us straight. We went and looked at it and saw very conclusively that this was killing them. Just destroying them. The amount of lift they were getting from offering the package was, there was lift. They were selling more units as a result of doing this, but not nearly enough, not two X. They were going to get the same volume of lift, most of that lift was just seasonal. They were going to get it anyway. We were done with this. It didn't take us very long to come up with this result. We even kind of had to sit on it a little while to make it look like it was harder than it was. We don't do that at P3, but we did that at my last company, when I wasn't in charge. That's one of the reasons why I'm not there anymore. Started a different thing. Soon as they got it, they fired us, because I guess they had, it was the same thing, right. They'd hired us to prove that it was working. It's been a long time.

Jon Perl (00:46:22): Well, it could have been both, that it was working and you couldn't measure it.

Rob Collie (00:46:25): It's sort of the epilogue to the story. I was at Target before the holidays, and I didn't go down the liquor aisle. I was down some other aisle. On the end cap of one of the aisles at the back of the store, there they are, the gift packs of this same brand. And it has the nice gift in it. I'm like, oh my God. I look at the price, and then I just dashed across the store. I left my wife. I said, "I'll be right back." I dashed across the store, run down the liquor aisle, find that bottle, same price. They're still doing it, but they put it in a different place in the store. They didn't put it side by side. I think we still saw behavior adjustment. The person who was going to come in and buy it anyway is going to go to the liquor aisle and just buy it. But it's an impulse buy type of thing on the end cap. I started scratching my chin, like okay, it's probably that they've hired three different firms since then to tell them the same thing.

Jon Perl (00:47:34): Yeah. I'm sure they want someone to tell them that it's working and find a reason why, so they can continue doing it, because they love it.

Rob Collie (00:47:43): Yeah.

Jon Perl (00:47:43): I've seen this problem. With my partner and my clothing business, he was the sales and marketing guy and I was the operations, finance, make it happen guy. Well yeah, of course we have to show green ones, even though no one buys them, because it has to be in the line because that's what it's going to bring people to the booth. In your liquor example, if you could measure how many people bring home those Jameson glasses, and then they have the Jameson glasses forever, or the next however many years. They're probably more likely to buy Jameson the next five times they go to the liquor store because they already have the glasses in their house. It might not be able to be measured.

Rob Collie (00:48:24): Yeah. It's a loyalty program. You've got to consider the whole picture. You've got to zoom back sometimes and realize you're not working just under a microscope. I think that's really good advice. It's kind of like the argument about whether it's okay to have dashboards with a dark background. You can say, hey look, the cognitive science is very clear here. The dark background interferes with my ability to ingest information, probably by about 5%, not by much, but it's clear which one's better. The white background is better, right? Except that the dark background catches people's attention. It's more fun for them to get involved with. They feel cooler when they're using it. If you consider the whole thing as a funnel, I've got to get their attention and then convey information. Maybe the dark background dashboard has a better throughput of information conveyed than the white background dashboard. But no, no, no, no, you have to get really, really zoomed in and make your career on. Anyway, I get really grumpy about this. I'm going to stop now.

Thomas LaRock (00:49:29): No, no, keep going.

Rob Collie (00:49:35): We can just have one podcast, it's nothing but a screaming match of insults between me and one of these celebrity, cognitive scientists that think they understand that visualizations only work a certain way.

Thomas LaRock (00:49:48): Oh yeah. I have the whole post about contentious issues, data issues.

Rob Collie (00:49:51): That isn't what the world needs.

Jon Perl (00:49:52): I think it needs a little of everything.

Rob Collie (00:49:54): We're all stocked up on tribal combat these days, I think.

Thomas LaRock (00:49:59): It's trial by combat.

Jon Perl (00:50:00): Oh man. Wow. Difficult times.

Rob Collie (00:50:09): It is. You're a long time New York City resident, right?

Jon Perl (00:50:15): Yeah. But I grew up in the DC area.

Rob Collie (00:50:17): You grew up in the DC area? Well, we don't talk about that. We want to represent you as our home grown New York City.

Jon Perl (00:50:27): Yeah. I've been here 20 years, and 20 years in Manhattan. Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:50:30): All right. All right. We'll just say you've 20 years. We're going to round that up to, I lived in Manhattan my whole life. I grew up watching the Knicks. COVID's thrown you a curve, right. You're still living and working in the city part-time, but you've got a new outpost.

Jon Perl (00:50:51): Yes.

Rob Collie (00:50:51): Outside.

Jon Perl (00:50:52): That was pretty wild. I mean, after living in the city for 20 years, I have three little kids and we're living in this small apartment. It didn't feel small to us in, let's say March 1st, and then like March whatever, 14th, they closed the school down. Then I was like, wait a second, this apartment is really small. Long story short. I was like, we got to get out of here. I'm not riding out this pandemic in Manhattan, not happening. I panicked and was very lucky, I found a house to rent in Long Beach, New York and called the owner right away. We were in the house in 48 hours. It was for sale. There was nothing inside. I mean, we're talking I had teams of Ikea builders and whatever. 48 hours, I was out of city in this house, in the suburbs.

Rob Collie (00:51:40): That's right.

Jon Perl (00:51:42): Yeah. We spoke about it.

Rob Collie (00:51:44): There's something about the furniture you needed was only available in Baltimore, or something like that, and so you found someone that you'd never met before and hired them to go pick it up for you.

Jon Perl (00:51:54): I rang a commercial van enterprise, sent them to Baltimore, Ikea. Brought it here to meet the Ikea assembly. Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:52:02): It's all about supply chain.

Thomas LaRock (00:52:09): This reminds me of reading about Andrew Yang, who went upstate. They asked him, why are you spending the pandemic upstate? And he's like, can you imagine me trying to be in Manhattan with the kids in school and only a two bedroom apartment and all that. I'm like, why didn't I think of riding out the pandemic in my second or even third home? I don't know why that just never occurred to me to have that opportunity.

Rob Collie (00:52:32): It's like the VP at Microsoft that would sit down in meetings with us and tell us things with a straight face, without any understanding at all, that this was like a really tone deaf thing to tell the rest of us. You know folks, I think... He just had a kid, right. He'd be like, "You know what the real secret to having kids I think is to get two nannies, one for the daytime hours and one for nighttime hours." Just so matter of fact.

Thomas LaRock (00:52:57): I had that same experience, Rob. He was vice president and he goes, I was explaining a couple of things at home. He goes, you should consider hiring a nanny. I just stared at him. I'm like, you want to swap paychecks or something? How do you think that's relatable? In any way.

Rob Collie (00:53:15): Yeah. I mean, the salaries at Microsoft for the job I used to do are now just like way higher than when I was there. So, maybe that conversation's different, but at the time, none of us in the room could afford a nanny, and he's telling us that you need a second shift.

Thomas LaRock (00:53:40): Maybe it's more economical, they're only working part-time.

Jon Perl (00:53:46): No. I'm not that guy. I ended up ditching my apartment in the city. I've been a bullet and had two places for a little while. Got rid of my apartment in the city and decided to do this. I own the house now for less than... Beautiful house, thank God that left for less than my rent, just rebalanced my life a little bit. I didn't buy three houses.

Thomas LaRock (00:54:04): I didn't mean to imply otherwise. I knew what you were saying. Sorry.

Jon Perl (00:54:07): Yeah, no worries.

Rob Collie (00:54:08): We can dream.

Jon Perl (00:54:08): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:54:08): But that apartment of yours was kind of a score. To give it up, had to take some guts.

Thomas LaRock (00:54:15): There's lots of vacancy in New York.

Rob Collie (00:54:17): You think so?

Jon Perl (00:54:20): Right now, yeah. But I mean, that was an amazing fact. At the time it was like, it probably still displaced price wise, for what it was. Rob came to my house for a proper Sabbath, Friday night dinner and Shabbat lunch. Showed him the whole thing. Rob and Joslyn came. We did all the prayers. The whole thing, like soup to nuts.

Rob Collie (00:54:42): Yeah. We put our phones away. That's the longest phoneless stretch in my last seven years. I was on my phone more at Burning Man.

Jon Perl (00:54:55): Rob left his wallet and his phone at the door, out of respect. We were like, wow.

Rob Collie (00:55:02): You can't come into someone else's house and be disrespectful. But I did turn off the light in the bathroom when I left. Everyone had to go to the bathroom in the dark after that, until someone I think politely nudged me and I'm like, oh, I'll go turn it on.

Thomas LaRock (00:55:21): Oh man. That sounds like it should be a book like, Pranks to Play During Shabbat, at your friend's house.

Jon Perl (00:55:31): By the way, that's a thing. Any non-Jewish neighbor of an observant Orthodox Jew will know all about that.

Rob Collie (00:55:36): Would you mind pressing the down button on the elevator for me?

Jon Perl (00:55:43): Yeah. Somehow it's not weird, essentially.

Thomas LaRock (00:55:46): It's not, can I put a borrow cup of sugar? Hey, could you come over here and turn a light on for us in the bathroom?

Jon Perl (00:55:53): I forgot about it. What about, you're in a hotel on vacation. Surprisingly, there are a lot of hotels that, if it's near a synagogue, they'll know the [inaudible 00:56:07] Hotel in Guangzhou, China. It's right next to the [Harbin 00:56:10] Jewish Center. They have people on Friday night who will take you up, they know exactly what to do. I try to teach my kids that it's not a limitation, that's more of an opportunity and a privilege to be able to turn off for 24 hours every week, in a very disciplined fashion and focusing on other things that are not screen based, like your family and your relationships. It's a nice thing. So yeah. Got to experience that with Rob.

Rob Collie (00:56:38): It's also an excuse to drink more beer, because when over in Israel, I went to the bar or something in the morning and I wanted a coffee. They were like, sorry, we don't make coffee today. I'm like, okay, what can you do? Beer. I'm like, all right.

Jon Perl (00:56:59): That's right.

Thomas LaRock (00:57:01): Is all beer kosher? Is every beer considered kosher? Can't be.

Rob Collie (00:57:05): It's the machinery that was required to deliver it to me, I think was the issue at that particular point in time. It was the espresso machine, the coffee machine couldn't be turned on that day.

Thomas LaRock (00:57:15): Okay.

Jon Perl (00:57:15): Yeah. Exactly. They could give you a beer out of the fridge, because they could just open the fridge, give you a beer and somebody could charge it to your room. But as far as cooking goes, we won't turn on or off a fire and we'll only eat things that have been on the fire that have started cooking before the [inaudible 00:57:32]. Stews and stuff during the daytime, or whatever. At a hotel, even if you do this at commercial scale, it's no different. They'll serve breakfast and they'll serve whatever meals within that framework. So yeah, if you go to the hotel bar it's kosher. They're not going to flip on the espresso machine that day.

Rob Collie (00:57:48): What's next for JP? What's next for Jon Perl? What's next for Noah, for your software baby?

Jon Perl (00:57:54): I'm very excited about the launch of Noah, my platform for international commercial trade. We've rolled out a very, very exciting suite of tools to enable buyers and sellers of international goods to communicate and facilitate business in a way that they haven't before, as a data guy or creating an international language of data. What's inside those containers and those cartons and those pieces and those inter packs. What's the UPC codes? I don't know, not everyone gets excited by that. I get excited by that. If you know what that even means, it means you can save money. You can eliminate error, means you want to know on that sticky note, what's with your business, if you have a better platform which to run your business.

Rob Collie (00:58:34): Yeah. You're going to sell more of what you cut.

Jon Perl (00:58:38): Exactly.

Rob Collie (00:58:43): We're in the cut and sold business, not the cut and wasted.

Jon Perl (00:58:49): Exactly.

Rob Collie (00:58:52): There's nothing about that description you just gave that seems apparel specific. It sounded a little bit more broadly applicable. I mean, it turns out that there's a lot of stuff that gets bought and shipped internationally.

Jon Perl (00:59:05): Absolutely.

Rob Collie (00:59:06): We've never talked with this before, but it kind of sounds like you might be just starting with apparel.

Jon Perl (00:59:11): Yeah. We're starting with apparel. We actually have a couple of disparate customers. We're doing the exclusive distributor of the Rubik's cube, is our first customers.

Rob Collie (00:59:18): What?!

Jon Perl (00:59:18): Yeah. That's an exciting one.

Rob Collie (00:59:23): Rubik's cubes are one of the most efficient things to pack into shipping boxes. Did you know that?

Jon Perl (00:59:29): Actually, you know what, I get excited about packing Rubik's cubes to shipping boxes, because you can get a ton of them into a container, and every container is worth a lot of money. That's how I think about it.

Rob Collie (00:59:40): Do you know if you make the box that surrounds the Rubik's cube, just like one 16th of an inch less on edge, you get an extra thousand Rubik's cubes in that shipping container.

Jon Perl (00:59:50): I don't joke about that stuff, man.

Rob Collie (00:59:52): You don't joke about that? You should see Bill Gellin when it's time to publish a book. This book in this raw form is like 320 pages, and he goes, but you know, every multiple of 16 costs us an extra arm and a leg because it's like an extra roll of paper. They fold it four times to make 16 pages. It's like this binary computer thing, the memory only comes in 16 megabyte sticks. So he's able to get a 320, just with editing and layout, not even editing, just layout. He's able to get a 320 page book down to 253 to get under. He is ruthlessly thrifty.

Jon Perl (01:00:36): By the way, I would love to go all Joe Rogan podcast with Bill Gellin. That would be...

Rob Collie (01:00:45): He's on our list, man.

Jon Perl (01:00:46): I would love to listen to him going Elon Musk on your podcast. That would be a lot of fun.

Rob Collie (01:00:52): We're going to be cuing him up within the next probably six weeks I think. We didn't want to just shoot our Bill Gellin shot from the beginning.

Jon Perl (01:01:02): He's coming, I promise. Oh no, I didn't mean that. Oh, sorry.

Rob Collie (01:01:12): Jon, I enjoyed this immensely. This has been one of the best things that in my professional life, I've really enjoyed this podcast.

Jon Perl (01:01:20): Thanks man. Yeah, me too. This was incredible. Was my first podcast.

Rob Collie (01:01:20): Yeah. Well hey, it's just like my 17th. That's it.

Jon Perl (01:01:29): It's a privilege to get on with you anytime. I always learn a lot from you, Rob.

Rob Collie (01:01:36): Vice versa. Like I said recently, a professional excuse to talk to someone interesting for an hour and a half. I mean, man, even if no one was listening, that would be worth it.

Jon Perl (01:01:50): Rob, I'm going to call you the data Rebbi. A Rebbi is one of those Hasidic guys, who's got a massive posse. He's got a big gymnasium with bleachers. He's got all those guys who are singing and dancing. The guy in the middle with the beard and the coat, the whole get up, is called the Rebbi.

Rob Collie (01:02:08): Okay.

Jon Perl (01:02:08): Then the guy, they'll go around him, we call the Hasidim. Okay. The Hasidic people, those are the people who follow that specific route, so I'm going to call you the data Rebbi.

Rob Collie (01:02:19): Sounds cool. It sounds short for rebel. It does. It sounds pretty hip. It's like Rabbi, but a little hipper. Here's my Rebbi, he DJ's my parties.

Jon Perl (01:02:35): You say Rebbi instead of Rabbi, people will know you're really in.

Rob Collie (01:02:38): Really? All right, man. Thanks so much. This was great.

Jon Perl (01:02:42): All right, guys. Thank you.

Announcer (01:02:44): Thanks for listening to the Raw Data by P3 podcast. Find out what the experts at P3 can do for your business. Go to powerpivotpro.com. Interested in becoming a guest on the show? Email Luke P, L-U-K-E-P @powerpivotpro.com. Have a day today!

Lori Rodriguez has a unique perspective on business, she's been collecting data about and for C-suite technology leaders as Vice President-Executive Programs at Gartner.  In this episode, she shares her knowledge about technology and business as an expert in both fields.  Lori is an advocate for women in business and STEM fields and has authored the book due out soon-We Want You To Stay: The Hidden Lives of Twenty Women In Stem.  You can preview a chapter of the book and learn more HERE.

Episode Timeline:

• 3:45 - Lori knows more about CIO's than just about anyone on the planet
• 8:20 - Digitalization and tech changes EVERYTHING and that change takes time to develop
• 21:20 - Role and responsibility swings between IT and Business
• 29:40 - The bullying of IT by the villains and the importance of process discipline
• 37:55 - Is the real villain the software industry?
• 44:20 - The first MS software that didn't suck, and the idea that software development is prejudiced or gender-biased
• 48:40 - Some startling statistics about women and minorities and why women aren't staying in STEM fields
• 1:02:25 - The P3 Power BI class gender statistics and the P3 hiring process yield some insight into the numbers of women in the data field
• 1:16:20 - Lori has some great advice for fathers with daughters about to enter college
• 1:25:10 - The interesting history of Lori's book, We Want You To Stay: The Hidden Lives of Twenty Women In Stem
• 1:31:55 - Rob makes the Ratatouille reference of the decade , The Data Cook can come from anywhere
• 1:37:10- The clearest explanation as to why P3 is the quickest to results BI consultancy-5 business days for a first tangible project iteration is common for P3's team
• 1:43:10 - Another crystal-clear explanation as to why Power BI is the best BI tool-with a nice bonus sports analogy!
• 1:49:25 - Lori shares her great perspective about the human side of Gartner's processes
• 1:52:35 - Power BI's dominance in Interoperability defined and discussed-The BI in Power BI should stand for Business Improvement: That's Rob and P3's philosophy!
• 1:59:20 - Rob's theory on something big that Microsoft is planning

Episode Transcript:

Rob Collie (00:00:00): Hello, everyone. This week's guest is Lori Rodriguez, a Vice President at Gartner, a company you may have heard of, and also author of the upcoming book, We Want You to Stay: The Hidden Lives of Twenty Women in STEM. Going in, I knew this was going to be a compelling conversation, but I honestly had no idea. This is by far the longest podcast we've recorded so far. And we weren't rambling, at least I don't think we were. It was compelling to me every single step of the way. Otherwise, we would've called it off. We would've bailed. We cover a lot of ground. Of course, we talk about her work at Gartner. We talk about her book. We talk about the unique challenges facing women in STEM fields. But the thing for me that I think led this to be such a long conversation was just how much valuable acquired wisdom was on display.

Rob Collie (00:00:57): Lori has just a tremendous amount of experience and right at that critical junction between technology and business, which we're always talking about here on the show. And it's not just that she's worked at that intersection for so long, it's also the way that she's been observing it. This is someone that's constantly, it's just obvious that she's always been synthesizing and revising her models and her understanding of the world around her, the world that she's navigating through. And I like to think of myself as being similar. So we just had a great time. At one point, Tom had to drop and we continued for like another 90 minutes after that. That's how much fun we were having. Make sure you catch near the end, the reference to the movie, Ratatouille. I've been saving this Ratatouille reference for about 10 years for just the right moment. And it turns out I found it. I found exactly the time to use it. So, that was really gratifying. It's a long one, but I think it's worth it. You'll be the judge, of course. So, let's get into it.

Announcer (00:01:59): Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention, please.

Announcer (00:02:03): This is the Raw Data by P3 Podcast with your host Rob Collie and your co-host Thomas LaRock. Find out what the experts at P3 can do for your business. Go to powerpivotpro.com. Raw Data by P3 is data with a human element.

Rob Collie (00:02:22): Welcome to the show, Lori Rodriguez. How are you today?

Lori Rodriguez (00:02:26): Hey, Rob. I'm doing great. How are you?

Rob Collie (00:02:28): So good. So good to have you on. I'm really glad we get to do this. Lori, you work at a company that people have probably heard of. Can you tell us what your job title is and stuff like that?

Lori Rodriguez (00:02:38): Sure. So I'm Vice President Executive Programs at Gartner. What does that mean? I'm on the business side of Gartner. I'm not an analyst. Opinions are my own today. I'm also not an IT, I'm not a consultant, and I don't run any of our conferences. So I work on the business in the business, if that makes any sense.

Rob Collie (00:02:58): Yeah, it does. But of course, no one would ever think that such a thing exists. Like from the outside, of course, Gartner's just a bunch of people that are experts in industries that write articles and review software and stay on top of trends. And that's it. That's all it is, right? And, of course, there's more behind the scenes, isn't there?

Lori Rodriguez (00:03:16): Yes, there is. So specifically what I do is I lead our innovative initiatives and I build products and services just like you all do out there. And for my audience, it's CIOs, at least it used to be. And now it's all of those other senior, most tech leaders with all the little alphabet letters behind them, chief technology officers, chief data officers, chief data protection officers, and anything else they throw in there that has to do with the tech side of any business today.

Rob Collie (00:03:45): Yeah. There's certainly an innovation in titles that has happened over the last few years. Like, people realize that the word chief, it could be thrown in front of many things. It didn't just have to be like the usual, right, we could put chief in front of anything.

Lori Rodriguez (00:03:57): Absolutely. Chief success officer.

Rob Collie (00:04:00): Oh, yeah.

Lori Rodriguez (00:04:00): Chief customer officer.

Rob Collie (00:04:02): Yeah.

Lori Rodriguez (00:04:02): Chief customer experience officer. You can keep going.

Rob Collie (00:04:05): Chief success officer, that seems to cover a lot of ground. I think that might be the end all, be all.

Lori Rodriguez (00:04:10): Kind of think it isn't at the CEO, I don't know, but...

Rob Collie (00:04:13): I don't know either, but success seems like it's important to everyone. Okay. So would you say the people with those sorts of titles are kind of like your customers?

Lori Rodriguez (00:04:22): Yep. Those are my customers, not from an IT perspective view of customers, but external end user customers. So my job is to go understand what their needs are. I've interviewed over a thousand CIOs. I've actually been Jane Goodall, took my notepad and followed them around all day long, writing down who they're talking to, what devices they're using, things like that. I've done some of that work, day in the life work. Then I understand, well, okay, what is it they're trying to do? How are they getting that done today? And then where does Gartner fit into that model? Or not just Gartner, but anything that has to do with information sources, what are they using today? And where are the opportunities for Gartner to improve their products and services? Or if we have a gap in those, what else can we do to fulfill those needs so that our customers are happy, successful, and keep coming back and buying our products year after year.

Rob Collie (00:05:17): So you're going to write a book called CIOs in the Mist.

Lori Rodriguez (00:05:21): Yeah, could be, could be. They are strange animals.

Rob Collie (00:05:24): Yeah. Yeah. And over a thousand of them, that's fascinating.

Lori Rodriguez (00:05:27): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:05:28): How many people on the planet have had a similar experience to interview over a thousand CIOs? I mean, I bet it's single digits, single-digit human population that has had that kind of experience. And that's fascinating. One of the things that I've really appreciated in the last 11 years since leaving Microsoft, the nature of our business is so up tempo, so fast. Our whole ethos is to burn through projects as fast as we can on behalf of our clients, no padding, no overhead, nothing. Right? And one of the side effects of that is that we do get such a broad sampling of the world. Like if you're doing projects quickly, in order to stay in business, we have to do a lot of projects. And so we're just seeing, we're like drinking from the river of everything. Microsoft, they would send me on a field trip every six months maybe, to visit a customer. And I'd come back all full of customer energy like, I know what we should do now. Like that one one day spent with one customer-

Lori Rodriguez (00:06:30): Data point of one.

Rob Collie (00:06:30): Yeah. And so you end up with some very lopsided opinions about the world. But when I hear someone who has that breadth of sample, especially given our experience, I take note.

Lori Rodriguez (00:06:40): Cool.

Rob Collie (00:06:41): Like you really know what's going on in a way that most people don't get an opportunity to. That must be really fascinating.

Lori Rodriguez (00:06:46): Yeah. It's why I love Gartner, why I love what I do. And it's a very unique perspective because I intentionally mentioned where I sit within Gartner because my audience are CIOs, they run IT departments, but I build products and I need my IT department to help me build that product. So it's very interesting when... And it's getting better. Thank God. But for so long CIOs tended to be far too functional and not businesslike. So I would always hear from them as the market research person, oh, we need to get a seat at the table. The big bad business is beating us up, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm the business. And I'm listening to them talking in tech terms going like, no kidding, listen to you. I'm the business.

Lori Rodriguez (00:07:34): So on the one hand, internally I'm going, yeah, you really need to understand business value of IT and speak in business terms, because you're not speaking to me in those terms. And if you use those terms with your business, I can see where you're having those issues. And on my side of it, I'm the business working with IT. Right? So I understand those problems from the business side as well. So it's a very unique perspective. I thought coming into things that I'm building these products for people and I'm using those products as well in IT. And I could see this huge disconnect. So I would go back to our research organization, I'd say, look, we can keep telling CIOs to talk in business terms and to move from being a functional CIO to more of a business strategist, right? You still have to maintain and manage your IT department, but if you want that seat at the table, you need to take it. And to take it and to lead there, you need to speak as the business in the business to lead the business.

Lori Rodriguez (00:08:29): And we would always say that on our research. We said, we need to do more because we're not moving the needle. I keep hearing this year after year, after year. And there's been a significant shift in the last say three years in the conversations that I have with CIOs and senior IT leaders, which has been very positive in that business direction. And they had to, they had to because of digital business. You have to have your IT organization to be at a certain level of maturity before you can take on digitalization, for example. So that was happening and then COVID. And now we've seen all sorts of stuff, all these things that couldn't get done before, telemedicine, remote work, all that just got thrown on the table very quickly. Some people were prepared, others weren't and we've accelerated where we are in the maturity of IT organizations considerably. And I don't know the numbers, but I would imagine that a lot of CIOs maybe lost their job or will be losing their job because they were not up to speed. They weren't prepared.

Rob Collie (00:09:28): On a previous show, I mentioned that the famous physicist Max Planck said that the whole notion that science moves forward through a meritocracy of ideas and the best ideas flow to the top, he basically said it was all bullshit. He said-

Lori Rodriguez (00:09:43): Beta versus VHS. I mean, come on.

Rob Collie (00:09:45): Right. He said, no, here's what happens. The better ideas come around and they're rejected. They're locked out. But then the old guard dies off. Then there is sort of a little bit of a meritocracy of idea, but it doesn't really have a chance to gain a foothold because basically what he was saying is, is that entrenched professionals don't change, I think is what he was saying. Keeping in mind, of course, you are speaking as yourself. You are not speaking on behalf of Gartner. I'm just dying to ask you, the progress that we've seen in the past few years, do you think it's more along the lines of Planck? Like it reflects a changeover, there's different people in those roles? Or do you think it's people actually kind of finally getting it?

Lori Rodriguez (00:10:26): I think it's a combination of both. So fall of 2019 maybe, it was in 2019, early spring or fall, I did a set of interviews and I forget the question I was asking, but I kept hearing over and over again, CEO change, CEO change. So, chief executive officer had changed in the organization. And I was like, wow, random sample. So I wanted to go check that. So I did some research and it was true. I'm going to mess the numbers up, but it was something like in the course of two years, give or take 10%, 50% of... No, maybe 40% of the CEOs were turning over-

Rob Collie (00:11:08): Wow.

Lori Rodriguez (00:11:08): ... in the course of two years. Huge. And the board was bringing in CEOs who had more technology savviness about them, whether it was a tech background or they just were more savvy. Right? Changing of the guard, like you said, right? The old guard was changing. The board understood that to survive, they need to become, I hate to say the phrase, a technology company, but they had to leverage technology in a way they hadn't thought of before.

Lori Rodriguez (00:11:34): And so to that point, there was this recognition we have to change. And when you change the CEO and they're mandated to change and use technology, it puts a lot of pressure on CIOs. So the downstream effect is, geez, CIO, if you're still over here and haven't matured your IT organization, you're probably in some big trouble in the next couple years, and then COVID hit. So, that just accelerated everything. I haven't looked at it, so I don't know whether companies kept the CIO that they had, because they had to because things were changing so quickly or if they were like, dump them and let's go with somebody else quickly. I don't know what that fallout was, but you'll see that change from those CEO shifts hitting the IT organization and then really making that cultural shift. To answer your question, where does that fall in terms of which side of the coin was that?

Rob Collie (00:12:23): Yeah. I agree with you. I think it's both, right? Good ideas are one thing. Things that you can nod your head to and say yes, what you're telling me sounds correct, that's one thing, but it's different when it has that visceral power of reality behind it. Like you're watching your friends and peers maybe lose their jobs, lose their positions because they weren't flexible enough, that'll wake you up in the morning. So yeah, the world doesn't really move until it has to. Yeah. But I guess in the world of physics there weren't CEOs being changed over that told the physicist what to think. So Planck's rule, maybe it only halfway holds for IT.

Lori Rodriguez (00:12:59): Yeah. But the thing is, change is slower, fast, depending on where your horizon is. So if you were looking... If your arc was pretty far out there, you saw this coming. You heard me talking about, I've been talking about this for years, digitalization is going to change everything industry by industry. You could see that coming. You had decades. And I'll talk about my journey. I come from marketing where everything was being bridge board and markers. We did everything by hand. And then they put a Mac IIcx on my desk in 1989 and everything changed. And in 12 to 18 months, it was really, really fast. These industries that were a hundred plus years old gone. Gone.

Lori Rodriguez (00:13:48): There's a really complicated apprenticeship role called a stripper, of all things. And you had to practice for decades to do that. But once you obtained that level of expertise, it was a high-paying job and you were kind of set, right? That was gone. The strippers weren't needed anymore once you had access to Adobe, it was called Aldus at the time and other software that was coming out at that time, everything. And I was like, this is amazing. Fell in love with technology. And I could see then, this was just marketing. Who cares? It's bullshit, right? Like, you're marketing stuff. But you could see with this technology, what it could do, if you looked hard enough. You could see what it would do for government or get some sense of it, healthcare, education, buying a car, voting. You could look at any industry and see how digitalization was going to change that industry.

Lori Rodriguez (00:14:41): And that's kind of where I just fell in love with technology and where I kind of eventually found that Gartner was doing that. And I wanted to be part of that. I wanted to be part of accelerating that digital change so that we could take advantage of what I saw when I was working in a creative studio in marketing.

Rob Collie (00:14:59): Yeah. I love that journey. We talked about this a little bit backstage. To me, the future of most valuable things is at that junction between IT and business, between the subject matter expertise and the technology expertise. And the closer you can get the two together, the more effective you're going to be at the distance between them. And so the people who can speak both, the ambassadors, I sort of think of the ambassadors in some sense is sort of like, that's my tribe. That's who I belong to. I just love looking around and saying, ah, my tribe, our day has come. We are really important these days. I was fascinated by your marketing background in the beginning and the path that you've taken. In Mad Men, there's an episode where they bring the giant computer into the office, like in the early seventies or late sixties. And they're like, this is going to change everything. And, you know, watching it, it doesn't for a long time.

Lori Rodriguez (00:15:50): A long time, a long time, 1989 to maybe like five years ago where people's... And we're still not there yet in a lot of industries, but the tipping point is happening. There's no going back. And how often in a lifetime do you get to go check the box on your mission? I mean, that day, that that box appeared on my desk became the day that my mission became clear to me. And here we are. That's so cool and to have a front row seat and even be able to make what small measure of progress I could do, that's been fantastic.

Rob Collie (00:16:26): You know what's really funny, I've been going around for years telling people... And it's the truth. It's not a lie. I've gone back and looked. Most of the personal computer advertising that was done in the eighties, if you go back and look at the ads, you see that it was actually spreadsheets. The pictures are of spreadsheets and of charts. And so like the PC, everyone knows this, if you watch the documentaries, the killer app for the PC was the Spreadsheet. But there was also another killer app now, wasn't there, which was Publishing, the production of creative materials. And this is where the strippers lost their jobs, right?

Lori Rodriguez (00:16:59): That's where the strippers lost their jobs.

Rob Collie (00:16:59): That's right. Pagemaker put the strippers out of work.

Lori Rodriguez (00:17:05): So Apple at the time was about to go out of business around that time period. I know that because when Steve Jobs came back, I went and took my entire 20-year-old retirement savings and bought Apple stock, which I still have today.

Rob Collie (00:17:20): Well done.

Lori Rodriguez (00:17:20): So it was good, good move. Effective rate of 33 cents a share. Thank you very much. And I knew, because I knew fonts and colors, it would take several years before any non-Apple product could replace the font system and the color management system that Apple had and publishers had invested millions of dollars of equipment that you couldn't turn over on a dime. So that was going to take long enough for Steve Jobs to come back and get back in the saddle of this organization and change it around. That was a bet I placed. It was a pretty good bet.

Rob Collie (00:17:56): Did you also buy Bitcoin?

Lori Rodriguez (00:17:58): Yes, I did.

Rob Collie (00:17:59): Oh, man. So next stop, you're going to run a hedge fund.

Lori Rodriguez (00:18:05): Just a one or two trick pony, so that's all I got on that bit.

Rob Collie (00:18:07): Those are good tricks though.

Lori Rodriguez (00:18:08): Yes.

Rob Collie (00:18:09): If you're only going to have one or two, those are pretty good ones to have.

Lori Rodriguez (00:18:12): Yep. But it's funny you mention Lotus 1-2-3. So, spreadsheets. Prior to that, it wasn't the first time I touched a computer. I was working as a secretary, they called them secretaries at the time, in a marketing company and I was reporting to the CFO and the CMO. And the PC came out, IBM PC DOS, black screen, green dots on it. And I went out and learned it. I brought it back and our CFO, all he did the whole week was about five spreadsheets. There's maybe 10 numbers you plug in, and he spent the entire week filling out by hand these spreadsheets.

Lori Rodriguez (00:18:47): So I went and learned Lotus 1-2-3. It took me about a week to take those spreadsheets and do all the formulas. And then I plugged in those... The CMO got the numbers. So I would call, get the numbers. I'd plug them into the spreadsheet, hit go and printed out... And the guy was just jumping up and down. He was so excited. Wow, this is amazing. That was week one. Week two, I printed them out and he was like, okay, okay. Week three, the computer was gone. He took the computer out and we were no longer using the PC.

Rob Collie (00:19:19): And somewhere Max Planck nods.

Lori Rodriguez (00:19:22): Because he was this old dude. It's all he did all week. And he was made completely redundant by this little box that sat in the corner of his office and he removed it from the office.

Rob Collie (00:19:34): You want to tell the alternate story, which is, at that moment, the CFO goes, oh, I am now free to do... I use a lot of sports metaphors, even though I wasn't really part of a lot of organized sports growing up. Doing the spreadsheet every week is sort of like a defensive thing, right? It's just sort of to keep the lights on. The opportunity to improve things, to go on the offensive, to advance a new initiative or a new line of thinking, like this guy now had so much time that he could have used effectively. But when moments like that happen, you find out that unfortunately, most people, not everyone, but most people do have a bit of a defensive mindset.

Rob Collie (00:20:14): So yeah, this notion of offense and defense. And I wonder if the thing you were talking about earlier, like the CEO changeover and sort of the changing mindset amongst the CIOs, that's one of the things, when we do talk to CIOs or IT directors, we don't really come out and say it this way, but that's essentially what we're trying to say to people oftentimes is like, you can be part of the wins and not just the people who are noticed when something goes wrong because a lot of times trying to get people to do something different, their first response is this is going to land on me, isn't it? When things go wrong and we're like, well, that's how it is today. Imagine being involved in one of the wins, like something goes right and changes everything for everyone. It takes a little warming up to that idea. But it sounds like, just from what you've been saying, that even on a broader scale than what we see, things are kind of headed in a positive direction there.

Lori Rodriguez (00:21:10): Yeah, absolutely. Completely agree. They had to. You can't be a digital organization in a defensive posture. And so a proliferation of those roles with all those different titles was a response to the fact, there wasn't anybody in the organization who felt responsible for bringing technology to those wins, right? Or enabling those wins through technology. A few years ago, it was interesting. I was like, where's that going to play? I actually mapped it out. I created this scenario of roles and tasks and then threw titles on the top of it, just to see, and then just played out for fun, because I'm stupid geeky that way, where could I anticipate these responsibilities heading because nobody was responsible for them?

Lori Rodriguez (00:21:56): Well, let's take customer experience for example, who owns that? It's not the IT department, right? They're not good at that. They're math people. They're not psychologists. So then you think, well, who's responsible for any of that today. Well, the closest thing you come up with is the CMO in marketing, but they don't have the technology background. So that was a short-term play where there was a potential that things would go over there and maybe they still are in some places, but they weren't the right people either. So now it's sort of swinging back to IT, but I don't think that's landed really, who owns that yet? When I ask where does customer experience sit in an organization, it's reporting structure, it's not in a satisfying place right now. So we'll see where that goes.

Lori Rodriguez (00:22:38): But that's a landscape that the CIO could take on, right? Because as an IT department, you are in a very unique position to have eyes on every part of your business. There's not many roles that have that and customer experience is that. It's the DNA of the organization or it should be. And so it does kind of pair nicely in the IT organization. If the IT organization is completely focused on governance, their favorite word, and effectiveness, you can't take on customer experience because governance and effectiveness is down here in a pace-layering model that changes slowly. And what you measure is very different in effectiveness than what you're measuring in customer experience and innovation.

Lori Rodriguez (00:23:25): So you talked about speed. You got to have a lot of speed up there. So IT has to be able to wear those two different hats. Like one is fast and failing a lot, right? Their effectiveness is speed, agility and failing fast forward. When you're managing systems where you can't have failure, particularly if you're NASA, for example, or any business or anywhere, there might be a potential breach in that data that's going to cause harm to your organization or to your customer set, you can't fail. Like, that's a completely different model. So IT's got to reconcile how they would do both, but if they can't figure it out, that's a nice pairing. Or you end up with a chief technology officer or chief customer experience officer, whatever that other CXO is and you have to work very closely together because all of that innovation stuff has to be integrated fully into your systems or you end up with very siloed experiences and your customers are like, this is awful. This is an awful experience.

Rob Collie (00:24:29): You mentioned something I thought was just absolutely spot on, which is the CIO does have sort of guardrail to guardrail exposure to everything that's going on, whereas on the business side, that usually isn't true. It's a bit more departmental. And I've got a short story to tell you that I think amplifies your point. This is now coming up on seven and a half years ago. This is a really cool story, especially when you put it in the seven and a half year ago context. So one of our clients, which I won't name, big company, 16 plus billion dollars a year in revenue, not exactly a small shop, they knew that the services they provide their customers are essentially commoditized. Like the types of equipment that they install for their customers, it's the same equipment that their competitors install. And so they knew deep down in their bones that the only thing that differentiates them, win or lose, from their competition is the quality of customer service that they provide.

Rob Collie (00:25:29): But that is a long journey. It starts from a data perspective. It starts in the CRM. Someone inquired for a quote, did we even answer? Did we even get back to them? And it goes all the way through things like third-party surveys, like J.D. Power and things like that. The CEO of this corporation knew in 2013, knew all of this and knew that the number one thing that they needed to do strategically at their company was for now, first and foremost, just get a scorecard that told them how well they were doing. Improvements aside, how well are we doing everywhere? But they didn't have one. They actually had nothing measuring the quality of customer service because what they had was thousands and thousands and thousands of reports each coming from its own single-siloed system. And there were nine different systems that had something to say.

Lori Rodriguez (00:26:27): And can you imagine the data architecture. I mean, even organizational size, what's the value of organizational size? Is it by number of employees, number of revenue bands? And are the revenue bands across all of those reports equal? You can't even have the data talk to each other. Even if they're just sitting in different components, the data doesn't even talk to each other.

Rob Collie (00:26:46): That's right. As usual, the C-suite turns to one of their fixers. One of the things I really, really, really wish in this world, if the fixers had a consistent job title, because the fixers love us and we love the fixers, but they never have the same title. I've never run into two with the same title. They just happen to be like that lieutenant that someone turns to and goes, go kill. And this radical, absolute radical... In 2013, first of all, he went to IT and said, look, the CEO says, we need to do this. It's the most important thing the business could do over the next five years? IT said, yes, we understand. That makes sense to us. We'll get started in a year and a half. We're sunk amongst other things. There were some M&A or some spinoff types of things going on at the time. And they were really up to their eyeballs, but they're always up to their eyeballs, right? That's just the story.

Rob Collie (00:27:33): He tried us. Again, that's what I mean by what a radical. Like the technology really hasn't changed. The stuff that we do at our company with Power BI, it's fundamentally the same as it was seven and a half years ago in terms of the real important things under the hood. But it was not a responsible choice back then, right? It wasn't established enough. Like they didn't have the reputation yet to be a safe career move, to try it. But we just knocked it out of the park. I mean, you talk about the data, doesn't talk to each other. It never had to really. It only came together in this data model that we built. Power BI didn't exist. It was still Power Pivot in Excel. And this thing, we were done essentially end to end in three months.

Lori Rodriguez (00:28:17): How did you reconcile data values that didn't match up? Did you create your insulation engines?

Rob Collie (00:28:24): You mean like IDs and keys?

Lori Rodriguez (00:28:26): No. The example I gave you, like what a revenue band is for an organizational size, right? Is it one to $4 billion? One report would say, is revenue band A, let's say. Revenue band A is 4.1 onto 10. That's one report, right, has it modeled that way. Another report has it modeled zero to 1.5 billion is A. So they're completely, they don't match. You can't say this revenue band matches this revenue band, even if it's in different reports, because the values are different.

Rob Collie (00:28:58): Well, we got to a lower level of source data. So it was down to like individual-

Rob Collie (00:29:02): Of source data. So it was down to individual contracts, agreements with individual customers. So for example, one of the things, one of the factors that we measured was attrition. It was essentially a subscription business or like the monthly revenue in force. And we can see when contracts got canceled, you could assign attrition and it was dollar-weighted attrition. And the whole point of this was to make it drillable so that you could see that it was the same report at the C-suite level for the entire company, as it was for someone managing an individual office in an individual city. You just drill down and you'd see their versions of these same metrics.

Lori Rodriguez (00:29:39): Wouldn't that just be what you would think, right?

Rob Collie (00:29:42): Yeah totally.

Lori Rodriguez (00:29:42): You have a view across the organization and everyone up and down and across, sees the data in a way that makes sense for them at their level permissioning and all that other stuff. But fundamentally, you can compare apples to apples. It seems so easy, right? But anyone who deals with data, and clearly your audience does, it's hard, it's the hardest thing. From the business side, you're going, "why can't you just, I don't understand. Just give me a report." But does this?

Rob Collie (00:30:10): Yeah. At P-Three, we run a really, really tiny boutique competitor to Gartner in the form of me spouting opinions. I'm not restrained in any way. We're small enough that I could just speak my mind. For years and years and years I've absorbed so much messaging from the respected figures in industry, talking heads and analysts and things like that. They're always talking about what the next big thing and data is going to be. It's going to be this, it's going to be this, it's going to be this, and I keep looking around going, next big thing in data is doing the basics right for the first time ever. And it's a green field.

Lori Rodriguez (00:30:47): Yeah. Clean data. Can we just start with some clean datasets and good data architecture and some governance around that? I'll take that to your point. You, we can do amazing stuff with data, but it's a house of cards if the foundation and the basics aren't done and the business doesn't understand that. Like I said, I wear this weird hat. And as the business side, I'm going like, oh, I don't understand any of that. Just make it happen. Order-taker status I get to have. On the other side, having to produce things and dealing with the folks who have to develop it, it's fricking hard. It's not that easy, business.

Lori Rodriguez (00:31:25): It's really hard. And if you guys could get your act together across businesses and define what attrition means, define your KPIs in a way that you can actually have data sets where you could do some of the trending analysis and all the cool stuff you want to get to, but it's garbage in, garbage out. And the business itself is often the reason why because we bully IT and we bully our developers and we bully our programmers to say, this is how I want it. And it has to be done that way or I'll fire you kind of thing. Well, then that's what you get. You get what you ask for and we don't have the basics. We don't have clean data that we can build really cool stuff on top of.

Thomas LaRock (00:32:04): Rob, remember I've always mentioned to you how nobody goes to school to be a data janitor.

Rob Collie (00:32:10): Yeah. I was coming around to the same exact sort of thing like if you want an example of the behavior, you're talking about Lori, bullying IT, you can even go and look at how the business ends up implicitly treating its Excel gurus. The Excel people, which are in the business, the shadow IT that you talk about. They get beaten up in all the same ways that IT gets beaten up. Excel has for a very long time. Been sort of like, I think it's improving a little bit, but Excel has been a bad word in IT circles for a long time, it's a point of frustration. When I get them together, I'm like you folks, don't talk about Excel, talk about the people who use it and go get to know them and you will be stunned at how much you have in common; the two of you.

Lori Rodriguez (00:32:55): True, true, true.

Rob Collie (00:32:57): The number of times that people who are good at Excel, given a set of requirements, I need the numbers tomorrow morning. Can you give me the numbers? It's not even the report or whatever, like it's just the numbers. They just make it sound like it's such Childsplay.

Lori Rodriguez (00:33:09): It's easy.

Rob Collie (00:33:10): Yeah.

Lori Rodriguez (00:33:11): Why can't I have these numbers? Well, because you've demanded them one way, your sales department has demanded those numbers another way, neither one of you will budge. You won't talk to each other. And so you create two separate. You have people in each side, whether it's IT, or whether it's the Excel business analysts or whomever. And they're creating reports because somebody higher up said, this is what it has to be. And then those two departments get together to present to the operating committee and their numbers don't line up. And then guess who's spending the weekend trying to reconcile the numbers. It's not the folks who won't talk to each other. You're laughing. So sounds good.

Rob Collie (00:33:47): This is it. Over and over and over again. It's really kind of neat when you finally like plugged those two wires into each other, the IT and the Excel people. And the reason we have the opportunity to do this in our business, it's through power BI. It's the new stuff from Microsoft that is aimed at that Excel person. That's actually was my job at Microsoft before I left, was building these tools for those people. When you get them together, I'm going to whisper this, you can kind of sideline the villains in the story and the villains are going to be happy. They're still going to get what they want, but the people who are causing the problems are really not that important in the end once you have the right tools and the right culture in place. And it's just been really gratifying to see it.

Lori Rodriguez (00:34:31): It is the right culture. It's not too often. I love the value thing, but it's also, we don't have to be, right? We have to be reasonable people. And we have to understand that every side has to hold up their side of things, right? Like you have to say, well, this is the requirements, we are non-negotiable and these are non-negotiable. If everybody understood, it's important to have non-negotiables and then you negotiate and then that's where guiding principles come in. All the stuff that people don't want to do up front, because they don't have the time, create the frameworks, create the guiding principles, create the data architecture or architecture in general. Oh, that terrible word nobody wants to hear. But if you do that upfront, you're just slotting stuff in and you have a very neutral objective way to negotiate those non-negotiables. And then, things move very quickly.

Lori Rodriguez (00:35:24): You can get a lot of stuff done once you've done that foundational, the basic stuff, then you have speed after that. But what we do is we don't have time to do it right. So, we get it done and then we never have time to do it right and every project takes exponentially longer because the foundation isn't there. And after three years, you realize, "well, if you'd spent two weeks, maybe, up front doing this other work, you would've probably got three times as much work done at the end of the three years. Minimal, if you just spend a little time upfront negotiating the terms.

Rob Collie (00:35:58): Yeah, I do want to circle back to the villain word because that process, you're talking about, process discipline, and things like that, that's hard. People don't really want to do that.

Lori Rodriguez (00:36:05): Culture.

Rob Collie (00:36:06): Yeah. Even at my own company, process discipline is not my forte. It's not my strength. Our president Kellen Danielson, he's been responsible, really. He's the backbone of a lot of growth over the past several years. Cause once we got to a certain scale, all the things you just said, I'm probably guilty as charged.

Lori Rodriguez (00:36:27): We all are. We all are, but somebody needs to stand up there and do it, find a process, hire a process geek. When you look at your team, find somebody who has some love of process. There are people like, we all look at that and go, "oh God, that was horrible, whoever would want to do that." You're like, "There are people who love that stuff." Make sure somebody on your team volunteers. They're the kind of person who volunteers to take over the process things and then the flip side of that, right? I'm very bipolar that way is you can get into analysis paralysis and get stuck by process. The process is not the end game. The process is the rules that define the game that you're going to play. And they're worth putting down on paper, so you don't have these arguments and you end up, you end up with villains and hurt feelings and all sorts of other stuff.

Rob Collie (00:37:14): Yeah, at our company, it's a joke, but I think it's the truth. It's that I've been saying for a while that Kellen and I combined are one complete leader.

Lori Rodriguez (00:37:24): That's a good thing.

Rob Collie (00:37:26): It's been really good. And I've always known that there were people who were good at processing who enjoyed it, but what I didn't do was I didn't respect it. I didn't respect it. I didn't really think it was valuable. If I look back, I would say, "I thought of it as the equivalent of holding the clipboard." I'm seeing with new eyes in the past several years. I have seen what it can do. I am now that visceral believer and the thing that I used to just nod and say, "mm-hmm (affirmative) of, course." Now, I'm the visceral believer in it. And it's a big difference. I really want to get to talking about your book, but I wanted to throw one more thing at you before we do that, which is you're talking about these villains and see what your reaction to this is.

Rob Collie (00:38:02): I think that the single biggest villain and the decades of IT, business, conflict, and friction has actually been the software industry. I think that people like me, for a very long time, have built tools that basically contain all of the necessary and sufficient ingredients to create dysfunction. All of these processes we're talking about and a cultural change and getting on the same page and all of that, a lot of those things we're talking about actually can't happen unless the tools facilitate it. The tools have to at least allow for it and so much of the software that I used to build for it departments, I was a decision maker. I was designing this stuff. How does it behave? What are its capabilities? What are its feature set? I was baking in conflict, without knowing it. And I think there's this early, early glimmer of awareness now. This trend in the software industry is even younger and more immature than the one we were talking about with like CIO is coming around to a business mindset. It's like IT software has to be built for that middle ground between the business and IT.

Lori Rodriguez (00:39:18): I'd agree, the only thing I'd change is that's been around forever. Create software that doesn't suck. That's been the mantra of open source and other people. So when you have the consumerization of IT, so people bringing in mobile devices and just like, we'd had it, right? We were living a world outside of work where technology was something we were dependent upon and then we'd go to work and we hated it, right? We hated IT department, we hated the tools we use, we hated all of that. Once we brought, we were like said we've had enough and sort of everybody at work created their own manifesto. Then I think that's where it sort of flipped to what you're saying. So it is sort of young in that aspect is that the internal tools and software we're building, we were the last mile, right?

Lori Rodriguez (00:40:04): It doesn't matter what the associates are using. We had to focus everything on the client. I'm like, well, your associates are touching the client. And if their software sucks, it just translates down the line. One of the things that's happened and it's still happening today, this whole notion of customer experience, when I say customer experience, and I know IT folks, that's a bad word, right? So I get that, I just don't know what other label to throw. You have four things really under that, you have your customers, the people you sell to. You have your customer's customers in B2B, right? So who are they selling to? You have your associates, which is the part we're talking about building tools. So there's an experience for your associates, associate experience. Whatever you want to call it? And then there's internet of things. So things are going to be customers where you're talking specifically is associate software.

Lori Rodriguez (00:40:55): I think. And what's happened is you remember the old prioritization you'd have 1, 2, 3 must haves, nice to haves. The only thing that ever got built were must haves, and those typically were along the lines of the function. Does it function? I need it to turn the lights on when I say "help I've fallen, I can't get up," and when I say, turn the lights on, it turns the lights on. But if it turned on floodlights and what you really needed was reading light or something, or it turned on your red light that spins and "Woo Woo Woo," that's not the kind of light I needed, but we put down as a requirement to turn the light on. So when you're thinking of needs analysis, there's a lot more than just does it do the thing that we said it was going to do.

Lori Rodriguez (00:41:43): There's a whole lot of psychological and emotional and behavioral aspects along the lines of a requirement. So you have the logical ones. Does it, do you know the functional piece? Does it achieve the goal that we set out to achieve? Does it drive the behavior that we're expecting, but then you all will be aesthetics. Is it pleasing? Is it adoptable? Will I use it? If they're not going to use it, it doesn't matter all. If you've hit the functional requirements and we're still not there yet, we're much further along on the client side of things, because it's revenue impacting. They won't buy your product if it sucks, but you're forced to use software that sucks internally, but we shouldn't allow that, it's not going to be effective. You're not going to get the gain or the ROI that you expect. 70% of initiatives fail that touch the client, 70%.

Lori Rodriguez (00:42:36): And why do they fail? Because they suck. They're not adoptable. So can you imagine how bad it is for associates? And that's why we feel it because it sucks. And we always think, oh, well, who cares? If it's pretty to use, well, guess what? Your users care. They won't use it. And they'll find ways around your software, which we all know. And so you have shadow IT, you have people who just refuse to use it, they build their own things, whatever it is.

Lori Rodriguez (00:43:00): So, you know, what, why don't you just give into it, realize it upfront and understand what it takes. Stop thinking about how do we get this thing out the door to meet this functional requirements. Start thinking about really, that's not the end. The end is a little bit further. The end is when you have them adopting it and you're driving the results that you expected. We think over the line is the launch, over the line is the usage. And once we recognize that and we start measuring the usage piece of it as our criteria for success, as opposed to I successfully launched it, redefined success. And that'll change I hope, how we develop the software in the first place.

Rob Collie (00:43:46): A note to the listeners here, you can tell Lori has been around a lot of software because she uses the insider technical term sucks. Cause that's what software does.

Lori Rodriguez (00:43:56): I think that term came out the moment they launched the very first software that phrase came out and it's been part of software development ever since.

Rob Collie (00:44:08): I remember meeting a customer one time when I was at Microsoft and then looking at us and saying, you know, we like to say that Microsoft software sucks less than the competitors, you know? And I was like, oh, what a compliment? I feel so warm inside. That's what we were aiming for.

Lori Rodriguez (00:44:24): Microsoft was one of the main reasons why that phrase came out, software sucks. The first time I tried a Microsoft product that I said, "wow, who made this?" I knew it was Microsoft but I really was like, "did they buy a company? Acquire somebody was OneNote."

Rob Collie (00:44:39): Yes. I knew you were going to say OneNote.

Lori Rodriguez (00:44:41): That was the first time.

Rob Collie (00:44:42): I knew it.

Lori Rodriguez (00:44:42): First time.

Rob Collie (00:44:43): I almost jumped ahead of you and said, you're going to say OneNote, aren't you? Right?

Lori Rodriguez (00:44:47): It was awesome. I was like, this cannot be a Microsoft product. I'm like, they must've acquired this. And then I was like, well, find that development team and then clone them throughout Microsoft. So tell me, why did OneNote come out and why was that a good product that didn't suck or sucked a lot less?

Rob Collie (00:45:07): All right, I don't know the whole story, but I'll tell you what I do now. First of all, the group program manager for OneNote and Microsoft, the program managers, you probably know this, but for the rest of everybody, the program managers, that was my job. We're part of the engineering team, but we were essentially a hybrid of design and engineering and also customer requirements and research and things like that. We would write all the specifications of what the software should do. We wouldn't actually implement anything, but if the software sucked, it was our fault. If there was a bug in the software that was the developers fault, the programmers or the testers or whatever, just an actual bug, but any design problem or capabilities or usability or any of that kind of stuff, that was all us. We were responsible for that. We made lots of mistakes and think about it. I was a computer science grad, what the hell business did I have in my early twenties?

Lori Rodriguez (00:45:58): And you had no cognitive sciences background, either?

Rob Collie (00:46:01): That's right. Well, hold on. Now as a little bit of an outlier and that I'd taken a couple of psychology courses, I was a philosophy, math and computer science triple major. So like you could already tell that I wasn't really all that into it from the technical side. So then I went to work for a monster technical company and that ivory tower like mathematical-mindset.

Rob Collie (00:46:21): This is one of the reasons why software does suck, I think, is that in order to build it, you need the chess master type personalities that have been deep into code and deep into data structures and all that other stuff which is really kind of repulsive to most normal people. It's not a crowd that you want to go have a beer with typically. And they don't have a whole lot of real world experience. I like to say that they took me from college to Microsoft in a sealed underground tube so that I wouldn't polluted with any real-world knowledge on the way, from one campus to the next. And then sit you down in front of a desk and say, okay, now design software for the world, make decisions on behalf of multiple billions of adults who know more than you do. It's just so bizarre.

Lori Rodriguez (00:47:03): And I'll tie this back to the book. So who were those people white males, nerdy white males, right? So then you got-

Rob Collie (00:47:11): Check, check, and check. That's me. Yup.

Lori Rodriguez (00:47:13): So you had code that doesn't recognize black skin in a camera, right? And you have software that doesn't recognize that moms handle computers differently than some guy sitting in front of a computer who played video games, their whole life. So you run into a world that is kind of like a left-handed person using right-handed scissors.

Rob Collie (00:47:39): Yeah. It's this has gotten better. But I actually think at the time that I was doing this, like the late nineties, early 2000s, I think it's even worse. I think you're talking about an audience of people behind the scenes doing this at Microsoft who fundamentally didn't really understand human beings. There's a lot of refugees from humanity in the tech circles, at least back then-

Lori Rodriguez (00:48:01): I love my tech buddies.

Rob Collie (00:48:04): Yeah, I do too. But you, but you notice though-

Lori Rodriguez (00:48:09): It's a different mindset, it's a different mindset.

Rob Collie (00:48:10): It is, some of the most eccentric and difficult people that you'll ever meet are also the techies. You can assemble a group of friends at a social circle out of techies and it is awesome. But if you had to make your friends out of all of them, it might be a little, you might think a little differently.

Lori Rodriguez (00:48:28): Who's getting kicked off the island first?

Rob Collie (00:48:30): That's right. By the way, we won't go into this. But some of those people that I'm talking about that were difficult to get along with were in positions of enormous power at Microsoft. Let's leave it at that. So let's get to the book. First of all, what's the title of the book?

Lori Rodriguez (00:48:48): It's called "We Want You To Stay- The Hidden Lives of 20 Women in STEM." STEM being, most of your audience knows, science, technology, engineering and math.

Rob Collie (00:48:57): I guess I kind of always implicitly wondered if the M was medicine, but yeah. Okay. So it's math, the stem fields, is the book out yet?

Lori Rodriguez (00:49:06): Nope. I'm hoping to get it out late spring 2021. So we're getting close down to the wire.

Rob Collie (00:49:12): We're going to talk about the book a lot before I forget if you're listening to this and you're like, I really want to, I want to read this book someday. You can sign up, right? There's an email list.

Lori Rodriguez (00:49:22): Go to stayinstem.com. So S T A Y I N S T E m.com, sign up, and you're early enough at this point that I'm also taking beta readers, so there's a free chapter out there and at the end of the chapter, there's a link to go provide me feedback. Look, I took this on like a product, so I'm building it with the audience. So that's why there's 20 women in stem. The bulk of the book is their autobiographies. And they're helping me decide where we focus and what we talk about and what's important and what's not.

Lori Rodriguez (00:49:56): I'm interviewing dozens and dozens of young fathers, so men, women, women of all across all STEM across the world, in addition to the 20 women understanding, what are they up against? What are they running into? And in co-creating the book with this incredible audience of people. And now that the first chapter is in beta form, I want to know, is it boring? What did you find exciting about it? More of this, less of this, would you read another chapter and building it like I would do a product or any problem solving, using the frameworks that I've used to build products. So just applying that to the book.

Rob Collie (00:50:33): Bringing that process discipline that we talked about earlier.

Lori Rodriguez (00:50:36): Yes, exactly.

Rob Collie (00:50:37): Unlike me who just sits down and says, all right, this isn't real until I start writing.

Lori Rodriguez (00:50:42): Well, I did, I did a lot of that too.

Rob Collie (00:50:45): So Stay In STEM, it's 20 stories, it's primarily 20 stories of women in STEM, sort of like their career stories.

Lori Rodriguez (00:50:51): Not just their career. It is their stories, everything. It's the conversations they had with their husbands, it's the death of a child, a parent, the suicide of a partner, all of that, because that's what we bring. We bring all of that to the table. And we're human beings back to your point, whether you're men or women or you're human beings. And part of this is we need to understand that. There's three acts, the first act is why does this even matter, right? Like what is the current state? It's pretty dismal. I'll throw some numbers out, but why does it even matter? We started to touch on that a little bit and I'll give you a couple examples. I'll give you one right now, scooting around, looking for stats. I love data, actually. I suck at math, but actually I was really good at math as a young kid. And I was like, I'm done. I didn't see the need for it. Now. I wish I had spent a lot more time. Cause I love math actually.

Rob Collie (00:51:46): Let's make sure we circle back around to that. I want to talk about that.

Lori Rodriguez (00:51:48): Yeah, so I love stats and numbers and studies and digging into that. And so I have 800 rows of studies in a spreadsheet, somewhere that I use. So there's a current state. And then why does it matter? There's three reasons why. And the first one is pretty shocking. There's a whole book out there that I ran into that I just love. I'd already seen a couple of these numbers, but there's a whole book somebody did call "Invisible Woman." If you are in data, you have to read it. If you're a woman and you're reading that, grab a bottle of wine or tea or whatever, and you are going to get so mad, but you need to just chill to just calm down. So there's a lot of stats in that book. Like this one consumer reports did a study or was part of a study or that's where I read it.

Lori Rodriguez (00:52:32): In a car crash, they take all the other variables away. How many drivers, level of what- Any car crash women are 17%, 17, one seven percent more likely to die in that car crash. And 73% more likely to have serious injury in that car crash. Why? Crash test dummies are set for the average male body that includes size and anatomy. So who made that decision? Who was in the room, who wasn't in the room? It's expensive, crashing a car, doing a car crash test is expensive. So you're going to do one or however many the government tells you, you have to do so to do one for men. And one for women you've doubled your cost. So who chose, guess what they chose? There are more women drivers in this world than there are men, driving is about equal, right? And whether you're driving or you're a passenger, it doesn't matter.

Lori Rodriguez (00:53:27): The injuries are higher and there are stats all over like that. And so, and it gets worse for women of color. And I'll just give you a stat, it's related but separate. And when you think about artificial intelligence and you're building AI systems, think about autonomous vehicles and the choices an autonomous vehicle has to make. This camera does a real crap job of recognizing dark skin. Particularly if you have a dark skin and a light skin in the same photo, guess who it optimizes for. That's terrible, but that's Hey, I got crappy pictures. Now you put that same system and technology on an autonomous vehicle. You're going to end up with a lot of dead black and brown people before somebody recognizes it and does a report on it. And the old uproar and then we change that. Why don't we just make those decisions upfront in the best way to do that is to have diversity of visible minorities, as well as diversity of thought in those rooms where decisions are being made at every level, certainly at the top, but all the way down to the coders as well.

Lori Rodriguez (00:54:35): Somebody has to go, wait a minute. Are you recognizing the color of skin it's disabilities too? I don't know if people are into game theory, again, nerdy thing. I kind of like.

Rob Collie (00:54:45): Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Lori Rodriguez (00:54:47): I forget what it's officially called, but there's one about a train is going down the tracks and it's going-

Rob Collie (00:54:52): The trolley problem.

Lori Rodriguez (00:54:53): The trolley problem, it's going to hit somebody, right?

Rob Collie (00:54:55): Yeah.

Lori Rodriguez (00:54:55): So you divert it. So let's say there's a bunch of people walking across and you got that trolley problem train. If the car keeps going, it's going to run somebody over. Well, it's going to divert probably to a non-human being. So it's going to crash someplace else. So you avoid the human-being, well, does it recognize somebody in a wheelchair as a human being?

Rob Collie (00:55:16): Have you trained it?

Lori Rodriguez (00:55:17): Yeah, it is going to get increasingly more important that we have people from diverse perspectives in the room where decisions are being made. So that's the first thing, really important. The second one is role models. Women make up 50% of the overall labor force, used to be less, but we are at parody in the labor force, but we're only 26% in STEM. So we got to do better on those numbers. And in some things like computer science, it's actually going backwards. We used to make up in the 60s, women were hidden figures. We were doing a lot because there was a data entry kind of stuff in, I forget the year, 1984, maybe somewhere around there, we were in the 37% range. We're at the 15% range now. So we're actually going backwards in computer sciences, pretty bad. So when you don't have role models, you don't think you have a career path in that organization. So that's a problem. And there's a lot of problems too around, I won't get into toxic environments because there's that kind of stuff too.

Lori Rodriguez (00:56:20): But you just, you need role models. You need to say, oh, there's a path for me here. And you need to have that. So you need women in the decision-making levels, right? So up in the operating committee, on the boards and they need to be visible. You need more of them so people enter those fields in the first place so it's cyclical. It gets even worse, 26% of women in STEM, 53% of the 26% leave. So after 10 years, you're down to like 13% of the people.

Rob Collie (00:56:46): Eek.

Lori Rodriguez (00:56:46): Yeah, we leave. It's sucks to be a woman in STEM. It's just really, really freaking hard.

Rob Collie (00:56:52): Okay. Let's zoom in on that really, for a moment. So the 20 something percent number, if you stride, it sort of like by cohort and you go like a number of years into career, that's the total of all human beings working in STEM. If you filter the audience to say with 10 plus years in field, then the numbers skew even further. Wow. Okay. So that I didn't absorb initially. That's amazing.

Lori Rodriguez (00:57:17): Yep. More than half women, 10 plus years in leave.

Rob Collie (00:57:21): Now you said something earlier that really spoke to me, which is that I like to say that the line between personal and professional is an illusion. It's a fiction invented to serve, I don't know managers, I have no idea. It wasn't invented to serve humanity. That's for sure. And so when I said career stories and you said, no, it's their life stories. I was like, oh, I just got corrected on my own principle, dammit. It's not supposed to happen. So when you said, why is it important, for me, the second reason, the one about if this is something that speaks to you, if STEM is something that is interesting and it seems like your calling, then what a shame to be one way or another discouraged from it. Cause again, coming back to that line between personal and professional-

Rob Collie (00:58:03): ... Are discouraged from it. Because again, coming back to that line between personal and professional, we're talking about human happiness here. Rewarding work, valuable work. And everyone should have the equal opportunity to that.

Rob Collie (00:58:13): The first thing you were saying about, "If we don't have better representation in software development teams or whatever," right? "Then, we're going to make these, continue to make these sorts of mistakes." I agree with that.

Rob Collie (00:58:24): At the same time, I wonder if that's a way of just letting me off the hook. It's implicitly saying, "The white males are never going to change. They're going to keep doing the crash test dummies at a certain height and weight. And they're just never going to wise up." That's the environment I'm coming from. I completely agree that that is a problem. And I had to wake up from that nightmare and become a human again. Even in the latter half of my time with Microsoft, something really changed in me, and I became somewhat of an alien. And the people who were doing OneNote were that kind of people. They had had that kind of transformation. Like Owen Braun? Owen Braun sat next to me in New Employee Orientation in July of 1996. I met him on my first day at Microsoft, his first day at Microsoft. And he went on to run OneNote.

Lori Rodriguez (00:59:10): Cool.

Rob Collie (00:59:10): And he did an amazing job.

Lori Rodriguez (00:59:12): It was a transformational product for Microsoft.

Rob Collie (00:59:16): Yep.

Lori Rodriguez (00:59:16): It felt like, from the outside. It's interesting to hear the backstory.

Rob Collie (00:59:20): Yeah. I agree with you at the time. I was like, "Wow! This is a piece of software that I actually like! I'm happy with this thing. What's going on here?"

Rob Collie (00:59:28): And it wasn't just Owen. I mean, there was a whole team there. It was a really interesting cultural outlier, even within the Office team at the time. Oh, it just warms my heart to know that we were both thinking of OneNote when you said that.

Rob Collie (00:59:41): Okay. So if 50% plus leave after a certain number of years, that's probably happening beforehand too, right? The initial number, the number that make it to a STEM job, even for a little while, it was probably already whittled down. You go back through school, you go back through everything, right? And there's that same, "Hey, let's call it attrition." There's an attrition process that... It's not like it starts on the first day at work. It started in third grade.

Lori Rodriguez (01:00:10): Yeah. There's been a fair amount of people looking into women in STEM, girls in STEM, girls who code. Which is awesome, right? I love it. But there wasn't anybody who was looking at why, really focused on this huge problem of women leaving. And if you think of a bucket with holes in it, it doesn't matter how much water you're putting in. Those holes are big.

Lori Rodriguez (01:00:30): And when girls don't see women in STEM fields, whether that's on television, in books, magazines, newspapers, or in the companies that they're applying for, or the programs that colleges that are trying to introduce them or the professors, they're like, "Oh! This is a guy thing. It's not for me" or whatever. "It's going to be hard." Or it's the CIO of NASA that you had pointed out. "There weren't girls in my class." It wasn't just in the class, right? This is another, "Aha!" When I go talk to my friends, they're not in STEM classes. They're not in science and engineering or math classes. I don't have as much to talk to them about. And they're talking about whatever they're taking in humanities or something else. And I become less relevant even in my own circles.

Lori Rodriguez (01:01:16): So when she, the CIO of NASA, when she tested high for engineering, she was like, "Uh-uh (negative). No way. I know what that means. I'm going to be alone again." And she became an economics major instead. Turns out, that passion for technology and math and science is hard to get rid of. And her career just kept circling around that. And eventually, she became CIO of NASA, which you can read about in the book and you can download that chapter when you go sign up on that stayinstem.com.

Lori Rodriguez (01:01:45): So yeah, it's attrition, all the way through. But again, I look at root cause analysis and I'm looking at it. This is a problem I want to solve. Where can we really be most effective? And I think we have to stop the stem, pun intended, of women leaving the STEM fields. And if we plug those holes, we'll actually accelerate the number of girls coming in.

Lori Rodriguez (01:02:10): So to me, this gets down to root cause and the right place to spend some time and money. So my time and my money at this point is...

Rob Collie (01:02:22): Well, that shows that you're committed, right?

Lori Rodriguez (01:02:24): Oh, yeah. In both meanings of the word.

Rob Collie (01:02:27): That's right.

Thomas LaRock (01:02:28): I have a question and a comment for right now. And I'm not asking this question in any way to take away from the importance of what I would equate to customer retention. If you have a girl or a woman in STEM, you want to keep them there. I believe that is important. But I am curious, because I'm a data person. How many men leave?

Lori Rodriguez (01:02:49): Yeah. Let me see. I have that stat.

Lori Rodriguez (01:02:51): So women leave it twice the levels. I forget the number. So if it's 53%, men are leaving at like 20-something.

Thomas LaRock (01:02:58): Okay. And the reason I ask is because I was curious of about the overall retention rate for our field. Because I think of things as burnout. And I think of things, like when Rob talks about what Microsoft used to be like. And how some people can just say, "You could end up working in tech but you're working for this horrible Facebook-like company." And you just say, "I can't do this anymore."

Lori Rodriguez (01:03:22): It's a very good question, especially from a data perspective. Because you can tell a lot of lies with facts.

Thomas LaRock (01:03:27): Yeah. And that's what I was getting at. So knowing that's twice the rate between just those two genders is relevant.

Thomas LaRock (01:03:35): So here's my comment. And my comment is actually to Rob. Because Rob? See, Rob used to tell me how he had solved the problem of women in technology. He had solved it.

Rob Collie (01:03:46): Oh, I'm being set up here. This is what being set up sounds like. Go ahead.

Thomas LaRock (01:03:50): So he used to tell me, though. Every class he would run, half the audience were women. Everywhere he went, his classrooms were, more often than not filled with women, beyond the, what I would say is, I think 30% of IT or 30% of technology workforce is women? Something like that? So anyway, he had a higher rate of that.

Thomas LaRock (01:04:14): So I'm just wondering, Rob, are you still seeing a high number?

Rob Collie (01:04:19): Yeah. I haven't taught one in a little while. It's been a year since I've taught a class. But I spent 10 years teaching essentially Power BI. Pretty technical. Pretty technical topic. Data modeling, star schemas, and all kinds of stuff. And my classes, oftentimes, it's volunteers, people who signed up for this class, they went out of their way to sign up for it. Other times, it's like a hostage situation where some manager decided, "We're going to teach the team."

Rob Collie (01:04:48): But either way, I think, over time, it's been slightly more than 50% female, the students in my classes. So in terms of quantity, we're at parity in these classes. And you go, " Okay. Well, all right. Well, what about quality?" Well, again, every class, in the back of my head, I'm always identifying who I think is the best student over the course of those two or three days. Like, "Who's going to run with it the most?" And again, it's 50/50. Again, maybe a little bit more female. It runs with the population that I see in the audience. It's not like the dudes are just shining by comparison. I mean, I've always been just so happy about this, that it's, whatever the filters are, the attrition factors and things for STEM, when it comes time for these classes, that filter isn't being applied somehow. We're missing that filter.

Lori Rodriguez (01:05:41): Did you think you were doing anything different? Were other classes getting the same kind of 50%?

Rob Collie (01:05:48): Well, I don't know. You're right. They're possible. And of course, this would be really a really nice, self-serving narrative if there were something about the way that we described the classes or advertised the classes or whatever, ahead of time, that led to this, there might be a sampling bias, right? And that sampling bias is us, the way that we talk about things. That is one of the things that we do is, we talk about technology in a much more approachable way. Almost reflects my journey of being a technologist-turned-human over the course of my career at Microsoft and how much better things got when I became human. So we stuck with that. We bring that with us. But let's ignore that. Because I don't really think that's the case. Because even in the hostage situations, this is the case.

Rob Collie (01:06:32): Let's talk about Excel for a moment. In the course of working in business, in any role, any sort of office role in business, you can think of it as a random particle thing. Like you're just bouncing around. You're this molecule, bouncing around. And sooner or later, you're going to collide with Excel. And most molecules, most people, when they collide with the Excel molecule, they bounce off. Fast and hard, like twice as fast, the other way, as they came in.

Rob Collie (01:07:04): But some freaks, they stick. And that moment, who sticks to Excel versus bounce off. That thing? This is what I believe. And I don't know what the why here is. But I do believe, with some strong factual basis, that the people who stick to Excel do not skew male, that it is like 55/45 female.

Rob Collie (01:07:27): And I like to think; this is where I start speculating as to why. Okay? I consider that first thing to be fact. Everything after this is speculation. The idea that, "I don't want to do the same thing over and over and over again." Like, "I don't want to manually repeat steps. I don't want to do meaningless work." I don't see why that would skew male. Right? Things that solve problems, like solving a mystery? All these things are things that you can get behind. Whereas, in math class, in high school or whatever, right? You have to absorb calculus as something, the reasons for knowing it, you have to take those on faith. Here I am, years later, working...

Rob Collie (01:08:10): Basically, I do math for a living. We're primarily a BI company. And everyone was right in high school. We're never going to use this shit. I've never used it. None of it. A tremendous swath of my academic career was a lie that I fell for. But with something like Excel, you can just see the practical benefit. It's right there. At that moment, all the societal filters, whatever; they're just not there.

Rob Collie (01:08:34): The one thing that is sad about this; and this is a really, I think, an interesting topic for discussion; is that, despite what I've been telling you, that it's like 55/45 women in these classes, and it's 55/45, best student is female in these classes; so you're checking all the boxes of what you would want to hear, what you'd want to be reality; only like 15% of the people who apply for jobs with us are female.

Lori Rodriguez (01:08:58): So I'm going to throw some hypotheses out there.

Rob Collie (01:09:00): Oh, I like hypotheses.

Lori Rodriguez (01:09:02): Could be completely wrong. But they're based in some fact base, right? So I'm making some dot connections here that may not, should not be connected.

Lori Rodriguez (01:09:11): So we talk about confidence, this notion of confidence. I'll give away one of the things in the book that I'm working around. Don't know what the type exactly, the labels yet. So this is new. We've got self-confidence, which is, "I've got self-confidence," right? But with women, there's a confidence and then there's imposter syndrome, right? Like, "I'm in this place and maybe I shouldn't be." So that was a term somebody came up with to take a subcategory of confidence. It didn't seem to fit the model, what everybody typically thought, of confidence.

Lori Rodriguez (01:09:44): I think there's something else. Self-confidence and imposter syndrome is something you're feeling about yourself inside. When you're a visible minority, there's a whole bunch of other stuff that's happening that falls outside of imposter syndrome and self-confidence. You can know your shit and you can know that, that role that you're applying for, there is no one on the planet who's better qualified for you. Right? So you've got this level of self-confidence. You don't have imposter syndrome. You're not... Overconfidence, too. But let's just say that's not the case. You really have a good bead on reality. There's a whole bucket of stuff we're not talking about. It's like, I can know that I can do that job. What I don't know is, "Do you believe I can? Do you believe that I can do this job?"

Lori Rodriguez (01:10:35): And it's not only that weight of not knowing. You, then, can't pull apart what is reality and unreality in that framework. When you don't get that job or you're not given that promotion or you're not getting that high-visible project, you don't know if it's something you can control, right? Like, is this, "Am I doing a good job?" I'll get around to why this is important with the Excel. "What can I control? And what can't I control?"

Lori Rodriguez (01:11:02): Someone came up with this really cool term. I don't know if it's that yet. But I like it. It's called quantum confidence. And she was like, "Because you're confident and you're unconfident at the same time." I'm like, "That's..."

Rob Collie (01:11:13): Schrodinger's confidence.

Lori Rodriguez (01:11:15): Yeah! There you go! All right! Cool!

Lori Rodriguez (01:11:18): So what does that fall into this? Well, women don't apply. And I'll add another dot. Women don't apply for a position till they feel they can do that job at a 100% and men don't. So if you don't feel you can do that job at 100%, you're going to go try to get those skills.

Lori Rodriguez (01:11:34): So are they going to these courses? Not the hostage situation. But are they going out to upskill, to gain a level of confidence to apply? And that's the self-confidence to apply. But then, they're not actually gaining that to the degree that they're applying. So they're getting the skill set but there's still being something holding them back from actually applying for positions.

Lori Rodriguez (01:11:56): But I think those two factors may have something to do with what you're seeing.

Rob Collie (01:12:01): I believe that.

Rob Collie (01:12:02): Let me ask you a piece of advice on this topic. So something about us is, I think, unusual, is the screening process that we use, the interview process that we use for hiring. In fact, our PR company has seized on this and we've written now multiple articles for various outlets about our hiring process because it is so different. There's a lot about it that would be interesting to talk about. But we have lots to talk about. So I'm not going to drag us through all the details.

Rob Collie (01:12:27): But here's the thing that I think that's relevant here, is that it's incredibly selective. I think we have like a 2% or 3% pass rate on this process. And it's actually, without going into much detail, it's actually very, very, very, intentionally very objective. It's a test. And it simulates the job that you actually have to do. So it takes a tremendous amount of all the human judgment out of it. It's pretty close to blind in a lot of ways. But we never see the person. By the time we talk to them, face-to-face, on camera, or whatever, we've already decided we're hiring them.

Lori Rodriguez (01:13:01): Do you black out the names too? Or just the...

Rob Collie (01:13:04): No, we don't. We don't. But you either get this thing right or you don't. We really have removed... You never remove 100% of the judgment, right? We're like 98% judgment's been removed. We know whether someone can do the job or not. And a lot of thought went into this process to do what it does. Some of it's secret even. Like if we talk too much about it, it won't work anymore.

Rob Collie (01:13:27): So when I'm teaching these classes, right? A lot of times, people come up to me, in the hallway or whatever, like during breaks. And there's, "What about coming to work for you?" The one thing that I hate about our interview is that it discourages 97% to 98% of the applicants. We turn away really good people. Because we need to unquestionably know that you're excellent. The type of work that we do, oftentimes, you're out there on an island, one person, dealing with some very difficult situations. In order to move fast, you can't have a huge team with you at all times. So we have some really stringent requirements we have for the job.

Rob Collie (01:14:07): So on one hand, I'm always wanting to tell the woman standing in front of me, asking me. It's like, "Come on! Apply for a job!" Right? But then, at the back of my head, I know, 97% of the time, we tell people they aren't good enough. I hate that. I just hate it.

Rob Collie (01:14:25): So if I suddenly went out in the world and actually convinced women to apply at the same rate that men do; let's say I managed to wave that magic wand; I'm actually weaponizing a bad message.

Lori Rodriguez (01:14:36): If it's fair and you tell them up front? "Look. I'd love for you to apply. Just letting you know, 97%." People want a chance to prove themselves.

Rob Collie (01:14:45): Yeah.

Lori Rodriguez (01:14:45): And we're not being given a chance. So that's one. So the one thing is, "Yeah, go ahead!" Tell that person, up front. Just say, "Look. This process is rigorous." Whatever.

Rob Collie (01:14:53): I do that.

Lori Rodriguez (01:14:54): Or, you could just say, "If you want to, that's fine. I don't discuss this kind of thing. I teach the class," blah, blah, blah. Whatever you want to come up, to either, to pass everybody, or you can say the same thing.

Rob Collie (01:15:05): I tell the truth. And I encourage them to apply. But here's the thing. I'm cognizant of whatever this dark matter is, this mystery, this other kind of confidence or whatever, right? If this person I'm talking to is trying to figure it out, they're hovering on the edge of, "Do I belong or not?" If a man is less likely to be feeling that way?

Lori Rodriguez (01:15:28): Yeah. Totally.

Rob Collie (01:15:30): And the woman is more likely to be feeling that way, I think that our interview might cause more harm to someone who's on that border. But I still do it. I'm like, "Look. This is the numbers. I would absolutely love for you to apply. I want you to succeed."

Lori Rodriguez (01:15:43): You said the fragility isn't in the trying and failing. It's the belief that you can, right?

Rob Collie (01:15:49): Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Lori Rodriguez (01:15:50): The belief that somebody else has in you. You can talk about, "Look. I believe you can do it. You may not be ready right now but you could do it. So apply, see where you are."

Rob Collie (01:15:58): Yeah.

Lori Rodriguez (01:15:59): That's a very different message than, "you suck at math," you know? Or whatever.

Lori Rodriguez (01:16:04): So there needs to be advocates and allies so, when there aren't women in the room, somebody is throwing their name in the ring. And a notion of, "Give people a chance. Tell them you believe in them."

Lori Rodriguez (01:16:17): The other thing is, you can go out and aggressively recruit from different places.

Thomas LaRock (01:16:22): This is very similar to how, when you're organizing a conference and you find out the conference has no women speakers. And you go to the organizers and they say, "We just can't find anybody." And you're like, "You're not looking. You really not looking." You can't find anybody? That says something, either about you or about your event maybe not being a safe space. So there's so much to unpack with that.

Thomas LaRock (01:16:46): But here's my question. My daughter, high school senior, she's been accepted to all the schools she wants to go to. What should I be doing for her at this moment in time?

Lori Rodriguez (01:17:00): The dishes.

Thomas LaRock (01:17:01): Yeah?

Lori Rodriguez (01:17:01): And the laundry.

Thomas LaRock (01:17:02): Okay.

Lori Rodriguez (01:17:03): And the housework.

Thomas LaRock (01:17:04): So I'm going to disagree with a lot of that. Because those are basic skills she'll need in life later on for herself.

Lori Rodriguez (01:17:11): No, no, no. You. You as dad.

Thomas LaRock (01:17:12): Yeah.

Lori Rodriguez (01:17:12): You as dad.

Thomas LaRock (01:17:13): Yeah?

Lori Rodriguez (01:17:13): Need to be seen.

Thomas LaRock (01:17:16): Yeah.

Lori Rodriguez (01:17:16): Because this gets to why women stay.

Thomas LaRock (01:17:18): Okay. So I do do all those things though.

Lori Rodriguez (01:17:20): Awesome. Great dad. At the level...

Thomas LaRock (01:17:31): Okay. But she also needs to do those things.

Lori Rodriguez (01:17:32): Oh, clearly. Clearly. You need to learn how to do that on your own.

Thomas LaRock (01:17:32): Okay. Just so we're clear.

Lori Rodriguez (01:17:32): Yeah. No. So we're clear.

Thomas LaRock (01:17:32): Just so more clear. She needs to do those things.

Lori Rodriguez (01:17:32): She needs to be able to boil water.

Thomas LaRock (01:17:33): Yeah. Yes.

Thomas LaRock (01:17:34): What else, though? How can I be of the most help for her over this next stretch of her life in order to give her that foundation? And she may choose STEM and then leave for some other reason. But I just want to make sure or that I'm doing what I can control, right?

Lori Rodriguez (01:17:55): I love it. It's a great question.

Lori Rodriguez (01:17:57): And I was joking. But also, a huge reason why women leave is the disproportionate amount of hours that they have to spend when life gets complicated. Doing the childcare, the elder care, the household management. We'll talk about that separately. That is a big piece.

Lori Rodriguez (01:18:15): There's something that you said that actually is key that sounds like you're already there. And that is, the ability for her to be independent and feel like she can do things like cook and travel and whatever. And the belief that their parents have in their children and that their children know. So doing things like, when they're little, but this is something you can still do now.

Lori Rodriguez (01:18:36): One of the women, an astronaut in the book, she recalls being a little girl. And her father was a pilot. He had a plane in Farmville, town of 1,100. And she'd go in the hanger. And he'd say, "Hand me the wrench. Can you fix this? Bang on that." So he had her, as 5, 6, 7, as long as she can remember, she was helping her dad build his plane. And he told her she could do everything. And he not only told her, "You could be anything you want." He gave her responsibilities at a young age that, to this day, that carries with her. And looked up at the stars with him at night and said, "Wow! Imagine what it would be like to be up there one day?" Because this was around the time of the Space Race. And said, "Yeah! You could do that. Of course, you could be an astronaut!" Even though there were no women astronauts, and even though you had to be a fighter pilot; so you couldn't even be that because women weren't allowed in combat positions; her father says, "You can do anything." But then, he backed it up by believing that she could.

Lori Rodriguez (01:19:38): And we have to be, as parents, you have this dual conflicting feelings. "I have to keep them safe and coddle them." But then, at the other hand, you have to toss them out in the world and go, "You can swim." My dad used to, we'd stand on the side and he'd go, "Good! Jump! Jump! I'll catch you." And then, when you'd jump in the water, and he'd back away. And you'd go under and you're drowning and whatever. And that's how we were taught to learn to swim. So literally, push you in the pool and you're drowning. And he just figured, "You're going to swim. But if you are drowning, I'll catch you." As parents, we have to figure that out.

Lori Rodriguez (01:20:10): So as your daughter's going through this, she's going to go through, especially if she does STEM, and engineering in particular, engineering's freaking hard. You're going to fail classes or get grades you've never seen before. You have to say, "Stick it out! You can do it." Don't ever leave because you don't think you can. Leave because you decide you don't like it anymore and not like it because it's too hard. But just, "Work hard and you can do it. Be okay with failing a little bit." And as parents, allow them to do that and be there to catch them if it's too hard.

Thomas LaRock (01:20:43): So here's her current field of interest. Forensics accounting.

Lori Rodriguez (01:20:49): Cool.

Thomas LaRock (01:20:49): Right? I didn't even know this was a thing.

Lori Rodriguez (01:20:51): Cool. That's cool.

Thomas LaRock (01:20:52): And we're at this school. And we're in the bookstore, which the school still has, for some stupid reason. She pulls out this book. She goes, "Yeah. Here's..." And it just says forensics accounting on it. I'm like... So that's like FBI stuff. That's like real...

Thomas LaRock (01:21:07): Anyway. Here's the question. Is accounting a STEM career choice?

Lori Rodriguez (01:21:12): It's a STEM field. It's math. So you're doing math. Yeah, absolutely. You're doing the math piece.

Lori Rodriguez (01:21:16): There's a woman in the book. Oh, she's just amazing. At 25, she was a CFO. 25 years old. CFO of a celebrity law firm that everybody's, you would know the name of. And then, at 26, one of the clients asked her to be CFO for their organization. And you're like, "26?" If she were a guy, we'd be celebrating, right? "Prodigy, prodigy!" The whispers in the hallways, the whole thing. But it was really, really hostile. This woman is, talk about confidence. I've never met anyone with as much confidence as this woman. She went to Montessori schools. You just figure it out. You just go find the thing you like to do today as a eight year old or whatever it is. You go, "Go do it. Here are things. And we'll kind of help you out."

Lori Rodriguez (01:22:02): And so, she started doing internships in high school, on her own. And so, all through college, I was like, "How did you get all those internships? They must've had a really good internship program at your school." She said, "No. I found all those on my own." So every time she wanted to learn something new, she moved on. It was like, "Okay. I learned what I needed from this job. Now, to move on to the next, I want to learn this."

Lori Rodriguez (01:22:23): So I added up her experience in internships as if it were a regular pathway on a resume. And she was at like 34, 35 years old. So a 35-year-old CFO is like a normal thing. She had just condensed all that, starting in high school, with the jobs that she'd had.

Lori Rodriguez (01:22:42): So forensic accounting, I think, the accounting piece of it, for sure, she can probably find some internships. And don't wait for the school. And give her the confidence that, "It's okay to fail." And that you believe in her. And have her find people to surround her with. One of the things that, a consistent thing that came up, was a board of advisors, career advisors. So find people, have her start collecting people; friends, family, maybe friends of yours; that she can turn to for career advice. Do those sound reasonable?

Thomas LaRock (01:23:18): Yeah. Absolutely. Thank you.

Rob Collie (01:23:20): Tom, I've got a suggestion as well.

Thomas LaRock (01:23:22): Yes, sir.

Rob Collie (01:23:23): And this is, of course, me talking, my book. But it's the truth. Power BI is amazing for that stuff. We have found fraud when we weren't looking for it. That thing we talked about earlier, like all the different silos of information in an organization? A lot of times, fraud utilizes that siloization to hide its tracks. They just know that, you're looking at this one report, you're never going to see it. But when you suddenly cross-reference, when you splice across all of those silos, and you have the ability to drill down? I mean, oh my gosh. It is so hard. It's interesting. Data quality issues, people aren't recording the data properly, that something's going wrong in the source data systematically, that's not intentional? That leaps off the page so quickly as well. So it's almost frustrating, how quickly those sorts of things surface themselves. Because now, you've got to go deal with something way upstream, nothing to do with the reporting that you were trying to do. That same sort of characteristic, it applies to basically any sort of anomaly. Anomalies have a very hard time hiding. We've caught people stealing. We were just trying to do some sort of product mix analysis.

Rob Collie (01:24:39): So I don't think the industry of forensic accounting has caught onto this either. The traditional training mechanisms and classes and all of that aren't going to feed you this. Because it's just so many steps removed from the way it's been done. So this would be an out-of-band. You could throw the word disruptive on it. Whatever you want. I really think that tools like Power BI are coming for the forensic accounting. And it's one of those things, like we were talking about. You can see it coming. You have the foresight. You can see it. But the depth perception is questionable. You have no idea when it's actually going to happen.

Rob Collie (01:25:15): Okay. Back to the book. You started talk a little bit about how you selected people. You didn't just go with your first-degree network, which is kind of what I thought you would do, right? You already knew everybody that you wanted. It was just a question of having to pick the 20. Is it true that you went looking for people that you had not known before?

Lori Rodriguez (01:25:32): Absolutely. I'll take a little bit of a step backwards and say how the book came about.

Lori Rodriguez (01:25:35): So back in 2012, a mutual friend put some CIOs that she knew together to have a networking session every four to six weeks. So we just got on calls. And we're like, "Okay. You're friends of Janet." Like, "Who..." So we just explained who we were. Because it was a random collection of women CIOs. And I was not a CIO. Well, I used to be. But I was a friend of Janet's. And she brought me in. And we explained our stories. And we were fascinated. Because the myth is, there's this linear path that you go on and you knew that's what you were going to be. So everybody started their story with, "Well, I didn't intend to be in IT or a CIO" or whatever. And then, we went through the paths and we found them fascinating. And being that these were CIOs? Clearly, they have a lot of ambition. They're like, "Okay. So what are we going to do with this information? It's nice that we're getting together but we want to be productive."

Lori Rodriguez (01:26:28): So the idea was to start a book. And we're like, "Okay. Well, on what?" "Well, women in STEM. Or women in technology." And we'd joke around like titles. And one of them was, "There's No Line at the Ladies' Room at an IT Conference." So that was like one of the titles. I'm still playing with that one.

Lori Rodriguez (01:26:48): But then, we started... Well, the problem we wanted to solve was what we had talked about. There were finally people looking at getting women into STEM but we saw far too many of our colleagues falling out. And at that level, at the C-suite level, every room they-

Lori Rodriguez (01:27:03): And at that level, at the C-suite level, every room they ever went into, they were the only woman in the room, the only woman in the room. Being a CIO is a very lonely job, in and of itself. Being a woman or a woman of color, the burden is really tremendous. You're invisible and at the same time, you're highly visible. You can't make mistakes because you're visible, right? You're just this, everyone's looking at you for that. And you don't get a pass on them. You have to do a lot more work. All these other burdens. So people drop out and they don't get to that level. And then, you're the only one.

Lori Rodriguez (01:27:34): So we started this book. And then, the book Lean In came out. We're like, "Oh! Okay. Cool. It's all going to be fine." Oddly enough, I was doing a laptop upgrade around nine months ago and I came across my notes. I was like, "Oh, damn! Let me go check those numbers out." We didn't improve over that eight years. In technology, at least. We actually went backwards. The numbers were even worse. So I said, "That's it. I'm doing it." And I just started working out on this book.

Lori Rodriguez (01:28:01): So clearly, I went back to one of the women I'd stayed friendly with. Which, at the time, she was the Deputy CIO of the EPA and went on to become the CIO of NASA. And that's where I started. And some of these other people that I knew. And about three or four people in, I was like, "I'm heavily loaded with CIO and tech." And as I'm thinking about and researching the book, I'm like, "This is exactly what everybody else falls into. You go to your status quo and what you know." So I did. I intentionally went out to find, I put in a metric, right? Like, "I'm going to have at least half the women in this book be women of color." So I'm going to be intentional about the numbers. And I'm going to measure it every which way from Sunday so I keep track of who I'm reaching out to and how much.

Lori Rodriguez (01:28:43): And then, I just started to look up, fish where the fish are. I started to look at associations and who's writing, who was in articles, et cetera. And also, I was like, I didn't want to lean too heavily on the articles because those people are already getting fame. It's great that the women who had 23andMe and YouTube are there, right? It is amazing. But not that many people have Stanford professors as parents, right? And grew up in Silicon Valley.

Lori Rodriguez (01:29:13): And one of the problems with the Lean In book was, that's awesome, Cheryl Sandberg. Thank God you wrote that. But it's unapproachable for many women. And they're like, "That's not me." I have Stanford graduates in there. I have people who dropped out of high school. I have community college. They went to community college. Myself, I dropped out of college. I was like, "Not for me." They were telling me what to think and I wanted to know how to think. And so, I was like, "I'm out. I'm going to go figure that out on my own."

Lori Rodriguez (01:29:40): So I wanted the book to be, anybody should go to STEM. Like we all should. If you're interested at all, I wanted it to be approachable. And I wanted to tell stories, at least one of the women in the book could be some way relevant to them, regardless of where they were born or the educational path they took because they were privileged to do so. Or maybe they weren't. Some people couldn't afford it. And all they could do is community college. Maybe they made a mistake along the way. And how do you recover? Or maybe they left the workforce and came back. I wanted all of those stories in there.

Lori Rodriguez (01:30:21): And I've done a pretty good job. It's pretty cool. And I also wanted to cross STEM. So again, I was really heavily IT-focused and technology-focused. I'm like, "I have to get some women in gaming in here." So I found this unbelievable story; should be a movie. This CEO of Future Club. Used to be at Riot Games and Lab Zero. Skullgirls, League of Legends, and things like that. It's just, the stories are just incredible. So I got gamers. I've got people on the aspergers spectrum, just all, the whole spectrum. I've got... Today, in the US, I have no idea where you were born. So I have women who were born in Ghana. And so, Ghanaian American. I have a Nigerian Canadian.

Lori Rodriguez (01:31:03): And I hate to bucket people. But I also have a colleague. I knew her story was amazing. It really was. South African. Grew up in and still lives in Soweto. So as an eight year old, playing outside in the schoolyard; this is just prior to Nelson Mandela being released. And military vehicles pull up to the school yard and tear-gas eight year olds. She sat on the playground. So, yeah. It's just incredible. So going in that environment and becoming CIO in that environment as a woman is just insane.

Lori Rodriguez (01:31:34): So a lot of really cool, as I said, life stories. At the same time, it has this STEM piece to it that, I just wanted to show, anybody has a place here, if you want. So one of the women said, "It's a book about women in STEM that has nothing to do about STEM." And I'm like, "Yeah. Maybe that's not a bad way to look at it."

Rob Collie (01:31:52): Stuff like that is always; to me, anyway; a sign that you're on the right track.

Rob Collie (01:31:56): I really like that you deliberately made sure that this wasn't like the pedigreed all-stars. Did you see the movie Ratatouille?

Lori Rodriguez (01:32:03): I love that movie. People say, "What is your favorite movie?" I'm like, "Ratatouille." And then, there's another movie that's, it's Japanese with American subtitles. Emperor's Tailor or something like that. I'm like, "Those are my two favorite movies."

Rob Collie (01:32:15): Really?

Lori Rodriguez (01:32:16): They're completely opposite. Love Ratatouille.

Rob Collie (01:32:19): So then, you know where I'm going, right? Which is, I've only seen that movie once. But it made an impression on me that I keep coming back to, thinking about it, many years later, which is always a sign that something was a beautiful piece of art, or at least it touched me. Like the chef, the hero chef that's like, that's not even alive anymore. He's like passed away in the story. He's always like, "Anyone can cook." His whole philosophy, that chef, that this young rat bought into, this wasn't some pedigree priesthood. It wasn't off-limits. It was a talent that lies dormant in people across every demographic.

Rob Collie (01:32:58): And the movie goes out of its way symbolically. It's a rat. It's not even a person, right? It's something that we all associate with dirty. Like, "You can't have rats in a kitchen." That's how beautifully constructed this story is. The critic, the snobby, snobby critic, who has a thawing and an awakening as a result of this experience and becomes a believer as opposed to the villain. It's just like, "Oh!" It's just this most touching story. And I've written a lot of blog articles over the years. I don't blog as much as I used to. But this, "Anyone can cook."

Rob Collie (01:33:33): What I was talking about it earlier, with the data stuff, with the Excel stuff, right? It's kind of like, it's that dynamic. I don't care whether you identified as a math person in high school. I don't care whether that spoke to you. It spoke to me. But it was really, in retrospect, in a really hollow way. It was just a way to have a false identity for me. It was a way that I could tell myself that I was good. I almost like wielded it as a weapon against other people though. I wasn't very nice about it.

Lori Rodriguez (01:34:02): You were ego.

Rob Collie (01:34:03): Yeah.

Lori Rodriguez (01:34:03): You were the critic ego at that point.

Rob Collie (01:34:05): That's right. And it's been a long journey for me. So now, I'm the one that's going, "Yeah. I actually prefer you if you weren't into calculus in high school." I don't understand why you would be so sick. It's almost like something's wrong with you if you were into calculus in high school. It takes one to know one, you know?

Lori Rodriguez (01:34:24): I hadn't thought about it. But I love that movie. And I tell my kids all the time about that movie. And they know I love that movie. And now that you mentioned it, that's what I was going for, absolutely going for, in this book, and why I was very purposeful and intentional in the stories or the people I reached out to.

Lori Rodriguez (01:34:45): And I had a super-high hit rate. I'd send an email or I'd ping people on LinkedIn. And I had like 90% of the people I asked at least talk to me. And I only had one person say no. And it was because they felt they weren't good enough and they gave me another person's name. And I'm like, "I'm going to come back to you and interview you because you are good enough. You're pretty cool or I wouldn't have reached out to you." But I did.

Lori Rodriguez (01:35:09): So everyone wanted to tell their story once they understood why. I didn't realize it at the time. But, yeah. That movie, that influence of, "Anyone can cook." Not that anyone can cook. I think ego explains it at the end. A cook can come from anywhere.

Rob Collie (01:35:24): Right. I talk about it in our world as the data gene. And I do believe this, based on what I've observed, that it cuts across every demographic at about the same fraction. It's not everyone. It's like one out of 16.

Rob Collie (01:35:37): I actually have a number of different research methods that have yielded the same result. Like one out of 16 is the high watermark. It's at most, one out of 16. The data gene can lie dormant for a very long time. You wouldn't know you had it. And then, that collision with Excel. That's usually, that's not the only story, but it's the majority of stories. Because that's the place where you would encounter it. You hit it that first day and you start getting this weird, twitchy, itchy feeling. Like, "Mm!" I agree. Like 15 out of 16 in the data world can't cook or don't want to. Not interested. They're not interested at all. Maybe they could. But interest is a big thing, right? It doesn't speak to them.

Rob Collie (01:36:18): But, yeah. I completely agree. The cook can come from anywhere in data. And so, this has been an ongoing fascination of mine. Like, "I want this to be true. I've observed it to be true. And now, I want it to be as true in the numbers that we see. My experience dictates it should be."

Rob Collie (01:36:36): And this is why the overwhelming weight towards the male applicants for jobs at our company bothers me. I mean, this is, in a way, we're staffed in a way that is not at all the tradition for an IT services consulting firm, for a BI consulting firm. We are overwhelmingly staffed with people who came from the business, for instance. We're staffed with people who can be the requirements-gatherer, the communicator, the architect, and the developer, all in one.

Lori Rodriguez (01:37:05): So you liked, in Renee, the CIO of NASA, you liked in her story?

Rob Collie (01:37:09): Yeah. Yes.

Lori Rodriguez (01:37:10): That you picked up on that?

Rob Collie (01:37:11): Oh, yeah.

Lori Rodriguez (01:37:12): She came back to math because of requirements gathering.

Rob Collie (01:37:14): Yeah. Actually, I have a fight-starter, if I go to particular conferences. I have a number of things I can say that I believe to be true that will immediately start a fight. Which shouldn't, right? But they do. Which is, I'll tell people that, in a traditional BI project, business intelligence project, greater than 99% of the elapsed time, the cost is in requirements transmission. The whole project. The time where the hands are spent on the keyboard, typing the right code, the stuff that sticks, the reports that actually eventually come out the other end, if you just sat down and typed those out and just typed that code, it'd be over in an eye blink. It's all requirements.

Lori Rodriguez (01:37:53): And do you think that's the right number? Do you think that's the right ratio? That it should be mostly requirements and less code?

Rob Collie (01:37:59): No. Because the problem is that it's so wasteful, that 99%. And if you measure it in its absolute terms? I don't know how many person months it'll end up being. But sometimes, it might even be like 100 person months. It doesn't have to be that. It could be like six person days. It's the tools.

Rob Collie (01:38:18): And this is the thing. I was part of building the old wave of BI tools at Microsoft. And then, I was part of building the new wave. And I also just lucked out in that I'd also had a chance at Microsoft to be someone who had applied the old BI tools.

Lori Rodriguez (01:38:32): So when you say requirements, you're talking about the old waterfall document-type requirements in?

Rob Collie (01:38:38): That's right. That's right.

Lori Rodriguez (01:38:38): Okay, okay.

Rob Collie (01:38:39): Yeah.

Lori Rodriguez (01:38:39): All right. Got it. Okay.

Rob Collie (01:38:40): And the old tools drove the waterfall methodology in BI.

Lori Rodriguez (01:38:46): Yeah. "We're going to write a document that's 400 pages long."

Rob Collie (01:38:51): Right.

Lori Rodriguez (01:38:51): "About this thing that we're eventually going to start building."

Rob Collie (01:38:53): Right. Yeah.

Lori Rodriguez (01:38:54): "Which means, then, we're so invested in that document, that all the requirements who wrote in there that, when we find out, midway through, as you always do through a project, or at the start, that they're wrong?"

Rob Collie (01:39:05): Right.

Lori Rodriguez (01:39:05): "It's too bureaucratic to change and we're vested in it too much."

Rob Collie (01:39:09): Yeah.

Lori Rodriguez (01:39:09): "And we're just going to produce it and launch it, damn it."

Rob Collie (01:39:11): That's right.

Lori Rodriguez (01:39:11): That kind of process you're talking about?

Rob Collie (01:39:13): That's exactly right. Yeah.

Rob Collie (01:39:15): And there's so many myths in the requirements document, right? One myth is that the people who are providing the requirements will transmit them properly. The next myth is that the people receiving them will record them properly. The third myth is that the person that they give it to to implement will receive it in a transmission properly. And the fourth myth was that the requirements were correct in the first place.

Lori Rodriguez (01:39:36): But there's a lot of plausible deniability built into a requirements document.

Rob Collie (01:39:41): Totally. Oh, yeah.

Lori Rodriguez (01:39:42): So no one along that path will take any responsibility for having caused the damage that that final product, when it's produced, create.

Rob Collie (01:39:50): Mm-hmm (affirmative). That's right. And if you're outsourcing this, if you're hiring a BI firm, like one of our traditional competitors? They love it when this goes wrong. They've been billing the whole way. Now, you're out in the deep water. You can't turn back now. So that change order, the addendum to the contract, is going to get signed. And you're going to keep billing.

Rob Collie (01:40:08): I believe; and our results over the last 5 to 10 years bear this out; that any BI project? We can be looking at your first tangible results, not a mock-up. You're not done. But within five business days, you can be seeing your first output.

Lori Rodriguez (01:40:26): You've got to get to the output as quickly.

Rob Collie (01:40:30): Yeah.

Lori Rodriguez (01:40:30): It's just like any other product's development process. You've got to get to your MVP so you can test it and break it.

Rob Collie (01:40:34): That's right.

Lori Rodriguez (01:40:34): You want to break it early.

Rob Collie (01:40:35): Right.

Lori Rodriguez (01:40:36): The longer you wait to break it, the more costly it is, because you've invested more time and money in building that thing. And the more vested people are going to be in saying, to keep persevering down this path anyway, the more objections you're going to have to pivoting or changing. So if you can get something out the door very quickly, with a minimal time, minimal effort, and break it? As long as you're going to break it. Because I see a lot of people doing Agile or MVP. It's just condensed waterfall. Like...

Rob Collie (01:41:04): Yeah. It's just a...

Lori Rodriguez (01:41:04): It's just, we, instead of taking months, we did it in a shorter timeframe, but you still get no chance to iterate, based on the feedback you have.

Rob Collie (01:41:11): Correct.

Lori Rodriguez (01:41:11): So they're still as vested in that thing that they launched as before. If you're doing that, you're getting it out in five days, with the idea that you're going to iterate based on what you find, you've built in the fact in those five days that you're going to spend more time iterating after. It's not like... Yeah, the expectation, it is done.

Rob Collie (01:41:30): It's not done. And we have a saying, which is, again, "Learn the hard way from experience." Human beings do not know what they need until they've seen what they asked for. So even if you manage to achieve perfect requirements transmission, which has happened never. If you got there, the first thing they're going to go is, "Oh! Right! This doesn't actually answer the question that I thought it would. But now, I know what we need to do." And you just peel that onion.

Lori Rodriguez (01:41:57): Any parent who's tried to teach their kid how to ride a bike has run into that. You could explain everything. And your kid gets on their bike. You're like, "Ooh! I forgot to tell them about balance" or whatever.

Rob Collie (01:42:06): Yeah.

Lori Rodriguez (01:42:07): Or anything you're trying to explain that you do from an automatic basis.

Lori Rodriguez (01:42:11): So people lie. And you know that.

Rob Collie (01:42:13): Oh, yeah.

Lori Rodriguez (01:42:14): People lie. And they don't do it on purpose. So when you're asking for requirements, they lie for a number of reasons. They want to give you the answer they think you want. They want to give you the answer that makes them feel, makes them look or seem smart or better or whatever that is. Or they don't know what they need because they think they know what they want. But because of lots of different reasons, it's not really, to your point, when they get it in their hands and they use it or they see it, everything changes. "Ooh, I forgot about this." Or, "Oh! I didn't mention that piece."

Lori Rodriguez (01:42:44): So the sooner you can get people to admit their lies and mistakes, the better off your product's going to be in the long run. Is that kind of where you're going?

Rob Collie (01:42:52): Yeah. The longer a lie ages, the more intractable it becomes. If you told me one of those accidental lies five minutes ago, you're not going to be as concerned about walking it back. But if that lie has sat on the record for three months?

Lori Rodriguez (01:43:08): In paper, in a requirements document.

Rob Collie (01:43:10): Yeah. It now becomes synonymous with your reputation.

Rob Collie (01:43:14): So the thing that I saw in 2010, with the new wave of tools?

Lori Rodriguez (01:43:18): And new wave of tools, explain that.

Rob Collie (01:43:20): So for me, it's power BI.

Lori Rodriguez (01:43:22): As opposed to Excel?

Rob Collie (01:43:23): Yeah. So the first effort at Microsoft with Power BI, we put it into Excel. It was called Power Pivot. Because of the visual canvas that tools like Tableau and others had, Microsoft realized, "Okay. We need to match that level of visual." And they couldn't do that in Excel. So that's why we have the separate Power BI product now. That and a couple of other reasons. But the stuff under the hood that's really the game changer for Power BI relative to the other tools, most of that was already put into Excel in the early 2010s.

Rob Collie (01:43:52): And our company, the idea for our company, dates back to that. When I saw that the tool now moved fast enough that you absolutely could handle the requirements process in the form of real-time collaboration with the stakeholder or stakeholders, like from a blank canvas? "Let's not talk about it so much. Let's not try to write documents. Let's not try to do any of that stuff. Let's sit down, load the data from however many different sources." Like that story I told earlier, about the customer experience scorecard. It's made a huge difference for them. That's how we did it. There were nine different data sources. Not all of them were in the data warehouse. The data warehouse is never complete either. We sat down, we loaded it, and we started.

Rob Collie (01:44:37): What's the first place to start? Well, let's start with the front of the funnel, like the CRM, like the first measure. What's the first metric? Well, people requested quotes. Let's start with the obvious. Did we ever get back to them? What is our response rate for people who say, "We'd like to maybe do some business with you?" It turns out it's not 100%.

Lori Rodriguez (01:44:56): As a business, you know the information's there, right? Like we collect it.

Rob Collie (01:44:59): Yeah.

Lori Rodriguez (01:45:00): We ask our customers to feed us a lot of information. We do nothing with it. So it's there. It sits there. But as a business, we know it's there. It's frustrating because you can't get at it.

Lori Rodriguez (01:45:11): One of the things you haven't brought up, but to me, is so important, is the democratization of data. Because if you can put it into that one place, like you said. And then, you could ring-fence it, with all the permissions and everything else. And then, you could set it free and let people build stuff on top of it.

Lori Rodriguez (01:45:28): So if I need to get data, if I need to get information and answers out, or even just go in and explore that data for things that it might tell me that I had no idea that I should know, the fact that I can go do that on my own, or I could get a BA to help me or whatever, and I don't have to wait a year to get a IT budget approved? To get money to have IT do it? You're freeing up the data for use for the business. And that's where I see just the huge potential of this shift that you just talked about, from the old way of thinking to the new way of thinking. Do you see that the same way? Or am I seeing it a little differently?

Rob Collie (01:46:06): I do. Because another one of the things that the old waves of software inflicted on us, IT didn't choose it to be this way. The software industry did; is that everything was heavy, heavy, heavy infrastructure. So we have all kinds of pithy little ways of saying things that we've developed over the years. And so, we call it faucets first. That's our methodology. The old way was plumbing forever. "Oh! You need a chart? Mm. Okay. Well, let's not get carried away. We've got to go build a lot of infrastructure before we can talk about charts now, don't we?"

Rob Collie (01:46:42): And seriously, like Microsoft's old software, for example, it required the old analysis services. It required that all of its data come from the same database instance. So in order to even get started, you had to first get all of the data moved into one place, which was never going to happen. It started with a known failure.

Lori Rodriguez (01:47:06): Yeah. Fatal flaw, right from the get-go.

Rob Collie (01:47:09): I visited one customer one time, who said, "You know the most exciting thing to us about Power Pivot?" And I go, "What?" He said, "Well, we have all these data warehouses. The enterprise data warehouse project is on our list. And it's forever on our list. It's become like this running joke that we're going to unify, unite the clans of all these-"

Lori Rodriguez (01:47:25): Single view of the customer. It's been on there for 20 years.

Rob Collie (01:47:29): Yeah. It's never going to happen.

Lori Rodriguez (01:47:32): It's outlived six CIOs and three CDOs. Single view of the customer.

Rob Collie (01:47:37): And these people were telling me, "We're really looking forward to the idea of being able to do dimensional modeling, like a BI analytical model, with data from multiple data warehouses." And at that moment, I just, my jaw was on the floor. I'm like, "I can't believe that we did it that way before."

Rob Collie (01:47:52): So I sound like a fanboy for a particular vendor and a particular piece of software. And I'm really cognizant of that when I'm talking to someone from Gartner. Even though you're speaking as you, right? Just as a person to person. But I tell people all the time, I didn't revector my career lightly. The fact that I'm really familiar with Microsoft is actually, or would probably, for me, be a reason not to bet on Microsoft. Because I know where the bodies are buried. I know that you become really familiar with the sins of the organization that raised you essentially. I really, truly believe that this thing is something different. And in fact, like now, we're seeing, we're finally seeing the other vendors start to come around to what Microsoft is up to. And they're starting to now go, "Oh. Oh, right." So they're starting to play catch up to Microsoft a little bit.

Lori Rodriguez (01:48:43): Yeah. So I mean, you can think of it. Sports analogies. Pick anything. Tennis, American football, the other kind of football the rest of the world plays. When there's a breakthrough, one team dominates, or Serena Williams comes in?

Rob Collie (01:48:59): Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Lori Rodriguez (01:48:59): It forces all, everybody else, to up their game to compete. So the fact that Microsoft did something more akin to OneNote than what it previously had done, the market's going to tell you whether it's working or not. It opens it up for competitors to beat Microsoft at its own game. So it's helpful when there's been a leapfrog made and then everybody else is going to scramble to fill that and compete.

Lori Rodriguez (01:49:24): So I appreciate that. I don't take sides on vendors, just from a, in the business itself, and then as Gartner, I don't represent the analysts. I don't represent anybody. I have to do my work as well. And I look for the organizations, companies, people, that are going to help me get my work done, faster, better, cheaper. And quite frankly, pleasant. Working with people is pretty critical that you can trust them and you have a good time while you're working. Because again, back to that work life, I don't want work to suck either. I want work to be fun and exciting and meaningful. And that has a lot to do with the people you're working with. So appreciate that, appreciate.

Rob Collie (01:50:11): Yeah. We call this show Data with the Human Element. It's what we're about.

Rob Collie (01:50:13): To do justice to your question, to honor the question that you were asking before, I want to make sure I close that loop. It might not have even been all that intentional. But I think it was halfway intentional. The Power BI sidestepped all that infrastructure. And you talk about how the data doesn't talk to each other. That's true. Your "best of breed," nine different line of business systems that are involved in a particular situation, have no knowledge of each other or interest in one another. In fact, they hate each other. And that data is now able to meet on a common ground inside a Power BI model. And it's effortless. It's not like line of business integration. It's not that kind of middleware. But to line these things up with each other and see across the business, end-to-end, it's breathtakingly simple now.

Rob Collie (01:51:04): And so, the requirements process and the infrastructure weight that was required before, I think they are two sides of the same coin, when you have a tremendous infrastructure investment that must be made. And again, another quote I got from a customer years ago is, "Yeah. My team spends six months to put a dot on a chart." Just looking at me, just confessing their sins. That was the cool thing about being at Microsoft. You were like the priest and everyone was going to confess their sins to you. Like in the booth, you know?

Lori Rodriguez (01:51:31): So I have a question. So I'm a fan of low-code, no-code, and the democratization. But there are things that you have to keep centralized. Then, there's this middle piece, which is integration, right? It has to be interoperable. And I feel like Power BI isn't there yet. It still has a lot of work to do, in and of itself, for what its current set of requirements are. You've got a great MVP V3 or something, wherever it's at. But it still has some work to do from that perspective. I think the next big leap, from what my limited experience, is the interoperability with the infrastructure itself. So it's got to be able to...

Lori Rodriguez (01:52:12): And again, I'm looking from a customer experience perspective where the end result, what I want to get out of. And I'm always thinking of what's next. So I'm all in. I love this thing. And yet, there are things that I need to do to trigger other systems to kick in, right?

Rob Collie (01:52:28): Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Lori Rodriguez (01:52:29): That trigger piece. And I'm not seeing that just yet. So is it because I'm inexperienced in this? Or is this the next place that needs to go?

Rob Collie (01:52:36): Well first, let's clarify what you mean by interoperability. I think I know. But just for the listeners.

Rob Collie (01:52:41): One kind of interoperability is ability to eat data from lots of different places. I think it's great at that part. It's probably best in class for a single software, piece of software solution. It doesn't require you to add three other vendors into the story. Power BI is a world beater in that regard. I think you're talking about like the read right?

Lori Rodriguez (01:53:03): Yeah. So for example, let's say that the insights you gained from your CRM system in this piece, right? You put a flag on it that says, "When it hits 83;" making this up; "go trigger this process over here in this other system to go tell the sales guy to go sell."

Rob Collie (01:53:22): Yeah. Yeah.

Lori Rodriguez (01:53:22): Or whatever it is. That triggering mechanism? Does that... I know you've got Power Apps. But it seems like it's not quite yet that right perspective. Or I don't know what your terminology is. But to go off and trigger the infrastructure to do something else.

Rob Collie (01:53:38): Sure. Sure.

Rob Collie (01:53:38): So this is awesome. This is like... I don't want to sound patronizing. But it's almost like we're following the same trail of breadcrumbs separately and seeing the same things.

Rob Collie (01:53:49): Before I show my cards, let me ask you a question. Are really any BI tools good at what you just described?

Lori Rodriguez (01:53:58): No. Not at all. But I don't care. I'm the business. I don't care about the tool. All I care about is, "Here's what I want to happen. This is awesome! You gave me this data." Now, it's like, "Ooh! I've got to do something with this data." Or, "What does it matter that I know it? I need it to do something." And the do something piece isn't there yet. I'm happy. I'm happy that I see it now. Now that I see it, I want it to do something. So I'm always onto the next thing to order the IT department and the Excel people to do. "That's great! Now, your next thing." You're only as good as the next thing.

Rob Collie (01:54:31): Okay. So in college, I had a problem, like an ego problem, when I was writing a philosophy paper. And I thought I was the first person on earth to have this idea, you know? And then, I would discover, two weeks later? I don't know. Some philosopher had written exactly my idea. And now, I felt terribly invalidated for some reason. And my professor told me. He says, "Listen. At these moments, you should not take this as invalidation. You should take it as confirmation."

Rob Collie (01:54:59): So that's how I'm feeling right now. BI, in a vacuum, means nothing. Nothing at all. Even just the nature of it. Business intelligence. This is a domain, this whole industry, that was so difficult and so unsatisfying and so relatively low ROI, relative to what we could imagine, that it has become almost, like a means to an end has become a goal in and of itself. The I should have always been for improvement.

Lori Rodriguez (01:55:31): Yeah. There you go. Exactly.

Rob Collie (01:55:33): Until your improved knowledge, your improved vision, it translates into improved action. It's meant nothing. And when you start to judge BI by that standard, suddenly you start to think, "Oh, my God. It's even worse than we thought. It's really, really poor. I've been part of this. I have built reports sometimes that I thought were, "Hmm. That's awesome! That's a hot report." But then, the user of it looks at it and goes, "I don't know what I would do with this. How would this change decisions that I would make or actions I would take?"

Rob Collie (01:56:03): How would this change decisions that I would make, or actions I would take? I go, "Mm, yeah. Okay." So, I think that BI software has been given a pass for a very, very, very long time in this. If the dashboard tells you something interesting that you should go act on, why does it just sit back on the couch and go, "Mm, good luck with that?"

Lori Rodriguez (01:56:21): That is exactly where I'm going through. You should know what the next step is. Right? You know what the action to take is. How do you then feed that back into the systems to take that action? That's what I mean by the interoperability, or that mild ... the right piece that you were saying. So, it's got this information. How do I then connect it back to the infrastructure, so it can trigger something else to happen along the way?

Rob Collie (01:56:47): I've got a lot of thoughts on this. Part of it is reading the tea leaves of Microsoft, as a trained observer of Microsoft. Let's give us all an example that we can use as the testbed. Even if it's not automated, even if the action isn't automated, that's next level. Even if we lower our standards a little bit from that, it's still a failure today. Right? So, the example I've been giving people lately is, let's say you're looking at a dashboard and it's just jumping off the page at you that warehouse six is going to run out of inventory before it's replenished. So, you're going to have an error gap in your supply chain. The dashboard that does that, that tells you that problem exists, today, thinks very highly of itself. It's very smugly satisfied. "Look what I did. I showed you a problem, but good luck." Right?

Rob Collie (01:57:37): So, now what have you got to go do? First of all, you've got to formulate a response. You've got to formulate what you can do to address this. But then you have to go and log into some other line of business system. Maybe we can transfer some excess inventory from warehouse four to warehouse six. That's one of the ways that we could do it. Of course, we need to rush an order. Okay. We've got to go to an ordering portal to rush the order of more widgets and deliver them to warehouse six. But there's this huge context shift that has to happen for the user of the dashboard. They have to go and navigate to the right system and drill down to the right context, warehouse six and warehouse four, or whatever. Right?

Rob Collie (01:58:19): Imagine, instead, if the dashboard, when it's highlighted for you, it's right there. You see the shortfall, multiple different actions that you can take. You can start to arrange the transfer of inventory, because you can see it right there on the dashboard. Four, warehouse four, has got six months of supply. Warehouse six is in trouble. It's just right there. Why do I have to go? Why can't I just connect the dots there?

Lori Rodriguez (01:58:45): Or have it do automatically. To your point, taking automation off the table, at least the information there.

Rob Collie (01:58:53): I think that organizations like yourselves, on the analyst side ... This is a prediction I'm making about [Gartner 01:59:00]. Right? Some number of years in the near future, when Gartner is formulating their magic quadrant for BI software, they're going to start using this take action integration capability as one of the axes that they're evaluating in order to ... in terms of completeness of vision, to rank the vendors. Once I came to this realization, all these sorts of things coming together, I had this all crystallized for me, suddenly, I understood what Microsoft has been up to for the past three years. It's like, "Uh oh." Again, this is me opining. So, your mileage may vary on this information.

Rob Collie (01:59:40): Microsoft had a great conference called the Data Insight Summit. Loved this thing. Thought it was awesome. But then they renamed it to the Business Application Summit. It became a little less fun. All of us in the data world were a little bit grumpy, because now we had the Dynamics. It was also the Dynamics conference. It was just data before, but now it was Dynamics and data. So, all the Dynamics products, the ERPs and CRMs and all of that, and accounting software and all that kind of stuff. The VP at Microsoft, James Phillips, who had been in charge of Power BI, just Power BI, after a while, when the track record was established and things were going well, suddenly, they gave James Dynamics, in addition to Power BI, but they also gave him all of this middleware stuff. They gave him the Power apps stuff. They gave him the Flow and the Power Automates stuff. Right?

Rob Collie (02:00:34): At the time, when they made the change, it just seemed like this random grab bag to me, or yet another Microsoft, pie-in-the-sky, out-of-touch, move. But now, now I'm starting to wonder. In order for the reality that you and I want to see, in order for that to happen, you have to accept that this is never going to be out of the box. It's the most custom, one-off type of equation ever. You can imagine building a dashboard that is, in some sense, one-size-fits-all for an industry. Every oil company that's running on this sort of drilling system or whatever, I could build some dashboards and sell it as a subscription product, for example. But when it came time for them to take action, everyone's got a different ERP. Right?

Rob Collie (02:01:20): It is the most custom thing ever, the taking action part of a dashboard. So, it is inherently going to be a development exercise. Now, how low-code, how no-code is that development? Okay. There's a spectrum there. But we need to accept that this is solution building. It's going to be a platform rather than an out-of-the-box answer. Oh, my God, does Microsoft have a platform mentality. This is one of the things that they are really, really, really good at, at least relative to their competitors. Right? As an observer of this industry, now also the Salesforce acquisition of Tableau makes more sense to me, too. Salesforce is also trying to be this middleware operating system for your business type of company. They've long since overflowed their banks of CRM.

Rob Collie (02:02:10): If you think of BI, seriously, just really think of the last three or four months, this has been churning in my brain. If you think of BI, effective BI, as a form of middleware, it is read-only middleware. It's the place where all these silos meet, but in a read-only sense. Oh, yeah. Of course, Salesforce needed BI. Of course, they needed the read-only middleware to go with their read-write middleware platform that they're trying to build, that's their core mission these days. Of course, they would reorganize all of this stuff together at Microsoft. I see this battlefield. Knowing the players, I know who's going to win. Microsoft already has the hooks. I'm sure that the hooks aren't good enough yet. The ability to embed a Power app into your Power BI report, they had that a long time ago. That's been in there for a long time. I'm not going to pretend that, "Oh, there you go. There's your answer." It's just that they've been thinking ahead in a very interesting way.

Lori Rodriguez (02:03:16): Do you think it's the right direction to put the Power app into the BI, versus the brain into the app? Right? To me, when you're talking about BI, it's the brain. Right? It knows all this stuff. You have the body. Your central nervous system is the middleware that connects the body to the brain. It feels like it's, perhaps, flipped the wrong way. You've got the BI as the thing that you put the body into, as opposed to the intelligence into the body.

Rob Collie (02:03:46): Well, if I'm following your metaphor, I just take it for granted, the data model brain that you build behind a Power BI report. I just take it for granted that thing is accessible via API. It's always been. I don't have to use Microsoft's front end at all, if I don't want to, to leverage the smarts that I've invested into that BI brain, the data model, even without Power apps, if I wanted to do the thing that you were talking about, the automated trigger.

Lori Rodriguez (02:04:13): Yeah. At the end of the day, in order to get a result, you have to change a behavior somewhere, in somebody. Right? So, if you're designing your experience to change a behavior, you want the intelligence to slot it and feed that experience. It seems to me, you're building the intelligence and then figuring out how to make the experience work around the intelligence you have, as opposed to just saying, "This is a behavior we want to get to. This is a behavior we have today. I'm going to create an experience. It's not with Microsoft products, but the Microsoft products are going to make the muscles move, or do whatever." I'm thinking of it that way. I don't know that there's anything out there like that.

Rob Collie (02:04:59): So, are you saying ... Again, I think I might just be struggling to understand where you're headed yet. Are you saying that maybe we take the improved behaviors and the information and inject them into the line of business system, rather than having a jump-off point in the BI?

Lori Rodriguez (02:05:15): I don't know yet. I'm not sure yet. I think I'm going ... I'm leapfrogging. This is awesome. You've now got all the data accessible in one place with Power BI. Then the next thing is to be able to take action off of that. You're starting to see that with ... I'm just using the Microsoft terms. I don't know what Salesforce or anybody else has. People are out there building other things like that. Whatever that thing is that some company's building on top of their BI platform, to then start to automate things, take action, that's awesome. That's terrific.

Lori Rodriguez (02:05:49): But if I were a disrupter, because Microsoft is building with what they have, taking what they have and trying to retrofit or fit it into this thing, I would just say, "I want this behavior to happen. This is where we are today," and I would build a product for internal associates or whatever, it includes a dashboard in there, that gets me from point A to point B, and slot it in there as the intelligence to make things move, to drive the behavior that I want at the end of the day. That's Nirvana. Right? If I were starting blank slate, I would start there. Then I'd slot in where BI comes in, where automation comes in, into that process.

Lori Rodriguez (02:06:32): Again, I'm tool-platform-agnostic. I'm just saying this is how I would build something, if I had that behind me. What Microsoft is saying is, "We had Excel. Now we have Excel Pivot, the next thing." So, you're iterating. Right? You're telling me, "Microsoft is iterating, along with products that they already have," as opposed to Blank Slate or Greenfield, and saying, "This is what it could be in a Nirvana state. Blank Slate, if I were to build this today, I would do X." I'm challenging, because eventually, you're going to get there, but it's going to take you a lot longer to get there in a scientific methodology of experimentation from a starting point, as opposed to saying, "This is where I want to get to. This is where I am today." Like a Google Maps. Right? Just say, "How do we get to that end place we want to go, if we were to just get in our car and design a roadmap from scratch?"

Rob Collie (02:07:24): Well, I think ... This is just my take on all of that. I think that your history proves that you're much more likely to be correct in this assessment than incorrect. The ideal, the final form of this stuff, is something we probably haven't seen yet. When you reach such a fundamental realization as all of our BI has forever been given a pass on the part that matters the most, which is the taking action, you know that there's a lot of road left. The thing that makes me comfortable, as a Microsoft partner, which is one way to define our company, I suppose. Right? I mean, I try not to think of ourselves that way. As an organization that is associated with and invested in the Microsoft platform, one of the things that makes me comfortable is that I think that Microsoft, technical distance from this unknown Nirvana, is probably quite a bit shorter than their competitors.

Rob Collie (02:08:23): They probably won't lead the discovery of that Nirvana, even though it happens with their own tools. One of the jokes we used to make about Microsoft was, we give you the parts to the Porsche. Have fun. So, companies like mine are going to be involved in the creation of these solutions, using their platform, which is insanely flexible. Again, you're saying that it should be better and closer to that Nirvana out of the box.

Lori Rodriguez (02:08:55): Insanely flexible then allows what you just said. If you give the parts, you can create a Porsche.

Rob Collie (02:09:01): That's right.

Lori Rodriguez (02:09:02): Dodge Caravan.

Rob Collie (02:09:03): That's right.

Lori Rodriguez (02:09:04): Some car that's never existed. You could strap on a hoverboard and come up with something else. That's the piece. It's got to be insanely flexible to then say, "Well, you know what? We built it so it was the outsides, but what we're seeing is people are using it as the inside, as opposed to the outside." So, the brain and the nervous system, as opposed to the body. Right? Which is the body is the behavior and the intelligence, and the nervous system is driving the muscles, which is the outside, is what you're seeing and experiencing. So, if it's insanely flexible, then that allows organizations to build the Porsche.

Rob Collie (02:09:42): Yeah.

Lori Rodriguez (02:09:42): Am I understanding that correctly? I think that's probably a good way to get to this blank slate, from what Microsoft and other companies are doing with what they have today.

Rob Collie (02:09:52): This is one of the only pieces of Microsoft's DNA that I think has remained relatively consistent from the beginning, at least from the ... I've said this before on this show. Most people think of Windows as a product, as a consumer product. It's the thing with the start menu and all of that. I went to Microsoft and I spent some time with the Windows team. I quickly discovered that isn't how Microsoft thought of Windows at all. The start menu and all of that is just one app, little tiny, tiny, insignificant piece of software that was written on top of Windows. The world thinks of Windows as the shell. That's it. They're like, "Ah, whatever. Those people weren't even all that respected, necessarily, on the Windows team." The difference between the Windows team and the developer division, the Visual Studio division at Microsoft, there wasn't any. They were the same crew. Windows was an API. Windows was a development platform. That's what it was from the beginning, and that's what it always was. That's where the parts from the Porsche thing comes from. You can get a fully assembled moped from Microsoft's competitors. You want a moped from Microsoft? You're going to have to build it. But you can build anything. So, this is the pros and cons, the plus and minus, is that it's so strange, in some ways. The very, very, very first version of Power BI included the ability for you to code your own visual. You could write your own custom chart control from the very first version of Power BI. Right? It's like, "Guys, this is not important. You spent your time on this. We could have had a million other really useful things. But that one? That one needed to happen first?"

Lori Rodriguez (02:11:29): You know why? Because people told them that it had to be there. Right? Back to the lies people tell in the requirements. Of course, I want control to be able to do that. Then you get it, it's like, "It's so complicated. I can't do everything."

Rob Collie (02:11:44): But only Microsoft would tell that lie. People are going to be falling all over themselves to code custom visuals. Now, it worked out, because it's future-proofed them in a number of ways. That's one of those features, if you don't do it at the beginning, you'll probably never do it. We use custom visuals. There's a pretty vibrant market in custom visuals.

Lori Rodriguez (02:12:05): Well, that's where you can layer on from the platform perspective. Right?

Rob Collie (02:12:08): That's right. That's right.

Lori Rodriguez (02:12:08): If you give people all the parts to build stuff, then you spring up a whole bunch of consultants who will create that moped for you based on ...

Rob Collie (02:12:17): That's right.

Lori Rodriguez (02:12:18): So, we can create it for you, or we've got ones that are already built and you just buy it. You could have that same model work.

Rob Collie (02:12:24): That's right.

Lori Rodriguez (02:12:25): Where you allow partners to come in and they do whatever it is that people want.

Rob Collie (02:12:29): That's Microsoft's ethos, in a nutshell. I don't think, as a company, that we have done too much work developing custom visuals. Most of our consulting work around Power BI is helping people build data models and reports. We have a partner, one of our partner companies, that has done a financial planning product, incredibly comprehensive financial planning product, integrated with Power BI, that would not have been possible, just a nonstarter from the beginning, if this custom visual framework wasn't in there. Their custom visuals are charts that also allow you to write back to various other sources, because the code is up to the custom ... So, it's not even a Power app. Right? It's just a chart that you can right click on a bar and say, "No, no. Make that six. Show me what the implications of that would be." A lot of the best things are things that Microsoft ... If you rely on Microsoft to anticipate what the world needs, you're never going to get there. They do leave the canvas flexible.

Lori Rodriguez (02:13:30): Yeah, but who would anticipate a pandemic? We have to be uncomfortable with uncertainty. One of the women in the book, she spent her entire life ... IBM fellow, National Academy of Sciences, she built her career on uncertainty, did her dissertation on uncertainty. She's like, "Yeah. I'm right there now. I was ahead, looking ahead." Because life's uncertain, which is you have this balance between flexibility and then overwhelming people with too much choice. How do you work through both of those things?

Rob Collie (02:14:02): Yeah. If there's 31 flavors of ice cream, if I up that to 600, no one ever eats ice cream.

Lori Rodriguez (02:14:08): Yeah, or even 31. Right? It's so cool with neuroscience, as well, that we can look at things like too many choices and figure out how to build products that accommodate how we actually think and what we actually do, versus what we tell developers, and people like me in market research, what they want, which is why Steve Jobs, he said he didn't do market research, and that's not true. But he didn't do the kind of market research that was typical at the time, with focus groups and telling people, "You want blue or yellow?" They're like, "Ah, of course, I want yellow." That's not the case, because it's not reality.

Rob Collie (02:14:46): The second half of my career is one in which I respect Steve Jobs immensely. His editorial force is just something else. There was something you said about uncertainty that really also spoke to me. The way that I found my way into my discovery of my own data gene was through fantasy football. In 1996, I was invited to join ... My first year at Microsoft, I was invited to join a fantasy football league. I didn't even know what that was. I wasn't watching football at the time. I wasn't interested, but I did it just to, "Ah, I'm a new guy. I'll meet other people. I'll use this as a social thing." Somewhere along the way, in year three, I read this article somewhere that explained to me what the real game was in fantasy football. I was like, "Aha! Oh, I get it now." The smoke parted. Suddenly, I was up to my eyeballs in Excel. That's what's, in the end, powered my interest in all of this stuff.

Rob Collie (02:15:44): So, back to the women in data, I think you'll really appreciate this story. I was in the succession plan on the Excel team. I was the heir apparent. I was next to take over for the group program manager job. I was making it. Then Microsoft decided to launch a fantasy football team, a fantasy football software team, over on the MSN side. I'm like, "I'm out. I'm out. I'm gone." So, really, you think of really poor career choices. One of the things I got to do over there was try to build a consumer-facing, end user-facing stats portal for the NFL. We did it, because it was me. Right? We did it based on Microsoft's pre-Power BI, their traditional BI software, with an Excel web front end over the top. So, it was an analysis services model with OLAP data, blah, blah, blah. Right?

Rob Collie (02:16:39): So, that stuff was too hard. I couldn't do that. I had to hire a consulting firm. I got to be a customer of a BI firm. I got to be the customer in a BI project. I was lucky that the consultant that they assigned to our project, from Hitachi Consulting or whatever, didn't know football. He was from another country. He had no idea about American football. So, we had the same dynamic where I had to explain to him the business, the subject matter, over and over and over again, and the requirements process. If I had just lucked into another NFL fan, it would have been easy. I would have missed an important learning, which later on, without that piece of information, without that experience, I would have never launched this company. I would have never known that the world was changing.

Rob Collie (02:17:22): The thing with women in data was that we started doing focus groups when we got something that was an MVP up and running. We started doing focus groups. We recruited people that were friendly to Microsoft. They knew Microsoft somehow. They had someone, a family member, who worked there or whatever, they had some sort affinity for Microsoft, but they were also into football. I was so proud. I would sit down in front of these people and say, "Oh, my gosh. Look at this. You can ask any question you want about a sports situation, an NFL situation." What's Tom Brady's conversion rate on third and long in the fourth quarter or whatever? The guys in the room were not interested at all. They didn't care. They were just like, "Dude, okay. Let's get to the end of the tour, so I can get my free piece of software, like you promised." But the women, not all of them, but the ones that were interested ... I did four or five of these focus groups. Every single time, the person who was most interested in what we were doing in the room was a woman. Just so excited to interact with this thing.

Lori Rodriguez (02:18:29): That's awesome.

Rob Collie (02:18:30): That was my first brush with maybe curiosity, maybe curiosity runs stronger in women than in men, which if it were true, makes me feel bad for men. Right? What's wrong with me?

Lori Rodriguez (02:18:44): Is that the digital equivalent of not asking for directions?

Rob Collie (02:18:48): I guess. I think it's exactly it. Right? I could see these women thinking to themselves, "I am so tired of listening to the guy at my office go on and on and on about football, like he knows everything. I'm going to go in and just own him next week with this portal."

Lori Rodriguez (02:19:04): I love it. My 17 year old daughter got invited to a fantasy football league. My husband and I were huge Giants fans when we were younger, but life gets in the way, and I just haven't watched football, like I used, to in years. So, it's just not on. So, she hasn't been exposed to football, which, wow, she doesn't even know the basics of the game. She gets asked to be in this fantasy football league. So, what does she do? Talk about curiosity. She starts asking everybody she knows, lots of people she knows that are into football, "How do you play this game? What do you do?" She's led the fantasy football league the entire time, from the beginning, by far.

Lori Rodriguez (02:19:45): In the last game, another female, same age, cousin in this family, overtook her by 10 points. So, the top two going away were the girls in the group, one of which has never watched, really, other than the Super Bowl, which we do a big thing for Super Bowl, has never really watched a football game. Because she just went to data, and she was able to get lots of different opinions, look at all the stats, qualitative, quantitative, and make some judgements based on what she's hearing, and just objective, very objective, she doesn't care about any team or any player, and she's led the whole way. It was awesome. I'm tracking with you on that story.

Rob Collie (02:20:28): So, I can't think of a better place to end. You hear that? That is what data is about. Ladies, just lean into it. I really do think there's something to this. I think, really, it's a weird thing to say, but I think women are better at it. I really do. Not that our guys aren't. We've got a good team, a lot of good people. I want to see that reflected in our demographics on our team going forward.

Lori Rodriguez (02:20:53): Yeah. I'll echo that. I heard a quote, and I love it. It's, "All flourishing is mutual." So, when we compete together, when we play together, we all win. We all push each other to make ourselves better. So, all flourishing is mutual. Yeah. We need more women in data. I'm right there with you.

Rob Collie (02:21:12): Yeah. Let's make that happen. I'm really looking forward to your book. Thank you so much, Lori. This has been awesome. This will probably be our longest podcast we've ever done to-date. Thank you so much for taking the time.

New Speaker (02:21:22): Thanks for listening to the Raw Data By P3 Podcast. Find out what the experts at P3 can do for your business. Go to powerpivotpro. com. Interested in becoming a guest on the show? Email Luke P, L-U-K-E P, at powerpivotpro.com. Have a data day!

He's just a guy in a cube helping people.  That's the simplest way to describe who Adam Saxton is.  He turned a childhood fascination for computers into an amazing career at Microsoft (he's currently a member of the elite Power BI CAT Team), he has a hugely successful YouTube channel, Guy In A Cube, with his partner Patrick LeBlanc, and is a respected fixture in the data community.  He sits down with the Raw Data Crew and talks about his origin story, the work he puts in for the YouTube channel, Power BI, life on the road, and everything in between.  Enjoy our conversation with Adam Saxton, he's A Guy In A Cube

Guy In A Cube Website

Guy In A Cube Twitter

Guy In A Cube Youtube

Episode Transcript:

Rob Collie (00:00:00): Today, we welcome Adam Saxton, founder of, and co-creator, ongoing co-host of Guy in a Cube. I could just probably stop there. You know who I'm talking about. Amazing story. Really just sort of a gift to the community, so it's just really, really gratifying to get to spend... We were recording for almost two hours.

Rob Collie (00:00:19): We talk about Power BI. Of course, we talk about Power BI. But really, we also focus a lot on just his story, like how did he find himself in this situation? What was his road that brought him here? How does he look at his job? How does he look at his two jobs? And I found it all incredibly fascinating. I finally got to ask him a bunch of questions. I've been meaning to ask for a long time, and I hope you enjoy it as much as we did. So let's get into it.

Announcer (00:00:45): Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention, please?

Announcer (00:00:49): This is the Raw Data by P3 Podcast, with your host, Rob Collie, and your co-host, Thomas LaRock. Find out what the experts at P3 can do for your business. Go to powerpivotpro.com. Raw Data by P3 is data with the human element.

Rob Collie (00:01:07): Welcome to the show. Adam Saxton. How are you, man?

Adam Saxton (00:01:12): Yo. Living the dream, my friend.

Rob Collie (00:01:14): Living the dream indeed.

Adam Saxton (00:01:16): Living the dream.

Rob Collie (00:01:17): Yeah. I can get behind that. I think I could understand that.

Adam Saxton (00:01:20): I got a roof over my head, my kids are healthy. I got no issues.

Rob Collie (00:01:24): The fundamentals.

Adam Saxton (00:01:25): Yes.

Rob Collie (00:01:26): You got a pretty hot gig too.

Adam Saxton (00:01:27): Can't complain. Can't complain.

Rob Collie (00:01:29): Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know how it is?

Adam Saxton (00:01:33): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:01:33): Always, always.

Adam Saxton (00:01:33): There's always something to complain about.

Rob Collie (00:01:34): You can always complain.

Adam Saxton (00:01:35): Yeah. But seriously, living the dream there. From the day job perspective, it's an amazing job with a lot of freedom and it definitely pays the bills, and then I get to also do the fun stuff on the side for my passion. Wife is very supportive, so it's nothing to complain about really on that. There's people with much worse problems than what I've got.

Rob Collie (00:01:57): Oh my gosh. Yeah. Like you said, the contrast between our work from home knowledge worker jobs and how good that is for all of us is just so, so, so in such sharp focus over the last year. In a way, our lives haven't changed. They have.

Adam Saxton (00:02:16): I miss traveling.

Rob Collie (00:02:17): Yeah.

Adam Saxton (00:02:19): I want to travel again.

Rob Collie (00:02:20): I miss seeing my kids. They're living the teenage life and so they're quarantining with their mom, who doesn't seem to have the same, I don't know, level of paranoia about this disease that my wife and I do.

Adam Saxton (00:02:37): It's a problem when you're not on the same page. That could be disheartening.

Rob Collie (00:02:39): Yeah, it is. But what it really is, I'm actually kind of grateful for it, because how are you going to fence in a couple of teenagers who are just now discovering the dating life and all of that? I'm actually sort of in a weird way, grateful that my ex is actually willing to take the risk. I don't know. It would just be unending conflict if they didn't have a place to stay.

Adam Saxton (00:03:03): Right.

Rob Collie (00:03:03): It sounds like I'm complaining, but actually I'm like, "Well, I do miss my kids," but even there, we lucked out. Even there, we lucked out.

Adam Saxton (00:03:11): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:03:11): And that's crazy.

Adam Saxton (00:03:12): I remember just some folks I talked to, because I'm like, "Oh, I work from home. My wife actually has a job where she works from home as well."

Adam Saxton (00:03:20): And they're like, "Oh, because of COVID and all?"

Adam Saxton (00:03:23): I'm like, "No, I've been working from home for years," so I'm like, "Nothing on that front changed."

Rob Collie (00:03:27): Our whole company, we like to joke, we were working from home before it was cool.

Adam Saxton (00:03:31): Yes.

Rob Collie (00:03:32): Except we did travel. We did go and visit some people. We would visit our clients. So we've had to make that change.

Adam Saxton (00:03:40): There's customers I work with, where one of them in particular, right before everything got shut down, I was actually planning with them saying, "I'm going to come out monthly," and then that didn't happen.

Thomas LaRock (00:03:52): So I will say, you're talking about teenagers in COVID. I got a senior and a junior in high school.

Adam Saxton (00:03:58): Yeah.

Thomas LaRock (00:03:58): One of them really doesn't leave the house anyway, so no issues there.

Adam Saxton (00:04:02): Yeah. I have the same situation. Sophomore in high school, her sweet spot is just laying on her bed, drawing, watching videos, playing games. She's basically my clone.

Thomas LaRock (00:04:14): And we've been remote learning since last March.

Adam Saxton (00:04:17): Yeah.

Thomas LaRock (00:04:18): They sent all the kids home, then they tried to get through the end of the school year, remote learning, and it wasn't as good, but they put together a good plan here. And we were remote for the first four months and now they are hybrid. But we elected to keep our kids remote. We weren't forced to go back.

Adam Saxton (00:04:36): Right.

Rob Collie (00:04:36): My kids, they were exactly that. They were the digital life. They lived on their phones, they never left the house, and that was how it was for years. I was always kind of trying to encourage, "Well what about going out into the real world every now and then?" They really got into the real world right around the time of COVID. That's when they turned the corner. I'm like, "Ah, no."

Adam Saxton (00:04:59): Yeah, that sucks. Yeah. My younger daughter, she's 13 now and she's always active and wants to ride horses, she wants to go hang out with friends, so it's really hard on her. But my older daughter, she's 15 going on 16, and she's like, "Yeah, I don't care. I don't like to people."

Rob Collie (00:05:16): Yeah. Well, like I said, I was living that life as a parent and then in the space of two months, boom.

Adam Saxton (00:05:22): Yeah, that sucks. That is tough. That is very tough. Very tough.

Rob Collie (00:05:27): I'm discovering things like what, there's a Tinder for teens? What?

Adam Saxton (00:05:31): Whoa. I didn't even know that.

Rob Collie (00:05:34): The other kids meeting people on Tinder, it's like, "What?"

Adam Saxton (00:05:39): That doesn't seem safe.

Rob Collie (00:05:41): What about at Xbox? Just go back to being the Xbox recluse.

Adam Saxton (00:05:46): Yes.

Rob Collie (00:05:47): All right. So let's get back to talking about Adam. Enough about our kids.

Adam Saxton (00:05:52): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:05:53): In our inaugural episode, Tom and I talked about how we first met and the backdrop for all of that was SQL Twitter.

Adam Saxton (00:06:02): Yes.

Rob Collie (00:06:02): When I first saw Guy in a Cube show up on Twitter, I'm like, "Hey, I recognize that face. That's A. Saxton."

Adam Saxton (00:06:11): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:06:11): You know how you get this weird, crazy ability to recognize people based on Twitter?

Adam Saxton (00:06:18): Funny story about the Twitter thing, because I absolutely agree. I met so much of, at the time it was the SQL family, and then it's expanded past that. The way I met folks and got to know some of the MVPs and other folks in the community was through Twitter. I remember being at PASS Summit one year and this big guy comes up to me, he's like, "Adam Saxton."

Adam Saxton (00:06:37): And I'm like, "Hey, how's it going?"

Adam Saxton (00:06:39): He's like, "Dude, it's great to finally see you face-to-face."

Adam Saxton (00:06:41): I'm like, "Yeah." And I'm looking at his badge, I see his name. I'm like, "I have no idea who you are, dude. What is this?"

Adam Saxton (00:06:47): He's like, "Oh, I'm SQL Chicken."

Adam Saxton (00:06:49): And I'm like, "Oh, okay. I know you buy your Twitter handle. I don't know you by..." Because a lot of folks didn't even have pictures of themselves either, so I'm like, "I have no way to connect with who you are."

Rob Collie (00:06:59): That's right. But you, when you were on Twitter as A. Saxton, it was a picture of you, wasn't it?

Adam Saxton (00:07:04): Yeah. My awsaxton's always had a picture of me and then Guy in a Cube has not.

Rob Collie (00:07:09): Okay.

Adam Saxton (00:07:09): For a little while, I had my little animated picture, but then that changed also.

Rob Collie (00:07:15): All right. So back in around 2010, 2011, in the early 2010s, what were you doing professionally?

Adam Saxton (00:07:23): I was a support engineer in SQL support at Microsoft, and actually not working on SQL. They had four different groups that were part of the SQL support group. One was actual SQL engine, then there was this advance performance team, and then there was the analysis services team. And then my team, which was originally called the web data team, and we owned all of connectivity, so connecting to SQL and then all of the developer support, so ADO, ADO.NET. And it also included reporting services because they didn't know where else to put it.

Rob Collie (00:07:58): It just totally belongs here. ADO, ADO.NET, reporting services.

Adam Saxton (00:08:02): Yes, absolutely.

Rob Collie (00:08:03): Yeah.

Adam Saxton (00:08:04): It's a web product, so it's developer.

Rob Collie (00:08:06): Oh, yeah.

Adam Saxton (00:08:06): Sure.

Rob Collie (00:08:07): Yeah.

Adam Saxton (00:08:07): Sure.

Rob Collie (00:08:07): Yeah. I didn't know that. I didn't know that you were Microsoft, even back in the day.

Adam Saxton (00:08:13): Yeah. I started on the web data team. So actually, I started doing support for Microsoft when I was a senior in high school. I did that for four-and-a-half years. That was my job when I was a senior in high school, so that was a Monday through Friday, 3:00 to 7:00 PM. It was an awesome-

Thomas LaRock (00:08:29): I'm sorry, you were a senior for four-and-a-half years?

Adam Saxton (00:08:32): No, no, no, no. I started when I was a senior and I did that job for four-and-a-half years.

Thomas LaRock (00:08:37): Okay. Okay.

Adam Saxton (00:08:38): So, that was supporting. Yeah, I was a senior for four-and-a-half years and...

Rob Collie (00:08:44): There's some sort of Matthew McConaughey joke in here.

Adam Saxton (00:08:47): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:08:47): I get older, the queries stay the same age.

Adam Saxton (00:08:51): That's it. That's it. But yeah, I was supporting. I started there supporting Windows 95 and then Windows 98, Windows Millennium.

Rob Collie (00:08:59): What?

Adam Saxton (00:09:00): Oh yeah. And then right into Windows 2000. Then I started getting developer skills at that point, and then I went off just doing different developer jobs, all self-taught. Then in 2005 I saw a job for a contractor position. It was in Charlotte. It was under a contracting name, the actual contractor, not Microsoft, but the way it read, I was like, "Man, that sounded like the Microsoft support." And it said web data. I didn't know what that was at that point. And then I went and it was support. So I started doing support as a contractor in 2005 on the web data team. And then 2006, I became a full-time employee.

Rob Collie (00:09:35): Did you move to Charlotte for that?

Adam Saxton (00:09:36): I did. I was living in Tucson, Arizona at the time. And then we relocated to Charlotte. We were in Charlotte for about a year and a half, and then we found out that there was a site in Dallas, Texas, the Las Colinas site. And my wife's originally from Texas, her family's outside of Houston, and so we relocated to Dallas, and that's when I got to meet folks like Bob Ward and Bob Dorr on the SQL side, and they basically became my mentors at that point, and it went from there. So I've been doing Microsoft for almost 15 years now.

Rob Collie (00:10:08): Okay. Let's go back because again, another unknown thing I didn't know. Microsoft support.

Adam Saxton (00:10:16): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:10:16): In high school?

Adam Saxton (00:10:18): Yes.

Rob Collie (00:10:18): All right.

Adam Saxton (00:10:18): Yeah. So I started November 1996, is when I started doing that.

Rob Collie (00:10:24): Oh my gosh. So I had started at Microsoft in Redmond in July 1996.

Adam Saxton (00:10:28): Nice. Nice.

Rob Collie (00:10:30): We're basically twins, you and me.

Adam Saxton (00:10:32): Yeah. That was very IT-focused at the time, so it was all Windows, I was playing around on with Exchange Server and Active Directory, once that eventually came out.

Rob Collie (00:10:40): That's what an average high school kid does.

Adam Saxton (00:10:42): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:10:42): Just play around with a little Active Directory.

Adam Saxton (00:10:44): Oh, yeah.

Thomas LaRock (00:10:45): How does a high schooler get hired by Microsoft though?

Rob Collie (00:10:47): So I built my first computer when I think I was 15. And then when I turned 16, I had to get a job. I was very passionate about the fact that I was not going to get a job in the food industry. So restaurants, grocery store, whatever. Nothing against that. But I was just like, "Look, I love computers. I want to work with computers. I'm going to get a job with computers." And in the mid 90s, it's still kind of new. If you were on the internet, if there was such a thing, it was AOL or CompuServe. It wasn't what we have today.

Rob Collie (00:11:18): So there was a little retail shop that was in Tucson. It was called Egghead Software. I don't know if you remember that. It was a retail job, selling software. So I got a job at Egghead Software for a little bit. One of the guys I met working there, because they started a call center in Tucson, Arizona for support, he ended up working there and he called me up. He's like, "Adam, I think you would love this job. They're hiring some more people for Windows 95 support. Do you want to apply?"

Rob Collie (00:11:46): So I was like, "Yeah, let's do this."

Rob Collie (00:11:48): Then I came home one day and my mom was like, "Why aren't you at work?"

Rob Collie (00:11:52): And I'm like, "I got a job with Microsoft."

Rob Collie (00:11:53): She's like, "Don't lie to me."

Rob Collie (00:11:54): And I'm like, "No, seriously look." So in high school, I have an orange badge for Microsoft and I'm a senior in high school and I'm studying for MCP.

Rob Collie (00:12:05): That's so cool. I just didn't have any worthwhile hobbies in high school. The first PC that I had, I got it when I was a freshman in college. I had never really been all that into it.

Adam Saxton (00:12:17): Yeah. So my first computer was a Commodore 64, 128 combo. And I had two five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy drives, and that was everything.

Rob Collie (00:12:26): Two?

Adam Saxton (00:12:26): Yeah. I remember programming on basic there. I was really just a video gamer. That's all I wanted. Then my dad ended up, he had a 386 and he upgraded to a 486 with a turbo button. I remember that. That was very exciting. So then he gave me the 386, and I was 11 or 12 at the time. He said, "Look, I'm going to give you this computer, but if you're going to use it, you're going to know how to use it."

Adam Saxton (00:12:54): I'm like, "Okay." So I had to go through this tutorial on DOS 6 and it was Windows 3.0 and DOS 6. So I just learned how to do it and I was playing around with these commands. I'm like, "You know what? I'm going to do this on my dad's computer because it's a little faster." I said, "All right. Let me try this new command. What is this? F disk... Oh. Oh, crap. I don't know what that's doing. Right. We're going to turn that off."

Adam Saxton (00:13:20): Then my dad comes home and was like, "Oh my God, my computer won't boot. What's going on?"

Adam Saxton (00:13:23): And I'm like, "I have no idea."

Rob Collie (00:13:25): Yeah.

Adam Saxton (00:13:25): I'm like, "My computer's fine." So I learned all that stuff, and then by the time I was 12, I knew way more than he did. I remember he had a game, so this may bring back some memories. He had a game called Leisure Suit Larry.

Thomas LaRock (00:13:40): Oh, yeah.

Adam Saxton (00:13:43): All the pixels. One of the things they had, they had this kid protection in front of it where you had to answer these historical questions.

Rob Collie (00:13:51): Yeah.

Adam Saxton (00:13:51): And at the time I was in Pennsylvania and we had a basement and so the computers were down there. I'd yell up to my mom during the day because again, I'm 12 years old, we didn't have the internet, I couldn't just go look this up. So I was like, "Mom, which war was Franklin Roosevelt a part of?"

Adam Saxton (00:14:07): And she's like, "I think it was World War II."

Adam Saxton (00:14:09): I'm like, "Select." I'm like, "All right, I'm in."

Rob Collie (00:14:13): Yeah. It had an adult level. The game became dirtier if you could prove that you were a grownup.

Adam Saxton (00:14:21): Yes. That's how I hacked Leisure Suit Larry. I started with the social engineering.

Rob Collie (00:14:27): Yeah, that's right. That's right. You also mentioned having the two, five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy drives on the Commodore. You were the shit back then.

Adam Saxton (00:14:34): Yes.

Rob Collie (00:14:35): Because you could make copies of games without having to swap disks every so many.

Adam Saxton (00:14:39): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:14:40): Luke and I were part of that culture from the Apple two perspective. I never had the dual drive.

Adam Saxton (00:14:46): I was PC all the way. So I remember when I was a senior in high school, there was also this issue at my high school where I guess someone deployed some virus. They were using, it was a Novell infrastructure. And they deployed a virus and I was pulled into this office or whatever. I was one of three people that they tagged as suspicious for this activity. I'm like, "Wow. Thank you. It wasn't me, but I appreciate that." Then there was this other time I came in and I saw my teacher scrambling, he was on his Mac. They all used Macs, and I'm like, "What's going on?"

Adam Saxton (00:15:20): He's like, "Ah, it's just the network's just not working.

Adam Saxton (00:15:24): I actually had a laptop. I was senior in high school working at Microsoft. I had a laptop and I'm like, "Well, what's going on?"

Adam Saxton (00:15:30): It was like, "Well, no one on this floor is working." And they had the computer guy come into the room and he's messing around on his computer. And I'm like, "All right, well, if the whole floor is down, that ain't going to fix anything." So I told the teacher, I was just like, "Look, do you want me to look at it?" I'm like, "It's probably like an issue with the hub or the router or something. Where's it at?"

Adam Saxton (00:15:51): The computer guy is like, "No, I can't take you to that. It's sensitive and you're not allowed."

Adam Saxton (00:15:56): And then the vice principal came in and said, "No, just show him." So they walked me down to the janitor's closet and the broomstick... Seriously, I kid you not, the broomstick fell and knocked the power cord out of the wall. And when they plugged it back in, the whole floor was better.

Thomas LaRock (00:16:10): Exactly.

Adam Saxton (00:16:10): I was like, "You guys are stupid."

Rob Collie (00:16:13): That's like a movie scene. Some sort of crisis going on, and then there's this outsider, and the outsider's just like, "I know how to fix it." And the there's the establishment that says, "No, we're not letting it..." But then someone comes in and overrules.

Adam Saxton (00:16:26): Yes.

Rob Collie (00:16:27): They say, "Give him a chance."

Adam Saxton (00:16:29): Yes.

Rob Collie (00:16:29): And the music swells.

Adam Saxton (00:16:31): Dun, dun, dun.

Rob Collie (00:16:33): Yes.

Adam Saxton (00:16:34): You open the janitor door. Dun, dun, dun.

Rob Collie (00:16:38): Yeah. That's right. That's right.

Adam Saxton (00:16:39): People were like, "No way."

Adam Saxton (00:16:41): That was like, "I swear to God, it was the classic trope of..." Yes. So one of the best stories I have from support. So the old modems. Even before the main modems, you had the coupler modems.

Rob Collie (00:16:58): The ones like in more games.

Adam Saxton (00:17:00): Right. So this guy calls up and he's just like, "Look, I'm trying to connect to my BBS server and every time it does, it just disconnects, it drops it. It used to work fine, but it just started not working."

Adam Saxton (00:17:11): I'm like, "All right. Well, let's go through and let's see what it sounds like."

Adam Saxton (00:17:14): So he starts doing it and you hear something in the background and I'm like, "What's that noise in the background?"

Adam Saxton (00:17:21): "Oh, that's my parrot. I just got that a couple weeks ago."

Adam Saxton (00:17:25): And I'm like, "Hmm, can you move the parrot to the other room?" And then all of a sudden, it starts working. It's like, "Oh my gosh." The parrot was mimicking the modem sounds.

Rob Collie (00:17:35): Yeah, that's crazy. Is that on the flow chart? Like reboot, reinstall the drivers, move the parrot.

Adam Saxton (00:17:43): Windows 95 and 98, it was always a clean boot, safe mode, or safe mode then clean boot. And then it's just bring it down to the simplest form, remove options and keep trying, and that's support. That's troubleshooting.

Rob Collie (00:17:57): And then you get escalated to tier three.

Adam Saxton (00:18:00): That's right.

Rob Collie (00:18:00): Where they talk about "Well, talk to me about the pets."

Adam Saxton (00:18:03): Yeah. Tier three is animal control. You got to...

Rob Collie (00:18:08): That's great. That is really, a really a good story.

Adam Saxton (00:18:11): There's many more. There's many more like crazy, weird. Oh my gosh.

Rob Collie (00:18:16): I have the same sorts of stories about bugs.

Adam Saxton (00:18:18): You mean software bugs. Yeah. Not real bugs. Not like an Indiana Jones bug moment in a tunnel.

Rob Collie (00:18:24): If you get real bugs, I recommend you just get a parrot. That will hoover those things up. But sometimes the way that the real world conspires, chaos can leak into a finely-crafted system, in the form of a parrot in this case.

Adam Saxton (00:18:39): Yes.

Rob Collie (00:18:39): Just sometimes it's just beautiful, isn't it?

Adam Saxton (00:18:41): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:18:42): It's just beautiful what can happen.

Adam Saxton (00:18:44): Yeah. It's always amazing. That's the other thing I loved in the developer support side of it, just working with code and I got into memory dumps and going through all of that and just being able to logically, just follow it and trace it down and this is the line of code where the problem is, and being able to get fixes for that, and that was always fun.

Rob Collie (00:19:04): Yeah. There's nothing more fun for me than going through a memory dump.

Adam Saxton (00:19:08): Yes. I love the smell of dumps in the morning.

Rob Collie (00:19:12): Yeah. I'm actually completely kidding. I've never once...

Adam Saxton (00:19:16): I love memory... I live to go through a memory dump. Patrick. I remember my business partner, Patrick, we were in his basement one time. Microsoft had acquired, I don't even remember the name of them anymore. It was Dataviz or some third-party company we took over and ended up getting incorporated into a Power BI Report Server, and also SQL Server Reporting Services.

Rob Collie (00:19:41): Datazen.

Adam Saxton (00:19:41): Datazen.

Rob Collie (00:19:41): You're talking about Datazen.

Adam Saxton (00:19:41): That's it. Yeah, Datazen.

Thomas LaRock (00:19:41): Datazen.

Adam Saxton (00:19:42): There was this weird thing where they had their little builder thing and it was trying to get data, and he's like, "Why is this so slow?"

Adam Saxton (00:19:52): I'm like, "You must be working with big data." I'm like, "What is it?"

Adam Saxton (00:19:55): He's like, "It's like 30,000 rows in an Excel file."

Adam Saxton (00:19:57): I'm like, "Whew, that's really big." So I'm like, "Well, just give me a memory dump. I'll see what's going on."

Adam Saxton (00:20:04): And he's like, "What?" So we start looking at the dump and I'm like, "Oh no, here it is. Right here's the call stack. This is what you're doing. You're getting stuck in this weird loop. It's just really slow."

Adam Saxton (00:20:13): He looks at that and he is like, "Dude, that's like the matrix. What are you looking at?"

Adam Saxton (00:20:17): And I'm like, "Ah, I just see a blonde, brunette, redhead. It's fun."

Rob Collie (00:20:19): Yeah. And then you point to this other place on the screen and you turn and look at him and go, "Naughty. Naughty."

Adam Saxton (00:20:26): Yes. There was one time I was asking a guy, he wrote this third-party extension thing for Reporting Services, and he was claiming that it was fine. I'm like, "Look, this error is coming from your extension."

Adam Saxton (00:20:41): He's like, "No, it's not."

Adam Saxton (00:20:42): And I'm like, "Can you send me the source code for what you do?"

Adam Saxton (00:20:45): "No, I can't send you the source code."

Adam Saxton (00:20:46): I'm like, "Can you send me a memory dump?"

Adam Saxton (00:20:49): "Oh yeah, I can send you that."

Adam Saxton (00:20:50): I'm like, "All right." And it was .NET, so I'm like, "Oh, I'll just extract the binaries and here you go. It's on line 18."

Adam Saxton (00:20:57): And he's like, "Oh, you're right. How'd you know that?"

Adam Saxton (00:21:00): "It's magic."

Rob Collie (00:21:01): Adam, I completely did not plan to ask this, but in your support days, you said up through Windows 2000. Did you ever end up crossing paths with supporting the Windows Installer MSI?

Adam Saxton (00:21:14): Not on the Windows 2000 side, because I know that was a whole different architecture from the Windows 95 and 98 stuff. So I didn't end up actually dealing with any of that. It was right when I was going out was when they started bringing the Windows 2000 stuff.

Rob Collie (00:21:28): Okay. 2000 was NT. It was the first time that they-

Adam Saxton (00:21:31): Yes. It was the NT kernel.

Rob Collie (00:21:31): It sort of thrown out the consumer Windows.

Adam Saxton (00:21:34): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:21:35): Yeah.

Adam Saxton (00:21:35): Bringing it together.

Rob Collie (00:21:36): We could have really nerded out. You were saying that you've been into Active Directory and all of that. Yeah. I might actually have spent more time in total time in over career in Regedit.

Adam Saxton (00:21:47): Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Rob Collie (00:21:47): Than you.

Adam Saxton (00:21:48): Yeah, probably.

Rob Collie (00:21:50): Maybe.

Adam Saxton (00:21:50): Maybe.

Rob Collie (00:21:50): Just because of my two years in setup.

Adam Saxton (00:21:52): I will say though, the experience of going through on the IT side and understanding things like Active Directory, networking, Exchange Server and having that foundation and then going into SQL support, because one of the challenges I've always had, even today, folks that are doing Power BI and when we're connecting to data sources, they don't necessarily understand everything involved in that pattern. And I'm like, "Look, it's a data source. We're going to go over the network. We're going to have some protocol to go get that. We've got to wait for it to come back. How many hops in latency do we have in between?" And just having that foundation has really helped to understand the whole picture and not just my funneled or little tunnel vision of whatever product I'm working on, and so just being able to go past that and play around with it. That's how I got into Kerberos. I love Kerberos.

Rob Collie (00:22:43): Oh man. Oh gosh. Again, back in the early 2010s, everyone loved setting up Kerberos.

Adam Saxton (00:22:51): Oh, SharePoint.

Rob Collie (00:22:52): Yeah. SharePoint. Kerberos It's the worst thing ever.

Adam Saxton (00:22:53): SharePoint Integration with reporting services. I knew everything about it because nobody else wanted to touch it.

Rob Collie (00:22:59): Yeah. And Power Pivot for SharePoint, right?

Adam Saxton (00:23:01): Yes. The gallery. The gallery with Silverlight. That was amazing.

Rob Collie (00:23:05): Oh, yes, yes, yes.

Adam Saxton (00:23:07): Yes. Good times.

Rob Collie (00:23:07): I think Power Pivot for SharePoint was the peak awkward server product. It was-

Adam Saxton (00:23:13): It was so awful.

Rob Collie (00:23:14): Oh.

Adam Saxton (00:23:14): It was so bad to set up and so fragile.

Rob Collie (00:23:18): Yeah. At the company I was with, when I first left Microsoft, we eventually resorted to writing agents that were just constantly polling to see if various services had died.

Adam Saxton (00:23:27): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:23:28): And if they had, forget trying to diagnose it, don't even try to get to root cause.

Adam Saxton (00:23:33): Just no. Just restart it.

Rob Collie (00:23:33): Just restart it.

Adam Saxton (00:23:34): Just restart.

Rob Collie (00:23:34): Restart it automatically. "Oh, it's out? It'll be back. It's no big deal."

Adam Saxton (00:23:38): Yes. I actually had a blog post one time. I titled the blog post When in Doubt, Reboot. It just fixed it. It's not worth going into any of the other details.

Rob Collie (00:23:50): And move the parrot.

Adam Saxton (00:23:51): Yes. Move the parrot.

Rob Collie (00:23:52): Definitely move the parrot.

Adam Saxton (00:23:53): Move the parrot.

Rob Collie (00:23:54): All right. Let's-

Thomas LaRock (00:23:55): Woo.

Adam Saxton (00:23:57): That was my 200-plus pound dog getting a little excited.

Rob Collie (00:24:00): Oh, that's okay. That's okay. I've got a combined 200 pounds of dog.

Adam Saxton (00:24:06): I have five dogs, but he's the biggest.

Rob Collie (00:24:09): I have two dogs, four cats.

Adam Saxton (00:24:13): I don't like cats.

Rob Collie (00:24:14): Yeah. I didn't either for a long time.

Adam Saxton (00:24:16): Yeah, nice.

Rob Collie (00:24:16): Now I've converted.

Adam Saxton (00:24:18): I will never like cats.

Rob Collie (00:24:18): Yeah. You know how it is.

Adam Saxton (00:24:20): I'm on the Power BI cat team, but I don't like cats.

Rob Collie (00:24:23): You know how it is, if you don't like scotch and you're around someone that really likes scotch and you say, "I don't like scotch." You know what's going to happen is you're going to spend the next couple of hours drinking scotch.

Adam Saxton (00:24:34): Yes.

Rob Collie (00:24:36): And at the end of it, you're like, "Nope."

Adam Saxton (00:24:39): I'd like to say that's how I got into Jägermeister, but that's not what happened.

Rob Collie (00:24:42): No, that's not how anyone-

Adam Saxton (00:24:44): I just got it and I'm a like, "Sure, I'll try it." I'm like, "Oh, this is delicious."

Rob Collie (00:24:48): Oh, really?

Adam Saxton (00:24:48): Yes.

Rob Collie (00:24:48): It wasn't a lot of people standing around you, chanting, "Go, go, go"?

Adam Saxton (00:24:52): No, this was the whole, the incident thing I was referring to earlier with, and Tom was part of that.

Rob Collie (00:24:59): All right. Well, I do want to get to that.

Adam Saxton (00:25:00): Yes, okay.

Rob Collie (00:25:01): I want to get to that.

Adam Saxton (00:25:02): Okay.

Rob Collie (00:25:03): But just chronologically, I'm the worst about this, staying on topic.

Adam Saxton (00:25:08): Yes, we're not there yet.

Thomas LaRock (00:25:10): Okay. I'm going to get ready for it though. I'm going to bring up on Swarm-

Adam Saxton (00:25:15): Yes, there is a check in on a location.

Thomas LaRock (00:25:16): ... the Adam Saxton memorial washroom.

Adam Saxton (00:25:19): Yes. I have a screenshot of that.

Rob Collie (00:25:22): All right. You know what? Let's save this for late in the podcast. It's like the reward for people who stick around.

Adam Saxton (00:25:28): Yes.

Rob Collie (00:25:28): You know?

Adam Saxton (00:25:28): Yes. Stay tuned till the end where you hear this embarrassing moment.

Rob Collie (00:25:32): That's right. That's right. It's not like they have fast forward technology in podcasts.

Adam Saxton (00:25:38): No.

Thomas LaRock (00:25:38): There's nothing embarrassing about Jägermeister.

Adam Saxton (00:25:40): No. But no, there's... Sure.

Rob Collie (00:25:43): Okay. Look at that restraint. I saw it.

Adam Saxton (00:25:46): Yes, sure.

Rob Collie (00:25:47): I could feel that restraint.

Adam Saxton (00:25:49): Yes.

Rob Collie (00:25:49): Okay. So let's go back.

Adam Saxton (00:25:50): It's taunting me. I want to jump right in and I'm holding back.

Rob Collie (00:25:54): So you're awsaxton, you're on Twitter.

Adam Saxton (00:25:58): I'm just a guy in a cube, doing the work.

Rob Collie (00:26:01): Lower case guy in a cube, right?

Adam Saxton (00:26:04): Yeah. Just, I was literally in a cubicle, in a Las Colinas, just doing support cases.

Rob Collie (00:26:09): Yeah. I was laughing when you said, "I was supporting SQL, but not actually doing any SQL."

Adam Saxton (00:26:13): Yeah, I wasn't doing SQL.

Rob Collie (00:26:15): Yeah. Well, that's okay. At the same time I was a SQL server at MPB and wasn't doing any SQL.

Adam Saxton (00:26:18): Right, yes.

Rob Collie (00:26:19): That was just sort of what we did. SQL was this gigantic catchall branding thing. Data platform's probably more accurate. So a number of things change for you. If you fast forward to today. I don't have the chronology.

Adam Saxton (00:26:32): Yeah. I didn't give you the timeline.

Rob Collie (00:26:34): That's okay. That's what we're here for. We're here for the origin story.

Adam Saxton (00:26:37): Yes.

Rob Collie (00:26:37): That's what we want.

Adam Saxton (00:26:38): Yes.

Rob Collie (00:26:39): What was the vat that you fell into, or the radiation you were exposed to turn into your current form?

Adam Saxton (00:26:45): I would say that that was Bob Ward is what did that.

Rob Collie (00:26:49): Well, at a high level, there's really two questions. Number one, there's the transition from SQL, if you will, to such a strong presence in Power BI today.

Rob Collie (00:27:03): ... to such a strong presence in Power BI today.

Adam Saxton (00:27:04): Yep.

Rob Collie (00:27:04): So, there's a very interesting, I think, evolution in even just in the type of technology that you work with.

Adam Saxton (00:27:11): Yep.

Rob Collie (00:27:12): A lot of people, and I don't trivialize this because a lot of people struggle with a sequel to Power BI transition, even though you wouldn't necessarily expect it.

Adam Saxton (00:27:23): Well, I mean, It's a different mindset.

Rob Collie (00:27:25): It's totally a different mindset.

Adam Saxton (00:27:26): I know.

Rob Collie (00:27:26): Right. It's not surprising to me really, but it was when I first encountered it. It was news but the other one is, obviously, the transition from support to essentially a public figure.

Adam Saxton (00:27:37): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:27:38): So, there's the Guy in a Cube, Twitter handle and show and brand, and all of that. How do these things all come to pass?

Adam Saxton (00:27:46): I love working with technology, I love working with people. When I was in the SQL support group, a lot of the foundations for that evolved there. I've been very fortunate in my career path since high school on, that I've always naturally had a mentor of sorts.

Adam Saxton (00:28:02): I always hate when the forced mentor, when I was in support, they were like, "You need to mentor X, Y, and Z." I'm like, "That's not how this works." I'm like, "I love when it's more naturally, it just comes about." I've always been able to... I've been fortunate to just have that regardless of where I was, and in SQL support that person was Bob Ward.

Adam Saxton (00:28:20): He was very active in the community. I didn't even know the community existed before him. I didn't even know that was a thing. I remember when I was doing just actual, just Web development on my own that when I hit an issue, I was like, "I scour the forums." I'm trying to figure out an answer.

Adam Saxton (00:28:39): I'm trying to reverse-engineer things. I didn't even know you could call support for help. I ended up working in support where people would have those problems and call up for help. I'm like, "I didn't even know that was the thing." I'm like, "Wow, that was amazing."

Adam Saxton (00:28:53): So, I go through that, I get introduced to SQL PASS, and the SQL community at large get into Twitter. I start blogging because Bob asked me to start blogging with him and Bob adored. So, I'm giving back, I love that action. In support, we had this mantra of, they called it front of the funnel.

Adam Saxton (00:29:13): So, what can we do for case deflection? At the time I was like, "Well, blogging is great because it's a one-to-many activity. I can just get it out there. People can search for it and find it." Then, that got to a point we did in this internal training, we called them triages where we spent an hour, someone would present on a topic, "How do you troubleshoot something?" Answer some questions. At that point, I'm like, "This is weird."

Adam Saxton (00:29:39): I'm like, "This is great information to get out there." I would say 80-90% of it is not confidential. It's just like, what logs do you collect? What do you look for in the logs? Then, what do you go? What settings do you go change to address the issue? Nothing confidential.

Adam Saxton (00:29:55): So, I was sitting there one time and I was just like, "You know what? I'm going to try this YouTube thing." Because I was doing the blogging. I was doing that, once a month I would do a blog. I'm like, "What if I did a video with the blog?" I'll start this YouTube channel, but what do I call it? I could have called it Adam Saxton, but I'm like, "I want something else."

Adam Saxton (00:30:15): So, Bob would always say, we joke with him because he was the senior technical leader. He was like this principal architect, big poobah kind of person in the group. So, we'd always joke with him like, "you're up on high. We're just the folks in the trenches. This is what we do."

Adam Saxton (00:30:33): He would always laugh. He's like, "Dude, I'm just a guy in a cube." We were all in cubes at the time. He's like, "I'm just a guy in a cube." So, I was like, "Man, if I steal that?" He's like, "What do you mean?" I'm like, "Well, I'm creating this YouTube channel and I want to do a branding thing." I just want to call it Guy in a Cube because I aligned with him in his mentality of approaching that stuff. He's like, "Yeah, that's fine, whatever."

Adam Saxton (00:30:53): I remember, he and I talking, it was about a year or two ago and he's like, "I had no idea this would become this." I'm like, "I didn't, either. So, here we are." That's the philosophy I've had is I'm just doing the work. Even when I present, I'll say like, I'm a PM on the product team, I don't care about the title. The official title is Principal program manager.

Adam Saxton (00:31:16): I never put the Principal in there. Other people will for me, I don't care about that. I'm just here helping you. I don't care where I'm at in the org chart. I'm just trying to help you fix something. That's what I like to do and that's what I've always done in support. Going in, that's what made me do the blogging, that's what made me do the video now for six years. That's what we're still doing.

Rob Collie (00:31:38): I remember, Guy in a Cube used to be you.

Adam Saxton (00:31:42): It was just me.

Rob Collie (00:31:43): In a cube?

Adam Saxton (00:31:43): This was part of the problem was I didn't have any forethought. I actually thought it was going to be shut down. So, when I first started, I told my... I love gear. If you can't tell, I know folks listening to this, can't see it. But most people understand that production quality on my end is very good. I like gear, I like spending money on gear.

Adam Saxton (00:32:03): My wife knows that. When I first started doing, I'm like, "Yeah, I want to buy this, this, and this." She's like, "Let's hold on. Why don't we figure out if this is actually just going to be another six-month fad for you before we start spending a lot of money."

Adam Saxton (00:32:18): So, I was like, "Fair enough." Then, I think, was two years into it, I was like, "I don't think it's a fad, honey." She's like, "No, you're right." When I went to go get the camera I'm on now for my main videos, I mean that's a $6,000 rig and she even... She's like, "Yeah, get it." I'm like, "Okay, let's get it."

Rob Collie (00:32:35): The picture of your setup, your gear that you sent to us backstage, Luke was getting pretty jealous. Yeah.

Adam Saxton (00:32:42): He and I were talking a little bit before and he was just like, "Oh my gosh." I was showing up because I've got all my stream. This is my actual live-stream setup. So, I can just touch of a button and do a bunch of things and it's amazing.

Rob Collie (00:32:53): They didn't give Luke that level of gear when he was working at the radio station.

Adam Saxton (00:32:57): Yeah. I know because they had to worry with budgets and all that. I don't care. I just spent money on stuff. It's the Banana setup.

Rob Collie (00:33:06): Yeah.

Adam Saxton (00:33:07): It was that evolution of like that's my passions now in life have become Power BI as a technology is a passion. Then, my other passion is turned into video production and the YouTube side of it. The fact that I can marry both of those together from Guy in a Cube standpoint is just, it's a love of doing it and that's what's kept it going. It's been an incredible journey on that front.

Rob Collie (00:33:31): You did me without knowing it, you did me a huge favor. I just loved your early videos. It was so freeing to see the way you edited.

Adam Saxton (00:33:40): I had no idea what I was doing.

Rob Collie (00:33:42): But it Totally worked. There would obviously be splicing together of several takes in your videos. It was just like calm and confident the way you did it. Just no transition, no fade, nothing like that. [crosstalk 00:33:56]

Adam Saxton (00:33:56): Just hard cuts.

Rob Collie (00:33:57): Just hard jump cuts.

Adam Saxton (00:33:59): That's The YouTube way. That's the thing is I've always looked at what others are doing to understand. That's how I learned. I learned by example and by doing it. At the time, I didn't know anything about video production or YouTube or anything. I didn't know. I went and bought Camtasia. How do I even use this? It's all self-taught. Even today, I'm still learning new things. I actually have a video editor now.

Adam Saxton (00:34:28): Up until September of last year, I edited everything. Every all post-production was me. Patrick didn't do anything. All he did was turn on the camera, record it, drop it in this OneDrive folder and it just magically showed up on YouTube. That's all he ever did. People would always ask him, "What do you use to do all?" He's like, "I have no idea. Go ask Adam." Now, I've got a video editor so that has given a lot of my life back to me.

Rob Collie (00:34:54): Let's talk about that. It's like when you make a movie, the actors have no idea how good the movie's going to be.

Adam Saxton (00:35:01): Yep.

Rob Collie (00:35:02): The movies are made in the editing room.

Adam Saxton (00:35:04): Yep.

Rob Collie (00:35:05): The same is true for YouTube videos.

Adam Saxton (00:35:09): Yes.

Rob Collie (00:35:09): So, it is hard to outsource the editing of your videos.

Adam Saxton (00:35:17): It was like letting go of my baby. I like video editing. I do a weekly Roundup on Mondays. I'm still editing those because it's a really fast turnaround, but the video editors editing the main technical videos. I remember, Patrick first saw it and he's like, "Adam, you have to stop editing my videos." I'm like, "Yes, I agree. That's why we're doing this." I'm like, "Because they're better at what they're doing."

Rob Collie (00:35:40): But it's still a challenge there. In that video editor, you find someone who's good at editing video, they don't come from your subject matter.

Adam Saxton (00:35:49): Nope.

Rob Collie (00:35:49): They don't necessarily have the same, I don't know, sort of tone in their fingers that you would... How do you sort of maintain the direction of the content? There's some edits you can make that actually will result in something that's misleading on a technical basis.

Adam Saxton (00:36:05): Yes.

Rob Collie (00:36:05): Right?

Adam Saxton (00:36:05): Yep.

Rob Collie (00:36:05): Even though it was a good video edit, how do you quality-control for that? How do you train and pass that kind of tribal knowledge off?

Adam Saxton (00:36:13): I will tell you that. So, the video editor, it's actually a team of three people. So, I never know which one of that three people is actually editing the video. It's coming from their company. I will tell you that I've given little to no direction to them on any of it. We'll do an edit pass, so they'll put it up on Frame.io and I look over and I'm like, "Yep, good to go. No edits needed." There was one video, where it was super in the weeds. I think it was around Power BI embedded. So, it was like, they needed some help on that.

Rob Collie (00:36:47): Yeah.

Adam Saxton (00:36:48): But I've been very fortunate that they are very good at what they do. I think some of it also comes to the way Patrick and I go through the content and the way we lead through it, that it's fairly obvious where we're going.

Adam Saxton (00:37:02): I think some of that is just the style that we've had, we try and make it as simple as possible. By doing that, even if you don't know anything about it, you kind of understand the context of where we're at and what we're doing. I think that's helped them from an edit perspective as well.

Rob Collie (00:37:19): We're living that experience right now with the podcast, we really do a good job with it. I say we, I mean, Luke.

Adam Saxton (00:37:24): Yes.

Rob Collie (00:37:25): Outsourcing, post-production, it's easy to say.

Adam Saxton (00:37:29): It's always interesting too. One thing I do miss also as editing Patrick's videos, he will comment on the videos too. He's like, "Oh my gosh, Adam. I'm so sorry, man. I totally... Just cut. Cut all this out." I'm like, "No, I'm going to cut this out." I'm like, "Yes. Obviously, you screwed that up."

Adam Saxton (00:37:48): So, he'll add color to some of the things he's doing and it's great. He did this one thing and the first video that our video editor did, Patrick did this thing subconsciously, where he likes to use a phrase like, "Look, this is going to show you your ugly baby. You've got an ugly baby.

Adam Saxton (00:38:04): You're not admitting it and we're going to show it to you." So, he did this thing. He's like, "Look doing this action is just going to give you a nice-looking baby." She put this whole Lego, little baby wrap over his arms. It was like, "Oh my gosh, that is so good." That was awesome. But he'll do those things, or he's a lot more spontaneous than I am.

Rob Collie (00:38:26): I think, you're pretty spontaneous.

Adam Saxton (00:38:29): When I brought him on though, I said, "Look, Patrick, we're both technical." He's very smart. But I said, "Look, I'm bringing you on for the entertainment. So, I'm more of the corporate kind of feel and you're the entertainer. We balance each other."

Adam Saxton (00:38:42): That's why it's stuff that we present, it's always better when we do it together than if we do it separate because he's chaos and I'm order. He's funny and I'm more of the like, "Let's just get down to business." I've learned some things from him. He learns from me. It's a very good relationship on that front.

Rob Collie (00:39:00): Well, let's continue the evolution. So, you started the YouTube channel while you were still officially in support.

Adam Saxton (00:39:07): December, 2014.

Rob Collie (00:39:09): Okay. Now, it's quote-unquote, just an unpaid side gig habit...

Adam Saxton (00:39:15): Was a hobby.

Rob Collie (00:39:16): Hobby.

Adam Saxton (00:39:17): Labor of love.

Rob Collie (00:39:17): Right. Okay. At some point along the way, it becomes a part of your official... I don't even know. It's such an untraditional arrangement.

Adam Saxton (00:39:27): It's never been part of my day job. It's never been.

Rob Collie (00:39:30): Okay. Your job changed at Microsoft at some point.

Adam Saxton (00:39:35): Yes.

Rob Collie (00:39:35): I don't know actually the details of the relationship of Guy in a Cube to Microsoft.

Adam Saxton (00:39:41): Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Rob Collie (00:39:42): What can you tell us about all of that? It's really kind of cool.

Adam Saxton (00:39:46): Yep.

Rob Collie (00:39:46): Not what I would expect.

Adam Saxton (00:39:47): So, this is one of those things where I tell people, where this was something I never asked permission, I just started doing it. I'm like, "Look, I've got a passion. I see a need and an opportunity." From the Microsoft side, I've always looked at things. I'm like, "Look, I always have had the flexibility to do the right thing as it aligns to the business."

Adam Saxton (00:40:08): Because that's what they care about is we need to make sure we're aligning to our core business priorities and what we're doing. As long as everything is met there, we have a ton of flexibility of what we can do, whether it's taking the initiative to do certain things and trying to help. So, I saw this as it's an opportunity. I'm not going to ask for permission. I'm just going to start doing the being mindful of the business. So, I'm not slamming Microsoft. I'm not.

Adam Saxton (00:40:34): I'm being very thoughtful and just trying to help people. As part of that, I remember, right when I started doing the Guy in a Cube stuff, nobody knew who I was, from that standpoint. I already had a lot of relationships on the product team, just from the support interactions that I've had. I was on-site in Redmond with the engineering teams for a week.

Adam Saxton (00:40:58): This was right when James Phillips came in, who's now the president of Business Applications Group, who owns Power Platform and Dynamics at the time though, he was brought on for Power BI. So, I just set up a one-on-one with him. I was like, "Hey, I'm in support. I want to make sure we understand the relationship and how in support can we help you from an engineering side? This Power BI thing is just going to be rolling out.

Adam Saxton (00:41:22): We want to make sure that we're ramped up to be able to support this." Then, I also mentioned, I was like, "By the way, I've also started this video and I'm doing blogging, this Guy in a Cube thing, and I'm doing technical videos to help people out." He's like, "I love it. Sounds amazing. Keep doing it." I always thought marketing was going to shut me down because I've always done my own thing. I'm not necessarily aligning to the core messaging that they want to do, but no, even the marketing folks are telling me, they love it. It's great.

Adam Saxton (00:41:51): I'm just promoting the product and helping people adopt it and whatnot. That went on and that's how I kind of became that Power BI guy. No one in support wanted to touch it because, in support, it's always about what are the call volumes that are coming in. What are we getting calls on, that's where we're going to go focus. I saw this Power BI thing. I'm like, "This is where the product team is going. This is the direction nobody's paying attention to it." Nobody is paying attention to it because we're getting no calls.

Adam Saxton (00:42:23): This was in the original Power BI for Office 365 before what it is today. So, I said, "Look, I'm going to be that guy." So, I just started digging into it. I started meeting with the engineering teams. I'm like, "Okay, where are the specs for this? How does this actually work? What's the flow? How are these things connected?" I just started playing with it.

Adam Saxton (00:42:41): Then, I started doing videos on it and then we started getting calls, but it was such a low volume that they routed all of those calls just to me, because it was seriously, maybe five calls a week. It was nothing. So, the videos and blogs I was doing were basically the summaries of the support calls that I was getting. This was the scenario and this is how we fixed this. This is how this works.

Rob Collie (00:43:03): This is so parallel to me to what I did with my blog around PowerPivot. It was like it was in this place that kind of no one cared about.

Adam Saxton (00:43:13): Yep.

Rob Collie (00:43:14): The existing Analysis Services folks in the community...

Adam Saxton (00:43:18): I was there in support when all of that came out.

Rob Collie (00:43:20): Mostly, Analysis Services crew in the community had no interest in this thing that was embedded in Excel.

Adam Saxton (00:43:27): No, that was like, "This is just a cute little thing they're playing around with. It's never going to make it."

Rob Collie (00:43:31): I had moved to the Mid West and so I needed a new job. So, I just started blogging about it. Most of my blog posts for the first three years were just things that I was doing with PowerPivot in my day job, problems that I've had to solve and overcome, and all of that. Like you, I didn't really know or expect it to turn into what it...

Adam Saxton (00:43:55): I had no forethought on where this was going. I was like, "It's just me. I'm toying around. Maybe, at some point, I'll stop it. I don't know."

Rob Collie (00:44:02): I started the blog primarily as just like a digital resume.

Adam Saxton (00:44:05): See, I wasn't even thinking about that, either. Because I was like, "I'm in support. I'm not going anywhere." All of my thought and focus on that was like, "I'm just helping customers." That's all I was doing. I didn't really think about any other aspect of it.

Adam Saxton (00:44:17): I was just like, "Look, I just want to give back to the community." Seriously, that was all I thought about. I should have thought more about it at the time and I didn't. Looking back, I was like, "I made a lot of mistakes."

Rob Collie (00:44:28): Yeah. You wouldn't, if you just planned it out a little better, you wouldn't be the massive failure that you are today.

Adam Saxton (00:44:33): Right. Exactly.

Rob Collie (00:44:35): Yeah. You're really...

Adam Saxton (00:44:36): I'm glad you recognized that.

Rob Collie (00:44:37): Yeah. You're really a disappointment to all of us, Adam. That's why we had you on the show, really.

Adam Saxton (00:44:41): Yes.

Rob Collie (00:44:42): You know?

Adam Saxton (00:44:43): Yes. You just wanted to just bash me in and give me the reckoning that is needed.

Rob Collie (00:44:49): You finally met your match.

Adam Saxton (00:44:51): Yes. This is the intervention call, right? That's what this is.

Rob Collie (00:44:56): I don't know. We're pretty bad at that.

Thomas LaRock (00:45:00): So, I want to ask something about Guy in the Cube.

Adam Saxton (00:45:03): Guy in a Cube, not the Cube.

Thomas LaRock (00:45:05): The comment that you made was, it's not part of your day job.

Adam Saxton (00:45:08): Yep.

Thomas LaRock (00:45:09): So, do you do all the recording in your off hours then?

Adam Saxton (00:45:14): Yes. Honestly, in my day job, I'm always busy doing the day job. I don't have time for doing the Guy in a Cube stuff.

Thomas LaRock (00:45:20): My question was going to be more about like, you have to have some level of support at Microsoft and you did mention that the marketing team...

Adam Saxton (00:45:27): I mean, they didn't. They loved me doing it, but they didn't.

Thomas LaRock (00:45:29): That's right.

Adam Saxton (00:45:30): Yeah. They didn't stop me.

Thomas LaRock (00:45:30): No. That's what I'm saying is that they didn't stop you. You have some level of support and encouragement from your employer for what you [crosstalk 00:45:37].

Adam Saxton (00:45:37): That's always been there.

Thomas LaRock (00:45:37): Yeah.

Adam Saxton (00:45:37): Yes. That's always been. Every manager I've had and the different teams that I've been on... Once I left support, part of the thing that I had and I had this in my mind and when I left support, I was still... Maybe, not even 10,000 subscribers yet when that happened. But even at that point, I knew that I was the... I've told every manager since then I was like, "Look, I'm going, to be honest with you the day that you tell me to quit YouTube or stop it is the day I leave Microsoft."

Adam Saxton (00:46:07): I was like, "I'm just going to say that, right now." So, I'm like, "Let's come to an agreement. Let's come to an understanding. But if you are against that, then..." That's actually part of the reason why I left support was because they were starting to say, they're like, "Look, we see everything you're doing on certain things. We really want your community involvement."

Adam Saxton (00:46:22): Because I was doing other things outside of Guy in a Cube, but I was just really focused on community and they were starting to put the cramp down saying, I shouldn't do the Guy in a Cube stuff. I'm like, "Well, that has nothing to do with my day job stuff. I'm still doing." They're like, "Yes, but we don't want you to focus that much on, we only want you to do 10% of community engagement." I'm like, "Well, I want to do 100%. Maybe, I need to go find a different gig."

Adam Saxton (00:46:46): So, I did, but every manager I've had... So, when I left support, I went to the Power BI documentation team because it was content-related. I felt like that was more in line from then support because video and that stuff is content. So, I'm like, "This kind of aligns." But even then, they were like... Everyone on the engineering team, the marketing teams, and then my managers on the product side, I've always been very supportive of the Guy in a Cube.

Adam Saxton (00:47:11): They want that to still happen. When I was brought on the Power BI CAT team, obviously folks there knew I had my technical acumen was there. My manager was very upfront and he's like, "Look, he's like, I want the Guy in a Cube. This is like the CAT team is the A-team of people working on the Power BI product. I want Guy in a Cube as part of this." I'm like, "Okay. Let's do it."

Rob Collie (00:47:34): I imagine That somewhere back in the hallways of Redmond and the marketing department, there was the equivalent of the... Should we let him into the Janitor's Closet kind of conversation?

Rob Collie (00:47:43): There was someone saying, "No, this guy's out there sort of doing marketing on our behalf. He's rogue. We need to reign him in." Someone said, "No, let him into the closet, give him the access." You got support, not support, or the lack of opposition.

Adam Saxton (00:47:59): Yes.

Rob Collie (00:48:00): Knowing Microsoft, there was definitely a conversation at some point.

Adam Saxton (00:48:04): At this point of where I'm at now, I've actually heard some things about conversations that have happened and for different reasons but I know that stuff about that has happened. I don't necessarily know the details of it, but...

Rob Collie (00:48:18): But now it's too late. There's no way they can go back. You're like, "What do you know, who I am?"

Adam Saxton (00:48:26): Yeah. No, I don't.

Rob Collie (00:48:26): You don't seem like that kind of guy.

Adam Saxton (00:48:28): No, I'm not. I remember, Amir Netz, who's the CTO for Power BI, we were at a conference one time, just having dinner. There was a bunch of us there and he's just like, "Wow, you became the face of Power BI." He's like, "How'd you do that?" I'm like, "one video at a time for six years." I'm like, "I'm just there." I was there before anyone else.

Rob Collie (00:48:52): Yeah.

Adam Saxton (00:48:53): It's just consistency. It's a lot of hard work. This is not easy.

Rob Collie (00:48:58): Yeah, the grind.

Adam Saxton (00:48:59): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:49:00): I was two blog posts a week. You've made fun of how long my blog posts are in the past and they're encyclopedias. That's part of the reason why I don't do them anymore is because that just...

Adam Saxton (00:49:08): A lot of work.

Rob Collie (00:49:10): There's too many other things competing for my time. Plus honestly, there's so many people even at our company, who are so much better at these tools than I ever was, I sort of feel like I had my run. I want to do something different now.

Adam Saxton (00:49:25): I could see from your perspective, letting other people shine, where their strong suits are, and let them help them build up what you're working on and building.

Rob Collie (00:49:34): I go to my own company's people, my own team with DAX questions.

Adam Saxton (00:49:39): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:49:41): It's like, "Why didn't you write a book on that?" "Well, yeah."

Adam Saxton (00:49:45): Yeah. I did.

Rob Collie (00:49:46): But it turns out you're still a lot better.

Adam Saxton (00:49:47): I'm old, so.

Rob Collie (00:49:50): Yeah.

Adam Saxton (00:49:52): There's that.

Rob Collie (00:49:52): There's that too. Yeah. Okay. That's great. I didn't know any of that backstory and I've been really, keenly interested in it for a long time. So, you described Patrick as your business partner.

Adam Saxton (00:50:05): Yep. He's my second wife. I described him that way as well.

Rob Collie (00:50:08): Okay. So, business partner in Guy in a Cube?

Adam Saxton (00:50:11): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:50:12): This is obvious but Microsoft doesn't own Guy in a Cube. It's not a Microsoft thing.

Adam Saxton (00:50:18): That's correct.

Rob Collie (00:50:18): So, you've got your own LLC or whatever.

Adam Saxton (00:50:22): I do now. Yeah. I didn't, originally.

Rob Collie (00:50:23): Yeah. That's fascinating. So, you work two jobs.

Adam Saxton (00:50:27): Yes.

Rob Collie (00:50:28): I think a lot of people would probably assume looking in from the outside that Guy in a Cube is part of your Microsoft duties.

Adam Saxton (00:50:35): Well, I've had people comment on things, especially, when I first started doing it. There was one video I did in 2015 where I actually had some friends of mine, they had some camera gear and they helped me film something.

Adam Saxton (00:50:47): I actually did that video on the Power BI YouTube channel, because they had asked me to... At the time, I wasn't monetizing anything. I was so small. I was just helping out. The comment on that video was, "Wow, Microsoft really stepped up their production quality." I'm like, "Yeah. No, they didn't. That was me."

Rob Collie (00:51:05): All right. Let's talk about your day job then.

Adam Saxton (00:51:08): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:51:09): What does that look like?

Adam Saxton (00:51:10): So, the way I describe is the Power BI CAT team or the customer advisory team or something... I actually don't even remember what CAT stands for anymore because we just always call it CAT and it's customer advisory team or something like that. The way I describe this to people, because when we come in and they say, "We're part of the CAT team." They're like, "I have no idea what that is."

Adam Saxton (00:51:29): That's why I just don't even say it. I'm like, "We're a team of elite ninjas that drop in and help unblock you to gain adoption with Power BI." They're like, "Well, that makes sense." Our team deals with the largest customers, enterprise customers working with Power BI. Those, that are trying to push the limits and push the product, it's part of the product team.

Adam Saxton (00:51:47): It's the voice of the customer for the engineering teams. We're working with it... It's honestly amazing, the level of amount of data that some of our customers are working with. So, I joke sometimes because there's people that will complain and say, "Well, I'm doing 300 million rows and Power BI just can't handle it."

Adam Saxton (00:52:10): I'm like, "That's cute. That's itty-bitty data." So, I'm like, "I'm working with a customer, where they have a 100% imported into a tabular model of 1.5 billion rows inside a Power BI and that thing's running like a champ."

Rob Collie (00:52:22): Yeah.

Adam Saxton (00:52:22): So, 300 million rows. I'm like, " Probably, got a bad data model."

Rob Collie (00:52:33): Completely.

Adam Saxton (00:52:33): Yes.

Rob Collie (00:52:33): Completely.

Adam Saxton (00:52:34): Yes. That's, honestly. It's a broken record. That's what Patrick's and my day job. It was just like, you've got people coming in and saying, "I want to go to a P4 or P5 because I need more memory and space." I'm like, "No you don't. Give me 30 minutes and DAX Studio, and Tabular Editor. I'll give you 9-10 recommendations to optimize your model."

Rob Collie (00:52:53): Boy, I bet, you see a lot of data models, quote-unquote, that are just one wide table.

Adam Saxton (00:52:59): Yes. It's amazing. We had our Phil Seamark ended up joining our team. He was an MVP. I remember, a month or two after he joined the team, he's like, "Wow, I just had this in my head. I mean, these are the largest enterprise customers in the world.

Adam Saxton (00:53:14): This is Fortune 500. These are all companies that everybody knows the name of these companies. I just imagine, they've got these rock-solid teams that are building this stuff and it's really going to push my... They're doing some really wonky things." I'm like, "One giant table with 300 columns." I'm like, "What are you doing?"

Rob Collie (00:53:34): Well, this is where that sequel to Power BI transition really lands with both feet.

Adam Saxton (00:53:39): Well, I'd say Excel to Power BI as well.

Rob Collie (00:53:42): Well, but I mean, IT doesn't even understand Excel. The average IT professional can't write a VLOOKUP.

Adam Saxton (00:53:51): In fairness, I can't write a VLOOKUP, either.

Rob Collie (00:53:53): You never needed to. It's okay. We forgive you.

Adam Saxton (00:53:55): Yes.

Rob Collie (00:53:56): True story. I'll hide the names.

Adam Saxton (00:53:58): Protect the innocent.

Rob Collie (00:53:59): Well, some of the people in this story are not...

Rob Collie (00:54:03): Some of the people in this story are not innocent. So many people in this story are committing a sin.

Adam Saxton (00:54:08): Data blasphemy.

Rob Collie (00:54:09): Yeah. Well also just like an interpersonal bad human sin in my opinion, but we were a subcontractor to another contractor. Actually, there was a three level contract job. We don't usually do this kind of thing at all.

Adam Saxton (00:54:22): Like layers of wrongness.

Rob Collie (00:54:23): Layers of wrongness already. At one of the world's largest energy firms. We'll keep it like that. And there were different legs of this project. We were doing part of one part of it but then there was a sibling part that was like one universe over next to us. And they had brought in one of the big four accounting and consulting firms to do that part of it.

Rob Collie (00:54:48): Now they were both power BI tabular. Right, all that kind of stuff. And you know, the 300 million rows, all that kind of stuff. Like we were loading just you know how it goes just insane amounts of data. Like every single transaction that ever like happened in the history of this company forever.

Adam Saxton (00:55:02): And I need all of this.

Rob Collie (00:55:03): And we were just crunching, just absolutely destroying it. You know, it was like, "oh, you want a 10 year trend"? no problem. It's just like we had it all. So in the meantime, our sibling, over in that other parallel universe, we kept hearing these rumors, like they're struggling to get one month of data loaded. And we go because you know, we're friendly people. Can we take a look? We can help.

Rob Collie (00:55:26): And we got told, no, you are not allowed access to that closet. Right. We said, listen, we have the Big Four over there, and you know what else? The Big Four, that company, they sent their number one, Microsoft power BI expert to do this.

Adam Saxton (00:55:44): All right.

Rob Collie (00:55:45): And we go, oh, well then that must be something really complicated going on over there. We believe them. We're so naive. And then another two months goes by and they still can't get it, it's just a total failure. And so after hours, when like no one was looking, someone said, "Hey, can you come over and take a look?" We opened it up. Yep. One big wide table. And we're slapping our forehead, okay, this is how much dishonesty is running around in the world. And you know, the amount of money being charged for that number one, Ms. Power. it's [crosstalk 00:56:18].

Adam Saxton (00:56:18): That and it's one of the Big Four. I'm like there's money there.

Rob Collie (00:56:21): It was fraud. They were committing... It should be charged with a crime.

Thomas LaRock (00:56:27): Hold on. Just remember this. When you graduate medical school, right. They're going to call you a doctor, but not every doctor graduates top of the class. So that company could legitimately be saying, this is my number one power BI guy, Microsoft. That doesn't mean he's top of the class.

Adam Saxton (00:56:45): Yes. That's a fair statement.

Rob Collie (00:56:47): But it's top of the class for them.

Thomas LaRock (00:56:50): That's the best they could find. You know, that there's a dearth of people that can do proper data analysis. That was the best that they had.

Rob Collie (00:57:00): I will tell you now, one of the struggles we have when we're getting into some of these engagements, I will be completely honest with you that there's only a handful of people that really understand how to do it. And they don't work at these companies.

Thomas LaRock (00:57:13): Right. So I was surprised Rob, that you didn't know that guy. Because when they said, Hey here's you is our number one guy. He works at power BI I'm like you probably there's what a dozen of you in the world, you should have known exactly who that guy was. As soon as you didn't know him, you, you should have just questioned and go. Never heard of him.

Rob Collie (00:57:29): Let Me let you guys in on a little secret.

Adam Saxton (00:57:30): You don't Know everyone?

Rob Collie (00:57:32): Well, I don't know everyone, but the world is every day right now, manufacturing, just legions of people who are really, really good at this. And they're all on the business side. And they're all well, not all but overwhelmingly unknown and underappreciated.

Adam Saxton (00:57:53): Yep. I would Agree with that.

Rob Collie (00:57:54): They're not going to find their way into that room where they had the Big Four best power BI expert deployed because it's just like a different career path. It's entirely too authentic essentially, to find yourself in that situation, I'll be completely fine. This is part of our business model. I believe this. I mean in a way that I bet my career on it. This is the future. It's the people who are good at business. Good at communicating. If, they come from a tech background. Great. But they also have to have this other stuff. It's this hybrid that we're always talking about on this show. I think that most IT organizations are really struggling to embrace this fact, that their best data modelers, their best BI people are that unknown man or woman hiding in the finance department. It's not the CFO. It's not even the director. Right? It's this hidden diamond in the rough, this gem. And they're everywhere. Now

Adam Saxton (00:58:56): Working with one of my customers, there is that person, they work in finance and they came out of that world and he understands like all the finance aspects of stuff from the business side and he applies and he's an amazing data modeler. He's one of the best. And I've even said everyone needs that person in their company. We need clones of that person cause he's making amazing things. You and it's just incredible. And we do on the power BI CAT team, there's a program called the power BI enterprise voice, where we bring in direct people from those enterprise customers. And they have direct communication with feedback with the engineering teams. And one of the things we try and do is get someone from the business persona and then someone from the technical persona to try and get both represented in the program.

Adam Saxton (00:59:44): And I'll be honest, like the technical folks are good and I enjoy working with them. But the business folks, we seem to get more and or different types of feedback come from the business folks that tend to be more actionable than the technical cause the technical, we get on the tech side, we just get siloed in on this problem or this specific space instead of understanding the whole picture of that business side, along with it and how that would impact. And so having those business folks as part of that discussion is very important.

Rob Collie (01:00:13): Well, I'm glad that's also showing up on your radar. I think that as an outsider now, I think that Microsoft tends to miss this in my conversations with Redmond. It's very, very often about what it takes to convince a CIO, to commit to power BI as a platform. I see that a lot. And then I love that you are more engaged on the adoption side. What happens after you make the sale?

Adam Saxton (01:00:43): Well, I mean we're still engaged. So, where there as part of the adoption, but then it's an ongoing discussion of, I mean, I've been working with companies that have been using power BI for years, but it's still about adoption, right? It's about growth. It's about how else can we help you within the business? You know, help us scale it up. All of that. The other thing I would say is one thing I, I would agree in the beginning of my Microsoft career you're right. It was all about, we got to convince the CIO or the CMO or the CDO, like some C level has got to make that decision. Whereas now I've seen that conversation shift more to we need to find the influencer and it doesn't necessarily have to be the C level. Maybe it's a director level type person. Some of that has enough influence and has those connections in the business to help us be that sponsor and to push that. And we do have evidence that absolutely helps from an adoption perspective. And typically I'll be honest. I'll lot of times that person's in finance.

Rob Collie (01:01:40): Yes that's our experience as well.

Adam Saxton (01:01:43): If you Can find that person, sometimes we're not as successful there, but sometimes we are. Or sometimes that person that's in that influence role is not necessarily pro Microsoft, which is hard. And sometimes that's forced upon them. It's just interesting to see it's definitely moved away from the C level. Although those discussions do happen, especially at certain companies, but it's more about the influencer who can actually influence that decision from a business side of it. That's how we're going to grow adoption and actually get past the self-service grassroots stuff into real, the mix of the service and the IT central type of implementation.

Thomas LaRock (01:02:23): I was going to ask you, Adam, you used to travel how much? 50% or?

Adam Saxton (01:02:30): I always like to say it was 25%, but I think it was closer to 50% at certain points there were peaks and valleys, but yeah.

Rob Collie (01:02:37): Yeah, Same.

Adam Saxton (01:02:37): That was all self inflicted by the way. That was just because I wanted to go to conferences and speak and...

Thomas LaRock (01:02:42): Sure. Yeah. But I remember specifically the time that you were trying to get home to Houston and it was flooding. Right. And I've been there as well where I've been on the road and something's happening at home.

Adam Saxton (01:02:59): Yeah. It was Hurricane Harvey.

Thomas LaRock (01:03:00): Yeah. And usually for me, it's like a snowstorm and my family makes the best they can when I'm not here to clear it all the way. But I've had incidents and where I couldn't get home and I think it was the same for you. And I thought you might want... I think there are people out there that experience, that same thing where you're on the road. It's self-inflicted as you said, it's something you're doing that you love, you enjoy. And at the same time, there's something just weighing on you. You're like I need to get home.

Adam Saxton (01:03:31): Oh. And I was constantly talking to my wife, getting status, looking at the weather, looking at the news. And I was coming from Israel and there was a stop in Newark, New Jersey and then from Newark to Houston. And when I got to Newark and I'm looking, I'm like, there's no way we're going to take off because it's the storm's going to be right over Houston at the time that we're supposed to land. We took off and I'm, constantly in contact with my wife saying like, look, I'm, going to try, make sure you're safe, what do you need. Thankfully, her parents were about an hour and a half away. She wasn't necessarily alone, but yes it was, nerve-wracking absolutely a hundred percent just worried about them. And I there's nothing. Absolutely nothing I can do. cause I'm not there.

Thomas LaRock (01:04:18): Yes, exactly you're sitting there. There's nothing more that I can do. There's nothing I can lift. There's nothing, right. It's just this emotionally draining experience. And for those of us that hit the road from time to time, I don't think people understand that enough. It's not just being away. There's also all sorts of things. You know, I've missed soccer games and things like that. But the times I wasn't able to come home and I get home and they're telling me, "It was an ice storm and we had no power and you could just hear that the branches of the trees just breaking and creaking all night and we couldn't sleep." And I'm like, okay, this... So you, you have to have that balance between everything you're doing.

Adam Saxton (01:05:07): Well and everything I've done too. it's conversation with my wife as well, understanding the family and making sure we're not impacting anything there and the balance of work, play and family.

Thomas LaRock (01:05:20): Now the play part, see everybody thinks my kids are oh, you're going to all these places. And it's all happy, fun play time.

Adam Saxton (01:05:30): Yeah. It's just a party. It's just always a party.

Thomas LaRock (01:05:32): And it's not, it really isn't except for the times where it is. so my first trip to Damastown, I was the president of pass and I was asked to go over to attend their 10th anniversary celebration. And they were holding this sequel conference in Damastown. Stop. Yes. And it's easy to get there. You're fly to Frankfurt.

Adam Saxton (01:05:54): Frankfurt, the airport that is the bane of my existence.

Thomas LaRock (01:05:59): I don't mind Frankfurt.

Adam Saxton (01:06:00): Oh, I had an experience there. So [inaudible 01:06:02]

Thomas LaRock (01:06:02): I [inaudible 01:06:03] mine.

Adam Saxton (01:06:04): Oh, okay. I've never been to that one.

Thomas LaRock (01:06:07): I love the event. It's probably my favorite event of the year. And I can't go this year and that's really, it's sad. The thing about the Germans and this is mostly for Rob's benefit. So they, they threw this 10th anniversary party my first year and it was fabulous. It was, it was a lot of fun. They had a lot of fun putting it together and it was a nice environment to be in. It was to explain it for Rob. It was really like being with another extended family. And what's weird for me is all these people kind of knew me. They'd come up to me. They'd thanked me for my work with past. And I'm like, I really have no idea who you are. This is my first trip to Germany. Who are you? So at some point that first night somebody there, they're German. So there's a meeting of two cultures happening here. First is the love of Jägermeister for the SQL community at that point in time. And I'm in the home of Jägermeister right? Jägermeister comes from a little town, not [crosstalk 01:07:10].

Adam Saxton (01:07:09): Going through the Frankfurt airport and there's just massive displays in the [inaudible 01:07:14]

Thomas LaRock (01:07:14): So they bring out two handles of Jägermeister and it's special. Jägermeister, because it comes from the town and somebody brought it in specifically for their birthday celebration. And so we finished those bottles and there were a lot of people. It wasn't just like, [crosstalk 01:07:29] yeah,

Adam Saxton (01:07:29): It's not just six men in a corner finishing two bottles.

Thomas LaRock (01:07:32): Right, they were a lot anyway.

Adam Saxton (01:07:34): And these bottles are not small bottles.

Thomas LaRock (01:07:36): They're handles. That's a 1.75. It's big. I get to go back the following year and they're like, okay, next thing I know there's two bottles of Jägermeister. I'm like, are we doing this again?

Adam Saxton (01:07:47): I have very similar experience.

Thomas LaRock (01:07:49): Are we doing this again? I thought that was just for your birthday. They're like, no, no, So Adam shows up at SQL conference one year and [crosstalk 01:08:01].

Adam Saxton (01:08:01): So naive, and naive Little Adam

Thomas LaRock (01:08:05): We're at their basically attendee event. They have some food, they have some drinks and we grab some seats and I forget how many, maybe a dozen of us were just hanging out, getting caught up for a lot of us, talking with people from all over the world. Right. But at some point during the night out comes those two bottles and they always find me. They're like Mr. Jägermeister. They bring the bottles straight to me. And of course Adam's right next to me.

Adam Saxton (01:08:34): You were the second half of that. That was the second bottle I had parked. I was already halfway gone by the time I got to you. Okay. So there's a whole other part of it before I even got to you.

Thomas LaRock (01:08:44): So the play part. So the incident, I don't want to get into too many details, but I have a feeling

Adam Saxton (01:08:50): I'll get into the details.

Thomas LaRock (01:08:51): Okay. Yeah. well,

Adam Saxton (01:08:52): Some of the details,

Thomas LaRock (01:08:53): Right, some of the details because I don't think you remember.

Adam Saxton (01:08:56): This is one of the few moments in my life where I... So people have told me. So like the whole, the check-in thing

Thomas LaRock (01:09:03): On swarm. Yes.

Adam Saxton (01:09:04): I don't remember that part.

Thomas LaRock (01:09:05): No. Well we, we created the Adam Saxton Memorial washroom in your honor. Specifically because of events that night.

Adam Saxton (01:09:13): Oh no, I got that part. So Karen Lopez was with us as well. Yes. And so I distinctly remember waking up the next morning going, I just remember there was something about level nine. Karen was talking to me about something level nine. I don't know if that was real. I had to go look. It was like some NASA like level nine tours at the Houston facility.

Thomas LaRock (01:09:36): Right.

Adam Saxton (01:09:36): And I had to look that up because I was like, was that real? Or am I just imagining that? Because, we had this whole conversation about it. I'm like, oh that was real. All right. I'm good. I'm right.

Thomas LaRock (01:09:45): The lesson. I always try to tell, especially when that first time visitors, the secret conference is pace yourself because the Jägermeister is coming.

Adam Saxton (01:09:53): Remember. So like the shots that I got, these were not small shots. It's not like a little shot glass. This was like a big cup. And it's like got a good, healthy portion inside of it. And I think I had nine of those out of two separate bottles.

Thomas LaRock (01:10:06): So, and the thing about Jägermeister is that it really is something you can have a lot more of than you need. I really enjoyed the event. Not just for the Jägermeister, but the camaraderie. Yes. The, the feeling of closeness with all those people that I've met for. And I've gone for six or seven years now. But I do remember, so Adam has not returned since.

Adam Saxton (01:10:27): No I had two. I went the year after that as well.

Thomas LaRock (01:10:30): Did you?

Adam Saxton (01:10:30): Yes I did. I don't remember. [crosstalk 01:10:33]

Rob Collie (01:10:34): Don't don't let the truth get in the way of a good story.

Thomas LaRock (01:10:36): No, no, no. Wait didn't you guys. I think now remember the second year. Didn't you do the power BI hour?

Adam Saxton (01:10:43): Yes.

Thomas LaRock (01:10:43): Did you do that both years or the second years?

Adam Saxton (01:10:45): No. So the first year Casper did it, I was on the sidelines. I was recording it. Then the second year, then they moved it to the big auditorium and I was part of that,

Thomas LaRock (01:10:54): Which is awesome. So these guys and didn't you do like a presentation on beer?

Adam Saxton (01:10:58): No, [crosstalk 01:10:59] what I did there. I could not do in the U.S. Because it involved. I believe it involved Trump at the time. So I wasn't brave enough to do that in the U.S.

Thomas LaRock (01:11:09): So I Love the power BI hour that they do.

Adam Saxton (01:11:14): Oh the power hour. Yeah.

Thomas LaRock (01:11:15): Power hour. Is that done anywhere else or is that just a German [inaudible 01:11:19]

Adam Saxton (01:11:19): No, no, no, no. So that, actually has roots outside of that event. So it was done at past summit. It was done at a bunch of different, I think it was done at TechHead. It was done at TechReady inside of Microsoft. It's been done at Pass. We did one. The last one we did at the Atlanta Business Application Summit, Matthew Roach. And I kind of organized that. We were able to get 1300 people in that room. Yeah. For the power hour. It has a following.

Thomas LaRock (01:11:44): Yeah. Yeah. Those things are great.

Adam Saxton (01:11:46): It's amazing.

Thomas LaRock (01:11:46): And you guys pick a topic.

Adam Saxton (01:11:48): Preface it with you are not going to learn anything actionable out of this, but we're going to have fun with the technology and do things that you never thought about doing and.

Thomas LaRock (01:11:58): No it's brilliant. It really is.

Adam Saxton (01:12:00): But I will say the Germans at the sequel conference, it's a whole other level. Like it is not like in the U.S. It's fairly politically correct? I would say. And in Germany. No, no.

Thomas LaRock (01:12:10): They're passing out beers.

Adam Saxton (01:12:13): Passing out beers isn't the thing. But I remember the first year I went, one of them did, like, it was a whole skit on like the Ashley Madison database. And I was like, whoa. okay, here we go.

Thomas LaRock (01:12:23): I've seen that one too.

Adam Saxton (01:12:24): Yep. So it was, it was great.

Rob Collie (01:12:27): Adam, on a previous podcast, he told the story of my parallel story to that. It was tequila. It was Southern California. And the one part of your story that I kind of raised an eyebrow, was that you're like, I'm not sure that I really remember most much of the much of the evening. There're parts of it that are gone. But then, but you happen to know how many shots you had.

Adam Saxton (01:12:46): Oh, I know exactly how many shots.

Rob Collie (01:12:48): But no, no you do not.

Adam Saxton (01:12:54): Fair, point.

Rob Collie (01:12:54): That is exactly what I was getting at is that the morning after my incident, I woke up and told people the straight face, but guys, I only had two of those margaritas and they looked at each other like, no, oh my God, [crosstalk 01:13:07] he's thing.

Adam Saxton (01:13:08): That's the thing thing I'll add to that. And this goes back to the whole community thing and family. And some people always ask like, oh man, that's really dangerous. And I do know that there are, you do have to be mindful about that. Especially just be safe in what you're doing. And I was, I was surrounded with people I trust implicitly and I knew so like Casper de young was right there. Tom was right there. Karen Lopez was, these are people. I implicitly trust. I've known them for a long time. And there's very few times I've gone that far. It was to the point like Casper had to walk me back to my hotel room. Like he was there. He had to take my phone away from me as well. That was part of the incident. It involved my wife. And it was bad. Not like bad, bad but it was a [inaudible 01:13:50] that could have been avoided. And have been avoided

Rob Collie (01:13:54): Have you seen the quote unquote documentary movie about Motley crue? The Dirt?

Adam Saxton (01:13:59): No. I haven't. Seen that.

Rob Collie (01:14:02): He wakes up in the morning and he's on tour and he is handcuffed to his bed.

Adam Saxton (01:14:07): Oh no.

Rob Collie (01:14:09): Then they replay the events or the past night it ends with his manager handcuffing him to the bed.

Adam Saxton (01:14:15): No, no [crosstalk 01:14:17] just stop. So at the point of this, what I remember of the evening was Casper taking my phone away from me, responding back to my wife, saying, I'm drunk, I'm going to bed. I will talk to you in the morning. That's what he sent. And then he put the phone back in my pocket that whatever you do, do not text anyone, do not answer any calls until you have woken up and you're sober. And I was like, thank you, sir.

Rob Collie (01:14:41): You were Still, you were still receiving and absorbing instructions so.

Adam Saxton (01:14:44): Yes.

Rob Collie (01:14:45): But at least at that point.

Rob Collie (01:14:46): Well, because at that point I had transitioned to water because that's all they were giving me at that point.

Rob Collie (01:14:53): You had good minders.

Adam Saxton (01:14:54): Yes. Like I Said, those are people I trust and they were looking out and we were having a good time.

Rob Collie (01:14:59): And mostly people were just taking pictures of me.

Adam Saxton (01:15:02): Oh, there is a picture. In fact, the only way I can find this picture, it's in my email, but I have to search for, it's only the subject of the email. It was sent by Casper to Patrick and then Patrick forwarded it to me "its fucked up". And it's a picture of me kind of like strown out and yeah, that's the only way I can find that picture. I

Rob Collie (01:15:25): I Missed me some Casper. We're going to have, to have him on the show.

Adam Saxton (01:15:30): Casper's like my brother also, man, we've had adventures together. And I actually, it's interesting because the folks on my team were kind of all over the place. Good portion of them are in Redmond. But I there's a point like with all the traveling and everything, I would tell people that Casper is the person on the team that I physically see the most. Which is interesting because I would go to Europe a bunch. I go to Europe and he's at the things that I'm at in Europe, but also he's at the items in the U.S. As well. And so I'm seeing him on both ends. Whereas the folks in the U.S. I only see at some of the U.S. Things, not all of the U.S. Things. So it just got to the point where I saw him more than I saw Patrick face to face.

Rob Collie (01:16:14): It's a weird new reality. Like us moving around the country, sort of like just sort of being where the kids are until they're done with high school, and being approaching late forties I now have more friends in other countries than I do in my own city. And it's just like, this is not how it's supposed to be.

Adam Saxton (01:16:32): I tell that to folks too. Like when I'm at, when I was at past summit or ignite or anything like that, I'm like the Europe folks. I see them more than I see anyone else just because I'm going to both sides of it. We've had a lot of fun. I would say that the folks in Europe, I would argue that I have little bit more fun over there than I do in the U.S. Just because it's really open there. Right? Like they just enjoy themselves. It's a work hard, play, hard mentality over there of like they're very focused when we need to be serious, but they can actually enjoy themselves at the evening and, and whatnot. And so it's always fun to hang out with them and also being in Europe too, just getting new experiences of life and one pro tip I'll give folks if they do travel for conferences, whenever we get to do that again is try to work in family hacks into those trips.

Adam Saxton (01:17:21): Right. So there're times like when I've been to SQL Bits or SQL conference or whatnot, where I brought my family with me and so my daughters and they were older when we did this was a couple years ago. So they actively remember it. We went to London when SQL Bits was in London and I brought my wife and kids. Came out two days before, did some sight seeing. And then they spent during the conference, my wife spent a day or two just sight seeing London with my kids because I'd already seen it from a different trip. And so they've been to London, they've been to Paris, they've seen Stonehenge. So they've gotten to experience some of the culture outside of the U.S. And can relate to some of that. And it's very different from the U.S. and we've done that too when we've gone to Orlando for some things. So going to like universal and Disney with the kids as part of the work trip, bringing them with me as well. So working that in,

Rob Collie (01:18:13): Exposing them to that Orlando exotic culture

Adam Saxton (01:18:16): Absolutely. So the reason I brought them. The second time I went was because the first time I went and I went to the Harry Potter stuff and daughter loved Harry Potter. And so I'm just sending her pictures of me like posing and the dragons right behind me. And she's like, you're Awful.

Rob Collie (01:18:33): Yeah. You learned your lesson, didn't you? I don't think I've done as well at that as I could have, but it is good advice.

Adam Saxton (01:18:40): I mean, I could have done better as well, but I've tried to because my wife, the number one thing is my wife. Like she's just wants to travel. That's her thing. So once I started traveling to Europe and it was always interesting to, I never thought I'd get to travel outside of the U.S. And when I finally got around to doing it, I found that how easy it was and this really surprised me as well, because the way I hacked traveling to Europe because Microsoft wouldn't pay for it. And so I worked in was I would do these pre-con sessions, a full day thing. And because I was a Microsoft employee, they couldn't actually pay me to do the pre-con. And so the arrangement we did was look, pay for hotel and flight I'll cover food and all that. That's fine.

Adam Saxton (01:19:20): And so that's how I got to go to a lot of this Europe doing, not since I've been on the power BI CAT team they'll that just gets paid for. But before that I would make those arrangements. And it was interesting that the Europe crowds, even if it was a smaller event, they would do it. Whereas, and I tried making that arrangement with some folks in the U.S. For some SQL Saturdays or things of that nature and they wouldn't do it. And I'm like, it's way cheaper. Like I don't understand.

Rob Collie (01:19:48): Yeah. Now it is interesting. Either Europe puts more value on these events or there's something oddly cool about having an American come over, which will be harder to understand.

Adam Saxton (01:19:58): Some Of that is because from an international perspective, they're like, oh it's really good if we can get Americans to, or especially like Microsoft employees or folks like that, they elevate the event apparently at some stages. So

Rob Collie (01:20:12): I wonder if post COVID they'll have the same attitude. they'll be like, do we really want to bring an American over here?

Adam Saxton (01:20:17): Yeah, I know. Yeah. Oh that's true.

Rob Collie (01:20:18): I Don't know. Maybe it's time for us to go solo.

Adam Saxton (01:20:24): Yeah. So it's been interesting and just the experiences that I've had on that front have been, and the friends that I've made by doing that has been amazing.

Rob Collie (01:20:37): So back to power BI for a moment.

Adam Saxton (01:20:38): Yeah.

Rob Collie (01:20:39): How much opportunity do you find for doing like end to end project work? Do you ever get A chance to do something like that?

Adam Saxton (01:20:44): No. No I don't. And I would say this is something that is a gap on my side or just something I don't get exposed to I'm not a consultant. Right. So I don't do those type of projects. I'm very focused on the power BI side. I do find ways to interact with some of the data components, but the re [inaudible 01:21:03]

Adam Saxton (01:21:03): I do find ways to interact with some of the data components, but the real true end to end, I don't really get into that much. I try and find opportunities, especially if it's a Microsoft technology like Azure Synapse Analytics as news, or we're trying to do stuff there. But even Data bricks, I have some high knowledge of it, but at that point, I'm like, look, we got to get someone from that side to help with it, and Power BI.

Rob Collie (01:21:27): And so much of a project is the long tail of all the little details.

Adam Saxton (01:21:31): Yes.

Rob Collie (01:21:31): And so, probably it wouldn't require the metaphor you used earlier, the ninjas who parachute in.

Adam Saxton (01:21:38): Yes.

Rob Collie (01:21:38): And this is like a real early 1980s low budget film.

Adam Saxton (01:21:42): Yes.

Rob Collie (01:21:43): It's like, we're going to send you to Paratrooper school and Ninja school.

Adam Saxton (01:21:46): Yes. And so our team, even when I have to set expectations with folks too, it's like we are not consultants. We do not do the implementation. It's more of an advising consent type role.

Rob Collie (01:21:59): Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Adam Saxton (01:21:59): So we will evaluate what you're doing, we'll make recommendations based on best practices and then in some cases we'll get into the weeds a little bit. Some of that's just, do I have bandwidth to do that? And also, is it really interesting and is it really going to help unblock something. Specifically around model design and things of that nature, but I still won't do implementation. So I may come up with a sample or something to illustrate something but past that I'm like, either you have to do that as a company or you have to engage a partner or MCS or something of that nature.

Rob Collie (01:22:31): That makes sense. I bet that they're constantly trying to creep that line.

Adam Saxton (01:22:36): Everyone does. They try and bamboozle me.

Rob Collie (01:22:39): Yeah. But if you were going to write this formula.

Adam Saxton (01:22:43): Yes. But it'll be really quick. It would really help us.

Rob Collie (01:22:47): Yeah. Wait a second. You're the client. I'm...Okay.

Adam Saxton (01:22:53): Yes. And of course, I'm not even Support. So with Support, there's cost associated with that. Whether you're doing professional support and you're actually paying for it, or you're on the premier side where you have a premier contract that has certain hours that you've costed. And, or an MCS engagement where there's cost in that too. When it comes to the CAT team, there's no cost. We're just engaged. There's no billing that happens there. It's a quote on quote free for them to get anything out of us that they can.

Rob Collie (01:23:22): Yeah, totally.

Adam Saxton (01:23:23): They want to try and get like, can you come on site and help us? And I'm like, man, no. Sometimes I will, but still I won't do implementation. Sometimes I've gone on site for customers where we'll do an architectural review, where it's like a one or two day thing with a bunch of different folks from different tech areas and we'll do that type of effort.

Rob Collie (01:23:43): And I think one of the things that I've really, my whole history over the last 10 years with this stuff. Whether as a solo individual or with the company that we've been growing, the exposure to so many different industries, so many different problems. The velocity at which we move our projects, we don't turn a project into a multiyear affair. We get through those things as fast as possible, so that necessarily ups the pace on how much we're exposed to.

Adam Saxton (01:24:13): Yes.

Rob Collie (01:24:13): We still need to be utilized. We still need to be doing work.

Adam Saxton (01:24:16): And that's the other beauty of my job too. When I was in Support, we had to worry about utilization as well. I had to log that time, so that's where that struggle was is, okay, how much time do I spend playing around with something versus actually working a case and logging the hours. Whereas on the CAT side, I'm like, I don't have that. I just do what I need to do to get it done, which is amazing. Which is part of why it's a dream job, right?

Rob Collie (01:24:41): Yes.

Adam Saxton (01:24:42): I'm like, we've got budget, we've got the tools around the bleeding edge. I've got complete access to the engineering teams.

Rob Collie (01:24:47): Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Adam Saxton (01:24:48): Our whole mission is to just help unblock people with the technology, whatever we need to do.

Rob Collie (01:24:53): Almost all the upsides, very few of the downsides. Even as you were describing, I'm sitting going, this is ideal, right? I could ask the question, do you get to do full implementation? But there's also the question of, do you have to?

Adam Saxton (01:25:08): Yeah, I don't have to. And honestly, that's frowned upon because that's not a good use of our time in terms of what we're trying to do.

Rob Collie (01:25:15): Yeah.

Adam Saxton (01:25:15): Now the other thing I'll say with that though, is people are like, I want to get on. How do I get on that team? I'm like, if you look at the people on the team, this is literally the A-team. It's Casper De Young, it's myself, it's Matthew Roach. It's Patrick, it's Phil Seamark. It's a lot of folks that are top tier at what we do. It's a very work hard, play hard mentality. Our manager, Mark Ragera, he is amazing at hiring and finding people that fit that bill, that are very low maintenance. He's not a micromanager either. So he is like, look, you need to get things done. Let me know how I can unblock you, pass that. Go do your job.

Rob Collie (01:25:54): Yeah. I had a chance to talk to Mark really for the first time because he kind of rose to prominence within Microsoft as a voice for this stuff after I'd left. I was very impressed. I was very impressed with Mark.

Adam Saxton (01:26:05): Yeah, he's amazing.

Rob Collie (01:26:07): Yeah. We should also have him on the show.

Adam Saxton (01:26:09): That would be fun. And he'll freely admit he's not the deep technical guy. He's more on the business side. And he came from the finance world also. He gets all of it. His whole thing is he's hiring people and surrounding himself by the technical rock stars, so to speak. He helps shield us from the junk.

Rob Collie (01:26:28): That's great. That's kind of where I've found myself. The fact that I have somewhat of a technical history with this stuff is almost a historical accident at this point.

Adam Saxton (01:26:37): Yeah.

Rob Collie (01:26:37): I'm much more about the dynamics of the market and, and understanding and just sort of like what it does for the industry than I am about the tax formulas anymore.

Adam Saxton (01:26:48): Yeah.

Rob Collie (01:26:49): I still dabble.

Adam Saxton (01:26:50): Yeah, there's obviously some passion there. Right?

Rob Collie (01:26:53): Uh-huh (affirmative).

Adam Saxton (01:26:53): So it's like you enjoy it.

Rob Collie (01:26:55): Yeah.

Adam Saxton (01:26:55): You don't want to not do it at all. But at the same time, especially in your role of the company, it's like, look, you've got to pay attention to other things too.

Rob Collie (01:27:04): We have a lot of reports. We have a pretty sophisticated data model now for our digital advertising and the whole marketing side of the house. And that's not a hundred percent me. I have help, but I'm kind of the ring leader of that process.

Adam Saxton (01:27:17): One thing we struggle with, that Patrick and I have been struggling with, especially being on the CAT team, it's this balance between the CAT team and the Guy in a Cube stuff, because they're dynamically opposed to each other. In stance of on the CAT side, we're getting deep into the weeds of the technology. This is the super geeky stuff model optimization, large scale data, which when you look at it from an overall usage of Power BI, when we look at massive data, large model type, that's a small fraction of the usage of the technology. A Lot of it it's smaller businesses.

Adam Saxton (01:27:52): And even at large enterprise companies, there's a lot of folks that are doing stuff that I wouldn't consider large data. They're doing smaller operation type stuff specific to that business vertical or that team need. So we're in the nitty gritty of the largest stuff that excites both Patrick and I. We love digging into that and understanding how do we optimize this more even at the engine perspective, whereas on the Guy in a Cube side, I'm the destroyer of video ideas for Patrick, because he'll be like, look this cool thing I did in tabular editor and I'm doing this scripting thing, this is going to be a great video. I'm like, nobody's going to watch that dude. Nobody cares.

Adam Saxton (01:28:29): So on the Guy in a Cube side, it's more of the stuff that gets traction on that end is more of the intro and more of definitely not the deep technical side of it because what we're focusing on in our day job that it's all deep technical, but that doesn't translate to Guy in a Cube. And so Patrick is struggling with that way more than I am where he's like, you need to help me to figure out some video ideas that are going to actually be worth doing on the Guy in a Cube side because all I've got is this deep technical and that's not working over there. And I've told him, I was like, if you want to do one video a month on that, go for it. That's fine. But it can't be every week because our views will suffer.

Rob Collie (01:29:10): Talking about views. I would assume that views and subscribers are always trending up.

Adam Saxton (01:29:15): No, not after being off for two weeks and not doing anything. It's actually going to a nose dive. But, yeah. In general, yes, it curves up.

Rob Collie (01:29:22): Taking a, a little breather there.

Adam Saxton (01:29:24): Yeah, it hurt.

Rob Collie (01:29:26): Boy, why would you be so lazy?

Adam Saxton (01:29:28): Yes.

Rob Collie (01:29:29): And like two whole weeks.

Adam Saxton (01:29:31): Two weeks. And then basically slashed our numbers in half.

Rob Collie (01:29:35): That's the temporary.

Adam Saxton (01:29:36): Yeah.

Rob Collie (01:29:37): But what about COVID in general? That the slope of the curve change at all with COVID, people sitting at home, more time on their hands?

Adam Saxton (01:29:45): I don't know that COVID had really anything to do with it. I'm sure it did at some level, but the thing I've found over the journey is the numbers themselves, the subscribers is everything it was an exponential growth. It took me almost a year and a half to hit a thousand subscribers.

Rob Collie (01:30:01): Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Adam Saxton (01:30:02): And then it took me six months to get to 5,000. It was just like, it was always faster than next level.

Rob Collie (01:30:08): Yeah.

Rob Collie (01:30:08): And so we hit 100,000 in April of 2020. April of 2020 is when we hit 100,000. And we hit 150,000, December 14th. We hit 150,000. So I'm like, it was that much of a spread. Whereas it took me almost five years to get to 100,000 and then it took what? Another from April to December to get to 150,000.

Rob Collie (01:30:37): Yeah.

Adam Saxton (01:30:38): And then we're poised to hit 200,000, maybe a little over a year after hitting 100,000.

Rob Collie (01:30:43): That's crazy.

Adam Saxton (01:30:44): And it's insane.

Rob Collie (01:30:45): Yeah.

Adam Saxton (01:30:46): But it goes to consistency and the work and everything. So it definitely does not come overnight. And everyone's start wanting to start... There's lot of... One thing I will say in COVID is YouTube has been, especially in the power BI niche, has been flooded with new people starting channels and doing videos. That's one thing that has changed is it's gotten diluted. When I first started doing Guy in a Cube there was no one doing videos on.

Adam Saxton (01:31:13): Actually in general, even in the text base, from what I saw and I may be wrong, but it looked like there was just very little going on YouTube in general. A lot of it was focused on blogging and things of that nature. No one was doing video. Some people were, but not seriously. Now it's like everybody's doing it.

Rob Collie (01:31:32): Dilution is an ongoing thing.

Adam Saxton (01:31:34): Yeah.

Rob Collie (01:31:35): For a long time there I was the all only person grinding.

Adam Saxton (01:31:38): Yes.

Rob Collie (01:31:39): I had that luxury. No one else was grinding in competition.

Adam Saxton (01:31:43): Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Rob Collie (01:31:43): But, yeah. Now there's obviously huge differences in quality and level of engagement and all of that. Not all are created equal, but yeah. It's like who hasn't started a Power BI YouTube channel.

Adam Saxton (01:31:57): And Patrick comments on this also. And I tell him to just ignore it, because it's going to happen of where you see some videos or stuff that people are doing and they're imitating what we're doing on the Guy in a Cube side, they're imitating what others are doing as well. And I was there. When I first started doing YouTube, you go after, okay, what caught your eye? And you're looking at other people and you're trying to figure out your voice when you're early on.

Adam Saxton (01:32:20): I get it. People are trying to do that. It doesn't necessarily bother me. It bothers Patrick a lot, but I'm like, we got to do our thing and people are going to come up to our level or they're going to try to. And it's more than just production quality. You've got to have the entertainment factor. You got to have the key chemistry, the personality. I would say that's weighted way more than the production quality. Who cares? As long as your audio's okay, who cares about the rest of that? It doesn't matter.

Adam Saxton (01:32:47): Audio is important, because if you can't stand listening to it, you're going to abandon that really quick.

Rob Collie (01:32:51): Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Adam Saxton (01:32:52): But the video, use your cell phone. I don't care. Use a webcam. It doesn't matter. Don't use a web. A lot of people just do screen capture. The thing that Patrick and I have is the chemistry between us and the balance that we bring to each other. We understand what each other's thinking. We're on the very same wavelength. We've been doing it for years now so it's the content quality. It's the value. It's understanding that. That's what they have to rise up to. And then we have to think about, okay, we got to do something that separates us now. What's the next thing we can do to separate it.

Adam Saxton (01:33:24): And me getting the video editor was part of that because most people aren't doing that. And so the production quality is a lot higher. It does add value to what we're doing but we got to maintain the content quality as well.

Rob Collie (01:33:36): I have a couple other quick questions here that are more on the technical front.

Adam Saxton (01:33:40): All right.

Rob Collie (01:33:40): Or about the tools with enterprise customers, what are for like large Power BI customers struggling with the most these days? What are the things that you're most commonly either asked to help with? Maybe on the technical level, but maybe also on that kind of like social engineering level. Are there any common threads there or is it pretty much every single instance is different?

Adam Saxton (01:34:03): There's differences in each approach. The theme is I've already said it earlier that sometimes we feel like a broken record that we're always having to do model optimization. It's not...And I tell people, even in press presentations I do. I'm like nine times out of 10. Your issue is the model. When it comes to performance, it's because of the model. And not because necessarily the amount of data you have, but just the structure of the data and the fact that either the one table with all the columns or you're doing just some funky table stuff.

Adam Saxton (01:34:32): You're not sticking to just a [inaudible 01:34:34], right? Maybe you've got some transactional database and you just pulled all of it in the way it was. And you've gone to the ninth normal form and I'm like, all right, this is not going to perform. The other thing that's interesting and because of the customers we work with, we're working with larger sets of data. And usually when we go to do presentations on performance and we're giving best practices and stuff and someone will raise their hand and be like, I'm not doing any of that and my stuff is fine. I'm like, sure.

Adam Saxton (01:35:06): If you're doing like a million rows of data, you're never going to hit. I shouldn't say never, but you're not going to be as impacted on this. When you start getting to scale though, this becomes a massive problem. Now that being said, though, I've had some models where they had the one table and 300, some odd columns, they had about 8 million rows in the data. And this thing was just slow. It was because they didn't break out the dimensions.

Adam Saxton (01:35:29): They're trying to do a slicer with six unique values that was coming off of an 8 million row table. And I'm like, all right, come on, let's get a little real here. So typically it's either, it comes down to one of two things, either one, it's the model that needs to be optimized or two, it's that customer that wants to slap 120 visuals on the canvas and wonders why. And all of the docs, if you look at performance analyzer, all of the docs is like sub-second, like 30 milliseconds. It's fast. It's not your model.

Adam Saxton (01:35:58): It's the number of visuals that you had. And you're just trying to create a page native report in a Power BI report. And you don't understand the product and the tool that will help you be successful in what you're trying tell from a data perspective. In general, I would say the common theme at almost every customer is not taking the time to understand the story that you want to tell with your data and then figuring out how to do that both from a model structure, as well as your report structure, to communicate that story in an effective way. That's the theme. And nobody wants to. And part of it is it takes time to do that and everyone just we're all under deadlines. I got to get this out by next Friday so I'm just going to do what I can to throw it out the door. And then you know how it goes. It hits the fan and then they're calling Support. They're calling the CAT team like, Hey, we need to fix this.

Rob Collie (01:36:49): I think this comes back to like, again, just the overwhelming past success of SQL and of things like reporting services. And I just over and over again, I see large IT departments just look at Power BI and go, look, the new reporting services.

Adam Saxton (01:37:04): Yeah.

Rob Collie (01:37:04): And I'm like, no.

Adam Saxton (01:37:06): I want a Power BI report. And I want to just have this giant table with a bunch of columns and millions of rows. Wait, why isn't this performing? I'm like, that's not, we don't use Power BI for that.

Rob Collie (01:37:17): Even if it was performing, it's like, so missing the most valuable things that you can do with these tools, that mindset precludes you from ever discovering them.

Adam Saxton (01:37:27): And it's like the old, when I was in Support for reporting services where they're like, we've got this 300 page report that we got to print out. And I'm like, do they ever really read that?

Rob Collie (01:37:35): No.

Adam Saxton (01:37:36): They look at the first page and that's it. Nobody looks at that

Rob Collie (01:37:39): And then they export it to Excel.

Adam Saxton (01:37:41): Yes.

Rob Collie (01:37:41): Believe it.

Adam Saxton (01:37:43): And they complain because the color in Excel didn't match the color in the table in reporting services because it doesn't align to the color palette of that was a server down issue.

Rob Collie (01:37:54): Yeah.

Adam Saxton (01:37:55): That was not the right blue.

Rob Collie (01:37:56): One of them uses CMYK color scheme, right?

Adam Saxton (01:38:00): Yes. And Excel didn't use the same color palette. And so it looked purple when it was blue in their report. Can we make it bluer?

Rob Collie (01:38:07): Purple? You're going to get purple and you're going to like it.

Adam Saxton (01:38:09): Yes. That's just the people they need to take time and really understand. And it is just that sometimes they just don't get that time to do it or the business isn't helping them to grow in that area either.

Rob Collie (01:38:24): All right, here we go. Last technical question.

Adam Saxton (01:38:26): All right.

Rob Collie (01:38:26): Not even really technical.

Adam Saxton (01:38:27): Yeah, sure.

Rob Collie (01:38:28): When the dust settles, what do you think the number one sort of impact or usage case is going to be for composite models? I debated asking this as composite models, high end niche feature or guardrail to guardrail world beater. This is more nuanced.

Adam Saxton (01:38:44): Yeah.

Rob Collie (01:38:44): It's where is it going to be most impactful?

Adam Saxton (01:38:46): Marco Russa has called it the holy grail of BI. I will be honest. It scares me going back to what I said, people aren't taking the time to structure their data and understand the story that they want to tell. We've got this model out there, this big model, that's maybe the finance model and I've got my Excel spreadsheet. I want to bring them right next to it. And augment it little bit. That part I'm fine with. That doesn't necessarily scare me.

Adam Saxton (01:39:11): But now I've got this giant finance model. I've got this giant HR model, and now I want to bring in an Excel spreadsheet and I want to do direct query to my SQL server to bring in some other data as well. And that's where I'm starting to wonder. First off, it's the direct query over the live Power BI data set, which is really what we're talking about here is, it's enabling but I would also say it's very new to the point where I don't necessarily have best practices for it yet to understand what those performance implications are.

Adam Saxton (01:39:41): So the thing I'm telling people is yes, it is a very cool feature. It does enable some great things. Walk, do not run. Be mindful about what you're doing and what you're connecting to and how you're trying to relate that data. And the thing I just tell customers in general, I'm like, you've got to have a clean model. If you don't, Power BI is just one of those things where if your model is not clean, it's going to show you your ugly baby really fast. And that's when you start getting frustration, things aren't going to work very well. And you start calling us and complaining and I'm like, look, it's not a good data model.

Adam Saxton (01:40:18): We've got all this stuff. And every time we have this conversation, I'm like, it's just not... One customer I wrote an eight-page writeup of recommendations for why your model, why you have an ugly baby. I should have titled the Word doc that way, but I was more professional with it. That was in May and I'm still arguing with them over it today. And I'm like, why do you even call me? I don't even understand that. But yes, I understand you think your people are really good and I'm sure they have amazing skills in certain areas. But I'm telling you, this is how the product works. And these are the changes you need to make for this to be performant and then combine that with this composite model feature of direct query over Power BI data sets. And you're just amplifying the problem.

Adam Saxton (01:41:01): I think that's the biggest concern. And then the key is going to be is how changes could be made with that technology to make it more forgiving in those scenarios and making it smarter, to be able to optimize on the fly to accommodate that. That's really going to be the key and it's too early to even know. It's public preview. People are just getting their hands on it. We don't necessarily know what the best practices are yet. It's new. I don't have a magic answer for you on that one.

Rob Collie (01:41:28): I appreciate that. I didn't know what you were going to say. That's why I asked the question, but at the same time, I'm like I can recognize the wisdom and the authenticity of what you just said. That is probably the only right answer.

Adam Saxton (01:41:40): Yeah. It's not rocket science. It's garbage in, garbage out. It's the old saying, right? it's if you're not taking that time to really make it pristine and I've only come across a few models that I would even say or like that.

Rob Collie (01:41:52): Pristine is tough.

Adam Saxton (01:41:54): Yes. They do exist.

Rob Collie (01:41:56): Even when you really know what you're doing, the hard realities of life drive you in some interesting directions.

Adam Saxton (01:42:02): One thing you mentioned before though, talking about the business. The business persona, that person being the person that's modeling that more, the places where I've seen those pristine models is they understand the business.

Rob Collie (01:42:14): Yeah.

Adam Saxton (01:42:15): And they understand like I don't need all this other garbage, right?

Rob Collie (01:42:18): Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Adam Saxton (01:42:18): This is the problem I'm trying to answer. This is how I can do it. And this is how I can be smarter about it maybe with some pre aggregations or summarizing over here and not needing the actual detail row. Or if I do need those detail rows, there are ways we can handle that to make that more, I don't need it right up front. That's where I've seen success.

Rob Collie (01:42:37): Yeah. Those are tremendous amount of over-engineering in the IT driven mindset.

Adam Saxton (01:42:42): Yes.

Rob Collie (01:42:43): I have a fight starter that I can use in certain situations like in a past conference or something like that. I can start a fight in a conference really quickly by saying, 90% of slowly changing dimensions implemented in the world were unnecessary.

Adam Saxton (01:42:56): Yes.

Rob Collie (01:42:57): It's like, how do you data warehouse? I'm like, see.

Adam Saxton (01:43:01): Yeah.

Rob Collie (01:43:02): We talk about faucets over plumbing. you can build plumbing all day long if you never have to worry about faucets and pipes running everywhere that no one ever needs a drink.

Adam Saxton (01:43:12): Yes.

Rob Collie (01:43:13): Yeah. I agree. The business is capable again with the right people, these unicorns.

Adam Saxton (01:43:19): I fully believe IT could do it too, if they actively really worked with the business to understand that before they just try and go engineer it. I'm coming from that IT central admin type persona of where I just want to start building it, right?

Rob Collie (01:43:32): Yeah.

Adam Saxton (01:43:32): Let's just get it done and then you put that out there and it's not what they need, and or it just doesn't perform.

Rob Collie (01:43:38): I actually I'm going to politely disagree. I don't think that IT could ever pull it off. But not for the reasons that you might suspect. It's just the fact that there's not enough time. There's just not enough IT people. There's plenty of business people.

Adam Saxton (01:43:51): No, I would agree with that.

Rob Collie (01:43:52): Just the ratio alone is unfair.

Adam Saxton (01:43:55): I think that's why we're seeing a shift also when we talk about the self-service versus the central IT. It's one thing Mark Ragera likes to talk about is central at the core, but soft on the outside. Enable the self-service. Enable those business folks to get what they need to be done because they've got the numbers. They can do it. And it's hard for central IT groups to find that balance or to find a way to even enable that where people aren't just going to go rogue and get the data that they need to get the job done.

Rob Collie (01:44:26): Yeah, agreed. I think a top down driven one version of the truth is inflicted on the business.

Adam Saxton (01:44:34): Yes.

Rob Collie (01:44:35): And it doesn't work. However, a bottom up sort of meritocracy, you find the one that actually works the best and then you make it. You bless it at that point, right?

Adam Saxton (01:44:45): Yes.

Rob Collie (01:44:45): That is awesome.

Adam Saxton (01:44:47): Yes.

Rob Collie (01:44:48): I think there's probably still, in my opinion, too much of the mindset of we're going to top down it.

Adam Saxton (01:44:55): Mm-hmm (affirmative). Because that's the old school, right?

Rob Collie (01:44:58): It is.

Adam Saxton (01:44:58): That's how it's always been done.

Rob Collie (01:44:59): It is, yeah.

Adam Saxton (01:44:59): And the thing I've seen in organizations is that culture shift is hard and trying to get people to agree to it and, or move it. And I love some of the customers I work with because they have people there that are very forward thinking and like, yes, we want to change. We want to shift. We want to do it this way. We know we've always done it this way. Let's move over here and try it a different way. And those are really fun to work with. The ones where you've got that person in and they're like, no, we can't do that. We can't open this up to everyone. That's insane. I'm like, okay, it's not going to be successful.

Rob Collie (01:45:40): Did you ever hear what Max Planck said about scientific revolutions?

Adam Saxton (01:45:44): I did not.

Rob Collie (01:45:44): It's chilling and it's awesome. He said, there's all this talk about the scientific method and the scientific community. It's this meritocracy of ideas and it's proof driven and all of that. And that's how science moves forward, is by constantly testing itself. He said, no, it's not what actually happens at all. What happens is, is that that new ideas do emerge. They are better, but they do not gain traction at all until the old school dies. It requires that clean slate.

Adam Saxton (01:46:15): The change of regime, yes.

Rob Collie (01:46:18): And it's just so cynical and yet you can recognize it.

Adam Saxton (01:46:22): And I've seen that. Even on different organizations I've worked with and even in Microsoft, you get some of the leadership changes and that's when things happen.

Rob Collie (01:46:31): People don't need to die. They just need to leave.

Adam Saxton (01:46:33): No.

Rob Collie (01:46:33): They need to retire or something.

Adam Saxton (01:46:34): I know.

Rob Collie (01:46:35): It does require some degree. And even that person who leaves and goes somewhere else, oftentimes they find themselves with a fresh perspective.

Adam Saxton (01:46:43): Yes.

Rob Collie (01:46:43): And they're no longer trapped by their former reputation.

Adam Saxton (01:46:46): Yeah.

Rob Collie (01:46:47): But as long as they stayed there, the change that was required, wasn't going to happen.

Adam Saxton (01:46:53): Yes.

Rob Collie (01:46:54): No matter how much evidence.

Adam Saxton (01:46:56): Yes, I've seen that time and time again.

Rob Collie (01:46:59): Man, this has been a blast.

Adam Saxton (01:47:01): Yeah.

Rob Collie (01:47:01): In hindsight, I'm sad we waited this long to do it.

Adam Saxton (01:47:03): Yes.

Rob Collie (01:47:05): I really appreciate you taking the time. I know all you have is two jobs now.

Adam Saxton (01:47:09): I only have two jobs, yeah. But I've got plenty of time.

Rob Collie (01:47:11): Even if we didn't put the podcast live, it was worth it.

Adam Saxton (01:47:14): I look forward to the day where we can just go get a beer and hang out.

Thomas LaRock. (01:47:17): Or some Yager

Rob Collie (01:47:18): Yager, that's that's where it gets fun.

Rob Collie (01:47:21): Dude, so much fun. Thank you so much.

Rob Collie (01:47:23): Yeah, no worries.

Rob Collie (01:47:24): Bye, Adam.

 

 

Matt Selig wears many hats at SerVaas Labs, maker of Bar Keepers Friend (BKF). When facing pain points to running more efficiently before COVID struck, Matt knew how he wanted the BKF data to look, but he wasn't sure how to get there. Enter his relationship with P3 that began in February 2020. Matt kept the in-demand cleaning product of a post-COVID world top of mind and easily accessible with the help of customized and integrated dashboards to read real-time data for better business decisions.  Read the BKF/P3 Case Study!   Episode Timeline:

• 3:55 - The fascinating history of Bar Keepers Friend and founder Beurt SerVaas
• 5:50 - People's excited reactions to BKF are similar to people's excited reactions to Power BI
• 9:50 - Matt's many hats that he wears - From forklift driver to Executive Vice President, from curating and caretaking the Bar Keepers Friend Museum to BI Director- he does it all!
• 13:40 - Matt's history with Excel and how new tech and software was (and still sometimes is) shunned by the C-Suite
• 21:45 - A frustrating Pain Point that led Matt to the Power BI and P3 path, and the infamous Cocktail Napkin Dashboard Sketch
• 26:35 - Discovering Power BI was like discovering fire, and the ever-present pushback by the status quo
• 29:20 - The sociological aspect of large and small corporations, and The Dunbar Number-the rule of how many people one can maintain cognitive relationships with effectively
• 32:45 - The concept of one version of the truth is essential in answering vital business questions
• 39:30 - Matt Selig could be the Nostradamus of the modern age. He implemented Power BI at SerVaas Labs in February 2020, and it was truly the better way in the post-COVID world. He also managed to avoid some predatory "huckster" consultants before he partnered with P3
• 45:05 - Rob's crucial BI project timeline advice for 2021, Matt the BI and Power Platform sponge, and how SerVaas Labs and P3 work together to create amazing reports
• 55:50 - A peek inside of what's coming for SerVaas Labs and Bar Keeper's Friend in 2021 is Enterprise level stuff

Episode Transcript:

Rob Collie (00:00:00): Welcome, friends. For our first podcast of 2021, we welcome Matt Selig, Chief Financial Officer at SerVaas Labs, AKA Bar Keepers Friend. By now, you know that we don't explicitly call this a Power BI Podcast. Most of our guests absolutely are users of Power BI. And while that's 100% true for Matt, I think his journey highlights a handful of themes, really important themes that we might not have punched quite as cleanly as we need to in the past. And one of those themes is escaping the status quo.

Rob Collie (00:00:40): Oftentimes when people ask me, "Who are your competitors, Rob?" I'll usually give them an answer that they don't quite expect. There's other consulting companies out there that we compete with. There are other software products out there that compete with the Microsoft products that we use. But really the number one competitor is people just sticking with the status quo of what they have, people accepting the way that they've done it forever. And you'll hear in the conversation just how much Matt agonized with exactly this problem for years, and also how much better things got when he finally did decide to truly break away from the status quo.

Rob Collie (00:01:17): Another really important theme that I think comes out in this conversation is you do not need massive budgets. You don't need a massive team anymore to be effective at BI. Even though Bar Keepers Friend is a national and really internationally recognized brand, they're not like a Fortune 500 enterprise sort of outfit. They're a relatively lean mid-size company. And like a lot of us, you'll see that Matt has historically and continues to wear many, many, many more than one hat in his job. And they have seen some truly enormous benefits from their adoption of Power BI at their company.

Rob Collie (00:01:54): The last theme is the timelines. Those enormous benefits that they've been realizing have been happening at break that pace. You don't need large teams and you don't need long timelines and huge budgets anymore. You can get those wins. When you set your mind to breaking away from that status quo, the pace at which you can move and the quality of the results you get can really, really surprise you. I know I have found Matt's story to be inspiring and encouraging, and I hope you will as well. So let's get into it.

Announcer (00:02:30): Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please?

Announcer (00:02:34): This is the Raw Data by P3 Podcast with your host, Rob Collie. Find out what the experts at P3 can do for your business. Go to powerpivotpro.com. Raw Data by P3 is data with the human element.

Rob Collie (00:02:50): Welcome to the show, Matt Selig of Bar Keepers Friends/SerVaas Labs. How are you doing today, Matt?

Matt Selig (00:02:57): I'm doing great.

Rob Collie (00:02:58): Good, good, good. Glad you're here. We got a lot of things to talk about so let's get into it. Let's start with the boring professional stuff first. So you're CFO at SerVaas Labs.

Matt Selig (00:03:09): Yeah. I've been the CFO here for a little over 20 years.

Rob Collie (00:03:13): That's a long... People don't stay in jobs that long anymore. That's an outlier, isn't it?

Matt Selig (00:03:17): Yeah, definitely, but that's typical here. We'd have at least five people who have been here longer than 40 years.

Rob Collie (00:03:24): Wow.

Matt Selig (00:03:25): And when we hire people, I like to say, "What's our 20-year plan for this person? I don't want them to just come work for a week or a year."

Rob Collie (00:03:33): Wow. "What's our 20-year plan?" We tend to think in terms of like, "What are we going to do with this new person in the first three months?"

Matt Selig (00:03:42): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:03:42): That's our horizon. Not because we're expecting to be rid of them in three months. That is a very different mindset. I like it. So is it fair to say that SerVaas Labs is the owner of the Bar Keepers Friend product and brand, or is the manufacturer? How do you describe that?

Matt Selig (00:03:58): Beurt SerVaas was the person who founded the company in 1957. He was a OSS agent in World War II. He fought in China against the Japanese. And then after World War II, he fought against the communists until about 1953. He bought the brand in 1957 when they were selling about $5,000 a year with the Bar Keepers Friend, because his grandmother used a Bar Keepers Friend and he had a small plating shop. And people would say, "What are you used to clean the stuff you're doing with the silver plating for us, for her?" And he'd say, "My grandmother used Bar Keepers Friend." He found out the guy that owned it at that time wanted to sell it, so he bought the company.

Rob Collie (00:04:40): So he waged war against the Japanese. Then he waged war against the communist. And then he turned his sights to varnish. "Yeah, we're going to put an end to grime."

Matt Selig (00:04:52): That's right.

Rob Collie (00:04:55): So when we talk about Bar Keepers Friend, what is the core product?

Matt Selig (00:04:58): When I got here in 1999, about 80% of the core product was the original product that was invented in 1882, the powdered cleanser that had an abrasive, a soap, and oxalic acid in it and not much more. That had been invented in 1882. It was basically unchanged for the next almost 120 years. And they had a couple small other little product lines that didn't amount too much, but I think now the powder's about 50% of our sales because we've added new products and grown those.

Rob Collie (00:05:33): Diversified. Yeah.

Matt Selig (00:05:35): That's right. Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:05:36): When we first met, you had registered for one of our classes under the SerVaas Labs name.

Matt Selig (00:05:43): Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Rob Collie (00:05:44): You don't register as being from Bar Keepers Friend, you know?

Matt Selig (00:05:47): Right.

Rob Collie (00:05:48): But we started talking about it. I didn't really even know that Bar Keepers Friend existed, but then I came home and asked my wife if she knows about it. And we have a can. We had a can. We already had one in the house, you know?

Matt Selig (00:06:00): Right.

Rob Collie (00:06:00): It was already... We were equipped.

Matt Selig (00:06:02): A good abbreviation for Bar Keepers Friend is BKF. If you're an insider, that's what you know how to call it.

Rob Collie (00:06:08): Yeah. So I came home. I discovered that we had a can of BKF. And then I pulled the team at P3. And half the team not only knew about it, their first response was, "Oh my God, that stuff's awesome." Not, "Yeah, I know about it and I use it," which is sort of the expectation you would have for a cleaning product, right? But you don't expect that kind of emotional positive reaction about a cleaning product.

Matt Selig (00:06:35): I used to be really surprised. I used to live just a mile from our factory. Our HOA would have annual night out where they would rent a bounce house for the kids. I'd always bring a couple cases of BKF to give away. I remember one of them across the field, I heard this woman yelling, "Bar Keepers Friend! Oh my God! I just wrote a research paper about that at school. I had no idea it was just made up mile from where I live." I've encountered that same kind of reaction. At HR seminar, a woman in front of me asked me where I worked and I said, "Bar Keepers Friend." And the woman behind me started yelling, "Oh my God! Bar Keepers Friend saved my life." I can't think of any other clean product that people get excited about, enthusiastically excited about for whatever reason they do about Bar Keepers Friend. I've seen it over and over and over.

Rob Collie (00:07:27): Yeah. I mean, it's kind of like what I say about Power BI. You don't typically expect people to rave about a piece of software, especially kind of "normal people." It's one thing to have some professional computer science programmer or developer rave about a new integrated development environment or a new development framework. You expect that kind of fanboy nerdery, right?

Matt Selig (00:07:53): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:07:53): But amongst sort of the civilian population, you don't typically encounter people that just say, "Oh my God! It changed my life or saved my life" or, "Wow!" You just don't gush about software, you know?

Matt Selig (00:08:07): Now that you say that, I've noticed that with the Power BI reports that we have, the very first day when we had a sales report up and running, I could hear people down the hallway gasping when they saw what we had. "Oh my God! I can't believe it." And we've had that same experience that we have at Bar Keepers Friend or BKF.

Rob Collie (00:08:25): Well, we got to be careful. We don't want to get too many unexpectedly positive things in one place. If we got the cleaning product and the software and it's just one more, it might open a worm hole and then we're all gone. Got to watch that.

Rob Collie (00:08:38): You mention down the hall. It's been really fascinating for me. I've called it like the extended 10 year, now 11 year field trip, where I was allowed to leave the Microsoft Redmond bubble, the dome, and go out in the real world. For the last 11 years, I've been a free range nerd and able to meet all kinds of cool people. Just so many things about the world that are so surprising.

Rob Collie (00:09:02): So here's a product, a brand that is super well known. As far as I can tell, it's about 50% of all human beings that I run into know what it is, right? That's a hard thing to be. That's a big deal. And SerVaas Labs, you're 100% in this one facility here outside Indianapolis.

Matt Selig (00:09:27): That's right.

Rob Collie (00:09:27): It's kind of like when I got to Microsoft and I expected to find that there were 200 people working on Excel, and it was more like 40 top, maybe even 30. It was just stunning that so few people could be behind something with such weight in the world. You're not just CFO, you run an impressively lean headquarters staff for a brand this big, which means wearing lots of hats. So what else... You don't just do CFO things, right?

Matt Selig (00:10:02): Sure.

Rob Collie (00:10:02): You end up having to do a lot of stuff.

Matt Selig (00:10:05): For a long time, I was our chief human resource officer also, because originally they needed somebody who could pass out dental insurance applications and there was nobody. And so I said, "I'll do that. Somebody's got to do it." And so I got wrapped up in HR work. And then finally it got too big. That's why I was in an HR seminar because I needed to know more about HR. It got so big, I needed somebody to do that for me. But in the time I've worked here, I've worked on the production line, I've driven forklifts, I've crawled under machines. I've done everything. Everything. Including the curator of our museum.

Rob Collie (00:10:44): That's right. That's right. I have been to the Bar Keepers Friend Museum. On a previous podcast, we made it an ongoing joke about this one museum that I'd gone to in Sweden, the Vasa Museum. I didn't even think out the fact that I have really been to a very exclusive museum.

Matt Selig (00:11:00): That's right.

Rob Collie (00:11:01): The Bar Keepers Friend Museum.

Matt Selig (00:11:03): We need one of those penny rollers where you put your penny in and roll it out, then it makes a long oval penny that says BKF on it [crosstalk 00:11:11] BKF Museum.

Rob Collie (00:11:11): That's right. That's right. This would be one of the most exclusive trinkets in the entire world.

Matt Selig (00:11:20): That's what's so cool about the museum though. We have artifacts that go back to the 1880s and we have letters that the person who invented Bar Keepers Friend wrote that we've got off of eBay. I think it helps... Every employee gets to go see that museum and they get to see that. The 20 years I've been here is just... We've been the caretakers for a couple of decades. We talk about, "What do we do so that Bar Keepers Friend is around in the next 100 years?" We don't think about the quarterly earnings report and the conference call with all the Wall Street types. We just think how to build a solid business and caretake it while it's ours.

Rob Collie (00:12:03): It's still a privately owned.

Matt Selig (00:12:05): That's right.

Rob Collie (00:12:05): That's another thing that you wouldn't expect, right? You'd expect Bar Keepers Friend to be owned by one of the consumer packaged goods Goliaths, right?

Matt Selig (00:12:14): Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Rob Collie (00:12:15): Like a Unilever or something like that. And it's not.

Matt Selig (00:12:18): Yeah, that's true.

Rob Collie (00:12:18): It gives you a different kind of freedom as a company, doesn't it?

Matt Selig (00:12:23): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:12:23): But as we're talking about it, it also restricts your resources.

Matt Selig (00:12:28): Yeah, definitely.

Rob Collie (00:12:28): And so, you mentioned all these jobs like forklift driver and all of that. Those are pretty cool. But the one of course I was fishing for was, without the title, you were also de facto BI director.

Matt Selig (00:12:42): That's right. Uh-huh (affirmative). Yeah, it is, because everybody would come and ask me questions.

Rob Collie (00:12:49): Yeah.

Matt Selig (00:12:49): That opens up. BI just isn't what's in your software. I've got to be the guy who knows everything about everything or can get the answer really fast whether it's in an Excel spreadsheet or in a file somewhere or in somebody's head or in a PDF I saved 10 years ago. That's what always been my job is, kind of like the curator of our information.

Rob Collie (00:13:11): Yeah. You were responsible for essentially developing the reports that answered your own questions, but also developing reports that answered basically everyone else's questions about what's going on in your business. And for what? You've been there for more than 20 years?

Matt Selig (00:13:29): Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Rob Collie (00:13:30): What is it? Is it 19 and a fraction that was 100% Excel essentially? Or not 100%, but overwhelmingly, Excel as the tool of choice?

Matt Selig (00:13:40): Yeah. My first introduction to Excel was in August of 1995 when I started my first accounting job. My boss at that time had a... It was at an Apple II, the little square Apple II with the black and white screen.

Rob Collie (00:13:55): Oh, yeah.

Matt Selig (00:13:56): He said, "This is Excel." He said, "This is how you type a formula." And I learned equals A1 plus B1, return. That was my first earliest memory of Excel. But when I first got to Bar Keepers Friend... And there were some other companies associated with that. We still had a mail person that push the mail dolly around the offices. They didn't have email for employees here when I got here.

Rob Collie (00:14:22): Wow.

Matt Selig (00:14:23): The CEO had four secretaries that transcribed memos all day long, dictated but not read. And finally, she didn't want to hear about email. They were World War II generation. They didn't see the point. And they had a... What is it? A phone system, a PBX. It started crashing because people were bringing their AOL login information and tying up the phone line so they could get on the internet at work.

Rob Collie (00:14:51): Wow.

Matt Selig (00:14:52): In my previous job, we'd had a T1-line in 1995. So I was like, "This is email. This is old news," you know? But she didn't want to hear about it until she couldn't make a phone call because there weren't any lines available on her PBX and we got our first internet connection at these businesses. And before that, all the accounting was done on the big 2-foot wide dot matrix printers. She didn't want to hear about charts and graphs and Excel and stuff like that. The depreciation journals were books, physical books that you had to write on the ledger depreciation entries.

Rob Collie (00:15:30): They just didn't need any of that fancy new fangled technology to beat the commies, did they?

Matt Selig (00:15:35): That's right.

Rob Collie (00:15:35): Yeah, it wasn't necessary to beat the commies. "It's not necessary to run our business" until y'all staged an unintentional denial of service attack on her telephone.

Matt Selig (00:15:51): Yeah. That was kind of when they first saw that, "Hey, maybe the internet really is something new." I remember I showed her a stock chart that I got off of newyorktimes.com. She was just fascinated that I could get that information myself and have it in seconds, where before it would've took her half in an afternoon to call her broker and get the information.

Rob Collie (00:16:13): I look forward to the day where people like you and I, we will also be stubbornly refusing to adopt this, whatever the new thing is, like we're... For the moment, I still feel a little bit revolutionary. I'm still pushing something that the world hasn't come close to fully adopting yet. I can tell myself I'm current for the moment.

Matt Selig (00:16:34): I mean, that's something that stuck with me that you've said that Power BI isn't the new latest, greatest thing. It's been around for seven or eight years, I think. And Excel is still the gold standard. And then I say, "I use Excel every day, and so I'm not knocking it." But one thing I've had to do since I got acquainted with Power BI is to learn how to really use Excel and not how I was using it for the last 20 years. It's a challenge in our own business now. I was just talking with somebody this morning. They got the sales information from Amazon, our biggest e-commerce customer. The tables, the report that they got off of Amazon's website was a mess. And I think Amazon does that on purpose. I probably shouldn't record that.

Rob Collie (00:17:15): We're safe here. By the time Amazon comes for us, we'll all be well established.

Matt Selig (00:17:21): But she would open an Excel page and then she'd open her browser window with a report in it. And then for the next four hours, she'd look at the Amazon page and then move over to the Excel window and type the number in, and then moved back and forth. And our intern, the same intern, put an Excel report that automated that task where all she had to do was cut and paste. It cut down that four hour job, once a month job, to 30 seconds and made it more accurate. And so, that old model of typing in a two columns of data, column A is the date and column B is the number and then you type a formula, equals B1 plus C1, that's what I've learned.

Matt Selig (00:18:08): What I now see is the model is, that you use Excel as a data manipulation tool to automatically bring data in and then manipulate it once you get it there to answer questions you have, rather than manual entering the data all yourself. That was the way I did it 20 years ago.

Rob Collie (00:18:25): Was that intern project there, was that a Power Query script?

Matt Selig (00:18:29): I just saw the spreadsheet on... She shared the screen with me this morning so I'm not sure how he did it, but I don't believe he used Power Query, which I'm also kind of in the midst of... I'm working through M Is for Data Monkey right now to try to get-

Rob Collie (00:18:44): You hear that? Ken Puls.

Matt Selig (00:18:47): Yeah. Yeah. I don't know exactly how he did it. And I wanted to see that. But last night I couldn't sleep and I was texting my wife. You probably can't see this in the podcast, but there's a picture from M IS for Data Monkey.

Rob Collie (00:19:07): You were texting your wife pictures while you were awake and she was asleep so that she see them in the morning when she woke up?

Matt Selig (00:19:13): Right.

Rob Collie (00:19:16): Now, this is kind of the communication we never would've envisioned, you know?

Matt Selig (00:19:20): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:19:21): I do that too.

Matt Selig (00:19:24): I've been trying to learn a new way to use Excel. I don't manually enter the data. If I'm finding myself manually entering the data, I'm doing something wrong. What I'm trying to learn is how to get the data into it, automatically clean it, something like Power Query. And then use some kind of magic like Power Pivot or Power BI to make it answer questions. I haven't quite figured out how to describe that yet but it's like I consider learning the right way to use Excel.

Rob Collie (00:19:55): Mm-hmm (affirmative). We talk a lot about using the new tools, whether it's Power BI or whether it's the Power BI related tools that are now embedded in Excel. We call it "Being good to your future self."

Matt Selig (00:20:09): Yeah, definitely.

Rob Collie (00:20:10): Even the four hour transcription, it might be that it would take more than four hours to learn a better way.

Matt Selig (00:20:17): Right.

Rob Collie (00:20:17): So the short term incentive is to do it the old manual way, but that's because it's current me thinking about current me.

Matt Selig (00:20:27): Right.

Rob Collie (00:20:27): Current me needs to think about future me and be nicer to future me, because it turns out we're actually the same person. Well, so let's back up a little bit because there's something about your journey that I think is both admirable and very interesting. And at the same time, at least in our business, we have the privilege of seeing this with some frequency. This probably goes back about two years for you. You can correct me on that. But there's this moment where you just sort of came to the conclusion that there has got to be a better way.

Matt Selig (00:20:58): Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Rob Collie (00:20:59): And to come to that conclusion without knowing about a particular better way, just knowing in the absence of something that's crystallized in front of you, I think it's not the rarest thing in the world, but it's not a common leap either that you can become convinced of this without actually seeing an example of what that better thing is. You just know there has to be something better.

Matt Selig (00:21:23): Right.

Rob Collie (00:21:23): And you're convinced enough of it that you go looking.

Matt Selig (00:21:27): Yeah, the intern that we got from Indiana University, he looked at what the lady was doing with that Amazon information. He said, "Well, I took Wayne Winston's class and I can fix this in five minutes." So the younger generation gets it. They don't have to go through this process. But that was a problem for years when I think I've told you that I'd sit in a meeting and people would ask me a question how many widgets did we buy in the last six months, what do they cost, and how many did we use. And by the time I got an answer, the discussion had changed topics three or four times. And I'd back up and say, "Hey, wait, I've got the answers to the question you asked five minutes ago." So that was a pain point. Another point you brought up is that people just stopped asking questions when they know they can't get an answer.

Rob Collie (00:22:10): Yeah.

Matt Selig (00:22:11): It's going to take half a day to get an answer that they just don't bother to ask. That was a pain point. There's got to be a better way. And then it's right. I never heard of Power BI. I only vaguely knew what a pivot table was. I've taken a tutorial on VLOOKUP and my wife laughs at me because she says, "When I met you, you said you knew how to write the formula for a VLOOKUP, but you couldn't imagine when you would ever need to use it."

Rob Collie (00:22:40): That's funny, because looking at a lot of the spreadsheets that you were producing before Power BI, I found them to be pretty sophisticated.

Matt Selig (00:22:49): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:22:49): So by the time you were about to jump to Power BI, I was under the distinct impression that you were... Excel did whatever you wanted it to do at that point.

Matt Selig (00:23:00): Well, I was the guy who, if anybody had an Excel question, they came to ask. I've taken Ivy Tech at a local college here in Indianapolis. That's the online: beginning, intermediate, and advanced Excel classes. I took them all. I always take a tutorial. What I was trying to describe earlier, I wasn't using Excel the way it was supposed to be used as a data manipulation tool. I was using it as a manual, like a manual ledger almost. I'd make all my chicken scratches in Excel and then write formula that's going to answer questions or I'd make a chart. I wasn't really doing data analysis in it.

Rob Collie (00:23:36): I'm going to step in and say, I think you're probably beating yourself up a little bit too much there. The thing that's beautiful about Excel is that it can kind of do whatever you want. It doesn't mean that it can do it efficiently.

Matt Selig (00:23:50): Right.

Rob Collie (00:23:50): You can get from A to B. It just might involve traversing the Grand Canyon down one side and up the other barefoot. I don't really think of you as having misuse it. I just think that it wasn't really a good fit for the things you actually need.

Matt Selig (00:24:05): Yeah. And that pain point of to get an answer, it'd take a half a day so people just wouldn't ask the question. Excel, even now, a year and a half into this, it's the first program I open in the morning. I've spent a couple hours just today already doing different stuff in Excel. It's like an all day long, "You can't live without it" kind of thing.

Rob Collie (00:24:28): We're coming for those remaining two hours. To be down to two hours is pretty good, but we can still do better.

Matt Selig (00:24:34): That pain point in knowing what I want but not knowing how to do it I think was what was frustrating. I've told you the story. I remember there was a break in your class back in January. And I came up and threw my backpack on the floor and pulled my folder out and said, "Look, man, this is what we need." I've drawn it. [inaudible 00:24:55] I said, "This is what I need. Can we do this?" And you were like, "Yeah, sure, whatever."

Rob Collie (00:25:00): Yeah. I think that the word that you kind of coalesced around after realizing there's got to be a better way, I think the word was dashboards. We need to be using dashboards. That's sort of like the first refinement. Is that correct? Do I remember that correctly? Or am I putting words in your mouth?

Matt Selig (00:25:19): That's probably pretty close, because as the story goes, I walked past my wife's bookshelf and saw the orange Microsoft book, Analyzing Data in Microsoft Power BI and Power Pivot, I think. I just opened that book up and within a few minutes I realized "This is what I've been looking for." At some point, I drew that sales dashboard and said "This is the kind of sales dashboard I think we need." I just kind of on a whim grabbed a piece of paper and drew it. I didn't know how to actualize that, how to make a dashboard actually work, but I knew it could be done. I didn't know how to do it.

Rob Collie (00:25:52): It wasn't on a cocktail napkin. It was on real paper. But I kind of like to describe it as the cocktail napkin dashboard sketch that you carried around with you at all times. Like just in case you run into the person that you can show this picture to and they can go, "Ah, we'll connect that with the actual way forward."

Matt Selig (00:26:12): Yeah. I was like a lunatic walking around murdering. "We need this dashboard. This dashboard is going to change everything."

Rob Collie (00:26:23): It reaches the point where people when they're about to meet you, like the person out front that's opening the door, [inaudible 00:26:30] just sort of takes him aside and said, "Listen, don't let him get the sketch out."

Matt Selig (00:26:36): Anybody can find 100 little tutorials on Power BI on YouTube. I'd gone through a couple of those. And I was like, "Oh, that's really cool." You have a "This is what a data model is. This is how you link the tables. This is the common key. This is how you flip that and make a chart or a matrix or a pie chart in Power BI." And then I would see and be like, "Wow, yeah, this is it. This is it." And then I'd look in our accounting system and there were, I don't know, 800 tables in there. I had no idea what to do. I was utterly lost. I knew the answer was in there, but I didn't know how to find it.

Matt Selig (00:27:12): But I ran across your book at a bookstore up by where we live. I started researching P3 and listening to some of your maybe podcasts on YouTube.You said something that always stick with me in one of that podcast that was, I don't know, maybe seven years old at this point where the person inside the organization that stumbles across this stuff feels like they discovered fire and they take it back and they show everybody they work with and say, "Look, I've discovered fire" and everybody's like, "Yeah, yeah, whatever." They keep entering these numbers in Excel. As Stephen Covey says, "The leader climbs up to the top of the tree and says, 'Wrong forest'. And everybody down at the bottom is chopping trees down, says, 'Shut up! We're making progress'."

Rob Collie (00:28:05): Man, that's great. You can apply it to the fire thing too, right?

Matt Selig (00:28:10): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:28:10): It's like, "Hey, listen, we'd love to hear about your fire, but we're over here chewing on this raw meat. It takes a really long time to eat it. We can't be bothered to hear about your fire thing," you know?

Matt Selig (00:28:24): Right. Yeah, not invented here.

Rob Collie (00:28:28): It just the status quo is just so powerful. And that's kind of what I was getting at when I said like, realizing there's got to be a better way even though you don't know exactly what it is yet and then going looking for it. That's not super common. It's almost like there's so many things that converge here. It's like almost no one ever gets fired or otherwise penalized for doing the same thing that the company did yesterday.

Matt Selig (00:28:54): Right.

Rob Collie (00:28:55): There's kind of no risk there in a way, just staying in that rut. You have to rock the boat and you have to take some risks. Maybe that's greater risks in certain cases than others. I don't get the impression that anyone was particularly upset with you or bothered by your desire for something new. But in some organizations, that absolutely happens. You're going to face explicit headwinds sometimes.

Matt Selig (00:29:18): Well, I'm lucky to be in a high position in the organization. That's one thing about a small company. You can have your fingers in the whole thing. If I was in, I don't know, a big corporation like Microsoft, I could be office number 530C in a small Midwestern town in the middle of nowhere and just one of 80,000 people, you know?

Rob Collie (00:29:40): Yeah.

Matt Selig (00:29:41): But here I can just walk down the hallway to the owner and say, "Hey, this is what I'm thinking about." And then I can walk out to the factory and look around. I can walk to the accounting department. So I was fortunate in that sense.

Rob Collie (00:29:55): Well, human beings are really built primarily to operate at short range, like with people that you can see face to face, with things that you can touch. It's like the massive organization of a corporation is almost like a mutation, you know?

Matt Selig (00:30:11): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:30:11): This ability to... I forget the author's name. But the book Sapiens-

Matt Selig (00:30:16): I've heard of it.

Rob Collie (00:30:16): ... talks a lot about this and how it requires this incredible... It's basically a religion. It's how the book presents it. You need this ridiculously strong basically fictional belief that the corporation is an entity in order to rewire people to cooperate at distance that they can't see. You could call it old fashion, but we want to call it something different. We want to reflect... It's like the natural way to work, is sort of the right the kind of environment that you're in.

Matt Selig (00:30:45): Right.

Rob Collie (00:30:46): Of course the downside is, is that at that scale, you're also for a while the HR director.

Matt Selig (00:30:52): Yeah. Sociology has a concept called the Dunbar limit where it says people can only maintain a stable relationship with about 150 people. It's always been interesting to me because I was in the army for a long time. The army segmented itself into basically 120 person units at the company level. And somehow they got onto the idea that once you have 120 people, you can't really have real relationships with 121 people.

Rob Collie (00:31:21): It might not have been deliberate. We could take an evolutionary standpoint here and say "All the armies that tried to organize in groups larger than that, they got beat."

Matt Selig (00:31:30): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:31:32): They're gone.

Matt Selig (00:31:33): I think it's Patagonia that says "We're going to keep our facilities within the Dunbar limit. Once we get a 121 or 151, whatever it is, people, we're going to be build a new facility because it's difficult to maintain a social cohesiveness with a bigger group of people." And that's a challenge we face at SerVaas Labs because our sales increased 60% during the pandemic. We make cleaning products. We went from 70 employees to 105 employees. And now I walk through the factory and I see people that I don't know who they are. I don't know if they work here. I don't know anything about them other than there's some person in the building. And we're kind of approaching that limit. It's a challenge to think, "How do we remain SerVaas Laboratories, whatever the Dunbar limit is, when everybody can't have a face to face relationship anymore with everybody here?" That's kind of a big challenge right now.

Rob Collie (00:32:28): For what it's worth, I suspect that everyone has a slightly different number for their Dunbar, you know?

Matt Selig (00:32:34): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:32:35): I'm positive mine is well below average. I think I might have a number as closer to 10.

Matt Selig (00:32:46): I think it was Justin Mannhardt, your P3 guy. Justin Mannhardt first came and helped us put together the dashboard. I think it was him that I first heard him say, that we just want a single source of truth. We don't want five different data models to make five different sales dashboards, or we don't want 10 different data models to make sales dashboards and cost dashboards and one source of truth. I've kind of clung to that to say, "That's the answer. We have a single source of truth, and we have several Dunbar groups." Maybe the first and second shift is the Dunbar group each, but we all have the same source of truth. That when we need to answer questions about what's happening, we don't have alternate realities.

Rob Collie (00:33:29): The first time that I was introduced to this concept, one version of the truth, I was brand new to BI. I was working on the Excel team at Microsoft. But it's kind of funny. I had been tapped to be essentially in charge of the majority of the stuff that was going to be happening in Excel around BI, but I didn't know anything about BI. So I was getting this crash course on what BI means and was introduced to this one version of the truth.

Rob Collie (00:33:54): And I'll tell you, the first time I heard this concept, it actually kind of pissed me off. I kind of bristled at the idea when I first heard it. The way it hit me the first time was in such like an anti-democratic way. And I think there was some truth to this the way I thought of it, but I didn't have the whole picture. The thing that I heard was, the powers that be centralized deity or whatever at great distance from the people who are doing the work are going to come up with that one version of the truth. And then they are going to inflict it, right?

Matt Selig (00:34:29): Sounds like a Dilbert cartoon.

Rob Collie (00:34:30): It does, doesn't it, right? And that's sort of what I thought of it was like, "We're going to take all of the innovation and original thought that's possibly in the organization and we're going to legislate it out." I think that is one of the things. That was sort of the dark underbelly of the one version of the truth back at the time.

Rob Collie (00:34:52): Now, where we've landed with Power BI is this beautiful blend of the two strengths. We're not stifling innovation or original thought. We're giving it a conduit to actually come to life, to come to fruition and be implemented, be realized. You still have to decide. If there's multiple different possibilities of how you're going to calculate a metric, you have to pick one and you have to pick the right one. It's even easier to test now between those, like which one sort of most closely matches your targets or reality even. But yeah, you don't want to be playing "My spreadsheet can beat up your spreadsheet."

Rob Collie (00:35:33): You hear this all the time. It might not have been as big of a deal at SerVaas, but at bigger organizations, meetings very often start out with everyone showing up with their spreadsheet their versions of the same thing. They have different numbers. And the point of the meeting was to decide X, Y, Z, but they never get around to X, Y, Z, because they're spending the whole meeting fighting about whose spreadsheet is right. That does need to stop.

Rob Collie (00:36:00): And so I've come full circle. I am now a big believer in a phrase, in a principle, one version of the truth, that I was emotionally opposed to when I first encountered it. And it is. It's the best of both worlds. We get the innovation. We get the information and the ideas from the trenches where the things are actually happening. That's sort of a meritocracy of ideas whichever that can make it into the one version, that can be the one version now. Whereas in the past, whatever the best idea was going on out there, it was only in one person's spreadsheet and you couldn't tell the difference between that spreadsheet and all the other spreadsheets. There was no way.

Matt Selig (00:36:38): When I was in the army, the two parts to the time I spent in the army, the first part was in the infantry. And that was very fluid. Everything was rapid change. You'd start out to do something and it would change immediately. They'd make you stay awake for four days and walk 20 miles a day with 80 pounds on you back and throw you in these impossible situations and you had to try to figure out what to do.

Matt Selig (00:37:03): And as I started studying accounting, I said, "Well, I think I'll check out what the army does in its accounting work" because I'm a Finance Corps. I went to the controller's office in the Army National Guard Command. And I remember going to this woman and I was just the equivalent of an intern at that time. And I said, "What do you do?" And she says, "I take this piece of paper. I pick up that piece of paper. I put them together. I staple it and I put it in that pile." And I said, "Well, why do you do that?" She said, "Look, I take this piece of paper. I take that piece of paper. I staple them together and I put them in that pile." And I think bureaucracy is like a way of implementing one version of the truth, like every woman who did her job and every 50 national guards across the United States had one version of truth to how they did the job.

Rob Collie (00:37:53): Yeah.

Matt Selig (00:37:54): For me, I thought that was soul crushing.

Rob Collie (00:37:56): Yeah.

Matt Selig (00:37:56): I like the infantry. Make it up as you go along and figure out what to do.

Rob Collie (00:38:01): So when she was answering that question, was there any hint of irony in her answer or was it matter of fact?

Matt Selig (00:38:09): This is 25, 26 years ago. I remember it as kind of like a cynicism.

Rob Collie (00:38:14): Mm-hmm (affirmative). Okay. Yeah.

Matt Selig (00:38:17): "This is what the book says. This is the way I do it. You're asking all these questions and the book doesn't authorize you to ask questions."

Rob Collie (00:38:24): Yeah. It's like the guy in office space who goes in and talks to the two consultants and tells them the truth about what he actually does all day.

Matt Selig (00:38:31): Yeah. And everybody there was like that. But I think that's how you get one version of the truth. You have a policy manual that says, "This is the one way we do it."

Rob Collie (00:38:42): Yeah. So it's kind of like the bad version of one version of the truth is lowest common denominator.

Matt Selig (00:38:49): Right.

Rob Collie (00:38:52): It's like almost inherently about the worst thing. Instead, we want sort of the best thing to bubble up into that one version. We want the one version to be the best thing that we can do.

Matt Selig (00:39:01): Every McDonald's I've ever been in on three continents has the same Big Mac.

Rob Collie (00:39:07): But it's [inaudible 00:39:08] Big Mac.

Matt Selig (00:39:08): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:39:09): I'm full of fiction. Not that same commonality for the Quarter Pounder though according to Jules.

Matt Selig (00:39:18): I think that's kind of been a guiding principle. "Let's get to one version of the truth, but let's not use it as a straight jacket."

Rob Collie (00:39:25): Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah.

Matt Selig (00:39:26): Let's use it to support the kind of the free flow of like, "I can't write a policy for this company for tomorrow or next year because I don't know what we'll be facing next year."

Rob Collie (00:39:38): I mean, what could change in one year?

Matt Selig (00:39:40): Our sales could go up 60% and our headcount could increase 50%.

Rob Collie (00:39:46): Oh, cry me a river. Your 60% revenue growth, such a huge problem. However, it actually does cause problems, right? You can't just sit back and operate like you did yesterday under such circumstances.

Rob Collie (00:39:57): Let's rewind to January of this year. I think we should all just let Matt Selig pick stocks for us going forward. We should go to Vegas with him or something because Matt has amazing foresight. In January, he knew the world was about to be turned upside down and he needed to get that long running, there has to be a better way. He saw it all coming. He knew. He knew he needed to get Power BI implemented ASAP. Of course, I'm joking. You didn't see this coming anymore than the rest of us probably. But the timing was amazing.

Matt Selig (00:40:26): I kind of did, but for a different reason.

Rob Collie (00:40:28): Oh you did?

Matt Selig (00:40:29): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:40:29): Oh, okay. Yeah, maybe we could talk about that. But yeah, you got Power BI kicked off at SerVaas Labs in February, right?

Matt Selig (00:40:38): Mm-hmm (affirmative). Mid February.

Rob Collie (00:40:40): You came to our class in January and you told us afterwards. It's kind of as a means of almost interviewing us, sort of getting a feel for us.

Matt Selig (00:40:47): Yep.

Rob Collie (00:40:48): Because it is, like you mentioned, it's a scary step when you're going to finally commit to trying out one of the ways that it might turn out to be the better way. Sooner or later you have to take this leap and commit some significant amount of your own money, some significant amount of your own time, and even picking the software platform, choosing which one you're going to use, choosing a firm to help you with it. This is scary for a good reason. And so you had kind of stumbled onto us. You'd found the book and all of that. And you thought, "Okay, this is a candidate." But you were careful. You and one other person from SerVaas, you both came to our January class. We apparently didn't scare you off. And then we did our first jumpstart engagement to kick off a project with you in February.

Matt Selig (00:41:34): Right.

Rob Collie (00:41:35): I've got the timeline.

Matt Selig (00:41:36): The pressure I was facing at the time is we had a dashboard consulting company that will remain unnamed, that came on really hard and heavy with the... We've got this amazing dashboard that's going to show you it's going to have one page that has all of your costs categorized by things like freight, materials, chemicals, labor. We're going to compare it to a database that shows what you should have paid for those things. We only want $6,500 a month. They kind of like, you see fire all of a sudden. You discover fire. And while you're so amazed, they say "Sign this contract."

Rob Collie (00:42:14): Yeah. Yeah.

Matt Selig (00:42:14): But I had seen enough of Power BI to think their dashboard wasn't very good. It was crazy overpriced. And if we didn't like it anymore and didn't renew, we lost it. So I got motivated to find a better solution. I'd already talked to somebody at P3 early in 2019, but kind of just lost contact with them. I put it on the back burner. And I got a hold...

Matt Selig (00:42:38): And yeah, going to the class, I mean, we learned things about Power Query, Power Pivot. We learned a very little bit about Power BI, but we were there to check you guys out to see if you were a bunch of hucksters like the last salting company was, or if we really knew what you were talking about. I think my wife worked right by where the class was, so the three of us all went out to lunch one day.

Rob Collie (00:43:05): We did.

Matt Selig (00:43:06): Yeah, because she work literally 50 steps from where the class was. My wife and I took a couple P3 people out to dinner that night. We were enjoying ourselves but I just kind of wanted to know, "Are these just another hucksters that are trying to get us to sign a contractor before we realized what happens?"

Rob Collie (00:43:24): There you go. There's our new ad campaign. We're not hucksters.

Matt Selig (00:43:30): After that, I talked to our president and our chief marketing officer. I said, "They save her. For X amount of dollars, they can come in here in three days and get something up and running. I think we should give them a shot." And they were both enthusiastic about that because I was showing them my drawing that I'd shown you at that class.

Matt Selig (00:43:46): And Justin came down for three days. The first day the report he came up with, I was like, "Ooh. Oh, that doesn't look too good. It's better than what we got, but it's not that... Nobody's going to write home about this." But by the third day, through that iterative process of saying, "Okay, this is what I got, tell me what you need. Okay, this is what I got. Tell me what you need." And he put 50 more sticky notes on the white board. He just kept chiseling away, like Michael Angelo making the statue by removing all the parts of the rock that aren't the statue. And by the end of the day, we had people gasping when they saw the dashboard. It was the same kind of reaction I experienced with Bar Keepers Friend from people who were looking at it and they were like, "Oh my God. I heard that. Oh my God, I can't believe this."

Rob Collie (00:44:35): Yeah. [inaudible 00:44:36] was like a Lord of the Rings thing. "By the end of the third day, look to the west" or something. But yeah, because it... Your local here to Indianapolis. Justin, isn't. He flew in for this. But I dropped in on you on one of those, in the afternoon.

Matt Selig (00:44:51): Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Rob Collie (00:44:52): Yeah. I mean, there was a real live and breathing initial, anyway, initial set of a couple of dashboards. You'd already been making discoveries. There was at least one or two discoveries you'd made about your business that were surprising. That's actually relatively typical.

Rob Collie (00:45:08): I was recently asked to put together a one minute video. Anyone who knows me knows that this one minute of video, like, "Oh my God, you're going to let him talk. He has to say something coherent in one minute? That's not his thing." I was asked to record a one minute video giving sort of my number one piece of advice to people who are needing BI, to the BI universe, but mostly to the customers of BI. This is a terrible challenge. But it was really helpful. It was crystallizing, galvanizing in a way, because what I came up with is that you should set five business days as sort of the limit, the elapsed time limit before you see your first results. When I say first results, it's sort of like what you were looking at, even a little bit at the end of day two and definitely into day three of not that first day but late second day and then the third day. We were under the five business day limit for those first results. It doesn't mean that you're done.

Matt Selig (00:46:10): Right. Not at all.

Rob Collie (00:46:11): It doesn't mean that you're done. You're never really done. That's the beautiful thing, it's that you can always improve. You're just improving less and less. Over time, you're more than likely to be doing brand new things than fine tuning forever on a single report. That's not how it works. So that's what I did in this video, is to say any project timeline that involves you waiting more than five business days to see your first results is a loser project strategy. And just as importantly, this five day thing with the new tools that are available to us, this five day thing is absolutely legitimate. It's doable. It's achievable. So if you start hearing projects that are measured in months, maybe it does take months to get to where you ultimately want to be, but you're not going to be working on it full time for months to get there.

Matt Selig (00:47:01): Yeah. I had told you before we started the podcast here, it was kind of like the Grand Canyon. We stood at the edge and there was a lot of DAX in the middle to get to the other side. And to bring up our internal skillset to the level, we needed to get across that Gulf. It was going to take years maybe. Now, that's what P3 really did, was help get us from that side where we knew what we could have and we got across to the other side. And in the meantime, I went to your class, a book that really helped me get going was Roger Silva's Create and Learn in Power BI. Power BI Create and Learn by Roger Silva. It's still on my desk and it got me to the point where I said, "I can write a report now."

Matt Selig (00:47:47): Justin started to build that data model and I could write a report on top of it. I didn't have to learn how to make the data model, which was going to take me months to get up to that skill level. And I could take the reports that Justin created or further P3 consultants that we worked with, like Ryan and Paul, and I could work with it. I could change things. I knew how to change the title on and matrix report for visual for instance. I knew how to add a column. I knew how to put a slicer in. I knew what information I wanted. If I couldn't figure out how to do it, I could come back to the consultant and say, "Hey, could you show me how to blank, blank, blank? I'm trying to make this pie chart that has this information."

Rob Collie (00:48:25): This is a really cool dynamic that we don't have with all of our clients. Not all of our clients want this, to be perfectly honest. And that's okay if you don't want this, it's totally fine, obviously. But you are very keen and very spongy in terms of soaking up knowledge. And you are. You're advancing your own capabilities in this space and we're even helping you do that. So this interesting hybrid of our team, multiple members of our team at various points in time, have been helping you advance the ball down the field, but at the same time, you've also been learning how to do a number of these things for yourself.

Matt Selig (00:49:03): Yep.

Rob Collie (00:49:03): So you don't need us for everything.

Matt Selig (00:49:05): That's right.

Rob Collie (00:49:05): You sort of need us on the frontier.

Matt Selig (00:49:07): Last week, I had the capital expenditures report that I was showing you with the three different matrices. I figured out a way to do it, but I was like, "Oh my gosh. When I tell Paul Boynton what I did to do this, he's going to laugh." But I made it work. I made it work. Paul and I got on our weekly call and I said, "You're going to laugh when I show you how I did this." And he laughed, but he also showed me, "But you could have done it like this." And then we fixed it and made it the way it should be. Some things I've just said, "I have no idea how to do what I want, like this customer profitability report, but we really need it really bad." And then we've turned that over to him.

Matt Selig (00:49:50): In the meantime, I think I mentioned I'm working through M Is for Data Monkeys. I've worked through parts of your book. I'm working on Matt Allington's supercharged Power BI with DAX. I've taken a Udemy class on DAX with Gilly Dow in England. My first exposure to Excel in 1995, I still learned stuff about Excel. It's so big. Just a couple days ago, I watched a little tutorial on how to do an XLOOKUP function. I've never done it before. I'd heard of it, but I was like, "What is that thing?" And there's just so much to learn in there. I kind of feel the same way with... I'm not sure Power BI is just kind of like the shell on top of everything, isn't it? I mean, isn't it the data model beneath it all that's kind of driving the ship?

Rob Collie (00:50:33): Yeah. I mean, the data model, the DAX calculation engine, the M engine behind Power Query, these are the things that are really core and they're also the ones that are most powerful, the most useful, all that, and most unique. They're also the ones that require learning, right?

Matt Selig (00:50:52): Right.

Rob Collie (00:50:52): They're the ones with the learning curve.

Matt Selig (00:50:54): If you have a good data model, you can make a matrix in Power BI if you know the basics, you know?

Rob Collie (00:51:00): Yeah.

Matt Selig (00:51:01): You can change the colors on it. So that's, to me, what P3 has been the most useful for us building that infrastructure underneath the amazing, cool reports we have.

Rob Collie (00:51:14): Yeah. It's really, really satisfying to me and gratifying to hear you say things, even small things like, "I know how to change the title." I know that's not technical, right? You also do write some DAX. I've seen it.

Matt Selig (00:51:26): Yeah. Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:51:28): And you're reading these books. You're dedicated to constantly improving and growing and learning. We just hired... For example, for the first time ever, we have a full-time web developer working for our company. It's not just for the website. It's for a lot of things, but just basically everything that we do digitally out in the world to try to reach people, he's going to be involved in. He was telling this story the other day about he had worked for an ad agency or something like that in the past. He was in a meeting with some clients and he said the client was describing something that they needed. And Alex, Alex is his name, spoke up and said, "Yeah, that's easy. I can do that in no time." It was just a good, helpful human thing to say. But then when the meeting was over and everyone was gone, he got scolded and told he was never allowed to say anything was easy over again.

Rob Collie (00:52:21): He needed from now on to say... Whenever he wanted to say something was easy, he had to say it was interesting, instead. Because yeah, of course there are times that you think something's easy, and it doesn't turn out to be easy. You always want to be careful about that situation. But the instructions in this case he was getting were that essentially we had an opportunity there to charge a lot more money for the thing that you were going to do. We can't mark it up to 10000% that we were going to otherwise.

Rob Collie (00:52:49): I just love the fact that we have leaned into the honest version of all of this. We're not going to tell you, "Oh no, it's hard to change titles on charts," you know? Or do our best to keep you out of the text so that you don't ever discover that you can. We've been running with this experiment now for a long time, long enough to know that it works, that we're going to deliver things as quickly, as efficiently, as cost effectively as we possibly can. We're not going to try to hoard things and make it a black magic. And a lot of people didn't believe that that would work. But here you are, sort of surfing this hybrid model. On the flip side, if you're willing to learn all this stuff yourself and you are getting better at it every day-

Matt Selig (00:53:35): Absolutely.

Rob Collie (00:53:36): ... why do you still use P3 for anything?

Matt Selig (00:53:40): I was just kind of thinking through. We haven't really talked a lot exactly what we did. We've said, "Oh, it's amazing. It's amazing. I can't believe it. It's amazing. It's world changing. It's this bright, shiny fire." What we've done with P3... I can't remember if you've seen my whiteboard behind me where I've laid out the plan for our dashboard reporting. I thought I would get it done in six months, but the pandemic happened and it slowed everything down. But to date, we've got a sales dashboard report that will tell you anything you want to know about who we sell to, what we sell to, what they pay for, how we promote with them. Anything. Anything you want to know. We've got a cost dashboard that tells you anything you want to know about our costs and what we buy, who we buy it from, what we pay for it, how much we get. Anything you want to know about our costs.

Matt Selig (00:54:29): And I told Luke yesterday, "We tried to make these so any average schmuck could look at this stuff and it would be obvious." You don't need to be a CPA. You don't need to be a data jockey. We wanted this stuff like Fred Flinstone simple. And then we have an inventory report that tells us anything we want to know about our raw materials, our finished goods in our warehouses. It's just we couldn't have done it without somebody. P3 built the data model underneath all that and created a lot of the reports that were just beyond our abilities.

Matt Selig (00:55:03): And in the meantime, I've studied like crazy to try to get better myself, because it's interesting to me for one. And it's kind of like Excel, there's so much there to learn. There's a good five years worth of material there to learn. I'm sure of it. It's funny. Before this podcast, I was showing you, "I just learned how to post a Power BI reporting teams." And you said, "I don't think I've ever seen that." You're the pro and you still have stuff to learn.

Rob Collie (00:55:29): Well, I've largely been put out to pasture. I'm the mascot now.

Matt Selig (00:55:37): Yeah. You're here with the pretty face.

Rob Collie (00:55:41): Yeah, we're in trouble. Now I'm the person that says "We're not going to use email." I'm the one that fights change.

Matt Selig (00:55:49): So what we have online in the next, I don't know, six to nine months... I think it's optimistic, but we want to bring our factory into Power BI so that you can watch our factory run from anywhere in the world, on your cell phone. Everything. Everything. You can see how many units it produced, how much downtime it had, how hot the sensor was at a certain position at a certain time, what maintenance needs to be done. So we're going to have our whole factory online.

Matt Selig (00:56:21): The other big project that's coming online is digital marketing. We don't do television advertising and radio advertising. We used to, but we haven't in a long time. But our digital marketing on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok, YouTube, all those digital channels are pumping out a lot of data also. We're going to build reports that show our digital marketing operations happening in real time so we can see that. If the person who does our digital marketing says, "Oh, we've spent a thousand dollars on an influencer in Nebraska," let's say, I want to know, "Well, how many cans of Bar Keepers Friend did that move off the shelf?" I don't know if we can ever answer that specific question, but that's the kind of stuff we want to know.

Rob Collie (00:57:07): Attribution is hard in those circumstances.

Matt Selig (00:57:09): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:57:10): But at the same time, you've got seasonality, you've got baselines, you have the date of the influencer campaign beginning and ending and all that kind of stuff so you can... You know how they say, "Correlation is not causation."

Matt Selig (00:57:23): That's right.

Rob Collie (00:57:23): Correlation is sometimes pretty good.

Matt Selig (00:57:26): The final piece of the puzzle is to take our customers data. We sell to the biggest retailers in the United States, Walmart, Target, Dollar General, Amazon, Lowe's, Home Depot, Kroger, you name it. We think we have a pretty high penetration in all those customers. And they generate data. We want to take our biggest customers like Walmart, Target, Dollar General, Amazon, and bring their point of sale data into Power BI so that we can watch Bar Keepers Friend moving across their cash registers and we can tie that together there with our digital marketing efforts and say that we've tried to created a digital marketing campaign that tried to sell Bar Keepers Friend on the east side of Tulsa, Oklahoma at Walmart. Let's see if that happened.

Rob Collie (00:58:18): Yeah. And right now the sales data that you do get is from each customer, which is a retailer, right?

Matt Selig (00:58:26): Yes.

Rob Collie (00:58:27): You don't get a lot of granularity. Maybe you get some information like, "We shipped it to the east warehouse versus the west warehouse" or something like that. It's not time synced with the actual sale, right? You're dependent upon when they decided to reorder. You wouldn't be able to see those sorts of things you're talking about. You need that kind of granularity especially when you're having to these sorts of attribution types of exercises.

Matt Selig (00:58:50): Our salespeople need it when they go to visit Walmart, for instance, or Target. When they show up at Walmart buying center in Bentonville, they need good information to take to that buyer. They only have 30 minutes. They need to have a powerful tool to make their case when they get that 30 minutes once a year to get in there and sell to them. And for what they tell me, they love our sales dashboards, but they say that the kind of BI tools we're developing are what people like Walmart expect the big CPG players like Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson to have, but they don't expect a small little company like SerVaas Labs to be that sophisticated. But we're getting there. There's a lot of hard work to do between now and then, but I think it'll happen.

Rob Collie (00:59:40): They don't expect it today, but they will soon.

Matt Selig (00:59:43): Right.

Rob Collie (00:59:46): You're going to change their perceptions. Yeah.

Matt Selig (00:59:50): Yeah. And that gives us more credibility when we show up.

Rob Collie (00:59:55): That's right.

Matt Selig (00:59:55): In Walmart, Bar Keepers Friend is two facings on miles worth of shelves. We command six inches of shelf on Walmarts.

Rob Collie (01:00:05): These are the things that I always try to tell people ahead of time: how much is possible and how good it's going to be. But I think in the process of actually telling people the truth, I actually start to sound like I'm lying, you know? And so this is the riddle we're trying to crack, is how to actually tell people the truth about what to expect from Power BI and what to expect from working with us.

Matt Selig (01:00:29): Put a little sign by my picture that says, "Not a paid-

Rob Collie (01:00:32): Not a paid. Yeah.

Matt Selig (01:00:34): ... endorsement."

Rob Collie (01:00:34): That's right. We did a case study together. You were kind enough to participate on a polished case study.

Matt Selig (01:00:40): It does sound pretty crazy, but I don't think we've said anything here in the last hour that doesn't reflect reality.

Rob Collie (01:00:47): Isn't that neat?

Matt Selig (01:00:47): Because I'm super reality-based. I'm not a pie in the sky dreamer. If I didn't think P3 had lived up to our expectations, then I would've walked out of the class in January and said, "Nope, we keep looking guys."

Rob Collie (01:01:02): Onto the next Huckster.

Matt Selig (01:01:08): Yeah.

Rob Collie (01:01:09): All right. Well, Matt, I really appreciate you taking the time to be on the show with us. I've enjoyed knowing you and I've also love watching the journey that you've been on. I love like just how differently you're talking, how much progress you've made. I also love that you're even as amazing as the things that you've got now are relative to where you were before you started this. You're already talking about turning what you have today and making it look like it was kindergarten.

Matt Selig (01:01:37): Yeah, definitely. I think what we're about to do... We're like Icarus. We're flying near the sun, but I think what we're about to do will be the most amazing part yet, really.

Rob Collie (01:01:47): The sun is farther away than it looks. You're going to be fine. Your wings aren't going to melt. All right. Well, thank you very much.

Matt Selig (01:01:54): Okay. Well, it's been my pleasure.

Announcer (01:01:56): Thanks for listening to the Raw Data by P3 Podcast. Find out what the experts at P3 can do for your business. Go to powerpivotpro.com. Interested in becoming a guest on the show? Email lukep, L-U-K-E-P, @powerpivotpro.com. Have a data day!

Stephanie Bruno and Shannon Lindsay join Rob for a special holiday giving edition of the podcast. This duo makes up the colorful online world of The Data Witches. Both of these ladies in tech are Power BI User Group Leaders in their respective regions of Pittsburgh and Washington, DC. The witches continue to use their Powers (of BI) for good across many philanthropic efforts:

• From their early days working together at the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation (EGPAF).
• Shannon & Stephanie's philanthropic work with non-profits such as The World Central Kitchen
• There's a holiday fundraising effort for EGPAF, where your donations will be matched through December 24th!  Donate Here

Episode Timeline:

• 2:00 - The Origin of the "Witches" name and how they discovered the magic of the Power Platform
• 6:40 - The Vampiric manner that the Witches are converting others to Power BI
• 12:25 - Power BI is vital in data optimization in the Non-profit space
• 17:20 - The Data Community is an amazing community-those that have the Data Itch are a different and helpful type of human
• 30:00 - Gender and the data world, Rob and Stephanie debate the usefulness of Calculus, and the elation of besting one's academic rivals
• 39:50 - Data quality is important, especially so when lives are at stake...it's evident in the analytics
• 47:10 - How the Witches are using Power Apps and Power Automate
• 55:00 - Upstream and Downstream flows to Power BI- The concept of the Action Loop
• 1:01:30 - Stephanie's recent graduate degree and the highs and lows of going back to grad school
• 1:07:30 - The resistance to change and new technology-predictive modeling and machine learning are a tough sell
• 1:11:25 - Shannon's new gig at the not quite so non-profit Microsoft
• 1:16:15 - How COVID has impacted operations, and how non-profits view Microsoft and other large corporations

Episode Transcript:

Rob Collie (00:00:00): Welcome, everyone. We all know that Power BI is good. We all know that the Power platform is good. But it's not often, that we get to talk about it actually directly helping to save lives. But in a very real sense, our guest this week, the Data Witches, that's what they've been doing. They've been using the Power platform to help save lives. The data witches, Stephanie and Shannon met while working at the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation. So clearly, they're good witches, but they're data witches. And after seeing the promise of the Power platform and Power BI specifically, they've successfully advocated for the adoption of these tools within that organization, to great impact. Years ago, on separate occasions, I actually had the pleasure of having each of them in one of my classes. And so I played a small part in their introduction to this world. But that's just the beginning of the story. Because these two have really spread the religion far and wide, both within the nonprofit sphere and elsewhere. This was a really great conversation with two great people. And I hope you enjoy it. So let's get after it.

Announcer (00:01:20): Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please.

Announcer (00:01:24): This is the Raw Data by P3 podcast with your host, Rob Collie. Find out what the experts at P3 can do for your business. Go to powerpivotpro.com. Raw Data by P3 is data with the human element.

Rob Collie (00:01:39): Welcome to the show, Data witches, Shannon and Stephanie. Alright, so let's start there. You started a blog. You call yourselves the Data Witches. Did you have any particular witches from fiction in mind that you sort of identify with? I'm assuming it's not the evil witches. I know both of you, you're pretty nice. So was there any particular inspiration? Is this a reference to the TV show, Charmed or anything like that?

Stephanie Bruno (00:02:12): It was not. No. First of all, thanks for having us here, Rob. Data Witches is new, like you said. The name came because Shannon and I were doing a presentation together at the... What was it Shannon?

Shannon Lindsay (00:02:27): The Power Platform World Tour, DC.

Stephanie Bruno (00:02:31): That's right. Right before everything shut down. It was in March. And we were doing a presentation on optimizing your data models in Power BI and showing some tools and someone in the, one of the participants said, "What is this witchcraft you're showing us?" So we decided to just go with that. So, no. No specific witch.

Rob Collie (00:02:51): Okay. Witchcraft, though. That's good. I like that.

Stephanie Bruno (00:02:53): It's witchcraft. Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:02:55): A talk on optimizing your data models.

Stephanie Bruno (00:02:58): Indeed.

Rob Collie (00:02:59): I went to School of Computer Science, and all of that. And I still wouldn't have predicted that my future self might be on stage giving a talk about optimizing data models. Did either of you sort of see that in your career future 10 years ago. We're going to be on stage talking about optimizing data models.

Stephanie Bruno (00:03:15): No, never, not at all. I don't even like getting on stage. I never thought I would want to do that ever. Which is one of the reasons I like to present with Shannon a lot. Presenting with a buddy, I think is a, makes it a lot more fun. And Shannon's a great presenter. So I started presenting at user groups. But once I got to present with Shannon, it just became a lot more fun.

Shannon Lindsay (00:03:36): I never in a million years, saw myself talking about data models, or even knowing what they are. I like to be on stage to sing and dance. But the tech came later.

Rob Collie (00:03:48): Do you sing or dance during the tech presentations?

Shannon Lindsay (00:03:51): Occasionally.

Rob Collie (00:03:52): Really?

Shannon Lindsay (00:03:53): Interpretive dance works really well, for data model optimization.

Rob Collie (00:03:57): This is a many to many relationship. Let me show you what it looks like. That's awesome. Yeah, being able to blend that sort of personal touch into talk, to me, even though people just really don't expect it. I love that sort of thing when you can, when it's done right. So what are your backgrounds? How did you discover Power BI and the road from singing and dancing right on stage, right? The road from that to optimizing data models on stage. It's an interesting road. I find this kind of stuff to be the absolute best stuff. If we didn't set out to be techies to begin with. But we discover something that helps us. That's the best thing. If you're doing it for tech sake, you're almost certainly not even doing it well. People might think of this, "Oh, the accidental path to getting somewhere." No, it's the right path. It's really the only one that matters. And so, I know bits and pieces of your stories, but I don't know all of it. And I'm sure people listening would love to hear it. So let's talk about you.

Shannon Lindsay (00:04:58): I'll start with this one. I'm Mrs. Shannon. I had a non traditional path into this, which I think a lot of people in this field did. Which I find so fascinating. My background is really, as an analyst, if you put it in data speak. Many moons ago, after college, I joined the Peace Corps because I wanted to experience other parts of the world. And I thought it was kind of my duty being so fortunate to be able to work with people that were less fortunate and understand what the rest of the world lives like. And it was actually during that experience that I got to work with a health facility. I was doing health education, and I got to work at a health facility and help them implement their first ever electronic medical records.

Shannon Lindsay (00:05:45): And then it was from there that I decided to go on and get a degree in public health. And from there, I specialized in something called monitoring and evaluation, which is like a little niche part of development and public health organizations. But essentially, all it is, it's an analyst. And I was using a lot of Excel, that was basically everything I was doing. And once I met Stephanie, after years at different organizations, we landed at the same organization. And once I met her, she introduced me to the literal magic, that was Power Query. And it was honestly from there that my whole journey with Power Query, Power BI really started. So it was probably about I don't know, a year after Stephanie and I met that I came to my first Power Pivot Pro training. And then there my journey just continued.

Rob Collie (00:06:41): Awesome. Okay, so that means Stephanie was like patient zero in your life, right? She was the one that was infected first. Let's, so Stephanie how many fellow... We can use the witch metaphor, we start using the vampire metaphor, right? Because vampires make other vampires. Stephanie you just going around in the world minting other Power BI people or, how's this working?

Stephanie Bruno (00:07:05): I'm doing my best. Definitely trying to, but I would say that Shannon is the most infected of anybody that I've had the opportunity to infect. Yeah, she's really taken it on. And once I saw that in her, that she liked it. I didn't let up. It's like, "Oh, Shannon, you like Power Query? Look at DAX, let's go there next." Yes. So my opportunities to teach more people they are generally more within our organization, is where I started with them. But then also the community, I would say, that's the thing that really was the big changer for me, in my path getting here. I do have a IT background and a left brain background, I guess. My degree is in math and physics. And I started off in IT as a software developer. But I always liked that I could just hide in the corner and do everything by myself. And I thought that was just fine. Until I had an opportunity to go to a past summit in 2013.

Stephanie Bruno (00:08:06): And I do remember thinking, "Okay, this is awesome." I have two little kids at home. I'm busy all the time. I don't get any sleep. I'm just going to go to these sessions and learn a bunch of stuff. And then sleep. Just get a lot of sleep and watch movies and stuff in my hotel room. You're chuckling because you know that's not what happens at past Summit, I think. So-

Rob Collie (00:08:23): I've been a couple times.

Stephanie Bruno (00:08:25): ... Yeah. So that it turned out, no, I was completely wrong. And a bunch of nice people took me under their wing. And they said, "Oh, you do this great work for HIV in Africa. And we want to help you with that. This is amazing." So needless to say, I got very little sleep. But I met a lot of people and my eyes were open to, "Wow, this thing called community, I think that this is actually probably way better than just hiding in a corner and doing my IT work by myself." So everything just exploded from there. And I realized that there's a lot to learn and a lot of people who are really nice and want to help and share with each other. So that changed everything for me.

Rob Collie (00:09:06): Yeah. That's really cool. I didn't know that you had that math and physics background. I didn't know. Or maybe I did, just don't remember which is also-

Stephanie Bruno (00:09:14): What? You don't remember everything about everybody who attends your classes, Rob?

Rob Collie (00:09:17): No, I don't remember a lot. I wouldn't have guessed from knowing you that you came from an IT background. That's really just because of the IT stereotype of, IT isn't necessarily known for their communication skills, or their warmth. One of the things we're always talking about on this show, is the notion that the hybrid is where it's at. Whatever the sort of the day to day, subject matter or business domain is. You have to be firmly rooted in that subject out in the trenches, so to speak, while at the same time able to execute technically. And if you have both of those sort of in one brain that's infinitely more valuable than having it in two separate brains.

Rob Collie (00:10:08): It's kind of unfair to IT in a way, if I go, "Oh, you're just way too personable to have come from IT." But that's something else I want to talk about, which is that so many people who find themselves to be really drawn to this stuff, whatever this stuff is data, right? And using it, to help using it for an advantage. So many of us, this group, this community, so many of us did not grow up as the STEM people. The math and science people. Stephanie it sounds like you did. You didn't go from a liberal arts and humanities focus in high school directly to math and physics in college, I don't think.

Stephanie Bruno (00:10:50): That true.

Rob Collie (00:10:50): You probably are already on that path a little bit. Did you go to math competitions in high school?

Stephanie Bruno (00:10:55): I did not do that.

Rob Collie (00:10:55): Oh, see?

Stephanie Bruno (00:10:58): No.

Rob Collie (00:10:59): Yeah.

Stephanie Bruno (00:10:59): Yeah. Not full on. I'm sorry to disappoint you here.

Rob Collie (00:11:04): They were debating giving us math nerds a letter, like a varsity letter to put on our jackets for math team. And I was like, "Oh."

Stephanie Bruno (00:11:12): So you did? You did go to math competitions?

Rob Collie (00:11:15): Oh, yeah. I was a [mathlete 00:11:20] and physics competitions, and all that kind of stuff. But I had the sense even then to know that putting a letter on my jacket for math team was just going to make me a magnet for ridicule and bullying. So I just said, "No, we don't need to do that." But Shannon, did you grow up as a Math Science nerd?

Shannon Lindsay (00:11:38): No, not at all. My undergraduate degrees in biology, but I think I picked it because it was the easiest science. I was never good at Math, I would still say that I'm not great at Math. But through Stephanie's coaching, and the work that I've done, I realized that I am now capable of doing Math at least. But no, I was not a huge academic. I really started getting serious about caring about the data once I saw it, and I was working in the field. And I think that your reference to having both brains is really interesting. Because when I first started working with Stephanie, I had the field experience, and she had all of the technical knowledge. And I think over the last five or so years, we've both learned so much from each other. In both arenas, it's been really cool.

Rob Collie (00:12:27): You met working for a nonprofit, in the nonprofit space. And P3, we've done a reasonable amount of work for nonprofits. My belief is that really the kinds of problems that with data that you tend to be solving aren't really structurally much different at all, working in the nonprofit space versus the for profit space. The biggest difference would be if we were going to advertise our services to the nonprofit sector, we wouldn't say things like, bring the impact to the bottom line. We probably just wouldn't talk a certain way. That the work would probably be similar. For example, we did some work for FEMA. FEMA is a government agency, not a nonprofit, but it basically is. And one of the metrics that they had that I thought was really cool, was essentially, how much does it cost us to spend $1.

Rob Collie (00:13:23): We've got all this money that we need to deploy in response to a disaster. A hurricane wipes out Florida for the 10th time in the decade and gets declared a disaster zone. And so FEMA deploys and tries to put a bunch of money in the field in various forms, insurance and things like that. But there's also an overhead cost of doing that. So it's an efficiency metric. What are the sorts of metrics and things that you've find yourselves optimizing for? I know that you can't speak for the entire nonprofit space. What's the name of the organization again, where you met?

Stephanie Bruno (00:13:58): It's the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation.

Rob Collie (00:14:02): See, I was pretty sure that's what I was going to say. I didn't want to mess up a word here. There's a lot of words in that-

Stephanie Bruno (00:14:09): It's very long, if you want to say it again, you can say EGPAF.

Rob Collie (00:14:14): EGPAF. All right. I figured that there's got to be a cool abbreviation for it. What are the sorts of things that you find yourselves optimizing for at that organization? It's not profitability, right?

Stephanie Bruno (00:14:25): Right. Well, I actually jumped over from our IT department a few years ago to the department, Shannon was mentioning, monitoring and evaluation. Because I wanted to work closer to the data about the people, and less the operational data. So since I did that, then I am focused on that. We call it program data. So that's the data about all the facilities in Africa that we support. How many people are retesting for HIV, and of those people, how many people are we getting on treatment? And how many people stay on treatment? So it's really about it impact, it's less about profitability. So we try to show not how much profit we make, but how many people we're serving, basically.

Stephanie Bruno (00:15:09): But in addition to that, you mentioned that how much does it cost to spend $1? For us a really hard number to get accurate is, how much does it cost to test a person? And you can imagine that's because data silos, right? So because we've got our finance system, we've got a whole bunch of systems, and then we've got the program data system, and they just aren't at the same level. And so it's just years and years and years. And it's kind of the holy grail that we're trying to get to is blinking all this up. So we can just answer a question easily like that.

Rob Collie (00:15:43): And that really is one of Power BI's top two strengths, as a data tool, relative to its other BI tool competition. Is its ability to splice across those silos, and start to allocate fixed costs that you're measuring in one place. You still have an HR system, right? You're still cutting paychecks. So that cost needs to be allocated. Somehow, across the per test. It's just so many inputs. If you're just saying, "Hey, look, the cost of the test kit... What percentage of the cost of testing is just the test kit." It's probably really tiny, right? There's the facility, all that kind of stuff, right? Silos are everything, aren't they?

Stephanie Bruno (00:16:33): Yeah. They're painful.

Shannon Lindsay (00:16:34): And having worked in nonprofits, and also with governments for the last 10 or so years, I think that it's pretty obvious that their progress in new technology is a little bit behind other industries. So what was really neat about implementing Power BI and working with Stephanie was that we were one of the first nonprofits to start to use this technology. We really got our leadership on board, it really grew very fast within the organization. And then we were able to preach the gospel, or I don't know how to say it. But encourage other nonprofits to use this technology as well. So there is a whole little nonprofit community that is interested in using this technology too. And I think that Stephanie had a big hand in that.

Rob Collie (00:17:22): Is there a water cooler where all the nonprofit people get together and hang out? And how do you connect like that?

Shannon Lindsay (00:17:27): You know there isn't, really. Part of what's interesting about the nonprofit industry, the part that I've been involved in, is that we're all trying to accomplish the same thing. But at the same time, we're all fighting for the same tiny pot of money. So there's a lot less collaboration than you would imagine. And I didn't really understand the benefit and the value of community until I became a part of this data community and the sequel community and the Power BI community. I didn't realize that people just helped each other and just shared information, I did not know that was a thing. So now I understand. And, I think that's another part of why we do Data Witches and why we run user groups. We want to make sure that other people know these tools are out there, and that they will save you hundreds of hours of time and simplify your life. And just from the analyst perspective, it completely changed my day to day work.

Rob Collie (00:18:26): You've probably both heard me say this, at least one time, somewhere in some venue, the desire, the compelling, overwhelming need to tell other people about a piece of software. That is very strange. That doesn't happen. Software just sucks, it just wall to wall. So much software, it's just so much of a source of pain. And it's like, a lot of software's only slightly better than not having it. I'm just really cynical about most software, even though that's my industry of origin. It's probably because it's my industry of origin. But this stuff is different. There is almost a compelling, almost moral duty to tell other people about it and to get them introduced to it. It's weird, isn't it? Even just in the way that the two of you describe what you do? I can hear it. I can hear that. This is a moral imperative. We have to share. We can't keep this to ourselves.

Shannon Lindsay (00:19:22): If I can save one other person from copying and pasting... I mean, the reality is we were supporting 5000 health facilities when I first started. And what we were doing was manually compiling data into Excel sheets. It just sounds like madness, even saying it out loud. Now that I know what's possible. I also used to joke that I used to enter a lot of zeros into spreadsheets. That was my job. Data entry, copying, pasting, entering zeros and none of that is necessary, but I did not know that at the time. And so if I can save someone else that pain, by all means.

Rob Collie (00:19:58): Yeah. I think that in the course of any career, any sort of office career, and I know that you're not always in the office, right? Sometimes you're out in the field. But in any sort of knowledge worker role, sooner or later, everyone is going to cross paths with Excel. And the majority of people, when they cross paths with Excel, they just bounce right off of it. It's like, "Ooh, gross, I'm out." And that's at least 14 out of 15 people. But there's like one in 15, one in 16, that you get this itch like, "Oh, I just typed all those formula, that those numbers in, I was able to get this plus this, plus this. And I was able to change the input without rewriting the formula on the calculator plus this, plus that. And I get the answer out again." This twitch starts to happen behind your eyes and I go, "I was kind of cool."

Rob Collie (00:20:49): And next thing you know, it's like, wall to wall VLOOKUP in your life. So it's weird. I think that the reason why certain people, and again, you don't have to have been someone who liked math in high school. And I love this. Because frankly, most of the math we learned in high school isn't useful. It's just most of it isn't all that useful. The thing that draws you to it is the desire to not repeat work. That's the thing that feels good about Excel the first time to say, "Oh, I could really get into this." But then, of course, Excel turns around and betrays you, five minutes later. And it's just nothing but manual work.

Rob Collie (00:21:28): Even though you're writing formulas and whatever, it's still awful. And so it's really ironic that the crowd that is least able to tolerate tedium, is the crowd that's drawn here. And then Excel turns around, and it just tortures you. And I do think that has a lot to do with the feeling of moral imperative to help others because you know what it feels like. It's not just saving time, it's people are literally suffering.

Shannon Lindsay (00:21:58): Yeah, if we're spending all those hours compiling data, when we could be analyzing is this having an impact? Is this saving lives? It's a no brainer.

Rob Collie (00:22:08): Yeah, when you start to think of the end result in particular, right? When you're working in the for profit space, you don't typically think that way. It's a little harder to get sort of emotionally ramped up about some huge corporation saving more money. But still, the people that you're working with at that company, is more than enough to keep you charged up. It's their success. It's their life getting better.

Stephanie Bruno (00:22:32): So one of the things that Shannon and I did together at EGPAF with our colleague, [Elisa Lei Laurie 00:22:39], because we wanted to share more. Actually, I should back up and mentioned, when we say we work at this nonprofit, people get the impression that, oh, it's small, just a few do gooders trying to do their best. But we're actually pretty big. I think we have a staff of close to 4000 throughout the world, honestly. Most of whom are in Africa. Our HQ staff in DC is maybe around 150. But so mostly everybody that we work with, is in Africa. Getting all of these people that we work with to start using a new tool, Power BI instead of Excel, it was a lot harder than I expected. But like you said, we knew that we would save people so much time, if we did.

Stephanie Bruno (00:23:21): I remember one time Shannon and I were on a trip together in Tanzania. And I was in the office trying to see how their data systems work together. And I looked up, and I just looked at this sea of people on computers out in a room. And my jaw dropped because I realized, "Oh my gosh, they're all just doing copy and paste." That's what I'm seeing here. It's like 50 people doing copy and paste. We have to do better with this. So we really wanted to not be the only few people building Power BI data models and reports for people. We knew that if this is going to work, we have to get a lot of people doing it. So we started an internal user group at EGPAF. We started it three years ago. And we have quarterly meetings, we use Teams and people are sharing resources. And it's people from our different country offices helping each other, which is amazing.

Stephanie Bruno (00:24:14): We've had some celebrity guests, I think, come on for us. We had Patrick LeBlanc come on, probably [Comassani 00:24:21] came on and presented. And so it's just been this great thing. It's really been successful. You know, we can check out the metrics in Power BI to see who's building reports and who's getting the most usage. And it turns out, it's actually not our DC office anymore. It's our Malawi office has the most reports being used and built. So this is kind of been the best thing for us. Is this sharing with other people and getting other people to do the work and build reports and get excited about it. Yeah, so that's the sharing that's really been the most impactful. I think has been this internal group and just knowing all of our colleagues in 12 countries in Africa are now Power BI experts.

Rob Collie (00:25:03): That's great. Do you see the same sort of like ratio of author and consumer that I'm talking about. That 1 out of 16? Not everyone is going to, of those 4000 employees, for instance. Let's say if all of them were using it, most of them would be using it, consuming reports and dashboards that have been built for them. Maybe interacting with them filtering, drilling down, whatever, but I wouldn't expect that everyone is data modeling. It's not really even a question about the nonprofit space. It's just more like, it's your experience with the other offices. Because my experience with all this is overwhelmingly, USA based. I would say that this discovery of 1 in 16. And there's actually a couple of different ways that we've come to that number that both agree actually that's about 1 in 16.

Rob Collie (00:25:51): I just wonder if in a different country, it's the same. Are you minting authors at a greater or-

Stephanie Bruno (00:26:00): No.

Rob Collie (00:26:00): ... faster pace?

Stephanie Bruno (00:26:01): I think it's the same. We've done a few trainings in Africa. Shannon did a couple. I did a couple. We partnered with Microsoft, actually, some of the people from the CAT team came and did trainings for our office. Casper, I know you guys are-

Rob Collie (00:26:15): Oh, yeah.

Stephanie Bruno (00:26:16): ... good friends. Casper and Patrick, and then Maggie Sparkman from the documentation team. They all came and they did these trainings. And it was fantastic. And I would say I think probably the countries, maybe had more people sign up for the trainings and people who were actually ready to do it.

Rob Collie (00:26:33): It's exciting.

Stephanie Bruno (00:26:34): Yeah, it's exciting. But I do think that's just how it goes. And then people come to these trainings. And not everybody that comes to it is going to become a data modeler. But you're going to find some people that maybe you didn't expect, that really grab on and just love it.

Rob Collie (00:26:49): Yeah, I think that suffering that we're talking about, is sort of a crucial ingredient in deciding whether or not it's going to take with you. The same person, the same brain is a lot less interested or even understand the value of adopting these tools until they've worked in the spreadsheets sweatshop, for a couple months minimum. Even people who came to those classes that you're talking about, some of them it didn't take with them. But some of them, those people that didn't take with, will now go off and not use them. For some reason, their job takes a turn, and now they're using Excel all the time.

Rob Collie (00:27:33): And they're getting ground down. And then the next time you run that class, someone that you remember being checked out will be like, "Oh, my God." You'll see the spark, you'll see the light bulb go on. I've actually had that happen.

Stephanie Bruno (00:27:48): You've had someone come more than once?

Rob Collie (00:27:51): I did a training one time for a group, it was a company. Here, there's sort of two parts of story. One part is, I did go back one year later and train the same people on the same things, which is really silly, right? And this is where I learned a very important principle, that when you first learn this stuff, you have to put it into use almost immediately. Not almost immediately, you better put it into use immediately. And by the time, either of you showed up in any of my classes, I'm sure I was already saying this. You spend a couple days learning this stuff with us. You can't go back to work and do it the old way. Until you get caught up. That's a very seductive trap that you can fall into. And that's what this crew did.

Rob Collie (00:28:36): They spent like three or four days with me. And then of course, their job piled up during those three or four days. They weren't doing their job, they were already way behind. And so they got further behind. And so the next week of work, they just threw themselves back into the old way. Just try to dig out. Mistake, it was over. Just get becomes less and less fresh. And there's never a good time. And so a year later now they were really in trouble. And they brought me back. And that's how I learned the lesson to tell everybody like no, on Monday, you're not allowed to do it the old way. But there have been someone assigned to this class. We call them hostages. We teach a class for a company. A manager will tell everyone that they have to be there. Some people are excited about it, most people aren't.

Rob Collie (00:29:22): There was a woman in the room who could not have been more disinterested. I just had to tell. A year later the thing is she was new in that job. She'd never had to do the the Excel analyst job like she did the equivalent of sitting in the back filing her nails. It was so hard to take as the teacher. But the next time I came back she was on the front row asking the absolute best questions. She parlayed that into a, she's a full time BI developer professional now. And if I had based my impression on her on what she showed me on that first time, I would have thought she was zero.

Rob Collie (00:30:04): It's so cool. I love that. So yeah. Sooner or later, you'll have a similar experience, I think. You'll find someone that you wouldn't have bet on but suddenly they light up.

Shannon Lindsay (00:30:14): I think that's been part of the real, I don't know, joy of being a part of building something from the ground up at EGPAF, we saw the most unexpected people become the champions of the new technology. And I can't say this for the whole world. But in the countries that we worked in, I'm saying worked past tense, I do not work there anymore. But in the countries that we worked in, a lot of the monitoring and evaluation teams and the finance teams were predominantly men. And a lot of our shining stars and people who became the power users or the people who spoke up and presented at our user group, were women, who were often overlooked. And they took this technology, and they ran with it. And now they run those departments. I mean, so not only is it making their day to day life easier, but it's really giving them some visibility in the organization. It's changed a lot of people's careers, myself included.

Rob Collie (00:31:12): Yeah, I'm really glad you brought that up. Because this is one of my favorite things. And when I bring it up, I run the risk of somehow looking like the bad guy, even though everything in my heart is 100% good about this, I know what you're talking about. I went to computer science school, I grew up in the Math Science World. And I know what the finance world looks like. Oh, my gosh, these things couldn't be more male dominated in terms of numbers of people. I had one or two women in my computer science classes with me. Stephanie was there. I see the same thing. We even talked about this with Wayne Winston, when he was on the show. We're sort of coming around to this idea that the analytical half of our brain. This is a broad oversimplification, but the analytical curious parts of our brain is probably the more female part of our brain.

Rob Collie (00:32:06): The stuff that, I don't know, calculus. There's something that's super duper abstract about calculus that I often wonder. As an older person now, I often wonder, why is it we're sitting around trying to encourage more girls to study calculus? Because I think calculus sucks. Girls might have it right staying away from calculus. I mean, it's like, why is calculus considered such a an objectively good thing that everyone should be doing? We're putting it on a pedestal.

Stephanie Bruno (00:32:39): Because it's awesome.

Rob Collie (00:32:40): Oh, really? You still think calculus is awesome?

Stephanie Bruno (00:32:43): I do. I do think calculus is awesome.

Rob Collie (00:32:47): All right, give us your bullet point defense of why calculus is awesome. Keep it in mind, I went to the Final Four in Florida state competition for calculus. I mean, I was on a team that went to the Final Four. I was the weak link on that team. We would have placed first without me. So I've definitely been up to my eyeballs in calculus before. And I'm still on the calculus side.

Stephanie Bruno (00:33:10): So I mean, why do you think it's, that useful or unfun?

Rob Collie (00:33:17): Well, it definitely gets to the point where it's unfun. By the time I got to differential equations in college, I was like, "Oh, cool." I want out of this.

Stephanie Bruno (00:33:29): Rob, that was my favorite class in college.

Rob Collie (00:33:31): Was it? Ah, God.

Stephanie Bruno (00:33:33): But you know what I do remember, there was a guy in my math classes, and he was just so smug all the time about how he was the best one in our math group. And there was something about that year that I took differential equations, I think I broke up with some boyfriend and I was down. And I was like, "You know what, this year, I'm going to beat that guy and differential equations." And I did, and it was one of the most satisfying feelings. And it was funny, it actually became known in our class. And I even had people rooting for me, "Come on Steph, you could beat him."

Stephanie Bruno (00:34:12): So I've really warm feelings compared to [crosstalk 00:34:15] not based on anything altruistic in any way.

Rob Collie (00:34:19): Just vanquishing-

Stephanie Bruno (00:34:21): Just vanquishing.

Rob Collie (00:34:22): ... of someone who had it coming.

Stephanie Bruno (00:34:23): That smug guy.

Rob Collie (00:34:25): Good come upings.

Stephanie Bruno (00:34:26): That's right. So as a result, I got to an A in differential equations. It turns out, I actually learned something with my competitive motivation there. So maybe I just have positive feelings about calculus or differential equations.

Rob Collie (00:34:41): So I have something similar with me, and that the scouting report on me going into high school amongst my family was, "Yeah, bright kid, but no ambition. Not interested in anything. Never applies himself." I was still getting decent grades. I wasn't the troublemaker. I was a really good boy. I just was not into things. I got to a C in history one year in middle school. It was just like, then I ran into a guy that was sort of, my twin, my mirror image essentially. And a lot of ways, we grew into the same things. It really mess with my sense of identity.

Rob Collie (00:35:18): And in ninth grade, it became, I think it was both of our missions for a while. Just nothing short of total character assassination of the kid, was going to be acceptable. And we were friends, and we were trying to end each other academically. That powered me. Suddenly, I was really driven, really ambitious. And it was just like, destroy. I carried that for four years. And for me, it's almost a spirit of atoning. I threw myself for so long into something so relatively arbitrary and meaningless in terms of human life, and made it a defining trait. I think I probably took it a lot farther in terms of, my own self identity, than what you were in that diff EQ class, right? That was a maybe like a one semester one class thing for you. That was a lifestyle for me. I think I need to live three lifetimes to sort of atone for the bad things I did to people close to me.

Stephanie Bruno (00:36:16): I think its time to forgive yourself, Rob.

Rob Collie (00:36:20): Maybe.

Stephanie Bruno (00:36:23): Yeah. I think it's been long enough, you can probably let it go. And who knows, think of all the good things that came from that. That's another way to look at it.

Rob Collie (00:36:31): Yeah. Got me to Microsoft, where I proceeded to not use a single thing that I ever learned in college, or in high school, none of it was relevant.

Stephanie Bruno (00:36:42): I get it. I wanted, I was thinking about what you were just saying about this competition feeling. And the same thing with that smug guy in my class. But it did remind me that I think part of the reason that I did go into math and physics and all of that stuff was it was kind of just to prove something. To prove that I could do it. I even had a physics professor in college suggest, "I don't know, if you want to go to grad school in physics, you you might want to just find a nice guy and get married. That might be easier." Like really? You're my physics professor.

Rob Collie (00:37:19): You said that out loud.

Stephanie Bruno (00:37:19): Yeah. He said that out loud to me. I mean, I wasn't exactly a stellar physics student. Not like diff eq. But that's the kind of thing that pushed me I think, huge into going in this direction. It was just feeling like underestimated. And wanting to prove that I could do it. Which isn't, again, great motivation. But it got me here. So I'm happy to be where I am.

Rob Collie (00:37:43): When was the last time you use the differential equation?

Stephanie Bruno (00:37:45): Okay, I haven't in a long time. But calculus, I did, because I went back to school, Rob.

Rob Collie (00:37:52): Oh, so you used calculus again?

Stephanie Bruno (00:37:55): I did.

Rob Collie (00:37:56): At school?

Stephanie Bruno (00:37:58): At school.

Rob Collie (00:37:59): You used it at school? Yes. You take calculus so that you can take more calculus? Okay.

Stephanie Bruno (00:38:06): Okay. So you are mean, still, I guess.

Rob Collie (00:38:07): I am a little bit mean. I just remember the kids that were sitting there, while I was the person you're describing in your Diff Eq class, that was me in high school. Except no one ever vanquished me. I mean, I did lose in certain classes, but then I had beat that same person in another class. And that was all I needed to tell myself, "I'm still better." But like those kids that were sitting next to me going, "When are we ever going to use this?" And I would make just viciously make fun of them. It says, "You're just saying that because you can't do it." They were right. I'm never going to use this stuff. I mean, some people do, if you're building bridges, you're gonna be doing some calculus. Even there, I sneak in and go, now you're probably going to be using modeling software that will just take care of the calculus for you. But, I don't know.

Rob Collie (00:39:02): It'd be like if they kept teaching slide rulers in a way. Tech moves on, calculus is a little bit commoditize now, unless you are a physics researcher. There are will huntings running around doing that kind of stuff on a chalkboard. Today, it's just that most of us aren't doing that.

Stephanie Bruno (00:39:19): Well and machine learning.

Rob Collie (00:39:20): Yeah. So statistics, linear algebra and all this, I had no idea which of those things were actually going to be relevant. There were some things that I was taking back then that I kind of wish I'd either paid more attention or, more importantly retained longer. Because I couldn't look someone in the eye today and say I was a data scientist. That's not a title that would hold up to scrutiny. And if I were to go back to school, it would be to do stuff like that. If either of you considered that route, have you pursued it?

Shannon Lindsay (00:39:52): Well, speaking of statistics, jumping back, just a little bit, EGPAF as an organization, is a research organization as well. And so they have statisticians and bio statisticians on staff, something that I think was really neat for me to see and be a part of was while Stephanie was doing her graduate work. We got to take some of the manual, redo the stats, every single time new data comes in, we got to take some of those processes, and put them into Power BI. And it was really cool to see. So Steph, do you want to talk about any of the stats stuff that you did in Power BI?

Stephanie Bruno (00:40:29): The one I was thinking of that you were talking about with grad school was when we tried to work on a machine learning project together for one of my classes. I dragged Shannon in because, A, she's brilliant, and B, she's really the expert on the data that I was working on. The project was, I was trying to develop an algorithm to help us predict which patients were going to be likely to be lost to follow up. What that means is, HIV positive people need to take medication regularly, it's critical. If they don't, then they can infect other people, they get really sick, it's really important. They can also, I think start to be resistant to their drugs if they don't take them regularly. So making sure people come in every month and get their drugs every month is just critical. So what we needed to do was try to find... We were looking at a patient level database, which is actually hard to find in the work that we do. But we're looking at that and we were trying to find predictors of people who maybe we're going to be likely than not come back.

Stephanie Bruno (00:41:33): And so we used our for it, we use power query for it, we found that most of the data was just in bad shape. So the biggest part of that project, which was for a machine learning class, didn't turn out to be the algorithm, it turned out to be the data cleaning. And I would actually say that was my biggest complaint with grad school and analytics was that, all of the datasets that they had us work on were clean. They were just perfect. And so I remember feeling like I was the oldest person there, first of all. And feeling like the young people there were just not really getting to see what real world data was like. And that they weren't getting to see that what, okay, when they go out and they get their job. They're gonna have to spend 90% of their time dealing with this garbage data. That's ultimately what we had to do. So it was it was really cool. It was exciting.

Stephanie Bruno (00:42:26): But at the end of the day, it didn't turn out to actually be a very beneficial project. Because the data was so bad, there wasn't really anything that we can rely on. So as much as I wanted to do all the stats, and machine learning and exciting stuff, 90% of that project was janitorial.

Shannon Lindsay (00:42:43): Well. And speaking of janitorial, I'm going back now to Power BI. But I think one of the bigger impacts that we've seen with Power BI and correct me if I'm wrong here Steph, just simply getting more eyes on the data made a world of difference for the data quality. In the donor environment, they require more data than you could ever imagine at such granular levels. And the data is required in a really rapid turnaround period. And it's oftentimes collected in less than ideal systems. Most of the time, it starts on paper. So that's where we're coming from. But just getting people to look at the data and put their eyes on it and then say, oh, no, that couldn't possibly be true. There's no way we only saw men at this clinic or, whatever. But I think that the trajectory of Power BI at the organization was really amplified by the fact that people saw the problems with the data.

Rob Collie (00:43:40): This is a universal, almost principle, the saying the buck stops here, it stops at analytics. That's when all of the sins of the organization, all of the misexecution, all of the sloppiness, all of that stuff just comes home to roost, on your analytics. In the for profit world, and I'm sure this is really probably the same thing in the nonprofit world. But in the for profit world, if there's some sort of failure or organizational failure, or shortcoming that interrupts the flow of money that will get noticed and taken care of. For sure. Now, it can interrupt a small percentage of the money, and no one will notice. That's weird. There's a lot of things like that going on. But if 100% of the money in a particular segment stops flowing somewhere, someone's going to complain because that's someone's income. Someone is going to speak up in their own self interest. They're going to notice when their money doesn't come in. Every other problem that the organization experiences, the vast majority of them never get addressed.

Rob Collie (00:44:50): And then you get to analytics. And that's when all of that becomes apparent. And it's oftentimes difficult to get people to care about the data quality, even. In some cases, it's like, people just are just so flabbergasted like, "Oh my God, I can't believe that that's wrong." And they just want to go make it right. And you're lucky in those cases. But in other cases, they're just like, "Nah, we really can't be bothered to do a better job of maintaining the product catalog are. Make sure things are categorized properly. I'm not paid to do that." Yes, you are. But that's not what they're actually thinking. It's hard to push data quality back upstream to where it came from. But you absolutely notice it, it does. It just jumps off the page, especially with Power BI, for better and worse.

Shannon Lindsay (00:45:37): I think where we were really lucky. And where a lot of people that work with data about people is, those numbers represent human lives. And if we miss a person that we know, is positive, and they need to be on treatment, but we miss them because of a transcription error, or because of the piece of paper didn't make it from the facility all the way to the head office. I mean, that's almost unforgivable. I know, it's not because we're human, and we all make mistakes, but it raises the stakes for sure.

Rob Collie (00:46:05): Well, that does it. We're gonna completely refocus all of our client work on the nonprofit space. Especially where people's lives are at risk, because they'll be the only time we can get proper traction on data quality.

Stephanie Bruno (00:46:18): Maybe you'd like to come help us with those silo problems we have, Rob?

Rob Collie (00:46:22): Yeah. I don't think you want me doing it. Turns out that one of the things I like to say, because it's the truth, and it's awesome is that, everyone that works at our company is better at this stuff than I ever was. I'm quite a bit off peak, even with my own capabilities. I like to think that I did my part sort of getting some of this going, not just the company, but the awareness of these tools. And as I started to discover all these people coming at me that were saying, "Hey, I got into this because of your book or whatever." And then I start looking at what they're doing. I'm like, "Well, you're so much better than I am." That was actually really gratifying, whereas high school me would have been mortified. I don't want to let this linger. Earlier, you said maybe you are still a little bit mean, come on. I'm so nice. I just like having fun, though. So what about the broader power platform? You getting into that at all, not just Power BI?

Shannon Lindsay (00:47:16): I can speak to this. A couple years ago, maybe three years ago, when Power Apps was brand new, I was working on a global project at EGPAF. And I had just been hired on to Stephanie's team. So I came from this analyst role I had been brought into the informatics team, I was responsible for collecting data in nine different countries, on when every single patient comes into the clinic, they have to be screened for tuberculosis. Particularly kids are left behind in TB screening and so we needed to make sure that every single kid was screened. So when I came onto the project, I was told, okay, we're going to put these little wooden boxes in every single facility, and every kid's going to have a form. And we're going to drop those forms into the boxes. And then once a week, somebody is going to come pick them up, and then someone's going to enter them in aggregate into Excel. So they're going to count up how many girls, how many boys, whatever. Put it in Excel, and then we're going to do this, whole Excel based reporting.

Shannon Lindsay (00:48:16): And I knew enough by then that Power Apps existed. I knew enough by them that that was what we were going to use. And I think the main thing I learned from working with Stephanie, and just from learning about data in general, is that Excel is not a data collection tool. It should never be used that way. It is trash. Even when you're doing it for good things, obviously. But so I like to say that I took away their toys, and I made them use a Power App. And rather than letting them enter the data, in aggregate, I required that the data was entered at the patient level for just to make sure that we had the right data. And as far as I know, that Power App is still being used globally. And it was a huge success. So it was a Power App that was feeding into a, don't cringe when I say this, but it was feeding into a SharePoint list. And then that SharePoint list was populated in Power BI. I know it's like, undergone some iterations since then. But I really, by doing that project I got on board with the Power platform.

Shannon Lindsay (00:49:15): I can say that at the time, Power Apps was really incredibly difficult for me to learn. I don't have any sort of a background as a developer, I had no clue what I was doing. It took me six months to build the simplest app, but I did it and it's being used and it's in the rearview now. I believe that there is a lot of room for Power Apps and Power Automate. But I haven't had any experience with it since then. Steph, are you guys doing any new projects with Power Apps and Power Automate?

Stephanie Bruno (00:49:49): Yes, we are. And I can confirm that your Power App is still in use indeed. But I struggle with it. I love the rest of the Power platform but, A, I guess I struggle with how Power BI fits into it? I guess from a community perspective, it's interesting because it's still very much the Power BI community and the Power Apps and Flow communities. They don't have a lot of overlap, which I think is interesting. I don't think like, there's a lot of people that are really in both. We went to one of those hackathons at the, let's not call it the Data Insight Summit anymore-

Shannon Lindsay (00:50:25): Business Applications Summit.

Stephanie Bruno (00:50:27): That's right. And we were so excited. We're like, "Oh, good, we're going to work with all the Power BI, Power Apps and Flow people. And we were like, the only Power BI people there, and everybody else was Power Apps. I think there's some work to do to kind of bridge those communities together better, first of all. And then second of all, I want to love Power Apps, but I struggle with the licensing with it a lot. I think how things went with Power BI how they made it free for a long time. I think a lot of people still do complain about Power BI pricing, especially with premium. But now that there's per user premium, blah, blah, blah. But because we're nonprofit, we get a really good discount. So we actually jumped on board with premium immediately. And everything just was seamless and it went along really well. But the Power Apps licensing, I still can't wrap my head around. So I did push Power Apps pretty hard at first. But now I'm pulling back a little bit because I'm worried about how much it's going to cost us.

Rob Collie (00:51:24): Do you not get the same nonprofit awesome discount?

Stephanie Bruno (00:51:28): Well we do, but I haven't seen an equivalent of the Power BI premium. Because, for instance, we have a lot of data collectors. So if we want to build a Power App and have 1000 data collectors using it, no way.

Rob Collie (00:51:43): Yeah.

Stephanie Bruno (00:51:43): We have to do something way cheaper than that.

Rob Collie (00:51:46): Yeah, that makes sense for a 1000 person organization. Without an all you can eat premium version for something, that could be really difficult. Hey, Microsoft, you're, we'll making it like a dramatic joke, why are you killing people? We need to change this licensing model pronto. We're talking about human lives here. It's not just profitability anymore.

Stephanie Bruno (00:52:13): Yeah, I know, I feel like a traitor saying this about it, because I do want to love it. And I want us to use it. But I'm finding that bit difficult.

Rob Collie (00:52:22): Well, I often say that Microsoft makes like the best software, they're really good at it. But they're mediocre at best at every other thing. Pricing, marketing, documentation, everything. Everything is... But they make the best software, they really do. So the Power Apps experience. It's build as no code or low code. But we get into it, and it's like, oh, this is code. This is development. I can imagine Power Automate, having a lot of overlap, potential overlap with the Power BI crowd. Because hey, part of it is M part of it is Power Query. It's, "Hey, great. That's half of our story." Power Apps is a different animal. And so it doesn't surprise me, Shannon. I was going to ask you, before you volunteer. I was going to ask you, okay, so you're talking about it. And from the we point of view. We had a Power App, and we did this and I was like, "Okay, so who... " I was going to ask you who built this thing? So we get to this next question, right? And you said it was you and it took you six months to get far, it gets hard.

Rob Collie (00:53:22): It's not the same as Power BI. It's not just a third technology. It's like a separate universe next door. So you said you took it about six months to learn enough to build this app. That's still in progress, right? So that's not, we wouldn't call that rapid app development, right? Six months sounds like a normal app development timeline. But if you had to go back and build a very similar app today, how much faster do you think it would be?

Shannon Lindsay (00:53:49): Significantly. I think the main reason for that is the amount of time that has passed and the community that has formed around Power Apps, the community is pretty robust now. I think at the time, I did have help from the community. So I did not build that thing all by myself. So it took six months with help. But I think that they have made a lot more of the connectors native now. And there's a lot more stuff that Power Apps can do that it could not do before. I remember I had the hardest time with the right back and getting things to be properly stored in the collections and then right back to the SharePoint list. And it was probably just because I was doing it wrong. But there wasn't enough information out there about, step by step tutorials on how to do things.

Shannon Lindsay (00:54:38): At the time, there was the Power App in a day training. I don't want to call it that. The day long thing that existed and it was cool. You built this whole app where you could pick things you wanted to buy in a day and it was really awesome. But then, just like working with clean data versus dirty data. You go into the wild and you try to put it in your own environment. And it was really hard.

Rob Collie (00:54:59): There's a one of our episodes of this podcast is with a guy named Kevin Overstreet. Sooner or later, if you're going to be doing Power App stuff, you need to meet this guy. He got into Power BI came to one of our classes, one of my classes many years ago. But then with Power Apps, boys he found his calling. He's almost disposed of Power BI. Like, I'm so over that. I was a Power App person all along, I just didn't know it. And I think it has a lot, I'm not going to say potential. I'm going to say it's got a lot of value. It's in two places. Number one, you were giving an example of upstream from Power BI. It's part of the collection process. Yes, I don't have any problem at all with SharePoint being the place where the data was stored. I'm really the opposite of snobbish with this stuff.

Rob Collie (00:55:53): In fact, even if you were like putting it into Excel Online, I wouldn't have a problem with that either. Because really, the problem with Excel is data collection is validation and things like that, that the Power App will enforce for you. And I know that the query speed against an Excel spreadsheet isn't so great, but surely not super great against SharePoint either. So it's like six or one half dozen or another. But there's also downstream from Power BI.

Rob Collie (00:56:20): And I think there's every bit as much value in potential there as there is upstream. And this is going to be sort of almost one of our companies messaging and marketing focuses next year, is that BI doesn't make a bit of difference until someone takes an action, that's a better action than they did the day before. I can inform you to death, and actually not make a difference. If you've been in one of my classes, I even talked about this a little bit, depending on how much time we had. It's all about the action. So when you think about it that way, this has been dawning on me over the last six months. It's like, why does the dashboard, the report, why does it get to take a total pass? It just gets to give up, when it's time to actually make an improvement. You can just look at the report and go the reports just looking at you smugly saying, "It's not my problem. It's your problem."

Rob Collie (00:57:16): Really simple example, trivial. And I use the words dashboard and report interchangeably. I don't mean Power BI, capital D, dashboard. Like to me a dashboard is a report, is a dashboard, the same thing. If I'm looking at a dashboard, and I see some, I don't know, a customer, or a prospect, someone who's thinking about hiring us. And I want to change their status, I want to say we have this person marked as, probably not going to do business with us. But then I look at it and I go, "That's wrong." This is a valuable person that we need to be spending more time with. Well, the dashboard could say, "Okay, well, that person's name Jimmy Smith, go get them. Have fun." But it doesn't take much effort to, in that table visual or whatever, to put together a URL field, that is a link to Salesforce or CRM or whatever that links to that person's record.

Rob Collie (00:58:13): Maybe it doesn't like change that person's record. But it takes you there. It knows who this person is, right? The other example I'm always using, and it's just doesn't really apply, maybe it does to EGPAF. If you notice on a report that warehouse six is low on product or low on test kits or something and they're going to run out before you expect it. Imagine having buttons or something in that report that allows you to go transfer some inventory from warehouse five, or order more of that particular product from your supplier with a rush order on it or something like that. There could be a Power App, could be, it's just not a universal thing. It can't be everywhere, because you can't anticipate what every action is going to be. But why not embed a Power App in your dashboard or elements like that, for directly taking action?

Shannon Lindsay (00:59:05): Mm-hmm (affirmative). We actually did some of that with a Power App inside of a report.

Rob Collie (00:59:10): Cool.

Shannon Lindsay (00:59:10): And this was the health facilities change their names all the time, even though it's the same facility. And people get upset if things aren't exactly correct. And then of course, we need a master list to be able to understand what's what. So at the start of that previous project that I was talking about where we're collecting data with Power Apps, we also put a Power App right inside of a report where people could confirm that things were correct. If they weren't correct, they could make changes and then that all wrote back to the database. So we have done a little bit of that, but probably not as much as we should have.

Rob Collie (00:59:44): Well, no one does. We always judge our own efforts more harshly than we would if we could sort of see the whole universe. At the beginning of this conversation, I forget, someone said the nonprofit space was slower to take this stuff up than others. I'm like, no. I mean, I am shocked. It's been more than 10 years now, literally, more than 10 years since I realized that this platform... Which didn't even really exist under the current name. Power BI wasn't a thing. All we had was Power Pivot. We didn't even have Power Query yet. More than 10 years ago, I was like, "Oh, my God, this is going to change everything."

Rob Collie (01:00:25): And it's going to happen overnight. It's just so obvious. Everyone's just going to be like hoovering it up. It's like two years from now, everything's going to be different. No, still pretty early. 10 years later, you say like, "No, we probably didn't do enough of that." Oh, that's a good mentality. That's a good mindset, we can always do better. I think that Microsoft sort of organizing these technologies together in the same division, and renaming the Insight Summit to be Business Applications. It's like they were a few years early on it, or maybe I'm just really saying I'm just a few years slow on realizing what we're really doing. But like, it's the action loop. It's the improvement loop. And so there's upstream collecting, like we talked about the data collectors. The tuberculosis screens, whatever. And then there's the downstream, actually taking action. So we've got these sort of two frontiers upstream and downstream from Power BI. With Power BI still in the middle.

Rob Collie (01:01:24): I think it's a very promising time. We're not even dead ending or pigeonholing, as professionals in this space. Stephanie, you mentioned that you went back to grad school for a while. What was it that you studied? And when was that?

Stephanie Bruno (01:01:39): I went back in 2016. And I just graduated last year. So that was a relief. It was a lot more work than I expected. I went back and I got an MSIT with a focus on business intelligence and data analytics.

Rob Collie (01:01:55): Awesome. Okay, so you got a master's? Right. That's what the M means.

Stephanie Bruno (01:01:59): Correct.

Rob Collie (01:02:00): Okay. So what are sort of the highs and lows of the things you took out? Because and I'm asking this, even from a personal perspective. I'm not doing this to set you up for the, and how much have you used it? I'll probably do that, too. But every now and then, I guess, it's funny, that'd be like driving around somewhere. And I'll see a billboard for like a Master's of Data Science. And I'm like, I could try that. Maybe that would be a good thing for me to do, even just for awareness sake. What is it that I'm missing? But I'm also at the same time, skeptical of it, because I'm sure that two thirds of what some academic would be trying to tell me would be like, "Oh, come on the world doesn't work that way." You mentioned at least a little bit of that.

Stephanie Bruno (01:02:40): Yeah. You mean with the clean data?

Rob Collie (01:02:43): Yeah. There's just something funny about listening to someone. And maybe this isn't the way the professors are. But some of them I'm sure are this way they live their whole lives in an ivory tower. Then telling a citizen of the world what the world is like, when they've never been there. I would have a real problem with that mismatch of mindset, I think, but what were the most valuable things that you've taken out of that program?

Stephanie Bruno (01:03:07): It was valuable. And I'm really glad I did it. It was hard. I didn't plan on doing it, honestly. I just, I applied, because the application was free. And I thought, I'll never get in. Because it was Carnegie Mellon University. But it was free. And I think I was having a bad day. So I was like, "I need a little boost, if I get in, that'll be great". But it's also going to be way too expensive. So this is never going to be a thing I actually do. And I was with Shannon, when I actually submitted the application. It was on that same trip to Tanzania. But then I got in. And not only did I get in, but they gave me a huge scholarship. It was a combo women in tech and nonprofit scholarship.

Stephanie Bruno (01:03:51): So it turned out I hardly had to pay anything for it, which was a real shocker. So when I saw that, I was like, "Oh, boy, I guess this means I am actually going to grad school now." So this was not my plan, but I'm doing it. I guess you know, that's life, right? It's a roundabout way of the way things happen.

Rob Collie (01:04:09): Well, it does sound like having a bad day is a really important driving force in your life, right [crosstalk 01:04:14]?

Stephanie Bruno (01:04:14): Apparently.

Rob Collie (01:04:16): The diff eq guy he had no idea what was about to hit him. You just know just caught me on the wrong day. I'm going to [crosstalk 01:04:23] out-

Stephanie Bruno (01:04:22): I really have to examine my motivations for why I do the things I do.

Rob Collie (01:04:28): Just be careful not to have too many bad days. You'll end up taking on too much. Four years of grad school after one bad day. That's a big commitment.

Stephanie Bruno (01:04:36): Oh, yeah. My husband keeps saying he's afraid I'm going to have a bad day and go try to get a PhD next. But no, that's not happening.

Rob Collie (01:04:44): Four years is a long time even part time.

Stephanie Bruno (01:04:46): Yeah.

Rob Collie (01:04:46): Well, Carnegie Mellon is in Pittsburgh, right?

Stephanie Bruno (01:04:49): That's why I did it. Yep, that's where I live.

Rob Collie (01:04:52): It wasn't a correspondence learning.

Stephanie Bruno (01:04:55): Yeah, they actually do have it. You can do it fully online or you can do it fully in person or you can do a combo. So I opted to do a combo because I wanted to see what it's like to be a student again, that'll be so cool. But it actually, the in person classes, it really didn't turn out to be what I expected. I thought I'll meet some more people that are also data nerds. But outside of the Microsoft ecosystem, which is one of the things I did get out of it was that I wanted to be exposed to non Microsoft tools. And just data in general, not Microsoft data tools. So that is something I got out of it.

Stephanie Bruno (01:05:34): But it turned out, it was pretty intense. And so the kids that were there full time, they had already sort of formed their little study groups and their friendships. And so it wasn't really easy to get to know people and the occasional in person classes that I went to. So that was a bit of a disappointment. I thought there was going to be this whole new community, I'd be a part of in addition to the Power BI community, but that didn't happen so much. So that was something I didn't get out of it that I hoped to get out of it.

Rob Collie (01:06:04): If I went back like those people would all be half my age.

Stephanie Bruno (01:06:07): Oh, yeah, that's exactly what they were.

Rob Collie (01:06:09): Just crazy, right?

Stephanie Bruno (01:06:10): I'm pretty sure I could have been their mom. And that was weird. And I was definitely older than some of my teachers, too. That was also weird.

Rob Collie (01:06:18): Yeah. I would be too, wouldn't I? Don't even think about that.

Stephanie Bruno (01:06:23): It's true. And I took one class, the one that Shannon and I worked on that project for with the loss to follow up people. And the teacher was so young Shannon, LinkedIn stalked him for me. Because I didn't want him to see that I was LinkedIn stalking him, you know. So Shannon did it for me. And we saw that he was like, I don't know, 24, 25. So we refer to him as baby duck after that.

Rob Collie (01:06:47): That's great.

Stephanie Bruno (01:06:51): Man, that was weird. But he was brilliant, and it was a really hard class. But I did get a lot out of it. And that was actually the one class where he focused on dirty data. And what do you do with missing data? And what are all your options for how you can deal with it. It was really good. I think it is fair to say that I'm probably not using a lot of what I learned, which is a disappointment. But I would still do it again. And it was worth it. And I learned a lot. And I was exposed to a lot more ideas and methods that I'm not using. But it was good to learn. And I do think it, it has helped me with how I look at things, and maybe how I attack problems.

Rob Collie (01:07:33): It's like the question, I asked Shannon, six months to build the Power App, and how long would it take you today to do something similar? It might be that the reason why you're not using so many of those techniques, or whatever that you learned is that you're just not being hit with a necessity for it.

Stephanie Bruno (01:07:50): I think that's exactly true.

Rob Collie (01:07:53): The model where you're talking about the machine learning project that you attempted, that is exactly the customer attrition problem that like every business in the world is like, we've got a good regular customer, when are they starting to show us the warning signs that they're about to defect?

Stephanie Bruno (01:08:13): Right.

Rob Collie (01:08:13): I know, it's a different real world problem. But as far as the machine learning, it's the same thing but you're feeding it different factors. I would expect that you'd run into something like that, again, pretty quickly. That would be something that you would cross paths with, again, pretty soon, if you haven't already.

Stephanie Bruno (01:08:31): Yeah, I hope so. But my job is, it's not exactly play with all the cool new toys and try all these exciting new methods. It's really deal with this data and make some, help us make sense of it and help us make good decisions with it. So-

Rob Collie (01:08:48): A little too much humanity in there, not enough room for machine learning.

Stephanie Bruno (01:08:52): I think there is. It's just to get to that point, we have a lot of hurdles to overcome first.

Rob Collie (01:08:59): That's something that you do discover pretty quickly about machine learning is that the same data sources that might be okay, for aggregate analysis. The things that Power BI is particularly really good at, what's our percentage turnover, right? Or whatever, that same data set might not power a machine learning model well, at all.

Rob Collie (01:09:19): Shannon, that thing you were talking about with the where they were gonna tally it and lose all the individuality. Hey, maybe that would have still been fine for certain kinds of aggregate analysis. But it would have completely precluded any possibility of machine learning in the future. It's like what would you do with it? It's gone. All the variation is gone. All the richness is gone when you collaborate together like that.

Shannon Lindsay (01:09:47): I do you think there is a lot of opportunity for machine learning and new technologies and all of that. But another thing that a lot of these nonprofits particularly the health related nonprofits are contending with is, a lot of their key staff are researchers and academics. And they're very well established and pretty resistant to change. And we had great success, pushing a new technology and rolling out a whole new way of looking at data and doing things. I don't know what the limit is for the uptake of new technology. But I think looking at your data and analyzing it is one thing, but then predictive modeling and machine learning. And all of that is a lot scarier to that group of individuals. And maybe misreading that stuff. But I think it's a harder hurdle to pass with that group.

Stephanie Bruno (01:10:41): No, I would agree.

Rob Collie (01:10:43): Yeah. If you're saying that human beings are resistant to change, you're going to get nothing but agreement. You got to be motivated, right? Suffering. If you're saying that academics are even more resistant to change, then again, that's the nightmare. I've been trying to wake up from for the second half of my life is that, there's such a snobbery associated with a lot of all of that. That wasn't warranted and wasn't actually helpful. Again, I had to wake up from that bad dream and go, "Oh, okay. Part of the reason why I feel compelled to beat up on calculus, right? It's truly, it's that trend in my own life, really. Shannon, you have changed jobs. What are you doing these days?

Shannon Lindsay (01:11:28): I have changed jobs a couple of times since I was last working with Stephanie. I did a stint in consulting, where I worked solely with nonprofit and government clients. I did some teaching, which I really enjoyed. And now I just recently moved over to the worldwide learning team at Microsoft.

Rob Collie (01:11:49): So from one nonprofit to another?

Shannon Lindsay (01:11:54): I mean, I do carry a heavy load of guilt. Both because of how I was raised, and also because it's really my first time working in a big for profit corporation. And it's really too soon to say how I feel about the organization. But just within the first couple of weeks, the sense that I'm getting about the culture, and the team that I'm on, makes me feel like I did not, in fact, sell my soul to the devil. So...

Rob Collie (01:12:21): People at Microsoft are generally speaking really good people. I really enjoyed my peers, my colleagues. I was there during the antitrust trial back in 2000. And at that moment, we could see like that our leaders, were the bad guys. They really did not come off looking well there. And we didn't feel great about it. But so Microsoft, as an organization, especially back then, played very rough in the marketplace. Not necessarily always with the cleanest of reputations. But inside the company was a very different story. And I think today's Microsoft is quite a bit better, sort of citizen of the world than the one I sort of grew up in. Worldwide learning, can you remind me what that is?

Shannon Lindsay (01:13:07): Eloquently? No. But I can try.

Rob Collie (01:13:11): We don't do eloquent here anyway, really. So it's not our business.

Shannon Lindsay (01:13:15): Well, so I'm on the global technical learning team of worldwide learning. And so our goal is just to help people learn this technology. I mean, ultimately, it's a course, to drive sales. But I feel like, I am in a really neat position where I get to develop content to help people learn Power BI and Azure. And, specifically, I'm focused on the data analyst role, which I think suits where I've come from. I don't come from a technology background. And so I speak plain English, and I can try to put things into the mindset of, okay, coming from big flat Excel sheets. And the types of things that analysts would have to try to deal with. So our team is really just responsible for providing the content for folks to learn and then subsequently get certified on those technologies.

Rob Collie (01:14:06): Got it. So it's external. The people doing the learning are external to Microsoft. And it's about Microsoft technologies. So what you're really doing is trying to put our training business out of work.

Shannon Lindsay (01:14:21): Absolutely not.

Rob Collie (01:14:21): Yeah. Oh, come on. Look, it's all fair. But training isn't, even though that's how the two of you know us. Training is now a small fraction of our business. Most of our businesses in actual project execution consulting. At breakneck pace, that's our differentiators. That we move a lot faster than really, I think anyone else. But we still do training. In a way it's good for the world, even for us. If the training becomes your sort of increasingly commoditized and increasingly easier to get. Just don't make it too good. Because we still have to compete on quality.

Shannon Lindsay (01:14:55): Well, I'm on the team. So it's going to be good, right?

Rob Collie (01:14:59): I know. But, maybe you could just occasionally leave something out. Just... I know you won't. I'm not really asking you to. Obviously, it's just a funny thing to say. Well, that's awesome. I think that's a great spot to be right. Take your experiences. And you know the things you're saying, when you were laughing about not being eloquent, but that's great. I'm often told, what genius it was to have written my books in the voice that I did instead of the technical book voice. And I'm like, it wasn't genius. It was just what I had to do. I couldn't get through it writing in the technical voice. I tried, it wore me out in 10 pages. I did it for me, not for the world. But it turned out that was the way it should be done. So be that thing that you're describing, right? That non eloquent, but sometimes eloquent.

Rob Collie (01:15:53): But the human voice that walked in those shoes. That's what the world needs. The vast majority of people who need to be using this stuff are not coming from a traditional IT background. Even when they are, when they're successful at it. It's to the extent that they're also that hybrid. They are the Stephanies of the world that you wouldn't necessarily guess were The IT Crowd.

Rob Collie (01:16:18): So how has COVID impacted your organization, Stephanie? Shannon mentioned earlier, screening for tuberculosis? Is there a Power App now that's like involved in the screening for COVID? Are you even able to screen for COVID? How is that impacting your operations?

Stephanie Bruno (01:16:34): Yeah, pretty significantly. Number one, we have so many data collectors. So the way we work is we have office in each country that we work in. And I think there are 10 countries that we work in, in Africa. But then they do work to support 1000s of health facilities are around them. And part of the work they do, is to go out and collect data from these paper forms that Shannon mentioned. So obviously, that has changed, because they can't go to the health facilities now and collect data from the paper form. So that's a huge problem.

Stephanie Bruno (01:17:05): It's also impacted us because a lot of our work involves so much travel. So many of our HQ people go to Africa so frequently, so nobody's doing that anymore. But on the plus side, that's created that need for being better about collaboration virtually, which I think is fantastic. So they are doing better with that. It's speeding up the need for electronic data collection tools, so that people don't have to physically go and get the data off the paper. We are not doing a lot, we haven't added a lot of COVID related work onto our plate, because we don't have funding for that. So it's the opposite of a for profit company where you do the work, and then you get paid for it. We have to get donors to give us grants, obviously, to do any work. So we don't have any grants for COVID. We don't have any grants to do that work. Our mission is pretty much HIV. I feel like I'm bouncing all around with this answer. Because it's so big, but...

Stephanie Bruno (01:18:11): The other thing about artwork is that we're so, it's so important for us to meet donor set targets. Because the big donors give us money, but they they give us the targets. They say, "Okay, we're going to give you this money, but we expect you to test X number of people in this region. And we expect 90% of those people to get on treatment." And so we have to meet these targets, or we risk losing funding. Then potentially having to close down a whole country office and all those people lose jobs. So it's really important that we meet these targets. Sometimes the targets seem unreasonable, which is hard. But the targets didn't change because of COVID. So the targets are still there. So we are-

Rob Collie (01:18:56): Oh, that's so hard.

Stephanie Bruno (01:18:57): It's really hard. So then it's important for us to try to be able to explain the discrepancies. And so we've had to add COVID related Power BI reports on to our work, to help us explain the impact of how COVID is changing our results, really.

Rob Collie (01:19:16): Is the Gates Foundation one of your founders.

Stephanie Bruno (01:19:19): No.

Rob Collie (01:19:20): That's actually the best answer, because I was going to say, those sorts of targets, meet these targets or you miss them. That sounds like Bill Gates.

Stephanie Bruno (01:19:29): Well, right now, it's actually Deborah Birx, the person on the COVID team. You may have seen her when Trump was suggesting we put bleach in our lungs. And she was shaking her head or maybe looking down at her feet.

Rob Collie (01:19:42): That's right.

Stephanie Bruno (01:19:44): I can't remember. No, she's the one who her team sets our targets, really.

Rob Collie (01:19:48): Okay.

Stephanie Bruno (01:19:49): Yeah.

Rob Collie (01:19:50): Interesting. Okay.

Stephanie Bruno (01:19:51): They're very data oriented, but sometimes those targets are unrealistic. And that's been hard because if we don't meet the targets, they might say, "Okay, well, we're going to still fund you at path. But you don't get to support this facility anymore." Because they don't have enough HIV positive people that they need any money. That's what the really scary thing is. Is if we don't meet targets, we can lose funding. And that really does mean that health facilities lose funding.

Rob Collie (01:20:19): You mentioned that a lot of data driven people in celebrity positions in this space, do you think that has anything to do with the back to the Hans Rosling TED talk? Do you know what I'm talking about? Where you talking about mortality rates-

Stephanie Bruno (01:20:34): The one with a bubble chart-

Rob Collie (01:20:35): The bubble charts, that's racing up and he's narrating like it's a horse race.

Stephanie Bruno (01:20:39): Yeah.

Rob Collie (01:20:40): And now his son is carrying on that effort. Years ago, I had a Twitter exchange with him. He was like, "Wow, I can't believe how much Power BI can help us." We tended to avoid the Microsoft tools in the nonprofit space, because of the specter of a big corporation. It's way cooler, and sort of considered more like egalitarian to use Linux tools or something. There's actually a stigma, especially in the academic world, that lingers about companies like Microsoft. And for a long time, companies like Google, were spared that bias. It's sort of a full cycle now, Microsoft is starting to look like a relatively benign entity compared to some of these other tech giants.

Stephanie Bruno (01:21:25): Yeah. You did ask at one point, maybe an email I don't know about if we encountered any roadblocks. And I think that was what is that. We were pushing Microsoft tools. And in this space, traditionally, it's not so much about like the cool kids being Linux, it's more about open source. Because one of the biggest things that we have to do coming from the US and bringing solutions into Africa is we have to make sure that when we leave, the tools can still be used, it's still can be managed. And so oftentimes, it's just like, right out of the gate requirement that it's open source. Because, we don't want to have to pay for anything once you leave. So it's got to be open source.

Stephanie Bruno (01:22:08): I mean, I remember being pretty nervous that I'm pushing this saying, and it's not open source, it's not free, it is a tool that has to be paid for. Since we started using it, so many other NGOs have also started using it, the CDC has started using it. So I mean, I breathed a huge breath of relief about this. Because I think that, I didn't take us down a path that was going to ultimately get us in trouble. But I think part of that is because I have to preface this by saying, I really have drunk the Microsoft Kool Aid. And I love Microsoft. I think partly, hugely, because of how much they've done for our organization. It's been amazing. And also how much they do for nonprofits in general, with the really big discounts they provide. And the training and the resources they offer. It's impressive, it's really good.

Stephanie Bruno (01:23:00): I would definitely argue that even if we left tomorrow, I think that it's still sustainable. It's not something that people can't afford to use. And it's not too hard to use, it's just all going to fall apart, if we leave.

Rob Collie (01:23:13): And most people don't realize this, but Microsoft software is relatively affordable, relative to the competition, even at full price. So then you add in the the discounts and stuff. Microsoft model is the bulk model, their goal is to have the whole world using it. And if the whole world is using it, they don't have to charge any one particular organization, necessarily all that much. Yeah, so that's cool. I hadn't really thought about that really the headwind that you might get, but thinking about that conversation with Ola Rosling brought it back.

Stephanie Bruno (01:23:43): Yeah, it was scary. But I think we're cool now. I think we're okay.

Rob Collie (01:23:47): No one ever got fired for going open source in the nonprofit industry, right? You had to stick your neck out and suggest something really risky like Microsoft?

Stephanie Bruno (01:23:58): Yes. Something risky like Microsoft. Exactly.

Rob Collie (01:24:01): That kind of came up with Austin when he was on the show, talking about the museum space, the conservation space that he works in, and the inherent distrust of private enterprise in that space, right? If you're a for profit company, you're to be watched closely, which I think is completely right. It's a good thing to keep an eye on. So it's hard running a tech startup type business that isn't predatory, in a way. Because you're still going to be viewed as suspiciously as if you are, but you're not getting the benefits of being predatory either.

Rob Collie (01:24:40): So well, I've certainly enjoyed this. I'm really glad that we were able to do this. I'm glad that the two of you took the time. I really appreciate it. Thanks for joining us.

Stephanie Bruno (01:24:48): Thanks so much, Rob. I'm really glad you reached out to this has been fun.

Rob Collie (01:24:51): Maybe we'll do it again sometime. We just got to wait a little while for the, to manufacture more things to talk about.

Stephanie Bruno (01:25:00): Oh, we got plenty of stuff to talk about.

Rob Collie (01:25:03): Indeed. Thanks for listening to the Raw Data by P3 podcast. Find out what the experts at P3 can do for your business. Go to powerpivotpro.com. Interested in becoming a guest on the show? Email, Luke P-L-U-K-E-P at powerpivotpro.com. Have a day to day!

Conor Cunningham is a Microsoft Architect and he knows a great deal about data, storage, and everything Microsoft. He and Rob go way back and were even roommates for a couple of years during Rob's Microsoft days. There's quite a bit of history between Rob, Tom, and Conor. A history that fosters an insightful discussion and a little bit of busting chops! We discuss quite a bit including:

• What a Microsoft Architect does
• Organized storage and Data lakes
• Conor's celebrity status
• How the Query Store was almost killed, but Conor didn't give up on it
• Remote presentations and working remotely
• And so much more!

Episode Timeline:

• 2:25 - Conor the Celebrity
• 4:40 - Conor The Architect, and his unusually organized kitchen
• 9:40 - Speaking of meticulous organization, we talk Organized Storage and the transition from row and column models to....something else
• 16:10 - Data Shape and Data Volume in selecting databases, and are the old dusty data warehouses being replaced
• 21:50 - Curves and Cliffs in warehousing, some avenues are easier and cheaper than others
• 25:25 - The Data lake has changed the analysis process
• 29:50 - Rob pushes Conor into a long-awaited breakthrough, some failed projects from their past, and how the name "SharePoint" was almost given to a different product
• 34:55 - Let's go back to Conor The Celebrity, some good stories from Tom's Microsoft MVP days, and how Conor had no fear of the salty MVPs
• 46:50 - The "Query Store" isn't a place you go to purchase queries
• 55:00 - Keeping up with the competition: AWS and Babelfish
• 1:02:00 - The (ORIGINAL) Windows Phone debacle, and Windows Media PCs
• 1:06:20 - Doing presentations in the COVID-19 era and the future of the remote workplace at Microsoft
• 1:14:30 - Redmond's new buildings, and getting caught in the infinite loop that was the old Redmond facility design

Episode Transcript:

Rob Collie (00:00:00): Welcome friends to another episode of Raw Data. Today's guest is Conor Cunningham, thee Conor Cunningham. Some people in the SQL community simply refer to him as Conor. Conor is an architect at Microsoft on the Data Platform that spans a lot of ground as you'll see a during the podcast. He's long been involved with SQL server. He's up to his eyeballs in everything Azure-related that's not why I know him. Conor and I met as friends at Microsoft when we were both youngsters, we had both just shown up out there and we actually ended up, the two of us plus two other guys we ended up renting a house together for like a year and a half. It was a very interesting time in our lives. So as you might expect, this conversation is a blend of the personal and the professional. I think you'd expect nothing less of us at this point.

Rob Collie (00:00:50): We talk a lot about some of my favorite topics, things like the evolution of storage from purely rectangular to curly and how that interacts with the worlds of data warehousing, and how it interacts with our world of analytics. We talk about presentation styles and authenticity. We talk about a lot of things. He's delightfully nerdy, and he explained to us how his SQL architecture sort of background influences the layout and the design and how he stores things in his kitchen, which was awesome. But he is a really interesting guy, a funny guy, a nice guy, really a great friend and I really enjoyed this. So let's get after it.

Announcer (00:01:34): Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please?

Announcer (00:01:38): This is the Raw Data By P3 Podcast with your host Rob Collie and your co-host Thomas LaRock. Find out what the experts at P3 can do for your business, go to powerpivotpro.com. Raw Data By P3 is data with a human element.

Rob Collie (00:01:57): Welcome to the show. Conor Cunningham, how you doing, man?

Conor Cunningham (00:02:01): Pretty good, Rob. How are you today?

Rob Collie (00:02:03): Oh, fantastic. You know, it's been too long. We need to invent things like this, like podcast really the podcast, the real purpose of it is it is a forcing function for talking to old friends. That's what we're doing here, maybe not 100%, but it seems to be working.

Conor Cunningham (00:02:17): I like it. I like it.

Rob Collie (00:02:19): Yeah. Unlike many of our guests, you and Tom already know each other.

Conor Cunningham (00:02:25): Yep.

Rob Collie (00:02:25): This is also usually the vehicle by which I introduced Tom to all kinds of people that you know all kinds of weirdos that he doesn't know. But today we have a weirdo that he does know. And we're all weirdos here so as you know, we're not picking on you particularly. But I think there was a moment years ago where I was talking to Tom and I said something about having lived with Conor and Scott and whatever. Anyway he goes, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Conor-Conor Cunningham? I'm like, "Yeah." And he's like, "You know Conor Cunningham?" And I'm like, "Yes, yes. I know Conor Cunningham." Tom's voice took on this like hallowed tone. I think honestly that's when Tom really decided that he liked me was that I knew Conor.

Conor Cunningham (00:03:13): I'm glad I was your in.

Thomas LaRock (00:03:15): No, it gave you legitimacy is what it did.

Rob Collie (00:03:18): Yeah. I know him that doesn't mean that-

Conor Cunningham (00:03:21): It's good enough, I guess.

Rob Collie (00:03:24): ... Conor would Knight me. I thought that was hilarious because I had no idea really. I didn't know that the Conor that I knew was somehow like a celebrity in the SQL space, but it makes sense. You know, I just didn't know.

Conor Cunningham (00:03:41): I've been pretty lucky that people kind of all know my name now since I have been doing keynotes for my boss, Rohan. We have this thing called the Bob and Conor Show, we do it pass every year. And so it's rare that you get known by just your name, your first name. And I guess I've been lucky in the sense that at the right time I was able to get an in front of thousands and thousands of people. And now it's just thee Conor. I don't necessarily let it get to my head it's only in a very specific community after that I'm not really worth anything, but I think within that group, they seem to like me.

Rob Collie (00:04:12): Yeah. You're like Alice Cooper, you go on stage and then you're thee Conor. But when you walk off stage, you put your pants on like everybody else, one leg at a time, you know?

Conor Cunningham (00:04:23): Probably. Yeah, if I were wearing pants during this pandemic.

Rob Collie (00:04:25): Just to know yeah, I know. I think I'm actually wearing pajamas right now. So I don't know if that qualifies as pants, but it's a good COVID day for that. So when people ask you what you do? What's your job at Microsoft? What do you tell them these days?

Conor Cunningham (00:04:39): It's a little odd, my title is architect, but that means different things to different people. And what you think it means is only maybe 10% of what my job actually is. So architect at Microsoft means different things in different parts of the company. It's maybe a little bit of a glory title, but really the way to think about it is you're a senior engineer you're respected for what you do. You often are given these amorphous problems that don't really have solutions and in that sense, it's kind of what an architect does. I'm not really drawing like class diagrams or anything about how you put software together, but I am often trying to make sure that the whole picture of what we build for SQL or any of the other data offerings that I work on works together for the customer. So that often can be different things like when GDPR came in, I had to go figure out how do you get GDPR, the European privacy rule to work across all of our products so that we didn't hopefully get sued by the EU?

Conor Cunningham (00:05:39): And that's not probably a typical architect task but that's the kind of thing that would be normal for me. So I work on getting large companies to adopt our platform and to sort of solve all the issues that come up with that. Sometimes technical, sometimes training, sometimes legal, sometimes whatever. And usually it's like a joker in a deck of cards so you just be... You're throwing these weird problems and then you kind of get to go choose your own adventure and hopefully solve them. So it's a variety of different things and on any given day, I like to think of it as you don't really know what the day is going to be, but there's probably going to be a bunch of fun problems. And then you just have to kind of keep up because the pace is relentless.

Rob Collie (00:06:23): Yeah. Well, I do remember that about Microsoft for sure. It's actually one of the things that I, in hindsight, I've credited with a lot of my development. I mean, really most of my development came at Microsoft really, but the pace of it, the number of decision that you're forced to make per day that are going to stick, these are decisions that are going to impact the software. And some days you're making easily mid-double digit decisions about the products. It's crazy, it's a high-pace of decisions with enormous impact, potentially enormous act anyway. And so you've really got to be on your game and it really rewires your brain in some ways that I never really anticipated.

Conor Cunningham (00:07:05): You have to get in their head space to do it and so one of the challenges that I face is when I get done with work, I have to figure out how to turn the brain off in order to go back to doing normal human things like making dinner or whatever. You typically need to drive home and during the pandemic, you don't really get to leave the house, right? So you end up needing just to stop and give it five or 10 minutes to "drive home" so that you can just let yourself unwind a little bit and then become hopefully normal human Conor to be able to go watch football or whatever it is that you want to do that's for fun.

Rob Collie (00:07:41): I'm envisioning you like cooking dinner and going all like Rain Man lining up all the Tater tots on the tray.

Conor Cunningham (00:07:49): I will admit that I have taken every single thing out of my kitchen and organized it by function.

Rob Collie (00:07:56): I mean, you've got to be able to store and retrieve those utensils now don't you? And you would not want to be inefficient about that.

Conor Cunningham (00:08:06): Nope. I have too many colanders, so I got rid of some of the colanders and everything is partitioned by serving, baking, et cetera. I had so much fun doing this. It was too many years without doing it and now that I've done it, I am so happy that my kitchen is ordered.

Rob Collie (00:08:24): You know it's all indexed, you know.

Conor Cunningham (00:08:27): Pretty much.

Rob Collie (00:08:28): Do you have failover clusters? Do you have a backup kitchen?

Conor Cunningham (00:08:32): I have a second pantry.

Rob Collie (00:08:34): Oh.

Conor Cunningham (00:08:35): The first pantry's a little small so I have this room in my house it's not quite big enough to be a room it's like where you'd put a second fridge, I guess, but I don't. I have a wine fridge in there, but it was just big enough to kind of walk in. Originally, I tried to put like a treadmill in there but it was just too big. So I made it a second pantry and now it's like a big walk in pantry and it actually works out pretty well.

Rob Collie (00:08:57): So you've got an onboard cash pantry?

Conor Cunningham (00:08:59): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:09:00): And then sort of a secondary, more offsite type of... Yeah, I understand I get you.

Conor Cunningham (00:09:04): Level two cash for the pantry definitely.

Rob Collie (00:09:06): Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yep. It's just basic, it's pretty elementary really when you get down to it.

Conor Cunningham (00:09:11): It took me a few years to figure out that was the right plan, but now that have settled on it, I'm extremely happy.

Rob Collie (00:09:16): I can totally see you getting into that. We should do like an MTV Cribs type episode where you talk about your kitchen and check us out, man, over here. All right. Well, until we get the budget for that, we're just going to continue with the podcast. So when you and I first met, you were working on Jolt, the old, a DB driver for the jet engine, that powered access. And then as the years went by, and I'm sure there's some interesting things to talk about with Jet. I just don't know what they are, so we'll have to circle back. But one of the number one things I want to talk to you about is when I knew you at Microsoft, it was basically Pre-Hadoop. There's pre-Hadoop and there's post-Hadoop. And there's two different eras in our professional career when it comes to organized storage.

Rob Collie (00:10:05): And actually we have talked about this on a previous podcast about how Microsoft's sort of halfway anticipated this move to semi-structured storage. In the first iteration completely I think completely got the implementation wrong, which was XML blob storage in SQL. You know, it was anticipating a trend that data wasn't going to be just rectangles anymore. It was going to be curly as a certain architect referred to it. So when you say architect I think about these old white papers that I used to read with a certain degree of ceremony you would read these because they were hallowed, you know. Then you look back years later and kind of chuckle at how off they kind of were, even though they were at the same time pretty infused with foresight.

Rob Collie (00:10:55): So I would really like to talk about just in general, this transition from this rigorously Roman column model, which still obviously is very, very common and useful today. It's not gone at all, but there's all this other stuff that's happened since then. And I think you've now been dragged into that. You've been dragged out into those deep waters as well. Like you're in the middle of all that too, aren't you?

Conor Cunningham (00:11:23): Yeah. I work across all of the Azure Data offerings that we have both SQL server on-premises and also our cloud offerings, including the recently released Synapse Analytics platform. And that works over data in a logical data lake and it can be whatever format you want. It could be CSV files, it could be XML files. It could be whatever, parquet and that lets you kind of query over data. Where the structure isn't necessarily forced on you by a database and its schema, it's something that you tell the database what that structure is and then have it interface with it sort of indirectly.

Rob Collie (00:12:01): Yeah. So in terms of a personal journey, I kind of remember you as a SQL snob. There was a purity to the SQL and a purity to everything. When I say SQLs now let's say so lovingly, but I've never got a chance to talk to you about like that was a real expansion of the world and the fact that you're involved in all sides of it now, what was that journey like for you sort of opening up to this new stuff? Like in the beginning did it seem kind of, ah, this will never work.

Conor Cunningham (00:12:34): You know, when I was younger I would probably have said that, right? That doesn't solve all the problems that you want and you guys are crazy, leave me alone. As I've gotten a little older, I've had to just really catch myself the first time someone says a new idea. I try really hard just to bite my tongue and listen for a little bit more longer because there's usually a kernel of truth in the crazy new idea. And if you let yourself sort of sit there and listen to it and stew over it for a little while you figure out what is interesting about it. So the general trend about how we've got to the scale out, no SQL, maybe not necessarily strict schema view of the world is partially based on just the explosion of the amount of data that's out there now.

Conor Cunningham (00:13:23): And at some basic level you can scale up a computer to a certain size and then all of a sudden when the problem is too big for whatever the biggest computer is that you can buy, you need a different approach. And the world got to the point where that much data exists and we actually do want to process that. And once you start scaling out, then you don't necessarily need to have a bunch of really expensive computers to do that. You just need a whole bunch of computers with the right scale out algorithms. And that world gives you a lot of flexibility. It's also a little bit more complicated. The core algorithms, the area where I play to go do architect Conor stuff are the same when you get down to the bottom of it. It's just a question of how do you make sure that you have a cohesive technical solution in whatever it is you're trying to sell to the customer so that you can hopefully solve their business problem.

Conor Cunningham (00:14:09): And a lot of the world that I play with these days is some combination of scale up and scale out or structured data and semi-structured data, depending on where people are focusing and figuring out how do we apply the right algorithms generically across all of those. And it's a fun problem space, but it's also a very big world. It used to be very simple inside the SQL Org. We would just go build more SQL features and life is grand. And we still do a lot of that and that's still a very valuable business for us. But it also is an area where you have to be open to go meet the data where it is because there's so much of it now, just loading it into a database can take too long.

Conor Cunningham (00:14:48): So you need to think differently about how to solve problems like that and that gives you opportunities to kind of rethink well, what could you do? What is a database? Well, a database is just a thing that answers questions for you and then maybe provides you transactions and maybe does this and that. If you don't need all of those, then you can build a "database that maybe works differently" and solves problems better, cheaper, faster, whatever it is that you need to really meet customers where they are today.

Rob Collie (00:15:13): Yeah. It's the volume of data is exploding, but it's not just that it's also right the shape of it isn't quite... It doesn't want to like fit into neat rows and columns quite so cleanly anymore. And if it did, it would fit into the world's most complicated ad hoc schema. Can we explore that a little bit? This problem, and this type of storage sprung up in response to basically trying to store the internet, right? Like it was like internet search engines need to index the whole internet, how do we save that? So certainly tremendous volume, check and also though the properties of an individual page or whatever, a webpage doesn't just squish down into SQL, it doesn't squish down into tables and everything. And so to the extent that we can, this might be an impossible question, but to the extent that we can, how much of it is volume and how much of it is shape that drives not the introduction of these tools like data lakes and things like that, but their usage today?

Conor Cunningham (00:16:18): Yeah. It's a good question. I think that one way to look at it is even if you just had purely structured data, you would still need all this scale out stuff. We have scale out versions of traditional database engines and there's several commercial company that provide them including Microsoft and that exists. But you're right, Rob that the amount of data that is not formally structured is much, much larger than that. And therefore, if you want to go process that data, you need a different toolbox of stuff. And some of that you can build a new database engine, sometimes it's on the side or complementary. Sometimes it's just something completely different. Say I'm going to embrace that and just store random content so Cosmos DB is a new SQL store that we sell and it basically just lets you pass in JSON and you can store whatever you want, but up to a certain size.

Conor Cunningham (00:17:07): And then you can try to find ways to store different kinds of content, as long as you can figure out the interface that you want to use over it to make sure that you can write code to process it however you want. And that can be HTML, that could be images, it could be whatever it is that you want, but in each of those domains, there's probably going to be more specific tools because the amount of data is big enough now that it warrants having tools that kind of go after each space separately.

Rob Collie (00:17:32): It's just so fascinating. So like as I've been trying to, and I think reasonably well adapting in the way that you have, I've also had to adapt to this new world. And I did have a little bit of exposure to it when I briefly worked for Bing with their storage. Let's talk about data warehouses, one of my favorite things, my favorite straw men to set on fire from time to time. When you think about the term data warehouse, right? It's supposed to store like you can see the dust in the crates like the Indiana Jones, the end of the first Indiana Jones movie like this is where you put data so it doesn't get lost. Because your operational systems don't have a need to keep around the five years of history. Your operational systems are just really mostly concerned with the now and the recent.

Rob Collie (00:18:21): And so the original name given to these things implies, just don't lose anything. It does not imply that name anyway does not imply the priesthood that evolved around it. It became this like tower of Abel type of enterprise, it doesn't even really matter what the data warehouse is used for. The data warehouse is a thing that we're going to spend careers on and decades on. And one of my sort of pet theories has been that these semi-structured storage techniques have been eating into the data warehouse space, even though they don't do what we think of a data warehouse is doing, right? Like really neatly organized, highly structured, intelligently materialized storage.

Rob Collie (00:19:09): They don't do that. They don't replace that, but they absolutely replace the don't lose anything goal. Right? Like they do that, Right? And it's like a garbage disposal you just like almost like throw anything at it. It's like no, no. Yep. Got it. Got it. It's not going to be lost, not going to be lost. Part of my agenda for today is to run some of my pet theories by you and get your opinion on them. And if you disagree, if you think they're bad ideas, it's no big deal. We'll just edit them out. It's no problem.

Conor Cunningham (00:19:39): It's an interesting problem. Like enterprise data warehouses have existed at the center of large companies for like the source of truth for running those businesses. And there's a trend generally that we've seen where either just because they wanted to get off of expensive enterprise data solutions and move to Hadoop, they've been able to move to a solution that's more scale out. I think that there's a chicken and egg question about is it because they wanted semi-structured data or because they just wanted to get off of the maintenance fees for a particular vendor. I suspect that the maintenance fees and the size of the data are probably driving it more strictly in my mind than just whether it's semi-structured or not. But once you go down that path, you have the option of storing hierarchical data or data that's structured differently. And that then becomes a tool that's in your quiver that you can kind of play with all the different options that you can with I want to store more data there.

Conor Cunningham (00:20:34): And I still think there's a lot of structured data that's going to play in that world, but you can mix in semi-structured data, chase on payloads on the side, whatever it is that you want more easily without having to worry about, oh, how long is my backup going to take. The other nuance that's kind of interesting is in clouds today, the cost to store things that aren't being touched is generally very, very close to zero per bite. It's pretty cheap. Like we store petabytes and petabytes of data just to run one server in our public cloud. And that's just fine. It costs a fair amount of money to store things at that scale, but it's completely possible to do so. And we use it data to run our business effectively. Any big company can do that as well, even any modest size company can store tons of data cheaply compared to what it would've cost in one of these earlier solutions.

Conor Cunningham (00:21:26): And I think that that's part of it is that it democratizes the ability to get at lots of data. And then you can do lots of different things. Whereas before it was so expensive that you had to structure it, you had to spend all this time. Now you can choose if you want to cook that data into a structured format or not choose it if it's not worth your time right now.

Rob Collie (00:21:44): Yeah. There's a big difference between curves and cliffs and traditional enterprise data warehousing was a cliff. It's like, if you want to store anything, just write down a transaction. First, you have to read this thousand page Bible. It's like the cost of entry, even for the simplest things, is that you've really... It's all up front. And the ability to sort of scale how much you want to think about it and to be able to turn a knob rather than just flip a switch. You know it's not binary all or nothing. I think that the implementation cost even just figuring it out, what the schema should be and all of that kind of stuff, even that is part of the cost of ownership. And of course, I think you're right, like cost drives everything. So if that goes hand in hand with like reduced licensing costs like hey, sign me up.

Conor Cunningham (00:22:39): Absolutely. I think that the space here for proper enterprise data warehouse design still exists. Even in the scale out world, you can benefit from Kimball type 2 dimensions and fact tables that are as narrow as you can make them and all that type of stuff, because that does reduce the time to get results in some cases. It's not required in as many cases and the ability to add scale out processing can also be another lever to go after that same problem without necessarily having to resort to the same exerting rules that you would have in order to play the data warehousing game effectively.

Rob Collie (00:23:15): People ask me, what's your opinion on data warehouses? And basically I say to the extent that you already have one, they're awesome. They're the best thing in the world. They make everything easier. When I get into trouble with people when we start getting into arguments is when I say it's just not worth waiting on you build one. Analysis and actual business value can proceed and actually should proceed even if all the data that you need isn't already in the EDW. When it comes to going to work with our clients if ahead of time, if I could sort of magic wand sort of choose, I would say, hey, it would be great if this client already had everything in their enterprise data warehouse, just lower friction, we're off and running. You know I would love that. It's just never reality. It's always lagging behind the realities of the business by years really, in terms of what's been incorporated and digested, there's always so much that's not stored in there. That's relevant.

Rob Collie (00:24:12): I love that we've reached the point in this profession where we can, we can hybridize, we can use data from your data warehouse if you have one, but at the same time, there's also things being pulled from elsewhere and modeled together. And it's kind of a happy place to be.

Conor Cunningham (00:24:25): Yeah. I mean, just last week we released an update to our Synapse Analytics platform that lets you just throw all the data into a logical data lake and then you create some external tables on top of that and you can query it on demand. And instead of having to provision the data warehouse upfront, it charges you by the terabyte processed not any provision thing. It just goes away when you're not using it and it just costs storage and that's it. So there's going to be lots of work to make that easier and easier for people to get value out of their data with less investment to build that data warehouse upfront. Partially just because of the size you can't load it all anymore. And partially because that's where customers need help. They want time to solution for each team, not just the team that's in central IT for a large organization to have control over that data warehouse. If you want to spin up a new one and just have your own data lake on the side, that's completely possible now and it's really easy.

Rob Collie (00:25:16): Oh, that's great. That's great. This is probably my last theory of this sort. The game of data warehousing, old data warehousing was in order to store it, you had to design the tables to store it. You had to put it into rectangles in order to store it. Whereas now with data lakes, you don't have to go through that process if you don't want to. You can store it in sort of non-rectangular curly format, closer to its original format. But when it's time to analyze, which is typically where our company comes in, when you're analyzing across lots of "records or entities" you're not as concerned about the ways in which those entities are structured differently. You tend to be analyzing them across dimensions that they share. It's their commonalities that are interesting. And so you end up with rectangular-powered analysis like we still get to tables. When we're building our data model, tables are still absolutely 100% the way to go even if that data's coming from a format that wasn't stored as tables.

Rob Collie (00:26:23): So it's like you delay the rectangularization of the data until query time in a way because in every query is different. Every query would require you to rectangularize the data in a different way, right? And so it's kind of back to that curve versus cliff thing, right? You can kind of delay tomorrow's decisions until tomorrow when you actually know what they are rather than trying to anticipate every possible decision tomorrow in your schema that you design today.

Conor Cunningham (00:26:52): Yeah. I mean there's truth to that. I think the way that most of these logical data lake things work now are sort of tied to this runtime binding of the idea of here's the format now, and this is the subset I'm going to look at. So you can definitely push that decision out. There is still a trade off between like how fast is that query or how much does it cost to run if you're going to do that every single day, maybe it makes more sense to schematize it to get that to go faster or be cheaper or whatever. But that's a trade off that you can choose if you need to, as opposed to having to do it to be able to start playing.

Rob Collie (00:27:34): Right. No crystal ball delaying the work until you actually know what it is, is a tremendous advantage. And I completely agree with you. Let's say we walk up to an unstructured storage like a data lake and we start extracting things from it for analysis. There's going to be a lot of experimentation and iteration in that process. So as the project proceeds, we even refine the rectangles that we look for, right? But then after a while we dial it in and this dashboard, whatever it is that we built you're right, Conor like it's now running every day, powering business decisions and at refresh time or maybe we're using real time pass through queries or whatever, at refresh time, the performance of "rectangularizing" paying that every single time might suck. And so now that the spec for this solution is essentially stabilized. It's almost trivial I would think to define those rectangles as like a cache format that you can pull faster, you can optimize at that point rather than trying to optimize for every possible answer in the future, which is really a losing game, isn't it?

Conor Cunningham (00:28:43): Yeah. We definitely see people do that at different layers of the stack. You get like results set caching for example, or indexed views, materialized views are things that you can see inside the database to help you with that as well to kind of delay, even on top of these external formats to say, you know what I'm going to pre-process it once and store it here to make the layers above easier to serve. And you can all also do that within your serving layer as well. So I think there's lots of different options to try to reduce that cost to decide when you want to make that investment to go and really schematize things and you can choose to do so or not now in a lot more cases than you used to be able to.

Rob Collie (00:29:21): What a glorious world we live in. And you know what else is glorious is that Conor now you and I actually have a place where our careers meet. For the longest time like we were just both nerds working in tech at Microsoft, but like we'd come home and talk to each other because we did. There were four of us who shared a house together for like a year and a half, a very interesting year and a half. But we were never on the same page in terms of what we were working on. Now, I do remember though, you telling me that the MSI files that we used in Windows Installer that I was not allowed to call those databases.

Conor Cunningham (00:29:56): Yeah. That was back in my earlier dogmatic days. You can call it whatever you want now, Rob.

Rob Collie (00:30:01): Well, we all come from where you're coming from, what you're talking about. I mean, I have my own versions of that with age and experience and humbling experience, right? Is where you start to get a little bit more flexible, a little bit better about these sorts of things. Okay. So we could call an MSI file database now. Okay, here's the real test. Does Exchange run on a database, Conor?

Conor Cunningham (00:30:28): Yes.

Rob Collie (00:30:29): Yes.

Thomas LaRock (00:30:31): The look on his face.

Rob Collie (00:30:33): It was an important moment we had a breakthrough. It was a running joke where I'd run around and say, I forget it's JET Red and JET Blue, right? I forget which JET you worked on, but one of them was better than the other one.

Conor Cunningham (00:30:47): You know, the worst part is that the other one is more successful than the red one that I worked on but-

Rob Collie (00:30:52): Oh, bitter, bitter, bitter, bitter pill.

Conor Cunningham (00:30:55): No, I don't feel so bad about that anymore. I think that it's definitely the case that blue got used in a number of different things, including the storage engine backing for Exchange. And it's used in a few other places as well across Microsoft, but it's also a very specialized engine and it has a different sweet spot. It's not a general purpose database engine that you can use to solve any problem. So SQL is a far more general thing. I've worked on the main SQL server code base now for well say a very long time and that has some flexibility to do a lot of things. And I kind of enjoy that space because it is so flexible.

Rob Collie (00:31:35): Well, don't worry, Conor the single biggest failure in our personal circle that has anything to do with the Exchange Store is my project that I worked on for two and a half years, Office Designer, never saw the light of day got killed mercifully, was killed before it ever went to market. And believe it or not at one point in time, that awful, awful thing we were working on that was going to just be terrible. It was going to really, really suck. That thing was in contention to be named SharePoint, the SharePoint name was up for grabs. It was like Office knew this was a hot name and it was going to apply to either the technology that the Office web server folks were working on, or it was going to apply to the stuff that we were working on with Exchange. And it was like they were just waiting to see which one of us deserved it and they picked the right horse in that battle.

Conor Cunningham (00:32:28): Yeah. SharePoint is an amazing business. They're not a normal database app. They run on top of SQL server, but they don't really follow normal rules for rows and columns the same way that a normal app would. But it's a very, very large business for Microsoft and in some sense that's proof that you can take a problem area that's not quite normal row and columns that are fully schematized and derive a lot of value for customers that way.

Rob Collie (00:32:56): I remember when I was still there like the SQL org almost like regarded the SharePoint product as like an invader in a way, like a barbarian because was not... SQL was never intended originally to power something like that, but the SharePoint folks figured out how to make it work. And I remember, I don't know if this is still true, but like when you would go to Save a file like to a document library on SharePoint, there was like this ridiculous series of stored procedures that would run that would like tear that file into a million pieces and store them in individual places. And of course it took forever to say Upload a file to SharePoint because of it. And I suspect that that's kind of calmed down and things have kind of gotten more streamlined over the years, but originally it was kind of like the rogue effort in a way.

Conor Cunningham (00:33:41): Yeah. It's definitely a unique application on top of SQL in the sense that it doesn't follow the normal design rules that we would use for any traditional relational database application. That doesn't mean that they can't make it work and that they're not getting value out of the layer that SQL is they can use us to do backups. They definitely run queries. They happen to work, but it's not like we use SharePoint as an example for how to build an app. That said they have a huge investment in the enterprise readiness about how they run say SharePoint Online and they are an excellent partner of ours internally to be able to go drive us to be better at making sure that all the core keep the lights on things that we have to do to run our cloud service are being stressed every single day. Both on just the metrics of delivery and also on cost. So we have that running inside of our cloud today, so SharePoint Online runs on top of SQL Azure and they do that at scale with all of the different SharePoint sites that you have on there running. And it's a huge enterprise and it's one of our big internal customers.

Rob Collie (00:34:47): Let's go back to Conor the celebrity.

Thomas LaRock (00:34:51): I got some stuff.

Rob Collie (00:34:52): Yeah.

Thomas LaRock (00:34:53): All right.

Rob Collie (00:34:53): Yeah.

Thomas LaRock (00:34:54): So before we get there, I'm glad Conor, you cleared up what your title really is and the reason I'm glad, because whenever I speak of you, I just tell people he's the architect. So to find out that that's your actual title, just that makes me feel better about myself like I haven't been lying all this time. So I go back to knowing Conor roughly around 2009 when I was fortunate enough to become a Microsoft MVP. And that's where I got to really meet Conor was at the MVP Summit. And for people listening that don't know what it is. An MVP is essentially an advocate for Microsoft across any of the product groups mine currently is classified as data platform. And they would bring you on campus once a year and the product teams would talk through some of the stuff that they'd be working on and they use it to collect feedback to make the products better.

Thomas LaRock (00:35:47): So this is my introduction to Conor and a couple of things that you've said earlier about being the architect and all the fun things you do on the daily basis. The question I have for that, how long does it take for your decisions and your work? How long does it take for that to show up in the product? And I think the answer's different like how long did it take when you started and how long does it take now?

Conor Cunningham (00:36:09): Yeah, so before I answer, there are other Conor-like people on my team, I'm not thee architect, I am an architect.

Thomas LaRock (00:36:17): Fair point.

Conor Cunningham (00:36:17): And I don't want to try to make it oversell who I am. There are many, many smart people on my team and I am smart because I get to work with them as much as anything else. That said the time period to build software has changed over my career and SQL server would typically ship every three years or so. And so it used to be the way that we would build software for that would be we'd sort of think or design for a year, code for a year, test for a year and then ship. And then five years later, someone would tell me if the feature sucked or not, because they would take them that much time to go and adopt it.

Conor Cunningham (00:36:54): The world these days has sort of been inverted with the cloud. We now have to deliver software into the cloud every single month and we have to do that piecemeal. And by the time we get done after doing that 10 times, then the whole feature is there. And then later we ship that into SQL server. So that's the same code base for our cloud version of SQL and the on-premises version. And so the part that's interesting now is we're able to get feedback really early from customers as to whether that very first piece of small chunk of the solution works or not. And then use that to refine as we go. And that actually is really powerful for us because now I go find customers before we start the feature and if we don't have any, we don't build it. And so that's a very different engagement model and it used to be that we would kind of listen to the MVPs and we still do, but like they would kind of give us all this feedback on the two versions ago, product that we shipped and then we try to figure out what to do about that.

Conor Cunningham (00:37:58): There still is a degree of strategy and how do we think about where the market's going to go, that we put into what we do and why we prioritize things. But the engagement model that we're able to do now is far, far different both because we have telemetry in our cloud on what people are using or not using. And we're able to use that to figure out, oh, my God people are failing here. Like this is airing all the time. What's to go fix that. And we can also learn what features they're using in a way that helps us turn that around and invest in the areas that'll help customers the most. So that model is very different now and I actually think it's hopefully more responsive in the sense that we have to ship software that works. And you can't just guess, and then hope that they use it. We actually have to prove that they use it before we're done or else sometimes we just go cancel a feature that's missed the mark.

Thomas LaRock (00:38:45): So when I met you, Azure was really just starting and SQL Azure, which by the way SQL Azure is still remains the best name you've ever given it. But what I remember about it was the pushback, don't want to hear about don't want to talk about. And at some point I recognized Azure as basically a sandbox for you and your team to basically do some type of continuous integration, continuous deployment and to speed up the ability to get features to market. And I'm like, even if nobody uses Azure but Microsoft, Microsoft's going to create some really great stuff faster. And obviously you're only going to do it if somebody wants to buy it, but at least you have the ability and now telemetry and everything else that goes into these products to do that. And I just think it's been a great thing.

Thomas LaRock (00:39:38): So back to the MVP thing is that I remember being in that room and you would walk in. I have some of my favorite Conor moments, right? Like this guy, he walks in one day, he's got two slides. The first slide says, Conor's going to talk and then the second slide just said, Conor will take questions. That's it. That's all he had and the thing is, everybody in the room is like, yeah, that sounds good. Not a problem. And then there's another one where I think he just walked in and said... You didn't even have slides. He goes, "I'm just going to talk for an hour and then I'll take some questions from you." And we were all like, "Yeah, still not a problem."

Thomas LaRock (00:40:17): You weren't speaking, somebody else was speaking but you were addressing the room and your comments of "I'm not afraid of you anymore." Just still resonates just this... You can... Oh, that's it. "You can rate me wherever you want one through five. I don't care. I'm not afraid of you anymore." And it's just... So yes, Conor is a celebrity for all these reasons.

Conor Cunningham (00:40:37): In fairness, one of the things that maybe the audience wouldn't know is that the MVPs, there's a bunch of really smart, passionate people that are there. And they spend a lot of their hours working on behalf of Microsoft. And then they come to this forum and not every presentation that they would be giving would be particularly good. Sometimes the people that were working on a feature may not be the best at public speaking, or maybe they just had a bad business plan and they didn't really have a good picture that understood the customer well, and then the MVP's would be very willing to let them have it essentially. So I remember I gave a talk after one such talking so that the room was very salty, right? And I get into the room and people didn't really understand that I don't take guff from people when it comes to this sort of stuff.

Conor Cunningham (00:41:27): I want to get the feedback that I want from the room, but I have an agenda when I go into a room of 100 MVPs about what I want to learn and that's perhaps a little different than tell me what you think about my special flower project I've been working on, where someone is innocently coming in. So I'm usually coming into that room to play a different game than the average presenter. I also have the benefit of having been captain of the debate team in high school. And so having people try to bait me doesn't really work that well because I know most of the standard tactics and techniques.

Conor Cunningham (00:42:01): And I also, I'm just playing a different game. I'm trying really hard to figure out I have to make a key decision about the architecture. I'm not even going to tell you what it is because I can't yet, but I need to get the right data points from this audience because you are all the expert customers that have all this in your head, but maybe you can't tell me right now because you're too passionate about whatever random idea you want to complain about. It's just a different type of engagement model that I was using to go into that room and pull data that I needed to make decisions. So that maybe gives a little context as to why it's different. Also, Thomas, in fairness, as I've gotten more senior, I get less and less time to prepare. So coming in with two slides saying "Yeah, I'm going to give an extemporaneous talk with no slides for an hour" is pretty much my default mode of operation at this point. And I've been told literally five minutes before going in front of an audience of 100 or 200, "Hey Conor, I know you've been working all day in London and you're jet-lagged by the way, the user group is here and you're going to speak to them." And no one ever warned me that I had to go give a talk.

Conor Cunningham (00:43:03): So I would just get up and start talking and figure out how do I explain what we're doing, why our platform is interesting, what sorts of things people are finding that are challenging about it, and just I'm giving a very ad hoc presentation because literally that's all I have time to do. So I might as well use it to kind of help me refine my picture of what our customers need. And I'm constantly trying to do that so that I can hopefully make the software better when I make decisions every day.

Thomas LaRock (00:43:29): So one of those times you walked in front of the room and it was still at that point of where Azure, there was a lot of pushback. And like you said, you would ask the MVPs and you get feedback on features that were already baked into the product and it was two years ago, right? And I know these people and they sat there and they would tell you none of my customers are using this. And it's like so that's a data point of two people. And this is the type of feedback you were getting. So there was a lot of pushback to Azure and at the time there were some valid concerns about it but for most people they just fear change. So Conor walks in, goes to the front of the room and he goes, "All right, you don't want to hear about the Azure. I'm not going to talk to you about Azure at all." And a handful of people in the room were like, "Oh, thank God, because I don't want to hear it." And he goes, "I'm going to spend the time today talking to you about containerized databases." And everybody in the room is like, "Yeah. Okay, sure. Let's have this."

Thomas LaRock (00:44:29): So Conor proceeds to talk about the idea of a database as its own little containerized unit that can be basically picked up and moved to anywhere. And he details all of this in the talk and basically at the end of it he goes, "So what I just described to you is Azure." And for a bunch of people in the room like they were like confusion. Like, "Wait, that's it? That's what you've done here? That's what you built?" I remember sitting next to a Denny Cherry at the time and when you had detailed all that Denny and I were like, "Hell yeah, that makes way more sense right now. I wish you would've told us earlier, we'd been on board, but wow." That was just a brilliant way for you to control the conversation and lead a group of advocates to the place that you need them to be at for you. And I just thought it was brilliant, one of the best talks I've ever attended.

Rob Collie (00:45:26): That does sound amazing. Microsoft has an obsession with nouns, I had to sort of slowly over time break myself of it. In fact, after a certain point in time of my career, I would start telling like new hires that were reporting to me as I was mentoring them, that they were not allowed to introduce any new nouns into the product. Not allowed to do it. It's only verbs things that we do for the user. That's what we do. Like our nouns are us just nerding out over some abstract concept, right? And so like, this is what happens, right? Like Azure, right? It's Azure, Azure, Azure, Azure, right? The default is to go out and talk about Azure rather than what it does for you. It's a very computer scientist, Microsoft disease that a lot of Microsoft especially when they're young suffer from. The prognosis is not always good for recovery and so I wasn't at that talk. I'd never heard this story before, but I love it. Just this little redirect, let's talk about what it does and then we'll put a name on it. We'll put a name on it at the end, but the name isn't the important thing.

Thomas LaRock (00:46:37): So the other one that sticks with me, and this was around, I want to say 2010. I mean, I've got a lot of memories of MVP talks like Conor said some just go sideways.

Rob Collie (00:46:48): This is basically a this is your life.

Thomas LaRock (00:46:50): Oh, yeah. But no, so this is my impression. And this is what when I tell people that Microsoft is different now than when it used to be I mean I'm serious because I've seen a lot of it. But here's one, I think, great example and it's Query Store. So I'm sitting in this, God, I hope I'm not breaking my NDA at this point.

Rob Collie (00:47:14): I don't know.

Thomas LaRock (00:47:16): Okay. So I'm sitting in this talk, Conor comes in and he goes, "Hey, wouldn't it be great if we could persist performance data between a restart because that data usually gets flushed." And he wants to build this thing and store it inside of the database and he's going to call it the Query Store. And he basically asked the room, what's some of the stuff you'd want to see in there and we give him our feedback. Although I'm working for a software vendor that collects performance information. So there's some trepidation like are they about to put us out of the business? Like what's really about to happen? Conor's intent was never like oh, there are these handful of vendors out there we can just get all their business. That was never it, it was to build a better product to serve customers because everybody wants happy customers. And I remember him outlining it and I also remember how it took so long for that to make it into the product. I think it was six years, six years and this must have been like a side gig for you. You had a full-time job, but this was just something you did because you knew it was going to make things better. You would have more happy customers as a result and it probably wasn't even considered a priority for anyone in your office.

Conor Cunningham (00:48:32): The Query Store was an idea that when I went back to Microsoft, I sort of developed that, refined it with the help of some of my peers and my managers at the time. And then it kept getting kind of just below the cut line of what we would go fund for one reason or another. And it was a frustrating time in that regard because I knew that this would be helpful. The reason for that is the process we have for dealing with customer support tickets is usually that customer support engineering organization will typically handle most cases when they have ones they can't handle those get escalated to the engineering team. And then people like me would look at them to go figure out, okay, here's how you answer that and figure out either how to do a hot fix or otherwise the answer to the customer's issue.

Conor Cunningham (00:49:16): And then furthermore, there could be executive escalations where some big enough customer complains to some big enough person in Microsoft and then eventually things kind of roll downhill and then end up on my desk and I needed to go deal with this. And in both sets of cases, it typically boils down to if we only had X, this would just work. But the fundamental lesson there was when we first built SQL 7.O the query processor was very advanced, but there's a whole huge space of problems to solve. And eventually you realize that if you can push down some information into a store and learn from the last time you ran that same query, you can do better over time. It's a really simple concept, but in order to get to that, you had to take a system that wasn't built for that concept and add that on without breaking any of the existing customers that are running there.

Conor Cunningham (00:50:07): And it took a while to get the design right. It took a while to get the perfect scale right. These days I pretty sure that no one would ever want to go back to the old days. And that includes the people who are tools under is on top of SQL, right? It's a definitely a better world and there's a lot of things that we're building now where we have learning algorithms that we're adding to the Query Store, so that we figure out how to make your app go faster or scale better without you ever doing anything. And it's a huge playground for us. It's just it took a lot longer that first time to get out because I think it got canceled three times and I had to resurrect it just out of sheer force of will. And there's reasons for that sometimes just about how Microsoft works and what it prioritizes sometimes strategically what we had to do in the industry.

Conor Cunningham (00:50:56): They were all valid reasons at the time, even if I didn't always fully agree with them. I think now that we've had it out, though, people love it. It's on by default in every single SQL Azure database that you have, you can turn it on in SQL server and many customers do. So it's a huge thing that lets us make our customer's lives better, hopefully. And sometimes you have to just know up front that maybe it's the right thing to do, even when no one else will tell that to you. I'm now at the point where I'm basically only picking things like that to do whenever I get free time inside of Microsoft.

Thomas LaRock (00:51:28): You're taking away a lot of nerd jobs, right? You're making SQL server better with less human intervention to do so. Fair statement?

Conor Cunningham (00:51:38): I think Query Store specifically pivoted from a model where I'm going to give you a window into the inside of the engine of this car to here is an abstraction that is intended to be at the level of the database administrator or the DevOps person. And I want to make certain problems that required Conor or similar to Conor to solve to be democratized so that you don't need an expert to solve them. So yeah, definitely to the extent that that requires fewer labor dollars to be able to solve a problem, sure. But that also means you can spend your time doing more things for customers and stuff.

Thomas LaRock (00:52:15): Yeah. That's why I want to ask you. So for the people that have traditionally focused on database engine and tuning and tasks, things related to deep dive diagnostics, right? So for those people, if some of this stuff, as you say is being democratized, there might be less of those things to do. Where should they be spending their time next? What should they be doing for those customers? What's the next thing for those people who really are engine only?

Conor Cunningham (00:52:42): It's actually interesting because the query space is not one that I would say that they need to not know about. I would say that when you look at PaaS cloud offerings like SQL Azure, they have auto patching, auto backup, auto upgrade, auto change service tier, all that stuff goes away. So you don't necessarily need a sand person. You don't necessarily need a DBA that just does backup and restore. Those are the jobs that, that I think you probably shouldn't be focusing your time as much on that stuff. And there's still is actually a heavy value in my mind for a person who can take a database, especially if there's a company that has many of them and figure out how to tune them at scale. So one of the things that I do with very large companies that are like ISDs they have thousands of databases or hundreds of thousands of databases is we go figure out, okay, how do we take your app and tweak it so that maybe we trade off the ratios of memory to CPU, to IO, to disk, to tempDB to be to this or that.

Conor Cunningham (00:53:46): How do we design your app so that it doesn't require as much money so that we can squeeze the cogs down so that you can work at internet scale overcommit people to the same resources and save money on your SQL licenses effectively. And that game is highly valuable if you have enough databases. So I think that figuring out where you have the skills to do that kind of work is still very relevant even in a world with Query Store. Granted, there's a certain class of problem that maybe will get degraded and you won't need to have to really think about as much as the Query Store gets better, but the Query Store is not getting better fast enough that that's going to be a worry for me before I retire or anyone else who's going to listen to this podcast. In the next 10, 20 years, they'll still be problems with queries and tuning and figuring out the right way to go position applications to be able to make them work well. I think Query Store will solve a category of basic common ones, but you shouldn't assume that that world is going away anytime soon.

Thomas LaRock (00:54:44): So the world of tech of course, is changing very rapidly. I was wondering, so in my mind, what I think and this is very specific, I'm going to ask questions about AWS. And of course, AWS has some type of feature announcement like I don't know, a couple of dozen each day. So in my mind, I imagine Conor has some assistant somewhere inside Microsoft that gives them like a daily briefing and like an executive level summary. I mean how do you Conor, stay on top of all the changes that AWS is doing?

Conor Cunningham (00:55:16): I got bad news for you, Thomas. I don't have a person that briefs me on this. There is a mail that gets sent around about the other competitive offerings that we see from big Microsoft competitors that they send around to the executives and they will call me an executive since I'm on the mail thread, but that's maybe a gross stretch of my job title. I think that the main thing that you have to go look at is which ones do you control and directly compete against? So there are things that any of our large competitors do come out with. We tend to look at them closely. We have some conversations internally and brainstorm how to react. It's only really like two or three times a year where that becomes frantic I would say. It's not that they're releasing a new database feature every day for example. It might be that they release something on their messaging queue system or their identity system or their security scanner. And I'm not the first person to need to react to those things.

Conor Cunningham (00:56:08): I would say strategically, the part that is important for me is that I can meet customers where they are in terms of their design challenges and problems. And sometimes that means that they're on a competitive cloud compared to Azure. They could still use SQL. SQL is a huge business on AWS, but ultimately figuring out like how do we help them solve their problem is both a relationship discussion like a trust question of, can you give trusted advice to a customer as well as a technical solution piece? And we can do one without the other and we have, and we love being able to work with any customer that has a fun problem. And helping them solve those problems is really what we do independent of that. So I think we just kind of read up on them as we go through and some days I miss a few, but otherwise I put it on my to-do list each day to read about.

Thomas LaRock (00:56:54): So I'll be pointed because I'm imagining this might be a hectic time because re:Invent is happening. re:Invent is happening for three weeks this year, which is a ridiculous thing, but that's a topic for a different day. Have you familiarized yourself with BabelFish yet?

Conor Cunningham (00:57:12): Yes. I know what it is and I have a pretty good idea who built it.

Thomas LaRock (00:57:17): Because to me, that's enabling customers to migrate data to the cloud, which is the ultimate goal. They're removing more barriers for the data to get there so I would love your thoughts.

Conor Cunningham (00:57:28): So I'll just caution that I have not tried to play with it technically myself.

Thomas LaRock (00:57:32): That's fine.

Conor Cunningham (00:57:33): However, if you build a thing that sort of tries to fake the SQL server interface and have a different database engine underneath the covers, which is what that technology tries to do. I mean, obviously that would be in Amazon's interest, but at the same time, there are lots of technical differences across the various database engines. And it's likely that you're going to hit various challenges with that approach in the limit. It might work for a lot of the basic cases, just great. But as soon as you take a real application, I'd be very curious to know, does it always translate. Typically, when an application vendor tries to translate their software from any relational system that's of any age to SQL, when we talk to them, there's lots of challenges there because there's little nuanced differences that really matter, and they're not easy to fake, right?

Conor Cunningham (00:58:26): So you have to figure out, okay, well do the data types lineup? Well, that's not even true across a lot of them just to start with, right? Forget the semantics of a query, or how does the procedure language work or what's the exception behavior. So I think that it's obviously a very aggressive, interesting technology, kudos to them for trying to do it. I would be curious to see does it work for any real mature app?

Rob Collie (00:58:49): An example of what you're just saying there, Conor I think is I was still working on Office, I was in the Office Org when we went to the XML-based zipped file formats, which we now take for granted XLSX and DOCX and all of that kind of stuff. And there was a concern from the highest levels of Microsoft let's say it that way, that publishing the file format, making it open was going to enable the copycat Office Suites to steal our lunch money. And you know, it was really, it was coming from like the C-suite that opinion and that fear. And Chris Pratley, who worked on Word at the time, still at Microsoft, Chris Pratley had a different opinion. And I agreed with him, which was, it's not the file format. It's the behaviors. It's the behaviors of the application of PowerPoint, of Word, of Excel. Those are the hard things.

Rob Collie (00:59:46): Take it a step further, we Microsoft office, the Excel team, if we were given the Excel file format and told, even as us knowing what we knew, go duplicate Excel, we would go build something that wasn't the same. It would absolutely drift quite a bit from Excel. Like it would not be compatible with Excel. Even the Excel team couldn't rebuild Excel unless you just gave us the source code, right? Then we could probably do it. Software is again, it's not the noun, right? The storage is the noun. That doesn't count until things move. It's all the behaviors, the verbs, the flows, all of that kind of stuff. That stuff is loaded with nuance and it's a trickier beast than most people expect.

Conor Cunningham (01:00:33): Yeah. So there's definitely challenges there and again, I haven't tried any of it yet, so I'm not trying to go speak ill of a competitor. I'd just be curious to learn more since you asked about it. That's an area that we were talking about internally that would be definitely something that I would personally want to learn more about.

Thomas LaRock (01:00:52): Before I forget, there's one thing I want to point out and that is the three of us are all Jeep owners.

Rob Collie (01:01:01): I did not know that.

Thomas LaRock (01:01:03): I believe Conor just bought himself a brand new red Jeep within the past year?

Conor Cunningham (01:01:08): A year or so ago I bought a red Jeep, yeah. And one of the new Wranglers and I've been very happy with it. My daughter is also very happy with it and we have fun driving it. I got a GOBI rack on top of it. And it's quite nice looking.

Thomas LaRock (01:01:23): Oh, if you have a Jeep you have to accessorize. That's just the rule.

Conor Cunningham (01:01:26): I want to do more but with the pandemic and everything I've just been kind of waiting. I want to put a winch on it. I don't need a winch, but it just seems cool to have one.

Thomas LaRock (01:01:34): Exactly.

Conor Cunningham (01:01:35): Right. No, but I really wish I had reached this level of Nirvana in car ownership far, far earlier in life than I have, but definitely I've been enjoying my jeep.

Rob Collie (01:01:44): It's like the people that get really excited about their gaming computers and they're like blinging it out with neon and stuff like that same, whatever that itch is, Oh, look at that. Yeah. See, so you already had this itch you know.

Conor Cunningham (01:01:59): I also had that itch. Yes.

Rob Collie (01:02:01): Yeah. We told some very flattering Conor stories. Let's tell some others.

Thomas LaRock (01:02:07): All right. I don't think I have any.

Rob Collie (01:02:08): Oh, I know because you didn't live with him, right? I lived with him when he was still wearing diapers, you know? I mean he was a baby and so as I. This one actually, isn't a story about Conor really it's just about sort of like nerdom in general and how it can kind of overflow its banks. So I came home from work one day and I walked in the front door and I turned to my right and I looked into Scott's room and Scott and Conor were both in there and it looked like some sort of like tech bomb had gone off. The computers all had their covers off. There were wires strewn everywhere. I mean, there were cards laying here, cards laying there and they both looked like they'd been at this for a while like they were exhausted. And I was like, "Guys, what is going on? Now, keep in mind this was like probably like 1998. And I go, "What is going on here?" And without any hint of irony or humor, I forget who it was, one of them turned to me and said, "Well, we bought the new Windows phone."

Rob Collie (01:03:21): And this was a phone, a landline phone that was meant to like give you like additional voicemail inboxes and you could have different outgoing voicemails for each person calling you and all of that. And I was just looking at them and at that moment, my Grinch heart grew three sizes that day. Like I actually, I developed as a human being in that moment standing in that hallway. I just started laughing my ass off. And I'm like 100 years of dial tone and here comes Microsoft. I'm like, "Well, what's wrong?" They're like, "Well, we can't get a dial tone." And I started laughing even harder and I start to sort of like non-ironically asking them all the questions like, "Well, have you rebooted? Have you installed the new drivers?"

Rob Collie (01:04:10): It's like, we should not be allowed under like penalty of death as digital engineers to F up something so fundamental. If you're going to get into that game, if you're going to get into that game, you have to do it with a consumer mindset. And this was Microsoft is just typically not that thing you know, it's just hilarious. And I think you guys eventually got it working, but it took hours.

Conor Cunningham (01:04:37): Yeah. It's amazing that Microsoft is not a cell phone provider today, right?

Rob Collie (01:04:42): Oh, yeah. So shocking.

Conor Cunningham (01:04:44): It definitely was a nerdy piece of tech from old Microsoft back in the old days before we really changed how we do development. I had completely forgotten that we had that and this story I had purged from my mind, but I chuckle inside.

Rob Collie (01:05:01): Burned in my brain, right? And after that, it kind of became like a way that I could sort of like sort people. When I would be talking to someone in a meeting, you know, we'd be debating like whether something would be good for users or not or whatever. Again, this is like me after I'd grown a bit, I'd asked him, "Do you have a Windows Media Center PC at home?" And if they said yes, then I could decide to not trust them with regard to users or human beings ever again. Like they were willing to bring this complicated thing into their TV appliance supply chain.

Conor Cunningham (01:05:36): I admit that I have tried to do this and failed on multiple occasions and I keep trying, for whatever reason. It's like I still want a media PC and then it just would fail miserably.

Rob Collie (01:05:46): I can't help it. I've got the itch. But you know, this is Microsoft strength, right? Like Apple could never build Excel. They tried. Their Numbers app was a piece of crap you know. They could never build SQL server. They could never build Power BI, but they build amazing consumer tech. They really do.

Conor Cunningham (01:06:08): Well, they're a hardware company, not a software company.

Rob Collie (01:06:11): Yeah. I mean, you know, if Steve were here, he'd probably say they were like a lifestyle or experiences company even, right? Like very different emotional tone behind that. You mentioned that you've sort of like running out of time to do presentations. And that's one of the reasons why it's sort of like is driven you in almost like into a more authentic direction. If you don't have time to prep, you certainly don't have time to like put lipstick on the pig or whatever, right? Like you're just going to go in and be yourself. I sort of sympathize with half of it and then like the other half is the opposite. I can't help, but be working on a presentation. And my presentations aren't bullet points, they're all animated stories. They're all stick figure animations that tell stories and things, but I can't help but be messing with that stuff even like five minutes before going on stage.

Rob Collie (01:06:58): So one thing that you and I have in common, Conor is that when someone asks me in advance for my slide deck, that person is going to be very disappointed when they ask me. And they'd be very disappointed when they ask you, there is no such thing, right? It doesn't exist. But I don't work on those slides or the presentation or the demo or any of that until I get on the plane to go to the conference. That's the rule. That's what the airplane is for, that's what the hotel is for. So I do, I put it off, right? Because I don't have time. There's no way that I would end up prioritizing the presentation over the other things going on in my job until I go to the airport. But I don't go to the airport anymore. My routine, my workflow has been broken so I had this four hour webinar that would have been like a pre-conference session in the old days. I had that this week.

Rob Collie (01:07:52): Now that's like the night before and I haven't done anything, you know? And then the next morning, I mean, good news is I'd already given this talk in previous years. So it didn't take much prep, but I think I would have been in real trouble because I would have woken up that morning and gone, oh, boy where was the airplane? Where was the hotel? That's my lab for this stuff. It's a different world now.

Conor Cunningham (01:08:13): I had a presentation that I gave for a conference in the UK SQLBits and I had to give it virtually. And I had a lot of trouble getting motivated to get the slides done and give a presentation because I feed off of the energy in the room whenever I'm talking and I didn't get to do any of that. It was very disconcerting to try to just sit here in my office and talk to the microphone and hope that that turned out okay.

Rob Collie (01:08:37): We've always at P3, we've always been a remote company and we've always done a lot of remote work for our clients because it's super efficient. We definitely prefer to start a relationship with a new client in-person, at least once. We've been deprived of that now, you know, I mean, everyone has, so in a way it's sort of like by leveling the playing field like we're actually doing even better than normal because we're built 100% always, we were always a remote company. We were remote company before it was cool, you know? So I was actually going to ask you about that. So you've actually been a remote "employee" of Microsoft HQ. Your job would traditionally 100% have been a Redmond thing. And when you moved back to Texas, you did you left Microsoft because that kind of job just, mm-hmm (negative) no, it had to be there in Redmond.

Rob Collie (01:09:29): And some number of years later, they relaxed that. And it was almost kind of like it was sort of in the era of one-off, it was like a special exception that they'd have to make to do something like that. But it's becoming much, much more common even if you live in Redmond, you're not going into the office right now. Do you have any direct reports? Are you responsible for other professional human beings?

Conor Cunningham (01:09:51): I actually have been building a small team here in Austin, Texas where I live. So I have two or three people now reporting to me and that's another part of my job, but I started doing that earlier this year. And part of the idea was that I wanted to travel just a little bit less and to have an excuse to travel a little bit less by investing in the career growth of some individuals here in town, and to eventually build a relationship with the university since it's a top 10 computer science school, that kind of thing. So there's a lot of things I've been trying to sort of keep my career fresh and interesting and that's what I've been up to lately. So yeah, it's another one of my 10 fun things to do each day.

Rob Collie (01:10:32): Your real masterstroke in terms of not traveling as much was to engineer the Corona virus and distributed via 5G, you know.

Thomas LaRock (01:10:41): That was a brilliant stroke. Yes.

Rob Collie (01:10:43): I mean, it's like, look, I've got these direct reports to kind of tie me here, but just in case.

Conor Cunningham (01:10:52): Yeah. I mean, it's obviously been a weird year and ironically had been working out of my house for 10, 11 plus years when I'm here. And then I was getting kind of bored of it so I got space in the Microsoft office here in town and I was all ready to go work there. I would get up in the morning and take a shower and put on pants and go. And that went on for about like four months and then everything went sideways and now I'm back here sitting in my workout clothes, not quite sure what on earth happened.

Rob Collie (01:11:23): And now that team that you've hired in Austin like they could move to Guatemala.

Conor Cunningham (01:11:28): Yeah. For the most part like I've seen each of the people that report to me here in town exactly one day in- person each. And that's a little bit of a weird experience I talk to them all the time. Every day we talk sometimes multiple times a day, but it is a different experience and obviously we're all having to adjust this year. It's been a very strange year.

Rob Collie (01:11:48): You're interacting with your team more than I'm interacting with my kids. My kids live less than a mile away, but because they're living a normal teenage life, essentially, they're still out dating and all that other kinds of stuff. And we weren't really able to reach a consensus between me and their mom on how to handle that, so path of least resistance they just live with their mom full-time now. So yeah, the irony of having people close to you, even geographically, but you don't see them very much. It's a weird, weird, weird thing. It's even hard to watch movies now. Like you watch a movie and you see people like sitting in a conference room together you're like, "Uh, you shouldn't be doing that." It's weird.

Conor Cunningham (01:12:35): All the time. Yeah. I think there's definitely going to be a before and an after for this whole thing. And it's not just about how you record sitcoms or movies. It's also going to be a lot of the cultural references and stuff will just all be different once we get done with this.

Rob Collie (01:12:52): So do you think and you don't really have any special knowledge about this I think you can comment without speaking out of school, do you think Microsoft is going to remain a primarily remote company? Do you think they'll rather than ask it as a binary, how much of the remote culture do you think is going to stick around after all of this?

Conor Cunningham (01:13:11): They've made some changes policy-wise and I think that remote work, or at least partial remote work will become more common. There's definitely some cultural parts that's been helpful. As a person who was the only remote employee in a meeting, they would often have this thing that happens when everyone gets excited in a meeting where they all talk over each other and they never stopped to ask if anyone on the phone has anything to say. Now with everyone being remote, everyone's had to experience whenever they've been unable to share their thoughts. And I actually think that the culture around that and forcing everyone to go through that experience will help us to be a better company when we get done, because it will change how you do meetings. It'll change how you make sure you're inclusive in meetings and making sure that you just have the right protocol for doing that to keep everyone up to speed and feeling like they're part of the team.

Rob Collie (01:14:05): That's a very optimistic view, isn't it? I hope you're right.

Conor Cunningham (01:14:08): I think that there's obviously going to be... Microsoft has always been a Seattle company, but there are a lot of attempts to get it to be less exclusively so. I think it will be a 10 year journey to get to a different spot and maybe some of the other tech companies are a bit more geographically distributed, the big tech companies. But I think Microsoft definitely I don't know if you've been up to Redmond recently, Rob, but the original buildings one through 10 are just a giant hole in the ground last time I was up there. Because they tore them all down and they're building another huge like Uber campus on top of that space that holds more people. And the problem is that it's just really hard to build buildings fast enough for the company to grow at the rate that it wants.

Conor Cunningham (01:14:54): So I think there's actually some just geographic constraints that make it hard to put everyone in one spot. The traffic's not good, the house prices are expensive as you and I know I wasn't a huge fan of the climate in Seattle. So I think there are people that you would want to have at the company that might want to live elsewhere. And it's perfectly fine if you get the right model to be able to operate that way. It's a possibility that I think was less... I think the pandemic will help Microsoft consider that more aggressively than it would have otherwise.

Rob Collie (01:15:24): I hope when they tore down those buildings like seven, eight, nine, and 10, that they were really careful to search them for people who were lost inside them before they tore them down. Because those buildings were really an afront to humanity, they kind of needed to be torn down. They probably were some sort of like combined antenna for summoning Satan or something. I'm glad to hear that those things have been put to rest.

Conor Cunningham (01:15:46): Yeah. People, when you would first start at Microsoft, one of the things you would do is you'd send them to a meeting in building seven. There was no building seven and then eight, nine, 10 they were these weird, not quite diamond shapes in parts of them. And then if you follow the lines for like, okay, office numbers X through Y are this way. You could follow each of the signs and be stuck in an infinite loop forever. And so we would just send people to various meeting rooms with a particular office number that we knew that they couldn't get to by following the rules, unless they just sort of wander around randomly. And it was a good introduction to how not to design a building.

Rob Collie (01:16:22): Oh, it was awful. Then they started like painting certain hallways different colors so that you'd sort of have some sense of where you were, but all it did was just make you feel like you were lost in a circus tent. And it just was like the worse.

Thomas LaRock (01:16:34): Would you do this to people you like?

Rob Collie (01:16:37): What's the difference?

Conor Cunningham (01:16:39): Yeah. We would do this for every new hire.

Rob Collie (01:16:42): Yeah. If you like him, you did it to him. If you didn't like him, you did it to him.

Thomas LaRock (01:16:46): I think Conor, you once asked to meet me in building seven now that I figure.

Conor Cunningham (01:16:49): Probably.

Rob Collie (01:16:52): Like I said, I hope there wasn't someone still wandering around in an infinite loop sent by Conor when the wrecking ball came.

Conor Cunningham (01:16:59): Yeah. I wasn't there when they tore them down so I can't say for sure, but I haven't heard of any suspicious deaths. So we're hopefully they're all okay.

Rob Collie (01:17:08): Microsoft has been geographically distributing, like you know our old friend, Jamie he's in North Carolina. He now, I guess tactically works for GitHub after the acquisition, but he's been Microsoft, he never left Microsoft when he moved across the country. So yeah, it's a really an interesting new era. And one of the things that I have found, we were essentially like forced into a remote model from the very beginning, because the talent in our space, especially five years ago, you weren't going to find it in a particular location. And you weren't going to be able to get people to relocate either. So our hand was forced, but it was actually amazing because it allowed us to pull from the absolute largest possible talent pool. I think it's an advantage. I think it's a huge advantage.

Rob Collie (01:17:57): Working remotely allows you to set a quality bar in a place that you can't, if you're geographically-oriented, you know. Back when we were youngsters like were leaving college okay, fine. You're expecting to move somewhere, but once you've been established somewhere, you're part of a community somewhere moving sucks. No one wants to do that.

Conor Cunningham (01:18:18): It is definitely a big choice and I think that giving people flexibility to work remotely is a great thing if we can do it. I think we're lucky to be in industries that can largely be done remote and I've been-

Rob Collie (01:18:32): Mm-hmm (affirmative). Very, very fortunate.

Conor Cunningham (01:18:33): Yeah. Very, very thankful that this year I just have to focus on trying to make sure that team stays working and things like that so that everyone can work from home safely until we have a different circumstances on the ground.

Rob Collie (01:18:45): Well, I've really, really enjoyed this. And again, a manufactured excuse to speak with an old friend. Conor, thank you so much.

Conor Cunningham (01:18:53): Hey, it's been fun. Thanks for having me.

Announcer (01:18:55): Thanks for listening to the Raw Data By P3 Podcast. Find out what the experts at P3 can do for your business. Go to powerpivotpro.com. Interested in becoming a guest on the show? Email Luke P [email protected]. Have a data day!

Austin Senseman is a former P3 team member who went on to start his own business, Conserv, an internet of things startup company in the conservation space. Conserv does important work to help preserve historical artifacts in museums and private collections by using sensors and analytics. We talk about historical artifacts and the data that is used in preserving them, the infamous P3 Interview Of Death, dealing with Investors, business ethics and so much more.

Episode Timeline:

• 1:45 - Meeting Austin, a Talking Heads reference, and Austin nearly reveals his secret password!
• 5:15 - Sports-team allegiance is important, especially in the South
• 7:20 - Austin's company, Conserv, won a huge pitch competition this week and Austin explains what Conserve does
• 9:00 - Sensors and IoT devices that Conserv uses, and how to handle the challenge of networking and collecting the massive amount data from these things
• 14:00 - To buy something or to build something, what's a better path? The Black Market, and the hilarious story of The Backstroke Of The West
• 18:15 - Dealing with Investors in the startup space
• 20:40 - The analytics of Conserv, and how the physical world enters the equation
• 27:00 - Artifact care standards, how precise conditions must be to preserve these historical treasures, and the data that's behind it
• 33:00 - Rob mentions the Vasa Museum and a running joke is born!
• 37:10 - The importance of preserving historical artifacts
• 46:00 - Rob asks Austin his least favorite question. What other applications can this tech be used for?
• 51:00 - The grossness of the predatory extraction business model
• 59:10 - The infamous P3 Interview Of Death, and how it factors into how P3 perfected remote hiring
• 1:12:35 - It's not personal, it's just business...is just garbage and the amusing applicant story
• 1:16:30 - How Conserv used Power BI embedded, and the challenges he had to overcome with using it
• 1:29:00 - Celebrating as a business owner, and Custom Emojis in our Slack channel

Matt Allington is a Power BI consultant, Trainer, Microsoft MVP, author, and a friend! Matt has worked for many years in the retail and CPG industries, has a very deep knowledge of Business Intelligence and Data Analytics, and currently owns a Power BI consultancy ExceleratorBI in Australia!  Here's the link to Matt's book-Supercharge Power BI: Power BI Is Better When You Learn to Write DAX

Episode Timeline:

• 2:00 - Did Matt and Tom the SQL Rockstar previously meet each other?
• 6:25 - Matt's origin story is an epic and relatable journey of discovery
• 14:00 - The importance of process (and we adopt Matt's superior pronunciation of the word)
• 25:35 - Business, Sales, and IT (and once again the importance of Hybrid roles)
• 29:10 - The evolution of BI tools, and the best and worst of the bunch
• 37:15 - Structure VS Flexibility in BI tools
• 48:55 - Power BI and Power Query enter the fray, Excel people get angry, and everyone has the same opinion of Power View
• 53:50- The friction Tom got from adding Business Analytics to conference menus, and the birth of BACon
• 1:08:45 - Matt's connection to Rob's broken leg
• 1:11:05 - Training remotely in the COVID world, and The Collie Layout Methodology
• 1:16:20 - Rob takes exception to Matt's math

Episode Transcript:

Rob Collie (00:00:00): Welcome back friends to Raw Data. Today's guest is Matt Allington. He comes to us from Down Under. Now, Matt has a very particularly validating story for me. I bet my career in 2010 on the future success of Power BI. I just knew it. I could see it. And even though I was convinced that this was of the future, in 2014, when I crossed paths with Matt Allington, something happened. It was still, even though I believe what I was doing, was still incredibly validating.

Rob Collie (00:00:30): This guy was a BI director for Coca-Cola, Asia Pacific BI director. As far as I was concerned, one of the sort of made men of the elite of the traditional industry. And after a brief interaction and exposure to what I've been working on, he called me up and said, "Hey, I want to go do what you're doing." And like I said, even though I had been so convinced of what I was doing and it was already working out, it was going great, it was still a really validating moment and just an incredibly exciting feelgood moment for me to see someone sort of cross over like he was doing.

Rob Collie (00:01:04): Now in today's podcast, you'll hear that he actually... If I'd known more about him at the time, it wouldn't have been quite as much of a surprise to me. So a lot of things that we talk about on today's pod are things that I was hearing for the first time. It was really interesting even to me, after knowing Matt for as long as I have. We had a lot of fun. Hope you enjoy it as well. So let's get after it.

Announcer (00:01:26): Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please?

Announcer (00:01:30): This is the Raw Data by P3 Podcast with your host, Rob Collie and your co-host, Thomas LaRock. Find out what the experts at P3 can do for your business. Go to powerpivotpro.com. Raw Data by P3 is data with the human element.

Rob Collie (00:01:49): Welcome to the show, Matt Allington. Sometimes we like to say the, the Matt Allington.

Matt Allington (00:01:55): Thank you. Great to be here.

Rob Collie (00:01:57): Matt, you were at at least one or two of the past business analytics conferences. Tom, had a lot to do with organizing those. Did you guys ever meet at one of those?

Matt Allington (00:02:07): Yeah. I seem to remember passing Tom in a hallway. I actually think Tom from memory, you had just been elected PASS... Whatever the thing is that you got elected PASS leader is it or chairman or something? President.

Thomas LaRock (00:02:23): President.

Matt Allington (00:02:24): President. Okay, yeah. So I think it was that year. I think you'd been elected PASS president. And Rob, I was over at the PASS conference. I want to say it was in... No, it wasn't in Seattle. It was up in Santa Fe. San Jose.

Thomas LaRock (00:02:40): San Jose.

Rob Collie (00:02:41): San Jose.

Matt Allington (00:02:42): Yeah. San Jose. I reckon it was that year. Does that sound familiar? Do you remember-

Thomas LaRock (00:02:46): Yes.

Matt Allington (00:02:46): ...passing me, Tom? You remember I waved and wanted a selfie?

Thomas LaRock (00:02:49): I absolutely remember you.

Rob Collie (00:02:51): Oh, yeah. Matt, that guy.

Thomas LaRock (00:02:54): That Matt.

Rob Collie (00:02:54): The waiver. The mysterious waiver.

Matt Allington (00:02:57): Yeah, the fanboy.

Rob Collie (00:02:58): You're both figures in the community, in the data community, which is sort of coming at it from different sides. I was actually really curious coming into this whether you had to interact. I mean, you're familiar with SQLRockstar on Twitter. Yeah?

Matt Allington (00:03:11): I'm a follower. I'm a follower of SQLRockstar, so yeah.

Rob Collie (00:03:15): Really? And you still agreed to be on the show.

Thomas LaRock (00:03:17): Yeah, absolutely.

Rob Collie (00:03:18): Even though he was here. Yeah.

Thomas LaRock (00:03:19): Yeah, that's weird.

Rob Collie (00:03:21): I'm disappointed. The two of you never really, truly crossed paths other than the waving.

Matt Allington (00:03:25): Yeah. We haven't really ever met other than sort of through Twitter, but the Twittersphere is actually quite interesting because you really sort of... I feel like you can build a bit of a relationship with people and they're not the same way as a face-to-face relationship, but you sort of feel like you get to know people through these social media channels.

Matt Allington (00:03:45): In fact, it was Scott, Scott [Zinkaresky 00:03:48] at that exact same conference that we're talking about that talked me into signing up to Twitter. And you know Scott. You can't stop him, right? So he said-

Rob Collie (00:03:56): No, you can't.

Matt Allington (00:03:57): ... to me that this Twitter thing is the bees knees. Literally, I think even if I check my start date, it was probably on that evening when we were at the bar where I set up my Twitter account or very shortly thereafter. But yeah, I think you can really get to know people. When I have met people at conferences, you say, "oh yeah, I know who you are." Right?

Rob Collie (00:04:18): Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Matt Allington (00:04:20): I'm a real believer of putting a like image on your social media accounts, on your professional, social media accounts anyway. So Twitter and LinkedIn. If you want to do Facebook, something a bit off the wall butt I think that's a bit different. But as far as your professional accounts go, I think it's great to put a like image of yourself. And then when you go to these conferences, people recognize you. Right? And then if you've had a bit of interaction, you sort of feel like you're not strangers. I think it's great.

Rob Collie (00:04:50): Yeah. I was really surprised when I met Tom, for instance, that there weren't like these multicolored stars in the background behind them. It was really off- putting. I'm like, "Could you like halfway put your hands in your pockets? Oh yeah, there is Tom. Yeah." I was trying to think, what would else would we do with our image? Like a glamor shot or something. But no, Tom's got a professional... It's an icon. He's iconic.

Matt Allington (00:05:15): [crosstalk 00:05:15]. Sorry, about that, Tom.

Rob Collie (00:05:18): I was.

Matt Allington (00:05:21): Everyone that has a like image though is like 10 kilos, sorry, 20 pounds lighter and about 10 years younger.

Thomas LaRock (00:05:30): That's a data guy right there. He just did that conversion.

Rob Collie (00:05:33): Look at that, effortless.

Thomas LaRock (00:05:35): Seamless.

Rob Collie (00:05:38): He's a natural. It's a pleasure to watch you work. It depends. I was probably 10 kilos lighter six months ago. There's some peaks and valleys.

Matt Allington (00:05:50): Then you spend a bit of time at home with a few boxes of delivered donuts and [crosstalk 00:05:55].

Rob Collie (00:05:55): That's right. You know how food tastes better when you're camping? Delivered food sort of tastes better too. Delivered donuts are like an extra 20% above normal donuts.

Matt Allington (00:06:04): Extra sweet, yeah.

Rob Collie (00:06:05): So Matt has a very interesting origin story, I think in the Power BI, the power platform space. We are obligated to at least cover this. I've retold your story so many times because I just find it so compelling. Retell it from your perspective.

Matt Allington (00:06:21): Well, maybe I'll perhaps go back a little bit further than I have before when I've talked about this story. Because I mean, the bottom line is I met you, Rob online virtually or via probably telephone back in those days. Nearly seven years ago, right?

Rob Collie (00:06:36): Yeah. It's a long time.

Matt Allington (00:06:37): I'll come back to that. But we were talking before about data, right? This is about data. So the truth is I'm a data guy locked in a business guy's body. That's actually the true story of Matt Allington. Now, if you want to go way back, I remember in high school and in Australia year eight was the first year of high school. We had a computer lesson. Now, this is, I want to say, 77 orders of magnitude. Right? So I'll give you some sort of sense of time. So the PC was released in, what, '80 or '81?

Rob Collie (00:07:15): Yeah.

Matt Allington (00:07:16): So this gives you a sense of the time horizon. Now, we had a computer class once a week and we had this HP something mini-computer. I think they were called mini-computers back then. It had a cassette. You know what a cassette is, right? It's like plastic. It's got holes in it. Spins the tape through. So that's how you used to save your software. I got a library book out and programmed something in Basic. I taught myself Basic to use this thing. I loved it.

Matt Allington (00:07:51): I'd go in after school and program this computer. Then that was really the start of my love of data and computers, but I didn't go down a data and computer and IT path like many people who have that sort of gene tend to do. I'm not saying it's right or wrong, I'm just saying, this is what happened to me. So I often talk about there being a continuum of skills or styles, or genes, or whatever you want to call it.

Matt Allington (00:08:24): So at one end, you have the most extreme IT person that you can think of. This is the person that does the machine coding, right? The person who developed the operating system. The person who wrote in, in this code that you can't even read and understand because it's directly addressing memory and peripherals and things like that. So that's at one end. And then at the other end, you've got this business person who think of the entrepreneurial, strategic CEO that's never touched a piece of technology in their life.

Matt Allington (00:08:56): They do everything on a whiteboard with a whiteboard marker and they sell the vision and then someone else basically makes it happen. So these are the leadership people. I'm not trying to say these things are mutually exclusive. I'm trying to say that there's this continuum. And then everyone falls somewhere in between that, right? So you could at least philosophically put a line somewhere down the middle of that continuum and say, "At this point, you are now an IT person."

Matt Allington (00:09:26): On the right side, you're an IT person. On the left side, you're a business person or a commercial person. I've always straddled that line. I could have fallen either way. I mean, the truth is there's a gray space, right? So even though there's a cutoff point, there is a gray area where you could be a business person with an IT bent, or you could be an IT person with a business bent.

Matt Allington (00:09:49): So if you're an IT person with a business bent, you're a business analyst, right? So you understand the technology. You're actually an interpreter. It's no different to the early days when we had some people speaking French and some people speaking English, and then some people would do both. And those interpreters sat in between and they listened to one person and they translated it and explained it to the other person who couldn't understand.

Matt Allington (00:10:15): That's what a business analyst does. Right? They're an interpreter because they're in this gray area between the most extreme IT person who can't understand business and the most extreme business person who doesn't understand IT. We need these interpreters.

Matt Allington (00:10:30): I've always been in this gray space and I could have fallen either way. Frankly for economic reasons and luck, and whatever, I just spent my time in the business space. So I started working in a supermarket chain called Woolworths.

Matt Allington (00:10:50): Now in the US, Woolworths is a bit different to what it is here in Australia. So Woolworths in Australia is more like Kroger or Publix. One of those more mainstream supermarkets here in Australia. Whereas I think Woolworths is more like Walmart in the US. So just keep that in mind.

Matt Allington (00:11:08): But I started working in a supermarket and I learned about customer service. I remember getting my butt kicked by a manager one day. A customer came in and said to me, "Do you have any of this frozen chicken number 11 or whatever?" And I looked in the freezer cabinet. I said, "No, we don't have any of that." This is early days in customer service.

Matt Allington (00:11:30): So of course she went and spoke to the manager and the manager came and kicked my butt and said, "Don't you ever look in the freezer. I mean, the customer can see there's nothing in the freezer. Your job is to go and service that customer and find out if there's any out the back." Geez, did I learn a really valuable lesson about customer service. Seriously, for probably eight years that I worked in supermarkets casually and full-time over the years, I really learnt what it's like to service a customer.

Matt Allington (00:11:58): So even though I'm sort of in that gray IT data, I'm still a data guy, right? But I learn about business and customer service and the importance of clearly communicating to customers to treating them well, to listening, like listening. Oh my God, is that a skill. That's a skill that's actually through so many different areas, including IT. I mean, good developers listen.

Matt Allington (00:12:22): But the difference is that a good developer that doesn't understand business can listen, and often what they will hear is a technical problem. What they don't hear in between the lines is the true business problem. This is where these people in the gray area, I think have an additional skill.

Matt Allington (00:12:42): I think this is another thing about if you've been in commerce and you've got this sort of IT bent. You learn to be very curious. So when I go and consult these days... I'm jumping forward. But when I consult these days and a customer says to me, "I need this report," and I look at this report and I think, "No, you don't. You don't need that report. You think you need that report, but that's not what you need."

Rob Collie (00:13:07): You think you need chicken number 11.

Matt Allington (00:13:09): Exactly. But have you tried-

Rob Collie (00:13:11): But have you tried chicken number seven?

Matt Allington (00:13:13): Exactly. They're a bit small. But number 12, you get 9% more for less than 9% extra.

Rob Collie (00:13:22): By the way, there's a bit of a cliffhanger in that story you told.

Matt Allington (00:13:25): What's that?

Rob Collie (00:13:25): Was there any chicken number 11 in the back?

Matt Allington (00:13:28): I think there is. And I think history will say yes.

Rob Collie (00:13:32): Okay. All right. Anyway, it wouldn't be much of a lesson if there hadn't been any in the back. Right?

Matt Allington (00:13:39): Exactly. Anyhow, I think I've got off track somewhere along the line. I mean you asked me about my story and you were asked, I mean...

Rob Collie (00:13:45): Hey, off track is what we do here. I mean, we don't spend necessarily all the time on track.

Matt Allington (00:13:52): All right. So let me jump forward. All right. So school was where I fell in love with computers. At some stage after my supermarket life, I joined Coca-Cola. I Spent half of my life there as you know, Rob. So 25 years. I started as a Coke rep and I took that customer service experience as a Coke rep.

Matt Allington (00:14:13): I'm not a sales guy. I never really was, but I was in a sales job. In addition to customer service, what I learned in that job was process. I really learned a good sense of process. It's such an important skill that someone has. Not everyone has to have it, but someone has to understand process.

Matt Allington (00:14:33): I'll give you a good little anecdote here. So is back in the day, right? We had these, we called them route books. So that was like an A4 folder, which would be like, what do you call it? A letter paper folder with cards in it. You'd walk into the customer and you'd count the stock in the stock room, write it on this sort of thick piece of card and then go out. We had this handheld device, which resembles like an old Nokia phone that you sort of used to punch in the numbers and place the orders.

Matt Allington (00:15:02): Sometimes when I stopped to take an order, I'd take one, two, three orders in succession. Always do the most friendly customer last so you can stop and have a cup of coffee before you move onto the next customer. Right? So imagine this. Get out of the car, go to customer one, least liked customer. Number two, middle liked customer. Customer three, most liked customer, have a coffee, take the orders, get back in the car, take out the book, key in the order for the last customer, forgetting that you've been to the other two customers and off you go.

Matt Allington (00:15:34): So what would happen then five days later, you're sitting in the office and you get a phone call from customer number one, least liked customer. Can we bleep on this? "Where's my bleeping order from last week, you useless pile of Coke rep?" What learned is that I had this process that failed in operation. I could've probably gone with lots of different solutions, but the solution I came, the process based solution to solve that problem because of my customer service ethic, I felt terrible that this was my fault. It was my fault.

Matt Allington (00:16:09): And the process based solution I came to was that when I had those three card stops, I just flipped the order of the cards in my book. I put the last card first, the middle card second, the first card third. So I'd get out of the card and then work backwards. I'd go to the first customer, second customer, third customer. But my cards were in the reverse order. Have my cup of coffee, get into the car, forget all about the other two customers. But when I flip the card, there was the second customer. "Oh, that's right. I got to place this order." Flip the card. "Oh, that's right."

Matt Allington (00:16:43): But to me, it is just such a simple example of how process is so important because things can and do go wrong in business. And if you design a good process that protects against the thing, that's what process is all about. It's about protecting against things that go wrong, because if you rely on a human to execute a process, they're open to failure. Right? So I really learnt about process in my 25 years at Coke and had quite a few roles where that was an important part of the job.

Rob Collie (00:17:20): I certainly have been on kind of a journey of discovery when it comes to... By the way, we've been doing a great job of translating between metric and A4 to letter and all of that. And for those of us here in the states, when Matt says process, he's talking about process. That's what we mean. Similar word, but I just want to translate that for everybody. I had a friend that I worked with at Microsoft who was from Canada and he was always making fun of Americans for saying process. He's like, "I just hate how it sounds process, process. It's process. It sounds so much better." I kind of agree with him. Process does sound better. Anyway, the value of process.

Matt Allington (00:18:00): But I think these things go together. I think data and process go together. I think you got a bit of both. I don't think you can have all data and no process. This would be my experience. I could be wrong. Love to meet the person who's into data that doesn't have any process. I mean, just think about a developer, right? A developer is a process.

Rob Collie (00:18:19): I was just going to say-

Matt Allington (00:18:20): What are you talking about? You've got no process?

Rob Collie (00:18:22): Okay. So here's... I'm going to be-

Matt Allington (00:18:23): Oh, it's process?

Rob Collie (00:18:24): No, no. I'm adopting your word, processes is better. We've decided. We're going to go with process from now on. I'm going to beat up on myself probably too hard, a little too unfairly, but this is something really interesting about our business is that one of the challenges from the very beginning that we knew that was going to be a problem. I knew it was going to be a problem. That doesn't mean that I knew that I had to solve it. It's a little different.

Rob Collie (00:18:48): The problem was going to be that compared to the traditional BI business model, we're burning through projects at a much faster pace. And it's been our mission to grow. Our mission is to scale. We want to be a big organization. We don't want to just be me, which is great because everyone that we've hired is better than I am. And that's awesome.

Rob Collie (00:19:07): So in order to survive and be profitable as a professional services firm, you need to keep business coming in and you need to keep utilization relatively high when the blocks of work, because you're committed to finishing them much, much more quickly than the traditional model. It leads to what Kellan, our president calls the Tetris problem. How do you take all these little smaller pieces of work? And by the way, smaller, I want to be very clear, smaller doesn't mean less valuable. I truly believe that in a shorter period of time, people with our methodology, and Matt, you're the same way, right? Your operation I'm sure moves at the same pace that ours does.

Rob Collie (00:19:47): And this is why you're in this business instead of the prior one, which we're going to get to. But when you scale this, when you turn it into like a 20-person team even, wow, does it get hard. In the last couple of years, I have stopped saying a particular sentence that I used to say all the time.

Rob Collie (00:20:08): I used to say when people ask me, "What do you do?" I'd say something like I run a data consulting business. It turns out I wasn't very good at running it. In some very real sense, it was my idea. I was committed to this idea for a long time and I'm on the path that I saw 10 years ago. So I give myself credit for that. At the same time though, oh my gosh, if we look now at how our business runs internally, the way that we operate is almost impossible.

Rob Collie (00:20:43): The amount of internal process and data, like internal software, internal workflows that are both human, but also in large degrees automated, I actually consider that now to be a form of intellectual property of our company, that we have figured out how to operate at this pace and at scale.

Rob Collie (00:21:06): And it turns out that I'm just really not the person to solve that kind of problem. I thought that just because I knew that it needed to be solved, that's all I needed. And Kellan, who we absolutely need to drag, kicking and screaming onto this podcast someday, has done an amazing job developing that internal IP, that internal... Let's use the cliche, the internal digital nervous system. But it's a mixture of digital and human that keeps us humming.

Rob Collie (00:21:36): It keeps us profitable. It keeps us moving. It keeps us able to grow. And that is as much of a challenge as building like a piece of software and a complicated piece of software at that.

Matt Allington (00:21:46): You're not a process guy, but you're a data guy. I think that's it, right?

Rob Collie (00:21:49): At the same time, I have developed an incredible respect for process over the last couple of years in particular to the point where I actually think of it as a strategic competitive advantage for our company. It's just that I'm not good at it.

Matt Allington (00:22:07): Yeah. You can actually take a patent on a process. Did you know that? Ooh. Yeah, you can take out a patent.

Rob Collie (00:22:17): When I was at Microsoft, I got paid to patent basically anything. Use these three words together in a sequence. We should file a patent on that. In fact, this conversation is probably-

Matt Allington (00:22:26): Patentable.

Rob Collie (00:22:27): ... running a foul of 17 Microsoft patents because right now, we're not allowed to do this.

Matt Allington (00:22:32): I've got a bit of process in me but I spent my life in business when I really wasn't... No, it's not true. I am a business guy. I'm just not a sales guy. Now, let's talk about sales. Now, Rob, you said that you're growing your business and you have aspirations to continue to grow, and I'm sure you will, and be successful. But the person, the best person to sell that fantastic patentable product consulting approach that gives you hundred times more value than the price you pay in nine days, the person to sell that is not the person that's going to deliver it under most circumstances.

Matt Allington (00:23:16): Maybe there's some special people out there. There's definitely some special people out there. But most of the time, the person... You know that person, the person that they love the hunt, right? So they like knocking on the doors. And that first no is just a motivation to get up the next morning and go and knock on another five doors. And then they get the sniff, right? "Oh, that I think I've got a chance here." And then they... That's not me.

Matt Allington (00:23:42): I lived in the sales world, but the funny thing is we're very adaptable. Humans are very adaptable, right? So if you've got a screwdriver and you're facing a nail, you can actually hit that nail into the wood with a screwdriver, right? It actually can be done. Well, that was me, right? So I'm in a sales job and the truth is, I'm a data guy, right? But I'm in a sales job. But my goodness, I had the best data on my customers from anyone in that sales team. Right?

Matt Allington (00:24:15): I could log into the IBM AS/400 and I taught myself IBM Query, I think it was back in those days. And I could actually extract the data that I needed for my customers. Whereas everyone else is getting these six inches, thick pieces of paper. You know the blue and white line paper with the holes down the side?

Rob Collie (00:24:39): Yup.

Matt Allington (00:24:39): And someone used to come around and drop them on your desk everywhere. That was data for every other sales person.

Rob Collie (00:24:45): It was green here in the states. We call it green bar paper here, but that's okay. It's just the color inversion in the hemisphere. It's no big deal.

Matt Allington (00:24:54): Yeah. So we all use that competitive advantage, right? It doesn't matter what line of business you're in. We all use the skills that we have to get the job done. So I could go into a customer meeting and talk data. I mean, I could talk. I can talk to a customer, and that customer service ethic that I talked about before, I'm more than capable of doing that. I can use data to my advantage. But I wasn't that sales guy as such. So I could use data to help me succeed, but I was wasn't the sales guy.

Rob Collie (00:25:29): Either I wasn't aware or I didn't remember that you'd started in a sales role at Coca-Cola. It is kind of hard to imagine you in a sales role. It isn't your personality.

Matt Allington (00:25:39): I'll second that.

Rob Collie (00:25:40): I want to say one other thing was really interesting, which is that you mentioned that sales personality, the one that's hungry, enjoys the hunt and all of that, they don't really want to work for us either because there's no big kill ever. You're not selling the million dollar project with us. We might end up doing a million dollars of business with a particular company over time, but if so, it's a lot of projects. And the sales person isn't really important after the first sell, you know?

Matt Allington (00:26:12): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:26:12): So we're forced to hybridize in some ways that you wouldn't necessarily expect, but as soon as you said that, I was like, "Oh, that's one of our issues is that we're not selling at Ferrari price points."

Matt Allington (00:26:25): Yeah. But I think those sales people are on that same continuum that I talked about before, right? So there's a sales person that's closer to the center that's got a technology bent who is good at doing those engagements at smaller levels that the big million dollar project is not the most important thing to them, but getting a successful project of a smaller amount and moving on is fine.

Matt Allington (00:26:50): So you just got to find the right person for the right fit. So I was the best data guy on the block. So you may have imagined this person. So we're in an office and we had various little remote offices. Maybe there was 10 or 15 people in the team that I was in and I was the PC guy.

Matt Allington (00:27:10): So everyone sitting in their little cubicle. Something is wrong with Excel. "Matt, come over here. Help me solve this problem." At 20% of my day on any... Maybe this is why I didn't sell so much, I don't know. At least 20% of my day was solving other people's PC data, Excel. In fact, anything. Anything technology related. That's where I spent most of my time. Frankly, that's where I got most of my enjoyment.

Matt Allington (00:27:41): I think every company has got that person. Right? So that person who is more approachable than the average IT support person with the IT support processes. So imagine if you had this Excel problem and you wanted to get it fixed, so what are you going to do? You're going to log a ticket with support and wait for them to contact you. No, you're not going to do that. That's not how problems get solved in the business world. It's, "Hey, Matt. Come here and help me fix this problem." Four minutes later, the problem is fixed and we move on.

Rob Collie (00:28:18): Every team, it's not just every business. Every work group eventually develops this person. It's almost like they just coalesce into existence out of the cube farm. Because if you don't have one, you're just going to keep... Without even realizing you're going to keep hiring people until you get somebody that's willing to put that hat on. And then once they do, you never let them leave.

Matt Allington (00:28:43): And if you think about it, the tool of choice for that person since 1980 has been Excel. It is the tool of choice because you can solve any problem. If you can't solve it with a formula, you can solve it with VBA. You want a mail merge thing? Let's go to Excel. I'll show you how to do mail merge. You want to automate the sending of an email? The same time, I can write that in VBA for you. Sure.

Matt Allington (00:29:13): You don't need to come and spend $20,000 for that solution. We can do it in Excel. I'm not sure if Excel... Well, you talked about or implied the concept of evolution. I actually think Excel evolved with those people. They're mutually dependent on each other. If those people didn't exist, I don't think Excel would exist the way it is today. If it wasn't for those people contacting people like you, Rob at Microsoft saying, "We need this, we need that." It wouldn't be great if we can do this. Those people wanted those features and they weren't available previously.

Rob Collie (00:29:49): Well, they would contact us and say, "We really need a chicken number 11 added to Excel." And we'd say, "No, no chicken number two. And you're going to love it."

Matt Allington (00:29:58): Yeah, exactly.

Thomas LaRock (00:29:59): So what you've just though in saying since 1980, the tool is Excel. So does that make Excel the screwdriver or the hammer and what's the nail?

Matt Allington (00:30:10): It's the Swiss army knife.

Thomas LaRock (00:30:12): Is it?

Matt Allington (00:30:12): It's definitely the Swiss army knife. If it was a screwdriver, it'd be Access. Right?

Thomas LaRock (00:30:21): Do you ever come across a scenario, a situation where Excel really wasn't the answer and somebody's trying to use it in a way that they just shouldn't be using it?

Matt Allington (00:30:32): Oh, most of the times. Most of the times I would have to say, to be honest. I'm sure I'm preaching to the converted here for this audience, but I always say the best thing about Excel is its flexibility. And the worst thing about Excel is its flexibility. It's so true, because it's a double edged sword. You can do anything you want and that's not always the best thing. I think that's the difference.

Matt Allington (00:31:00): Everyone here loves Power BI, right? So we love Power BI. But to me, this is one of the big differences between Power BI and Excel is the structure, the rigor. The fact that if you have an error in an Excel spreadsheet and you try and load it in Power Query, into Power BI, it fails for goodness sake. What? I've put up with that error in that spreadsheet for years. Now, you're telling me I have to fix it?

Rob Collie (00:31:30): Yeah. It's so sensitive that if your Power Query is trying to delete a column that isn't there anymore, it also fails.

Matt Allington (00:31:37): Exactly.

Rob Collie (00:31:37): It's like, "No, no, wait. We're going to end up in the same place either way. The column is not going to be there." It gets very sensitive.

Matt Allington (00:31:44): Yeah. So I think that's the step change with the Power BI ecosystem, Power BI, Power Query is it's got the accessibility for the Excel world. Rob, this is how we first met, right? Because you'd recent... Not recently maybe. How long have you've been at Microsoft? Maybe five years or something like that?

Rob Collie (00:32:08): I was officially done at Microsoft in early 2010. But really I'd been out since like the fall of '09.

Matt Allington (00:32:15): Mentally, at least?

Rob Collie (00:32:16): Well, I mean I was in Cleveland. We didn't do remote work back then. That wasn't a thing. But I started the blog in the website PowerPivotPro in 2009. So the first post. But I didn't really get serious and start writing decks on the blog or anything until probably January 2010.

Matt Allington (00:32:34): Yeah, right. So it's targeted the Excel audience. So you came from an Excel program manager background and it was the Excel people, presumably with some of the analysis services, people that were brought together to come up with this new thing. But it was supposed to be accessible to the Excel person, right? The person who's grown up. I mean, one of the things that people ask me, not so much now, but certainly in the Power Pivot days of training was, "Can you give me a list of, this is what I do in Excel. This is how I do it in Power BI?" Because this is their mindset, right?

Matt Allington (00:33:10): So how do I do some ifs in Power Pivot? That was a typical question. Now, of course there's a whole world of retraining around the differences and perhaps that's a bigger conversation in its own right. But the marvel of this product is it was targeted at the Excel user primarily, initially. Not uniquely because it's also targeted at the professional end as well.

Matt Allington (00:33:37): But it was targeted at that group while bringing in some rigor and structure and trying to get away from the robustness or the lack of robustness of Excel. So a classic example would be, let's say you've got a 10,000 row spreadsheet in Excel and let's just for simplicity's sake, let's say you've got cost price and sell price in your column. You got 10,000 transactions and you want to work out the margin. How much profit did we make?

Matt Allington (00:34:04): So in Excel, of course, what we would do is we'd go into the next cell and go equals the sale price column subtract the cost price column. And we would copy the formula 10,000 times down the page, hopefully using some control, double click in the bottom right hand corner to extend the range.

Matt Allington (00:34:20): But the thing is we've duplicated, we've replicated that formula 10,000 times. That is a window of potential for failure, because at some point in time, when someone's down in row 9,723 and they accidentally hit the delete key, no one knows that that's happened, right? So that's the flexibility of Excel and the lack of robustness, which leaves the door open for an issue.

Matt Allington (00:34:48): So of course in Power Query, you have to load the data. We encourage you not to replicate that column, and it's built on the fly with a single formula that works on every single row. And if there's an error in the source data, the error will flow through to the report and someone has to fix it.

Matt Allington (00:35:10): We've always had this rigor in the SQL server world, right? One of the early things that I did when I first started out, so this is six and a half years ago. I started with a customer who had data, but no knowledge. And they wanted me to get their data and turn it into knowledge and insights and actionable reports, and those sorts of things. They actually didn't tell me that that's what they needed. They just said they needed help. So I told them what they needed.

Matt Allington (00:35:41): Anyway, the data was in an inaccessible way. So I loaded it up into access. Go to tool, for me. And I think within the first half an hour, I hit the... Do you know there's a 2GB limit in Access? Goodness. So I hit that limit. I thought, "Okay. This is not going to work." So then I installed SQL Server Express and then eventually went to SQL Server. And I had to teach myself these tools.

Matt Allington (00:36:03): Do you know you can't just cut and paste into SQL server? It's freaking incredible. You actually have to use this tool called SQL Server Integration Services. And do you know how freaking hard it is to use that software? It trips you up at every single step. If something goes wrong, when there's an error in my Excel formula, it won't freaking load. It's unbelievable.

Rob Collie (00:36:22): That explains why I never learned it.

Matt Allington (00:36:25): Oh, it's so frustrating as an Excel guy learning SQL Server Integration Services. I mean, SQL was pretty good. I got to say learning SQL was pretty good. Easy language, scripting language to learn. I got the concepts of tables. I'd done some IBM query programming as I mentioned before. So I understood the concept of writing these statements. But SSIS, oh my goodness, how freaking hard is that piece of software. Because it's so disciplined in what it does.

Matt Allington (00:36:54): So this is the difference between Excel and Power BI and Power Query is I don't think the traditional Excel folk understand how free they've had it, how flapping in the wind they've had it all these years.

Rob Collie (00:37:13): This itself is you've really cut yourself and thrown yourself into a shark pool here. Because this is my favorite, my absolute favorite topics. Although, I don't really bite. It's a pretty friendly shark pool. Structure versus flexibility. Just like we were talking about earlier with the IT versus business, there's of course a spectrum there. The story you just told, I think is absolutely true that Power BI brings structure to the Excel world. But at the same time though, Power BI is less structured than the previous version of analysis services.

Matt Allington (00:37:48): Absolutely.

Rob Collie (00:37:49): The previous version of analysis services was entirely too structured. And that was a mistake. So the way I like to explain it to people is that like the old BI tools and the previous analysis services, the multidimensional analysis services, they all had this same sort of three-part hubris about the world.

Rob Collie (00:38:09): First of all, this is a software engineering mistake. It's the type of mistake that a software and only really software engineers would make. Number one, the assumption is the implicit assumption of all these people working on these products has always been that the real world can be reduced to a series of academic mathematical concepts and constructs. You can translate it into symbolic notation, right? You extract the essence, find the bones of it.

Rob Collie (00:38:35): Okay. So you can translate it into some formal concepts. That's assumption number one. Number two is that you can actually get there. You can figure out what those concepts are. You can actually communicate with people to the point where we can make that translation. And then number three, once you've done that, that's the way things are. It's never going to change. Nothing's ever going to change about the business.

Rob Collie (00:38:54): So all three of those things are wrong, every single one of them. And so the formalized concepts of previous analysis services right off the bat, like is this a measure group or a dimension? What are your hierarchies? And these things became such hard strong constructs that two problems would happen. It actually had two bad, bad impacts. Number one was that it didn't fit the real world all that well.

Rob Collie (00:39:20): It was hard to translate. It was almost like you wanted to change your business to fit the software. It was that bad. And change, oh my God, you need to change something. If something about your business changed, you might as well just start over in some cases. But those same formalized concepts also made it a lot less approachable. You couldn't even get started.

Rob Collie (00:39:41): Every time I'd get started trying to learn MDX, I'd end up asking someone how to write an if. And 20 minutes later, we're off in hierarchy hell and this and that. There was no hello world. There was no easy progression. Whereas something like DAX and Power BI has a lot more sort of humble structures to it. We have tables. We have columns. We have measures. We have formulas.

Rob Collie (00:40:11): We have these lines, you draw between tables. We have relationships. They don't have as much overloaded functionalities as you might expect from SQL. So it's a lot more modest about what it makes you translate into. And that allows it to be more approachable, but it also allows it to be a hell of a lot more flexible. So it's like this Goldilocks sweet spot of structure versus flexibility that is really unique.

Rob Collie (00:40:35): I wasn't part of really anything to do with engine when I worked at Microsoft on Power BI and I certainly had nothing to do with the original analysis services either. But I did get to sit right next to them, mirroring Christian and Marius. Actually, I watched them essentially retrace their steps.

Rob Collie (00:40:54): I had this almost historian viewpoint sitting in these meetings just being so fascinated with watching them sort of... And they just nailed it. It's beautiful. I mean, it is really something to admire what that crew pulled off. It's not often that you get two shots at the same problem over a 20-year timeframe.

Rob Collie (00:41:14): Oftentimes, when you get that second shot, you oversteer, you overcorrect. You miss by the other direction. I'm a software cynic. I'm always beaten up software, but I'm truly in awe of what has been built there.

Matt Allington (00:41:30): Yeah. But I think this is an evolutionary thing as well. We talked about evolution before. So the way things evolve together. I was reading or watching something at some stage about the way that the domestic dog has evolved with humans. So my dog, if I'm looking at my dog and I point something on the floor, my dog looks at where I point.

Matt Allington (00:41:55): Now, if you do that with a wild wolf, the wild wolf does not look where a human points. Dogs and humans have evolved together, or probably in this case, more correctly, dogs have evolved with humans to have this gene of understanding, which has taken this wild canine and turned it into something that has evolved with a human.

Matt Allington (00:42:16): Now, I think software and people evolve together as well. I mean, in many ways you built this analysis services version one and it was complex. But I think most people would agree that we wouldn't have got tabular and decks if it wasn't for the learnings and the shortcomings of the previous version, right?

Matt Allington (00:42:37): So we take what we've learned. You said, Rob the opportunity to do it again from scratch. I mean, I actually talk about that in my training. I said just imagine someone comes and knocks on your door and says, "Hey, Excel guys. Hey, analysis service guys, how'd you like a chance to do it all again from scratch? Will take out all the dirty laundry and we'll just do it better this next."

Matt Allington (00:42:59): I mean, what a fricking once in a lifetime opportunity. And the other thing is that technology is evolving as opposed to software, which is what I was talking about then. So let's look at Apple for a second. You remember the Apple Newton, right? So the concept of palm based computers is not brand new.

Matt Allington (00:43:17): In fact, I had a PalmPilot when it first came out in the same sort of thing that I was talking about before. But the technology has evolved. So the iPhone of course was groundbreaking, but one of the key differences between the iPhone and the previous software that came before that was the hardware had this glass screen that you didn't actually have to push on it with a stylus in order to make input. That technology increase actually was an enabler provided you had the right entrepreneurial vision and right software design.

Matt Allington (00:43:53): I mean, it's an alignment of the planets. I think when we talk about tabular and analysis services tabular and decks and Power BI, it's the new technology that was available as a result of improvements in memory and not so much solid state disk, I guess, but processor speed. The fact that we could come up with these column store database and make them practical for business. I mean, I don't think we would've had that window of opportunity to reinvent SSIS unless that technology was there to support it.

Rob Collie (00:44:27): Yeah. Amir, when he was in graduate school apparently wrote two separate thesis, papers and one of them was on column store databases.

Matt Allington (00:44:39): This would've been years ago, right? Sorry to interrupt.

Rob Collie (00:44:41): Oh, yeah. I mean, I don't know. This was probably in the '80s, right? So he's just been watching for a long time, waiting for the RAM prices to fall into a range where realistic business volumes could fit into main memory. It was like they just passed a certain critical threshold one day and off he went. But he also then had him and the team, they had the experience of what they'd learned about their... There was really no reason why MDX, for instance, couldn't have been brought forward. MDX could have been brought forward and used in the column store, VERTEPAC world.

Matt Allington (00:45:17): Thank goodness that didn't happen.

Rob Collie (00:45:18): I agree. I wouldn't exist. I just wouldn't be here. I'd still be trying to write that first if.

Matt Allington (00:45:28): Yeah. So evolution of software, it's an interesting thing as is evolution of people, right? So I mean, ultimately we've been digressing, but you're asking me about my journey. So at some point in time, I jumped over to the IT side. So I spent eight years in supermarkets and 15 years in sales at Coke, sales and customer service at 23 years training about business. Then I jumped into IT and spent 10 years in IT.

Matt Allington (00:45:59): So that's when we met of course, sort of towards the end of my time at Coke. But for 23 years, I thought I'm an IT guy in the business world. So on the 23rd year, I jumped and I went on the other side of that line and I became in the IT world at least thinking I was an IT guy. But you know what, the grass wasn't greener.

Matt Allington (00:46:24): The grass was different. It was a little bit more manicured and had a little bit more resource against it. But the grass wasn't greener when I jumped the fence. I was just a business guy in the IT world then. There's just different problems, different responsibilities. I mean, I certainly learned an appreciation for IT in those 10 years. Goodness. Did I learn to appreciate IT?

Matt Allington (00:46:51): I spent 23 years hating IT as a business guy. They're the people that took months to respond to your support ticket that the systems always break down, blah, blah, blah. So I certainly got to see the other side of that, right? So you've got a level of responsibility of up time and you need to be able to support things and you can't just let the business guy do the Excel spreadsheet.

Matt Allington (00:47:16): You have to have documentation and processes and recovery processes and redundancy. It's no wonder it frigging costs so much money, right? What you have to put against this stuff, the IT departments are responsible for. But this comes back to my very earlier comment about the fact that you've got this crossover point and then you have this gray area. So the business analyst on one side and the IT style people in the business on the other side.

Matt Allington (00:47:43): The truth is there are a lot of us out there. Now, I'm not saying 50% of the population. Not even 1%. But maybe 0.1%. There's 0.1% of the people that straddle that line. They live in that gray space. They're either business analysts working in IT or they're the in-house Excel type person solving the problems that IT can't or won't, or shouldn't solve.

Matt Allington (00:48:13): So the truth is I'm one of those guys, and I suspect that you are probably one of those guys as well, Rob. I don't really know about Tom. But there's a lot of us out there and we have an important role to play because if you cut that gray piece out of the continuum, there's actually a bit of a grand chasm that a lot of stuff is going to fall through as you try and hand stuff over. I'm not saying that we are the most important people in the world, I'm just saying we're an important part of the-

Rob Collie (00:48:41): Yes, I am.

Matt Allington (00:48:42): No, we're just an important part of the overall process. Right? I think this is where Power BI comes in because Power BI and Power Pivot when I discovered it through you, Rob. I don't even think I discovered Power Query. When I decided to do this on my own, which was, it was early 2014, January or February 2014, and I remember having a chat with you, Rob. I was bouncing it off you and asking what your journey was like. I basically told you I was going to steal all your ideas and just fricking redo it because no one over here has heard of Rob Collie and I reckon I could be the Rob Collie of Australia.

Matt Allington (00:49:25): So I made that plunge at that point in time, but I'd never heard of Power Query. So my business was going to be Power Pivot, InfoPath, and SharePoint. That was my business, right? Customizing stuff, using those three groundbreaking technologies. Now, as it turns out, one of them sort of survived until it didn't, which is Power Pivot. Well, don't start me on SharePoint or some of its newer cousins, but Power Query then came.

Matt Allington (00:49:59): Well, it was already there, the truth is, but most people we haven't discovered it because the branding is pretty poor. So then came Power Query and then... I'm not sure what the history is. You probably know better than me, Rob of why we stopped or why Microsoft stopped on Power Pivot and moved to Power BI. But timing is everything.

Rob Collie (00:50:18): Let me jump in there for a moment. I can tell you that even at the time that we were doing it, we were doing Power Pivot, the Excel team wasn't terribly happy about it. I had left the Excel team at that point and then been recruited. I'd spent a year in purgatory and decided I hated that. About that time, Amir came calling and said, "Hey, I got this thing going on." I'm like, "Ooh." But these are my friends over on the Excel team. Like actually my friends at that point, not just colleagues.

Rob Collie (00:50:45): They were pretty grumpy about what we were doing because there was almost nothing they could do about it because they had an open... Anyone can write an add in so they couldn't stop us. They really just couldn't stop us. They'd have to like go to Bill to stop us. They had to begrudgingly go along with it. They didn't like any of the things we were doing.

Rob Collie (00:51:05): So as soon the SQL team who we think of as the Power BI team today, as soon as they realized that they needed to decouple from the office versions that are deployed in an organization, because upgrading office is such a huge, huge, huge thing.

Matt Allington (00:51:25): Let alone going from 32 bit to 64 bit.

Rob Collie (00:51:28): Yeah. As soon as they realized that they needed to decouple from office and that they needed a more modern graphical canvas in which they could innovate a lot faster than what Excel could.

Matt Allington (00:51:40): So Power View is not going to do it?

Rob Collie (00:51:42): No. It was a... They just-

Matt Allington (00:51:45): Silverlight? Silverlight is not going to do it?

Rob Collie (00:51:46): No, no. It turned out none of those things actually panned out very well. Power View was the one thing that actually United the two clans. In the end, everyone at Microsoft hated Power View. The SQL team hated it. The Excel team hated it. It was universally despised. They try not to even talk about it. It's like, "We don't remember that cousin that we had."

Rob Collie (00:52:07): So as soon as the SQL team took their eyes off of Power Pivot, it was over at that point because the Excel team never wanted it. In my opinion, that's a perfect example of how a big company can go wrong in a place where a small company wouldn't. Think about it. There are tens of millions worldwide of people who sling Excel in a BI capacity. The Vlookup and pivot crowd that I talk about, these people, like you say, percentage wise is not many. But in absolute numbers, it's enormous.

Rob Collie (00:52:41): There's one or two on every airplane you ever get on. Microsoft owns those people. They own the people who run the world's data. Full stop. They have full capture of the audience that matters. And yet the other half of the company has to go the long way around to try to market to those same people because the office team has different incentives and different goals, and different competitors and everything. It's like if Excel and Power BI were a company, can you imagine how dominant that combined company would be? I mean, nothing could stand before it, nothing. But because they don't meet until Satya, it's like, whoa, whoa, I don't know. What are we going to do? We can't figure this out.

Matt Allington (00:53:34): I think you take PowerPoint with it as well because you've got to be able to cut and paste those reports into PowerPoint. Right?

Rob Collie (00:53:39): Of course. We're even getting signals from the market now that a lot of places, Power BI is just being used as a slide presentation and it's just mind boggling, right? It's too far the other way. You've been talking about tweeners, these sort of like hybrids a lot. Even in the young history of this podcast, this has come up a lot. And you asked if Tom was a hybrid. Absolutely. We wouldn't even be able to communicate. Tom and I wouldn't have been friends all these years. If you know, we weren't like the reach across the aisle type of crowd. Tom, back when you were part of that organization and you were advocating for business analytics being on the conference menu, you took a lot of grief for that. That was a lot of backlash maybe in terms of intensity, maybe not in terms number of people, but that wasn't an easy road to spearhead that conference.

Thomas LaRock (00:54:29): No, there was a lot of friction. What was unfortunate when I look back at it is that it was clearly where the industry itself was heading. It was just very clear. Silos were being disassembled. They were being broken down. There was a lot of cross-pollinization happening and you found yourself increasingly being brought into a lot of different conversations and for good reason.

Thomas LaRock (00:54:59): Now, my experience is mostly the Microsoft ecosystem, but the fact that the letters SQL made their way into no less than 72 different products essentially meant, "Hey, well, this is SQL analysis services. That's SQL. That's database. You're the DBA. So you should just be able to help me with this. It's like, what? SSIS. So all of a sudden, guess what, if you were doing SSIS, you know what you are, you are what we now call data engineer.

Thomas LaRock (00:55:31): So there was a lot of this cross-pollinization that was happening and we saw that, we recognized it and we wanted to serve our members. Also, I was in charge of marketing at the time, and it became one of my responsibilities, one of my tasks to update our mission statement, which was to serve the Microsoft Data Platform Community essentially. It was no longer just a focus on SQL Server, it was on the entire platform. And that was step one.

Thomas LaRock (00:56:04): Step two was as part of that, we wanted to have this event and we were trying to attract a new audience. We could have done a couple of different things. We could have just had the event as part of our main flagship summit. We could have tried smaller events, but we said, "You know what? We want to do something a mid-size tier." The first one we tried, we put in Chicago, which we thought was centrally located. Chicago and Illinois, and Wisconsin is kind of a bed of analytics. You've got a lot of people in Cleveland, right? A lot of-

Rob Collie (00:56:34): Just up to our eyeballs, yeah.

Thomas LaRock (00:56:36): Yeah. So we thought that was a decent location to have the events, but for some of our membership, and these are discussions that we should have that were necessary, right? Hey, we're devoting resources to this new thing. Is that really what we should be doing? You know what those are fair conversations to have, but some of the venom that came out as a result, and what you're doing is just flat out wrong. You don't know what you're doing. You're looking on going, "I am not taking anything away from what you already have. I'm simply trying to add a new seat to the table for a new audience."

Thomas LaRock (00:57:19): Because having those conversations is going to make everything better for all of us. And yet, as you said, Rob, maybe it wasn't a large number. Maybe it was just the volume of a few, but that was frustrating because you would think those people would have, I don't know, enough judgment, enough common sense to understand that we're all in the same boat. And it'd be nice if we were all rowing in the same direction. They're sitting there drilling a hole in the bottom of the boat and you're like, "Hey, what are you doing? Hey, mind off. I'm only drilling underneath my own seat." You're like, "But we're all in this boat."

Rob Collie (00:58:03): I even started to feel a little guilty. Not for you. Right? I started to feel a little guilty. I was helping to an extent in my own small way. I was coming to these conferences and speaking and offering my advice and all that. There was this vocal minority who was so pissed off about it like they were being injured. They were so dedicated to it that and I'm like, "Maybe there's something here." Maybe they have a point. Right?

Rob Collie (00:58:26): So I made a point on Twitter of reaching out and engaging with one of these fine people to find out if I... And within 30 seconds, I'm like, "Oh, no. No, no. This is a bad person. This is just a bad person." Tom is on the right track. I never felt guilty again. I rededicated myself to the cause 2X.

Thomas LaRock (00:58:52): I look back and I always feel we could have done things slightly different, but at the end of the day, the direction was definitely there. What we called, it was business analytics, which I didn't really like that name. I always thought-

Rob Collie (00:59:06): But it was BACon.

Thomas LaRock (00:59:07): Yeah, it was the BACon. It was the BACon. I actually just wanted to call it the data conference and we would've had data con. And I wanted it open to everything. I sat there going Power BI, I don't think existed yet, but I was like, Tableau should be here. It's all about the data and we should have built the data conference.

Rob Collie (00:59:27): You're just not always right, Tom. It turns out BACon was great. I'm messing with you, obviously. But I love that conference. I think it's my favorite. And my second favorite is probably the financial conferences that I go to. It certainly isn't the pure tech conferences aren't as interesting. But not even as good in my opinion for drumming up business for meeting potential clients that you can help. You want the tweeners. You want these hybrids. That's what you want. You want the people who are able to see the value of both when they're combined and that's where we can add the most value.

Matt Allington (01:00:02): I'm pretty sure the first one I went to the first BACon conference was 2015. So I started on my own in April 2014. I have this recollection that the conference was like within weeks of me starting. So I didn't go to that first one, but I went to the second one. I can't remember. Was there one in 2016 as well, Tom? I can't remember.

Thomas LaRock (01:00:24): I'm going to say yes.

Matt Allington (01:00:26): Yeah. [crosstalk 01:00:27] I reckon I went to two and then Microsoft came out with the Data Insights Summit. And then of course, Power BI was starting to happen. The numbers were not the same as summit, obviously. I mean, you're trying to build something. You had a vision there and then BACon was no more. You know what, I've never been back to a PASS event since BACon. I mean, I would've gone to every BACon conference that you had, but I've never been to summit.

Matt Allington (01:00:55): I don't know. Maybe summit's got everything that BACon had. You know what? I don't know, but I've never been there. I'm actually your target audience... Not your target audience. I'm actually the target audience, but I've never been to a past summit. But I loved BACon.

Matt Allington (01:01:09): Then I went to the Data Insights Summit, and I loved it. The first year I couldn't get there. Remember, they had a thousand tickets and they sold out. I couldn't for love or money buy a ticket to that conference. Anyway, so I missed the first year. Then I went to the second year and I just absolutely loved it. Then Microsoft, in their wisdom, they combined the data summit with Dynamics.

Matt Allington (01:01:33): Let's put Microsoft Dynamics. And instead of it being a data conference, it can be a business conference. As far as I'm concerned, they completely marked it up. Someone from Microsoft might be listening, but I think they should be focused... I think there's a place for a data thing. We're the gray people, right? We don't care about ERP and CRM.

Matt Allington (01:01:56): Okay. I'm sure Microsoft would love some of the success of Power BI conferences to rub off on their aspirations to have become an SAP competitor. I'm sure they would like that, but let us have our conference. Give us a data conference. I'm happy if it's going to be a... I mean, if you're going to have a data conference, why not be the Power BI data conference? I think it's nice to have it sort of product agnostic and include Tableau. But I think the writings on the wall, Rob, you talked about that Excel Power BI company before.

Matt Allington (01:02:28): I mean, the truth is it's obviously Microsoft. I think the writing is on the wall. I think you're pretty ballsy if you're going to bet against that product. If you're a CIO and you're going to say no, we're going to be a Tableau. We're going to be a micro strategy shop because they've got mobile. You're pretty courageous these days, I think. So where's our conference? Microsoft, give us back a data conference.

Rob Collie (01:02:54): Yeah. We should come up with an acronym that ends up spelling MATT.

Matt Allington (01:02:57): Yeah.

Rob Collie (01:02:58): We call it at the MATT conference. It's like what are we really doing for Matt. I would go to that conference.

Matt Allington (01:03:05): Would you speak at MATT?

Rob Collie (01:03:06): It sounds like a great conference. Oh, I would totally speak at MATT. Yeah. I do a pre-con at MATT.

Matt Allington (01:03:12): Yeah. So, yeah. Interesting. It's very interesting.

Rob Collie (01:03:15): I'm going to share a little bit of a theory with you, Matt, that we could just as easily talk about offline, but hey, why not talk about it in front of the public? So I think I'm finally starting to see the grand plan. I think I'm finally starting to understand the Business Applications Summit. At first, my reaction was the same as yours, like, "Oh, come on. Just a silly rebrand and a combination of conferences." But I think that the story is starting to become a little bit more clear.

Rob Collie (01:03:42): So I was thinking about the other day, and for the first time ever, I realized that BI is actually a form of middleware. It's something that spans multiple systems. You can almost never get any reasonable insight just out of a single system. Even at our company to get an accurate cash flow forecast is like a five, six system problem.

Rob Collie (01:04:03): And they don't all come from the same vendor either. You know? So it was kind of a weird shift for me to think of BI as middleware. But then there's like transactional middleware, whether it's a customer transaction or not. You make a change. Multiple systems might need to be notified of the same change. If an employee is hired, they need to be added to multiple systems probably. Right?

Rob Collie (01:04:25): So you end up with this transactional middleware. So I don't have to go do five separate things. I can do one thing, and it kicks off all of the workflows to touch five different systems and things like that. Salesforce has been describing themselves for a while. At least they were... I don't know. Some number of years ago was like the operating system for your business.

Rob Collie (01:04:44): I think that it's no accident that Dynamics and Power BI, and all of the power platform, middleware stuff like the power apps and power automate and all that kind of stuff, I don't think it's any accident that they all now report to James Phillips. And then Salesforce's acquisition of Tableau starts to make more sense as well. This is sort of like an existential grand battle of the heavens that's taking shape. I do believe as you were hinting at, you do not bet against Microsoft in this sort of combat.

Rob Collie (01:05:21): This is what Microsoft does. No one does this like Microsoft. It's game over. It's lights out. It's just a matter of time. So the SAPs of the world... Do you really think? Does any of us think for a minute that Microsoft plans to long term seed the enterprise, the ERP market to SAP? No. Dynamics is mid-market. Yeah, but not for long. But Microsoft does know. There's something at Microsoft, especially the Satya Microsoft gets is that not 100% of the software at your company is ever going to be Microsoft, right? There's going to be lots of systems "best of breed".

Rob Collie (01:06:05): The random hodgepodge that you happen to evolve into your history. They get that. So it's almost like the multi-silo, multi-system, nervous system. Power BI belonged to James Phillips before he was given any of this other stuff. So I think that what we're seeing is that they're positioning themselves to do the same thing for the middleware market that they've been doing for BI, right, is to slightly make it one level more agile, one level more democratized. And it's all part of the same thing is it's all about spanning systems. Now, I've put my cards on the table.

Matt Allington (01:06:46): I think we're in violent agreement, Rob. I would 110%... Can you do that? You're a data guy. 110% agree with what you just said. But here's the thing. It doesn't mean we need a conference together. I'm talking about the conference. I'm not talking about the business strategy. I 100% agree with everything you said. It's brilliant, but let us have our own conference. Otherwise with Tom, with his BACon conference like why haven't all those people gone to summit? Why didn't they? Because they need their own space. Come one. Let's have some focus. Let's have some love.

Rob Collie (01:07:22): I agree. Do I really need to eat lunch next to a Dynamics?

Matt Allington (01:07:25): Exactly. Yes, we need them. They've got to sell the product. I get that. They've got to balance the books.

Rob Collie (01:07:31): Yeah. They've got to collect the data that we ultimately have to analyze. It's got to go somewhere.

Matt Allington (01:07:35): I like anchovies. They don't like anchovies. Come on. So I mean, three and a half thousand people I think was at the last Data Insights Summit, or maybe that was the one... I think it was the last Data Insights Summit. Something like that anyway. 3000, whatever. That's plenty. Let's just focus on that. That's what I'd love to see. I'd like to see Tom's original vision of having something just for the data people and all right, it's becoming a Microsoft thing. Well, I love backing a winner. Don't get me wrong.

Matt Allington (01:08:05): I mean, there's plenty of things you can do with your money. I would prefer to put mine on a winner and go for it and go hard. But yeah, I just think we need... We're all the same. This is what we've been talking about today, right? Is that we are the same types of people. I mean, I am an introvert. I know you're an introvert, Rob. I don't know Tom that well.

Matt Allington (01:08:24): But I tell you what, when I get to those data conferences and someone comes up and says, hello, I get them. Not the Dynamics people, right? Sorry Dynamics people. But I get the data people.

Rob Collie (01:08:36): I have some great pictures. The pictures of that San Jose hotel lobby hanging out. We need that again.

Matt Allington (01:08:44): Absolutely.

Rob Collie (01:08:45): I agree. But we're not doing any of that anytime soon. You asked earlier if there was a 2016 Business Analytics Conference and I know for sure that there was because I absolutely destroyed my leg right before that. I think it was your daughter, right? Didn't she drew a sketch of my mangled leg from a photograph?

Matt Allington (01:09:06): I don't remember. I think maybe I was writing a blog or something. Oh, that's right. Because I got thrown in the deep end. I think you were supposed to be presenting at pre-con and basically two days before, I think I got a phone call saying, "Hey, can you do my pre-con?" I don't know if the rest of the world knows this Rob, I got a little secret out here. Rob's idea of planning for a pre-con is in the bar the night before. He says to himself, "What am I going to talk about tomorrow?"

Matt Allington (01:09:37): So Rob shared with me all of the preparation that he'd done for that pre-conference and then basically I spent the next couple of days trying to put together what I wanted to present and it was with [inaudible 01:09:50] right? It was an [inaudible 01:09:51] night at that point.

Rob Collie (01:09:51): Yeah, it was.

Matt Allington (01:09:51): Anyway, so you break your leg and I think I must have done a blog article. That was back in the day when everything was super green on your site, right? Everything was green. So I got my daughter to do a sketch of Rob lying on his deathbed who was foot up in plaster. And that was probably it.

Rob Collie (01:10:10): She did a bang-up job.

Matt Allington (01:10:11): If I search it, I'm sure it's there.

Rob Collie (01:10:14): I still have it. It's in our clip art folder here. I mean, I did her a favor and she didn't have to approximate any angles of where to put my foot. I did a nice 90-degree. All she had to do was just rotate the foot 90 degrees from where it's supposed to be and then draw it like that.

Matt Allington (01:10:30): Yeah. Oh, I see you from your website that you did your knee in 2013 as well. So there's a bit of a...

Rob Collie (01:10:36): Yeah. It's the same leg.

Matt Allington (01:10:38): [inaudible 01:10:38] Okay.

Rob Collie (01:10:41): That leg is permanently smaller. My right leg is now... There's nothing I can do. My right quad is now just permanently smaller than my left quad. I'm just going to be lopsided the rest of my life. No more scooters.

Matt Allington (01:10:53): Yeah. But they were the good days, those conferences.

Rob Collie (01:10:57): They were indeed. Wow, this has been great. Tom, you've been scribbling notes seemingly, furiously the whole time. Tom saves them up.

Thomas LaRock (01:11:06): I was going to ask one thing since you guys do this training, I subscribe to the idea that when it comes to training, that telling ain't training, right? You have to put your hands on something. That's to me what training really is. And I've been skewered for this as well from professional trainers who tell me otherwise. I'm like these are two different things, right? So if I deliver a lecture, that's one thing. But if I really want somebody to learn, I'm going to have them put their hands on something and use their mind and their hands together.

Thomas LaRock (01:11:39): So I wanted to ask about how you guys structure your classes. I assume that the people in the class are interacting with Excel and Power BI as you're teaching your classes. Yes?

Rob Collie (01:11:49): Absolutely, yeah.

Matt Allington (01:11:50): Absolutely.

Thomas LaRock (01:11:51): So the question I really have for you guys right now is we mentioned a hostage.

Rob Collie (01:11:58): Yeah.

Thomas LaRock (01:11:58): Right?

Rob Collie (01:11:59): Hostages and volunteers. Two different kinds of students.

Thomas LaRock (01:12:02): Since you've switched to remote, and I'm assuming, Matt, you're doing more remote training these days as well.

Matt Allington (01:12:10): Yeah.

Thomas LaRock (01:12:11): How do you deal with a hostage in a remote situation? Because when you're live, I think the way you would deal with it is a little different. So how are you doing that today?

Rob Collie (01:12:21): Matt? Do you know what we mean by hostages and volunteers?

Matt Allington (01:12:24): I know exactly the typecast. I mean, I've been there actually. Yeah, absolutely.

Rob Collie (01:12:30): Tom's right. I mean, when you're in person, you can sort recognize pretty quickly who didn't want to be there. You can try to recruit them into being interested. And then eventually if you fail with that, then you can just start focusing your attention on people who are actually absorbing it. But boy, remote is hard. You don't get those facial clues. You don't get that feedback. We've made it work for sure. It's necessity and we're still getting good results. But I do think it takes more of a toll on the trainer

Matt Allington (01:13:02): Our experience has been exactly the same. So the process that we do for remote training is that we strongly recommend two screens and a camera, a webcam. I've got two screens at the moment. So one screen has the streaming coming from the teacher and the other screen has got your software application, typically Power BI. And you're actually going through the exercises at the same time.

Matt Allington (01:13:33): We ask people to turn their cameras on. It's a little bit obtrusive, but the difference between able to see on someone's face what's happening and seeing nothing is like daylight. It is so freaking hard to train someone if you don't get any non-verbal feedback. So Jason, who's my full-time trainer, he did his first live training course in 10 months last week. He rang me after. He was so excited.

Matt Allington (01:14:02): He said, "Oh, it's just so much easier to deliver face to face training because you're there. You're experiencing the feel of the room." These hostages are a subset of those people, right? They're the people who never look up. So you ask people to just look up when you're done and they never look up and you say, "Hey, hostage number one. Are you finished?" "Oh, yeah. I'm just catching up on my email while I'm waiting for you."

Matt Allington (01:14:30): Okay. So remember we're going to look up when we're finished, right? I mean, we've made it work too, Rob. Exactly the same. I mean, I learned how to train Power BI from Rob, right? So necessarily my delivery style is we... I remember we had a chat about this Rob once before, but in my book I train people to lay out their tables using the Collie layout methodology, which is the way I learned from Rob originally.

Matt Allington (01:14:59): But it just works. I don't believe we all have to reinvent the wheel. I mean, I could have decided to put the dimension tables at the bottom and the fact tables at the top and call it the Allington layout methodology. Right? But hey, why reinvent the wheel? Rob had this fantastic approach. I can always tell someone who's been trained by you Rob, or your team or from my team.

Matt Allington (01:15:23): I say, "You get these consulting jobs. Can you help me with this? First question, show me your model. Oh, you've been to the Rob Collie Matt Allington school of learning. So fantastic. I know I can communicate with you. So fantastic." When they've got all the tables everywhere, you know we're in trouble.

Rob Collie (01:15:41): Matt, I got to tell you, I have actually never circled back and told you this. I have been now told so many times from students, right? They're like, "Oh, this is the Collie style. This is what Matt talks about in his book." This comes full circle.

Matt Allington (01:15:55): Rob, you could be famous.

Rob Collie (01:15:56): Yeah. Tell you what, Matt, you and I just keep [crosstalk 01:16:00].

Matt Allington (01:15:59): You stick with me, mate.

Rob Collie (01:16:01): ... back and forth, right? Which is like increment by increment we'll pull each other up by each other's bootstraps.

Matt Allington (01:16:06): Exactly. Yeah. But I don't think we have to reinvent the wheel. Right? There's nothing wrong with learning something's good. And then let's let's just move on. We all add something to it. Tom, you mentioned the difference between teaching and lecturing. I mean, I really believe this. In fact, I'm actually just rewriting my book now. So I'm up to the third edition. So Rob, I know you've only done two, so this is opportunity.

Matt Allington (01:16:31): But you and Ken Puls, I mean, you're just such easy targets. So I'm doing my third edition in my book and I just can't... I'm actually really surprised at how much change I'm putting into the book. So I'm currently working on... I just finished all and I'm working on the filter function at the moment. I've changed the way I teach that topic in decks now, because over the years of experience of being in those rooms with the students, looking at the feedback, realizing that it's... You know that look Rob when the eyes just glaze over and you say, "Okay, this message is not going in."

Matt Allington (01:17:12): So you have to find another way. You have to find another way to explain the concepts. So I think we're all evolving. We come back to that same concept we talked about with the software, but you can learn how to deliver a message in a way that people understand.

Rob Collie (01:17:27): I feel compelled to point that Matt as a data guy, can't count. Okay?

Matt Allington (01:17:32): How many additions have you got?

Rob Collie (01:17:34): There's an audio podcast, so not everyone is going to see this, but note to the audience Matt is about to see-

Matt Allington (01:17:39): You're going to say you got three books.

Rob Collie (01:17:41): See the truth. So here's the original.

Matt Allington (01:17:43): I have that.

Rob Collie (01:17:44): This is version one, okay? We can all agree. Okay. That's version one. And then there's the...

Matt Allington (01:17:49): Can't count the PDF as a version, Rob. That's-

Rob Collie (01:17:52): No. Then there's the Australian edition.

Matt Allington (01:17:55): Oh, the mini me. The mini me.

Rob Collie (01:17:58): Which is on the metric size scale. See?

Matt Allington (01:18:04): It's 14% less value

Rob Collie (01:18:08): And then let's not forget the Spanish edition translated by Miguel.

Matt Allington (01:18:13): I forgot about that.

Rob Collie (01:18:14): I mean, I didn't really write it, but okay, fine. As long as we're playing games. And then we have the actual second edition. Then the alchemy book that sold like 600 copies and then we don't even talk about it anymore. So let's just talk about in terms of time scale. You're going to be much more current than any of my books.

Matt Allington (01:18:30): It's amazing how fast this changes. Right? So Rob, your first book was on Power Pivot. My first book was on Power Pivot for Excel 2013. One of my first introductory chapters was it's called a calculated field. Do you remember that?

Rob Collie (01:18:46): Oh, that terrible, terrible moment.

Matt Allington (01:18:48): So they're not measures. They're calculated fields. So the only version of tabular that had a calculated field instead of a measure. But yeah, this stuff changes so hard. It's tough enough doing live training where you can change the slides just before every lesson, which I literally do. But then video training, I know Rob, you've got your own video content. I've got my own video content. Books, they just go out of date so quickly.

Rob Collie (01:19:15): So the thing is the second edition book that's out there and still sells very well is incredibly relevant. There's nothing really about it that's truly gone out of date, but it might look like it has. It has the appearance of not being relevant anymore. If the screenshots are all of Power Pivot instead of Power BI or whatever, right? And the audience knows that. So you feel bad about it. Even if people are still buying it and loving it, they're still just not proud of it. It does look so out of date.

Matt Allington (01:19:41): But the transition is complete from Power Pivot. I mean, I don't know what the future is. I know how he's spending a lot of time trying to stabilize that product, but I don't see my opinion from looking on the outside in is that I don't think that's going very far. I mean, I have two versions of my book, Supercharge Power BI, Supercharge Excel. I updated them both together and the Power BI version sells 99 to one. In fact, I'm probably being generous there.

Rob Collie (01:20:11): Wow.

Matt Allington (01:20:11): So Bill and I have got a warehouse full of green ones and we've reprinted the yellow ones a few times. So suffice to say that the green ones will not be updated this time around. It's all about Power BI. And some people, the people that have been on the journey with us, they get it, right?

Matt Allington (01:20:29): So if I go back through my old blog posts, I talk about... I've got blog posts that talk about data modeling and Power Pivot. And some of the newer people don't even know what I'm talking about. Whereas of course it's still relevant. It's exactly the same. So yeah, it's a challenge.

Rob Collie (01:20:45): Well, Matt, I have really enjoyed this.

Matt Allington (01:20:48): Yeah, me too.

Thomas LaRock (01:20:49): Yes, Matt. It was lovely meeting you again.

Matt Allington (01:20:52): Yes.

Rob Collie (01:20:53): Hey, Matt. Can you give him a wave so he can remember?

Matt Allington (01:20:54): I'll be the guy with a selfie stick saying, "Hey, can I have a selfie?"

Thomas LaRock (01:20:58): Yes, that's him.

Rob Collie (01:20:59): That's him.

Thomas LaRock (01:20:59): That's him.

Matt Allington (01:21:02): Thanks, Tom. Good to meet you, seriously. And it's just great to chat. It's been a while, Rob.

Rob Collie (01:21:08): Matt, I'm really, really happy we did this.

Announcer (01:21:11): Thanks for listening to the Raw Data by P3 Podcast. Find out what the experts at P3 can do for your business. Go to powerpivotpro.com. Interested in becoming a guest on the show? Email Luke P, L-U-K-E-P @powerpivotpro.com. Have a data day!

For Thanksgiving week we think it's only appropriate to discuss the alcohol industry. For this, we welcome P3 principal consultant and alcohol industry veteran Paul Boynton. He and the crew discuss the tremendous amount of data that exists in the alcohol industry, hostages VS volunteers in training sessions, the culture at P3, and some great uncomfortable stories from Rob's days at Microsoft. Any great holiday get-together has to include a few laughs, and that we do. Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

2:00 - P3 and The Human Element 5:25 - Are you a hostage or a volunteer? 9:15 - Paul's Power BI moment of clarity 14:30 - Power BI Training stories 22:15 - The Gateway Formula 25:50 - To Maintain or Not Maintain the Status Quo 29:55 - Company cultures, Rob's epic Bill Gates and other horror stories 45:35 - Let's talk about booze, data, Category Managers, planograms and the Wild West that the alcohol industry still is 55:25 - How analytics leaves the computer screen, and how the human element comes into play 59:05 - Alcohol pretty much sells itself, but it's a data goldmine 1:05:00 - The 3 top opportunities in the alcohol industry for applying data more effectively 1:11:30 - Transformation in the alcohol distribution world and new ideas that are very strange and kind of cool 1:18:40 - PI Charts, Dark Mode, Dropshadow...you either love them or hate them!

Episode Transcript:

Rob Collie (00:00:00): Welcome friends to the first ever Thanksgiving week edition of Raw Data. And we have an appropriate guest for Thanksgiving week. Paul Boynton is one of the principal consultants here at P3 and he has a lot of experience with the alcohol industry. And we talk a lot about that industry. We talk about some of the unique ways in which it's structured, how it runs, what the opportunities are for applying data and Power BI for wins. But we don't only talk about booze in this episode. We also talk about things like how the mere existence of the Datesytd function made Paul bitterly angry when we first met. We talk about the differences between hostages and volunteers when it comes to being in a training class, and how every now and then a hostage turns into a volunteer. I forget how we got into this. I relay a couple of stories about some meetings that I had with executives back in the day at Microsoft that were relatively unpleasant, but at the same time treasured memories of mine. All that and more, he's a very funny guy. So let's get after it.

Announcer (00:01:05): Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please?

Announcer (00:01:09): This is the Raw Data by P3 podcast with your host Rob Collie and your co-host Thomas LaRock. Find out what the experts at P3 can do for your business. Go to powerpivotpro.com. Raw Data by P3 is data with the human element.

Rob Collie (00:01:27): Welcome to Raw Data. Paul Boynton. Yeah, now we're going to have some fun here. Not that we haven't had fun before, but we're definitely going to have fun today. You know that whole tagline, data with the human element?

Announcer (00:01:41): Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Rob Collie (00:01:42): Paul we just need you to drop your robotic nature just a little bit for us today. Can you do that for us? Can you be?

Paul Boynton (00:01:48): I can put the wall down.

Rob Collie (00:01:50): All right. All right. Well, I'm happy to hear that. So you're a consultant principal consultant here at P3. I know that ultimately it's your boss here sort of asking a question, but what's it like being a consultant P3? Be honest.

Paul Boynton (00:02:04): Okay, I'll answer that with another question. How does it feel as a CEO for your employee to tell you they don't think of you as their boss?

Rob Collie (00:02:13): That's great.

Paul Boynton (00:02:14): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:02:15): I think that's great. I mean, because factually speaking I'm probably just not, you know?

Paul Boynton (00:02:22): No, yeah definitely. I like to think of us as more than just a boss, employee for sure.

Rob Collie (00:02:29): And I like to think of myself more as like a mascot, like a religious movement and I'm just part of it.

Paul Boynton (00:02:36): You're just part of the mascot. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Who I quote in sight regularly in training and things like that. I get to borrow a lot of your credibility as mascot to make myself look cooler.

Rob Collie (00:02:50): This is an appropriate use of me, yes.

Paul Boynton (00:02:52): Say, "Hey folks, Rob says, 'People don't know what they want till they've seen what they asked for.'" And that just, saying it came from you all of a sudden makes it way cooler.

Rob Collie (00:03:04): There's an authenticity about that. Some people would absolutely just say just to share the principle. I can't do that. If it comes from someone else, I am compelled to immediately before I even say it attribute it to someone one else. But I've been on calls with certain executives from Microsoft when we're talking to a customer or something like that. And the executive will use one of my lines as if it was his originally, and I'm on the call.

Paul Boynton (00:03:30): Hah, hah.

Rob Collie (00:03:33): You won't.

Paul Boynton (00:03:34): Yeah. One of my favorite quotes that I came up with just now.

Rob Collie (00:03:38): Yeah,

Paul Boynton (00:03:38): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:03:41): So.

Paul Boynton (00:03:42): Yeah, you're filled with those, so yeah. I definitely think this company, that human element is for real, it's a really special group of people that you've assembled here. So really glad to be on talking to you.

Rob Collie (00:03:55): And I didn't set out to assemble such an interesting human group. I didn't, the interview that I designed five years ago, and we've refined a bit since then and certainly gotten really good at scaling it. I was just looking for people who could do the job.

Paul Boynton (00:04:14): Sure.

Rob Collie (00:04:14): There wasn't anything on there that was looking for, "Ah, are you going to be fun to work with. Or you're going to be stimulating or enjoyable to work with." There wasn't anything like that.

Paul Boynton (00:04:23): No.

Rob Collie (00:04:23): In theory a robot could pass the test, right?

Paul Boynton (00:04:27): In theory.

Rob Collie (00:04:28): But no. So we end up with some really, really, really compelling people. Just a lot of fun to be around. And that's a bonus as opposed to, it wasn't a requirement.

Paul Boynton (00:04:38): What was the pass rate again for the actual case?

Rob Collie (00:04:42): I think we make offers in 2% or less-

Paul Boynton (00:04:45): Wow.

Rob Collie (00:04:45): ... of scenarios, yeah.

Paul Boynton (00:04:47): Somehow you've managed to create a process that brings together a number of shared attributes. Like the love of grilling.

Rob Collie (00:04:54): Yeah, there's nothing-

Paul Boynton (00:04:55): Barbecue.

Rob Collie (00:04:56): There's nothing about grilling in the interview.

Paul Boynton (00:04:59): No, but a lot of us love grilling and meats. Another one is board games. People love board games, which is special, and beards strangely enough.

Rob Collie (00:05:10): Which is weird. Because I'm not really into any of those things.

Paul Boynton (00:05:14): And yet, and yet, flies to honey.

Rob Collie (00:05:18): Yeah. All right. So let's start with where you and I first crossed paths. When we crossed paths, we had no idea that we'd actually end up working together.

Paul Boynton (00:05:26): Absolutely not.

Rob Collie (00:05:27): The first day that we were interacting I remarked that I wish I had been like recording the whole thing from my point of view with Google glass or something like that. So set the stage for us, Paul.

Paul Boynton (00:05:39): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:05:40): What was going on there?

Paul Boynton (00:05:41): Yeah, and this will probably come up a little later. I was a category manager at Constellation Brands and you had come in to teach Foundations for us. So the Constellation leadership brought in P3 to do Power BI training. And I was one of what you refer to in the industry as a hostage.

Rob Collie (00:06:02): Yeah, and we talk about this a lot. We talk about hostages and volunteers, right?

Paul Boynton (00:06:07): For sure, for sure. So I was definitely in the hostage group, these are individuals forced against their will to take trainings when they'd rather be working.

Rob Collie (00:06:17): Who wants to sit in a multi-day training. That sounds awful, doesn't it? I mean, it really does.

Paul Boynton (00:06:21): It does.

Rob Collie (00:06:22): Yeah, I mean, it's just like, I don't want to do that.

Paul Boynton (00:06:24): Let alone fly out for it. Even though getting a hotel is nice, but yeah, we had to fly to Chicago and really, I had no idea what the training was about when I showed up. I didn't know that it was going to do Excelly kind of stuff. I just knew it was a training. It was another training that was blocked on my calendar. So I didn't really even really want to be there.

Rob Collie (00:06:47): You're just forced into it. And so, whereas when we hold one of our public classes where people can sign up, it's not a private training for a particular company, it come from any company, you have to go out of your way. You don't just accidentally fall into this class. You have to go out of your way to sign up for it. That's the volunteer crowd. And it's a different kind of crowd. When we go do a class for an individual company, there's one volunteer in the room, the person who thought it was a good idea. At least half the room that's just like, oh my gosh, two or three days of this, this is going to suck.

Paul Boynton (00:07:18): And we also don't project an agenda at the front either very intentionally, which-

Rob Collie (00:07:25): That's true.

Paul Boynton (00:07:25): Which can also make people uncomfortable. You really don't know what you're getting into with the training.

Rob Collie (00:07:34): Just other than it's going to be amazing anyway.

Paul Boynton (00:07:36): That would be, you start out with intro to happy and we don't believe you. And then slowly but surely then we buy in. So yeah, so I was definitely in the hostage group.

Rob Collie (00:07:45): So were you even really paying attention at the beginning?

Paul Boynton (00:07:48): Probably not.

Rob Collie (00:07:49): Probably checking out a little bit. We try really hard. I try really hard to hold everyone's attention. It's why I'm so exhausted at the end of a class.

Paul Boynton (00:07:59): At the same, I'm not a one foot in one foot out kind of person. That's just not how my brain operates. So even with my girlfriend, for example, she'll have shows that she watches I don't care for, but in the nature of compromise you say, "Okay, I'll watch this show with you." But I don't just watch Real House Wives or something passively. I get into it because if I'm going to be there, I might as well say, "Okay, so what's going on with this relationship," and something like that. So even though I'm not personally invested really, because I care about this other person I am. And so as a show of respect to you spending your time teaching me, I probably cared in the same way that I care about Real Housewives. Watching that with my girlfriend.

Rob Collie (00:08:44): There's no higher compliment that I could be paid.

Paul Boynton (00:08:47): I thought you'd feel that way.

Rob Collie (00:08:48): So when you're watching Real Housewives, do you occasionally sit there, you're sitting on the couch and all of a sudden you're like, "Oh no, she didn't."

Paul Boynton (00:08:57): Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe. And to be fair, my girlfriend doesn't watch Real Housewives. It's more of the Call the Midwife style.

Rob Collie (00:09:08): Okay.

Paul Boynton (00:09:09): Anyways, so yeah, first part of the training, loose paying attention, but keeping up, it's kind of a sign of respect.

Rob Collie (00:09:17): And then at one moment I showed something. I forget what it was.

Paul Boynton (00:09:21): It was dates year to date. I'll never forget.

Rob Collie (00:09:24): Calculate.

Paul Boynton (00:09:25): Yeah. You said, "Does anybody have to do dates year to date calculations?" And my have my head just went whooz. My eyes opened up, I said, "Okay, how's this going to go?"

Rob Collie (00:09:35): So for those of you listening at home, this usually happens late in the first day. So what Paul is really saying is he wasn't really paying attention for about six hours. And then I show this one formula and it's just so easy.

Paul Boynton (00:09:55): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:09:55): And.

Paul Boynton (00:09:56): Calculate sales, dates year to date, calendar date.

Rob Collie (00:10:01): Yep.

Paul Boynton (00:10:02): Enter.

Rob Collie (00:10:04): Everything changes.

Paul Boynton (00:10:05): It's over. You finished that calculation. This was an absolute nightmare in Excel doing these kinds of dynamic dates year to date calculations and so fundamental, especially to seasonal businesses and things like that to just, to understand these cumulative totals like that. So time intelligence really sort of blew my mind, and Power BI.

Rob Collie (00:10:29): So your job there was category manager, which from the outside doesn't translate into does a ton of Excel all the time.

Paul Boynton (00:10:38): People don't even really know what category management is, frankly. That makes no sense to most people.

Rob Collie (00:10:43): Actually a very strange arrangement in a lot of ways. Let's definitely come back to that. Make sure we talk about.

Paul Boynton (00:10:48): Oh yeah.

Rob Collie (00:10:49): The weird relationship between retailer and supplier.

Paul Boynton (00:10:51): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:10:53): So funny.

Paul Boynton (00:10:54): It is. Yeah. That's [inaudible 00:10:55].

Rob Collie (00:10:57): It is, but it's really intriguing. I think, especially for people who've never been exposed to it. So anyway, let's cut to the chase. I show this formula and from what, not quite the back row, but maybe third from back row, you were ways back there.

Paul Boynton (00:11:11): I think it was the back row. Again, I did not want to be there, so when-

Rob Collie (00:11:14): Okay, fine, I was trying to promote you a few rows.

Paul Boynton (00:11:18): I respect that.

Rob Collie (00:11:19): Okay. You're in the back and all of a sudden in this room, and this was a big room. There were probably 40 people in there, maybe more, and you just scream, "No."

Paul Boynton (00:11:29): Oh, come on.

Rob Collie (00:11:30): And you were angry.

Paul Boynton (00:11:30): I was.

Rob Collie (00:11:30): It wasn't just, you weren't smiling. You were angry. Can you tell us why you were angry?

Paul Boynton (00:11:36): Yeah, I even asked you that question I think later. Just, I was angry because I was thinking of the 90 hour weeks and the late nights putting reports together and copying and pasting. And it just sort of hit me all at once the amount of life force stolen from me by a spreadsheet.

Rob Collie (00:12:09): Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Boynton (00:12:11): Okay.

Rob Collie (00:12:12): I think this is the appropriate reaction.

Paul Boynton (00:12:14): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:12:14): This actually is the way you should think about it.

Paul Boynton (00:12:17): Right. And so I was angry at Microsoft, and it's a free add-in that you check a box and there you go. But it's buried in the add-ins that you got to change the comma. I mean, goodness.

Rob Collie (00:12:34): Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Boynton (00:12:34): It's buried. And I was just mad that nobody told me that I could have my life back if I check a box and type dates year to date.

Rob Collie (00:12:48): Yeah. So the Power Pivot add in just hiding in there isn't really helping anyone, is it?

Paul Boynton (00:12:54): No.

Rob Collie (00:12:54): And now of course, years later you might just skip that all together and just go to powerbi.com and download the free.

Paul Boynton (00:13:02): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:13:02): Desktop app.

Paul Boynton (00:13:03): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:13:04): And off you go. So it's just all sitting right there and no one was telling you about it. So that's why I wanted it recorded at the time was that your reaction of anger? Like, "Why have I been deprived of this?"

Paul Boynton (00:13:14): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:13:15): That is, it's your life.

Paul Boynton (00:13:17): It is. And I do talk about that in my trainings. I talk about life force. I use that word being given back to you. There is a report in the about me slide where normally consultants put their face and say, "Here's all the cool reasons I'm important and why you should listen to me." I just tell the story of this report I built. And one of the aspects is it used to take 400 hours a year of my life, working hours a year of my life to produce this biweekly report. And then using Power BI that came down to two hours a year. So that gives you perspective on not only the efficiency of the tool, but just the waste generated by the current process that the current tools produce. And a lot of that was just copying and pasting and doing checks. I mean, it just, it was a waste. It was a waste.

Rob Collie (00:14:12): Is not just an amount of time. The contents of that time are particularly dehumanizing.

Paul Boynton (00:14:19): Mm-hmm (affirmative), yeah.

Rob Collie (00:14:20): It's not smart work. You need to be a smart person to know where you're headed, but then you go do hundreds of hours of dumb work, repetitive tedious to get there.

Paul Boynton (00:14:32): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:14:33): If you're listening to this and you're either your contemplating what BI tool to adopt or like most of the world you're still up to your eyeballs in spreadsheets. Something I tell people anyway all the time is that like, "If I told you the truth about how much better this is, you will not believe me." So I almost have to undersell it. You just talked about a 200X time saved.

Paul Boynton (00:14:59): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:15:02): Who is ever going to believe 200 X until you do it?

Paul Boynton (00:15:07): That's true.

Rob Collie (00:15:08): Until you do it.

Paul Boynton (00:15:09): Until you feel it as well. Until you feel what that release, that relief is like. That's the other piece is knowing what it can do, but then committing to actually learning it. Those are very different things. And when I conclude the trainings, I really, I pull out my soapbox and I just tell them, "Hey, this is worth while. The sooner you decide to commit to reinforcing what we've learned over the past few days, the better and better you're going to feel about that decision. Don't put it off."

Rob Collie (00:15:42): I think you're really wise to lean into your personal journey when you're sharing this all with others, when you're committing a class or even you're doing some consulting work with someone. When someone's setting out to become a public speaker for the first time, it's usually pretty terrifying. I'm not saying this is your first time be as a public speaker. I'm saying in general for other people.

Paul Boynton (00:16:00): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:16:00): Because we know it's not your first time. We'll get back to that. But one piece of advice I always like to give people and it's cliche, you've probably heard it before. Everyone's probably heard it before, but just in case, that you are the world's number one, leading expert, foremost authority on your own story.

Paul Boynton (00:16:17): I like that.

Rob Collie (00:16:18): And so you can go up there, don't talk about yourself necessarily like in a self-serving nature, but you relate an authentic path that you've been on and not yeah, you literally are. You can have full confidence in that.

Paul Boynton (00:16:32): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:16:32): And the audience appreciates it too.

Paul Boynton (00:16:33): And that we make mistakes, that this is hard when you get started. I don't know everything. I don't know everything about this, no way, but I'm learning and I continue to learn and I continue to see benefit from that. So I want them to feel that too. I did originally apply to P3 to be a trainer. I wanted to do that more than really the consulting work. Just because of that visceral, oh, come on feeling that I got in the training I wanted to give that to more people. And in the trainings I do now there's usually one person. It just turns on for them, the light bulb then, oh my gosh. Then they start the possibilities. The worlds they can explore start to flood in.

Rob Collie (00:17:23): I had the opportunity one time to teach, years ago, I taught a foundations type class, Power BI type class to a team of Excel analysts at a particular company. And they didn't heed the advice to go immediately apply it. So they went back to their jobs and started doing them the old way, thinking, "Yeah, I'll just get around to it. I'll start using the new stuff next week." Next week never comes, you know? And so a year later the curtains had been on fire. But when I went there the first time they were so far behind. But now the whole building was on fire and even the concrete was burning.

Paul Boynton (00:18:01): Right.

Rob Collie (00:18:04): So one of the things that really struck me was that there was this one woman who'd been in the class the first time who simply couldn't have been bothered to be there. Now she was new in the role. She'd just been reassigned to via one of these analysts a couple weeks before. So the reality of her life hadn't set in yet. So I'm here teaching this thing and she's just like, "I'm doing the equivalent of just like," she was clearly on social media the whole time. By the way, students, if you're in a class of 30 or 40 you think you're getting away with something, no, you are not. We know exactly who's checked in and who's checked out, and I'm used to this. There's always, you can never capture everybody. But yeah, she was so above it. And sitting in the back and everything.

Rob Collie (00:18:46): The next time, a year later, she was front and center. She was in the front row. She was paying intense attention. She was asking some of the best questions of the whole class. And then a year later I watched her on LinkedIn. She left that job and went to become a full-time BI analyst.

Paul Boynton (00:19:05): What? Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:19:06): And she, I mean, it was a striking transition.

Paul Boynton (00:19:09): Wow.

Rob Collie (00:19:10): It was really cool.

Paul Boynton (00:19:12): What inspires that kind of transformation in people? I mean, yeah you could say, "Oh, exposure to the tool." But what is it really?

Rob Collie (00:19:19): Oh, no. It was the year of pain and suffering that she'd endured-

Paul Boynton (00:19:22): Exactly.

Rob Collie (00:19:23): ... in between.

Paul Boynton (00:19:23): Exactly. It's pain and suffering. To me doing these trainings it's like, I really do feel we are the good guys and that we do in a weird way make the world a better place. I really genuinely feel that. Because yeah, these people are suffering under the pressures of the business. They're constantly having to find more efficiencies, hard, shut down their laptop when Excel crashes, because they're trying to do something incredible that is just impossible in their current space. So, it's that pain and suffering. And which is, like you said earlier, if you were to tell people, "This will actually improve your life." No way, nobody would feel, "Oh gosh, no, it's Excel. It's just another version of Excel." No, not at all.

Thomas LaRock (00:20:15): So I got a quick question because, Paul, what you described. I tried to explain to people that, and it's not just a Power BI thing, it goes back to when I first met Rob and he was writing his book about DAX. And Rob used to tell me all this time how this stuff would change my life. And I'm like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah." So what you described though, it's that I've tried to tell people that somewhere in Excel or Power BI, somewhere in there is your gateway formula, right?

Paul Boynton (00:20:53): Yeah.

Thomas LaRock (00:20:53): Like gateway drugs, there's a gateway formula somewhere in here. And I think sometimes in your training classes you guys almost are doing that jelly effect, because you're going through all of these formulas and you know one of them is going to stick to the wall.

Paul Boynton (00:21:07): I like that.

Thomas LaRock (00:21:08): And there's going to be somebody in that room at that moment that just yells, "No way."

Paul Boynton (00:21:13): Yeah. Yeah.

Thomas LaRock (00:21:14): And it kind of happened for me. I was trying to find this, I thought I'd written this blog post long ago, but where there was some formula in DAX which just did this calculation and it just reduced hundreds of lines of T-SQL to just this.

Paul Boynton (00:21:30): Oof.

Thomas LaRock (00:21:31): And because my life has always, or used to always be inside of SQL server and T-SQL and so old school pivot type stuff. And how many hours did I spend on things like that when I could have just been in Excel, done the data and brought it back in. It's just, I forget which formula it was for me I was trying to find it, but there's that gateway there's that aha. And that also leads you to this point of where you say, "Can I share this with others? Can I make a living at this? This is sexy."

Paul Boynton (00:22:08): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:22:09): I think that blog post might actually be on our site, Tom.

Thomas LaRock (00:22:11): Oh, okay. Maybe that's why I can't find it on my site.

Rob Collie (00:22:13): The one you're looking for. If you're looking for it on your site, I think you wrote it for us-

Thomas LaRock (00:22:16): Okay.

Rob Collie (00:22:17): ... on our site.

Paul Boynton (00:22:17): I did have a gateway formula that's worth sharing. It is a measure that returns the top 100 market items not being sold in a given store. So as a category manager, my job was to work with the retailer to make sure that all of the, and it was alcohol company, make sure all of the products have the right space and distribute, the four pieces of marketing, the product, price, place, promotion. Well, on the 7-Eleven account there's 6,500 alcohol selling stores. That's a lot of beer products at a lot of locations. So our sales people were having to bring these giant laptops and lean up against the bagel rack in the refrigerator and have three minutes to craft a selling story on the fly with the franchisee who's got 10 customers in line. There's a lot of pressure to bring stories to the forefront very quickly and very effectively.

Paul Boynton (00:23:20): And I wrote with the help of [Narr 00:23:24] actually at P3 wrote this measure that returns those products and right there on an iPad, no longer on a laptop, our sales people could put all of it on an iPad, click the store and be able to say, "Hey, our product is the number two in the market not being sold in your store. And look here, you haven't sold this product in six months. Maybe we give the number two product a shot in that space." And that changed the entire way the Salesforce went to market. I mean, imagine that transformation. Everybody's now got iPads and they're one button press away from really compelling selling stories. It just, it was a game changer. It was a complete game changer.

Rob Collie (00:24:10): That's the happy ending of that story. I could tell another version of that story that would be equally believable, which is, you went and you came up with this measure, this one formula to rule them all, and it's available on an iPad and it's going to change everything. And then someone looks at it and goes, "Hmm, nah, we're just going to stick with what we're doing." That happens too. doesn't it?

Paul Boynton (00:24:35): Oh my gosh, yeah. I had to fight for these tools. I was fortunate enough to work on a team that was really, I guess you could say progressive, the 7-Eleven account is, 7-Eleven is a massive, massive retailer. I don't think people quite realize how large 7-Eleven is.

Rob Collie (00:24:57): 6,500 stores.

Paul Boynton (00:24:59): 6,500 alcohol selling stores. Yeah, it rivals Walmart. So there's a lot there. The account is very flexible in that franchisees are the business owners. They make the decision corporate. They sort of joked to themselves that they were professional recommenders because they can't really tell the franchisees what to do with their business. So they were always open to really creative things. So we got to do a lot of stuff other places in the company couldn't.

Rob Collie (00:25:28): So it's not like McDonald's where the rules are handed down from up high?

Paul Boynton (00:25:32): Yeah, I mean there's McDonald's, they have franchise too, I think.

Rob Collie (00:25:37): They do. But there's a really strict code of conduct essentially. You can't fire up and start selling hot dogs.

Thomas LaRock (00:25:44): And you have to use their equipment you have to buy from them.

Paul Boynton (00:25:47): Yeah, yeah. Yeah, there's definitely a mix of that too. And in the alcohol industry, I guess we could talk about the alcohol industry since we're here. There's a way of doing things in the alcohol industry. When it works, it works, and why change something that works? Well, you have this young guy or come couple guys coming in and saying, "We can actually put these on an iPad and we can make more money." And you just get these blank stares because it just, it doesn't make sense that that would be one worthwhile to do.

Rob Collie (00:26:24): Now you used the words a couple guys, because in this case it was a couple guys.

Paul Boynton (00:26:27): It was, it was.

Rob Collie (00:26:28): Yeah, because you're not saying that in general, it was you and another and another guy, right?

Paul Boynton (00:26:32): Shout out to Mike Neff, my brother in arms.

Rob Collie (00:26:35): Mm-hmm (affirmative), respect.

Paul Boynton (00:26:36): Respect, respect. Yeah. Because we fought this, the contrast you made earlier. The other side of that story is you make this amazing tool and nobody gets to use it because it's just not approved.

Rob Collie (00:26:49): I think it's written that you got to fight for your right to data.

Paul Boynton (00:26:54): To data, yeah.

Rob Collie (00:26:56): Yeah, I've heard that somewhere.

Paul Boynton (00:26:58): Yeah, I really.

Rob Collie (00:26:59): It's kind of burned into my brain for some reason that I don't know, like a guitar riff or something.

Paul Boynton (00:27:03): Well, it's just not good enough to have great analytics anymore. You have to have a great story. You have to, you have to, people have to buy in. It's just not good enough. The most impactful report, even sometimes the most beautiful report can wither because the individuals, the brilliant people behind putting those analytics together, they don't know how to sell it. And so this space where you have business intelligence, this big data and these really cool visualizations, the piece that can't go on, the how-to document is having an individual know how to communicate this to leadership and really sell it, is a special person.

Rob Collie (00:27:46): I often say when asked like, "You know who our competitors are." We obviously have people who are in the same business as us. They don't approach it necessarily the same way we do. But our number one competitor really is the status quo.

Paul Boynton (00:27:59): I love that.

Rob Collie (00:28:00): If I could eliminate one competitor, it would be the notion that things can't be better.

Paul Boynton (00:28:07): Yeah, it's a dangerous way of thinking too, really.

Rob Collie (00:28:12): Oh, but it's also not dangerous. The whole thing, like you know no one ever got fired for hiring IBM or whatever. This is a recurring theme on this show actually at this point. And still to this day, but certainly in the past you think that a football coach, their number one motivation is to win games, but they're actually their number one motivation is to not get fired. And these might not be exactly aligned.

Paul Boynton (00:28:34): Right.

Rob Collie (00:28:35): The absence of flaws, the absence of perceived flaws makes it harder to fire you. So the more you conform, the less risks you take.

Paul Boynton (00:28:47): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:28:48): You know-

Paul Boynton (00:28:49): Gosh, that makes me uncomfortable.

Rob Collie (00:28:49): Optimizing for not getting fired.

Paul Boynton (00:28:51): Makes me so uncomfortable.

Rob Collie (00:28:52): Optimizing for not getting fired and optimizing for improvement are unfortunately not identical.

Thomas LaRock (00:28:57): I think you just explained all of Norv Turner's coaching career.

Rob Collie (00:29:03): I mean, this is just human. This is everywhere. And this is something that culturally does have to be created top down.

Paul Boynton (00:29:12): It does.

Rob Collie (00:29:13): You're going to be rewarded for taking smart risks. It's not two strikes and you're out type of policy. You also, as a leader, need to create an environment in which bland conformity to the status quo is itself maybe not an F on the grading scale, we're going to set it at a C minus. You're going to get dinged for not thinking.

Paul Boynton (00:29:36): Oh, well yeah. That would be interesting in practice. "Excuse me, Paul. You've been really normal this year. Very normal this year. Going to have to dock your pay for being unexceptional."

Rob Collie (00:29:55): It's easy to say in a way, in my shoes, because this company started with just me and my wife seven years ago. So we've had the opportunity to build it from scratch. We've been able to have a culture that does lean that direction. It's a lot easier to do that from scratch and grow that way than it is to retrofit a new culture-

Paul Boynton (00:30:16): Oh yeah.

Rob Collie (00:30:16): ... into an existing org, of course

Paul Boynton (00:30:18): The size of the org also really matters here. Because I'm having a conversation with my CEO right now. That wouldn't happen in the other organizations I've worked in. I mean, it was rare. I think maybe one of my favorite CEOs is Sam Gilliland, Saber Travel Network. This is a guy who met me once at an intern luncheon, just welcoming the summer interns. Next time I saw him passing in the hallway, knew my first and last name and what program I was in during the internship. He's like, "Hey, how's it going over there in brand? Paul Boynton, hey, how's it going over there in brand marketing?" It just blew me away. But that is so rare to have that kind of intimacy with your decision makers.

Rob Collie (00:31:07): I'm pretty sure that Bill Gates would remember me, because again, he has that recall from our one interaction and remember my name and all of that. And then remember how stupid he thought I was. He might even remember all of the insulting things that he said to all of us. It wasn't just me.

Paul Boynton (00:31:23): Right.

Thomas LaRock (00:31:23): I was going to say, just you.

Rob Collie (00:31:25): No, no, but I mean-

Thomas LaRock (00:31:27): Wait, now I need to know, what was he angry with you about?

Paul Boynton (00:31:30): Oh yeah. The Bill Gates story. You haven't told the Bill Gates story yet?

Thomas LaRock (00:31:34): I think he has, I've forgotten.

Rob Collie (00:31:36): Not on the show, I don't think.

Thomas LaRock (00:31:37): Oh no, not on the show.

Rob Collie (00:31:38): So we were doing a review with Bill, basically all of office's plans, everything that we've been working on in office around XML.

Thomas LaRock (00:31:48): Oh, forget that I've lost interest. XML, forget it.

Rob Collie (00:31:51): Yeah. Yeah. Okay. All right. XL and XML.

Paul Boynton (00:31:54): If you're listening to this, skip ahead about two minutes.

Rob Collie (00:31:57): Oh no.

Paul Boynton (00:31:58): I'm kidding bro. I'm kidding.

Rob Collie (00:32:00): This is fascinating, because when we have Connor on, we're going to talk about this again, which is, in the early 2000s the crisis of confidence or whatever, but the world of data was changing in some really fundamental ways. And the ground under foot was becoming really soft and squishy and you couldn't trust it anymore. And this thing we were talking about on a previous episode, I think it's actually our first episode talking about curly data and how data was sort of no longer just neatly shaped in rectangles in tables. And so while the SQL org was busy going all in on this XML storage thing to go side by side with the relational storage, which as far as I can tell was not very successful in the end. And it's been replaced by other things.

Rob Collie (00:32:50): The office apps were having the same sort of revolution, XML. Everyone had to be dealing with XML. And so we were pitching our plans for XML and Office and I was in charge of the Excel XML plans. We were giving a demo, we were supposed to be really quick and just get over with and move on to the next thing. And Bill asked a question, and a series of terribly unfortunate things happened at that moment. This is like a one in 10,000 that these could all happen end to end, but they did. And this sort of thing happens in my life a lot it turns out. So he asked a question. So the first thing that was bad was that no one could answer the question, but me. It sort of like falls down the chain, you know? So none of my superiors could answer it. So it came to me. Okay. So that's the first problem. Second problem was that I misunderstood his question.

Thomas LaRock (00:33:39): Oh.

Rob Collie (00:33:40): The third problem was, is that the question that I thought I heard, when I went to give an answer, my answer actually sounded like a credible answer to the question he was actually asking. Normally you discover the misunderstanding when the answer is giving. It's like, "No, no, no, no, no, that's not what I'm asking." But instead my answer was compatible with think he was asking, but it was a horrible answer to the question he was asking.

Thomas LaRock (00:34:03): Oh boy, oh boy.

Rob Collie (00:34:04): It's like, oh my God. All right. So I mean, he was really, really, really angry. I mean, just so angry at us.

Paul Boynton (00:34:15): That answer must have been really bad?

Rob Collie (00:34:16): It was really insulting, the things he said. He was snarling and yelling and swearing and it was bad. And my boss started to figure out something was off, "Maybe I don't think, this isn't quite what was happening." So he decides to show Bill what actually happens with the product. So he clicks to show Bill what he thinks is going to show Bill that is going to be better.

Rob Collie (00:34:43): Here's the next unfortunate thing. A couple days before our developers had accidentally introduced a bug, which had not been detected up until that point, which led to about a 45 second hour glass, like it should have been instant, but instead the hourglass just sat there for 45 seconds. So we were looking bad and all that did was just have us all sit there so he could go off on us for another 45 seconds. And I mean, it was brutal. And then it finishes and he looks at it and he goes, "Oh," and this is word for word. Remember, there had been profanity. There had been swearing, there had been pointed insults hurled at our intelligence. And he saw the screen and he goes, "Oh, oh, that is okay." And then the next sentence, "I'm amending what I said before. I'm amending what I said before." Not I'm sorry or oops. That was a silly misunderstanding or any of the social things. And the formality of I'm amending what I said before. After this weird mix of geek and sailor tear down swearing. It was just, it was really, really, really bizarre.

Paul Boynton (00:36:09): Strong tonal shift.

Rob Collie (00:36:13): You know, we moved on and agreed to never speak of it.

Paul Boynton (00:36:16): Wow. So he took the next meeting with you never?

Rob Collie (00:36:20): Well, yeah, I mean, you could say this is an accident. Even though I was instrumental in building the BI stuff for the next wave, I was tellingly absent from that meeting. I didn't get invited by my own team to go back. Because again, somewhere multiple there is up on the chain, someone was trying to not get fired.

Paul Boynton (00:36:37): Sure.

Rob Collie (00:36:38): Right.

Paul Boynton (00:36:38): Oh yes. I get it, trying to not get fired, the incentive of trying to not get fired. I was on a job. There was a consulting engagement where one of the collaborating consultants said something cool. He goes, "A lot of work involves the spotlight. And when the spotlight hits you, you do your dance, your song and dance, and then the spotlight moves and you're off the hook." And so this spotlight is just traveling around constantly, looking for its next target. And your job is to just light up when it hits you and then get off stage.

Rob Collie (00:37:13): Oh my gosh.

Paul Boynton (00:37:14): And I love that metaphor for a long time.

Rob Collie (00:37:17): Nothing describe 90s and 2000s Microsoft at certain levels, better than that. The reviews with the executives, especially on the windows side of the house, not so much the office side of the house, the office side of the house is pretty humane by comparison, but Windows and the developer platform stuff and therefore Bill and his culture that he had sort of originally developed at Microsoft. I mean, those people were vicious. And another time I was in a review, it didn't have Bill in it, but it had Jim Allchin, who was not a Bill clone, but also similarly. Pretty tough, really tough. And instilled fear and was okay with instilling fear. At bare minimum, you can say that he was okay with being feared.

Paul Boynton (00:38:04): Fair game.

Rob Collie (00:38:05): So this review with the windows vice president was supposed to be about kicking our ass. I've been working on something else, I've been working on this Windows installer thing, MSI technology. This is before I worked on Excel. This whole meeting was to grill us. It was to hurt us. And there were elements in the room that were there to undermine us. It was blood sport at the highest levels. And in the middle of all of this, while we're getting our ass kicked about something, we're talking about how we use the windows registry or something like that. This other guy Rob Short, who I actually really liked. He worked in Windows and it was part of this culture, but I actually really liked him. He's just been sitting there just like minding his own business. Like he just has to be there.

Rob Collie (00:38:44): You know, he's just part of the committee, he's just been sitting there just like tuned out for hours. And when we explained the way that we've been using the registry and someone else had been criticizing the way we use the registry, Jim just goes, well, that just goes to show us once again, that our storage system is a piece of shit. And he turns on Rob Short and he just starts ripping into him-

Paul Boynton (00:39:08): Laser beams.

Rob Collie (00:39:08): ... the spotlight turns. In the space of one second, Rob Short goes from being just like a disinterested bystander to like, "whoa, whoa, who, fighting for his life?

Paul Boynton (00:39:20): Yeah. Yeah. Like a stage hand, crashing onto stage.

Rob Collie (00:39:25): Yeah, man, I am so enriched by having almost court gesture type job in the room at those times. I didn't belong in those rooms in my 20s where I was.

Paul Boynton (00:39:36): Yeah. You were a comic relief, I guess. Did you actually crack jokes or?

Rob Collie (00:39:40): Oh yeah.

Paul Boynton (00:39:41): Because this seems pretty dead in that room. It's pretty-

Rob Collie (00:39:44): I was terrified about the whole thing. I mean, there was still part of me that was able to detach and watch with bemusement everything that was going on.

Paul Boynton (00:39:51): Yeah. You know, let's see, I've got a fierce session coming up at two o'clock this afternoon.

Rob Collie (00:39:57): It was like a whole day of fear.

Paul Boynton (00:40:00): Well, yeah, this kind of reminds me of something. My mom says a lot, "Is you can never go wrong making your boss look good." And I just really believe in that. That's one way of making sure you're on your marks. When the spotlight shines on you is to, just do what you can and make your boss look good. They're supposed to be the people who fight for you. Not yell at not fight you. They're supposed to be the people who would break down barriers and give you the tools of resources you need to succeed. And so this person who's supposed to be giving you the tools of resources you need to succeed is grilling you with everything they got. Yeah, I wouldn't want to show up.

Rob Collie (00:40:42): Late 90s windows at Microsoft was a broken culture. It had worked for so long, you know? I mean, this is the problem, right? When you're successful at something you don't necessarily know which are the things that made you successful. And so, they've been smashingly successful with this culture and Microsoft really kind of started with this culture. It was really clear that it started with Bill.

Paul Boynton (00:41:09): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:41:09): Of course. We're just going to keep doing the same thing we've always been doing. It's worked for us. You get indoctrinated into it. It was something I've talked about before, which is nerd bullies. Oh. Almost every single person in those rooms who was being so vicious to other people, you could look at them and you could say, On yeah, I can see you in middle school and in high school. "You were getting picked on and made fun of and stuffed in lockers, just like the rest of us were, and now you're paying it back, sort of to your own kind. It's really unbecoming. We don't need to do that.

Paul Boynton (00:41:43): No not at all. And even when a company, and really a company is just a collection of people. And that's all it is. It's just a collection of people. And even when a company figures out what they did right. Usually time is passed and now, "Great, You've got that understanding, but it's not going to take you to the next level." You know, what got you here isn't going to get you where you want to go. And so people end up sort of, they sort of trip and fall into a ditch of success. It's like, if you are successful, there's a tendency to, at least what I've seen in organizations to sort of ride those coattails until you trip and fall in a ditch.

Paul Boynton (00:42:25): And then you go back and look at what went wrong more than how you should have kept up with what was right. It's kind of a backwards way of thinking to sort of wait until you fail to build more successes, instead of encouraging people to constantly innovate and find new things and fail early so that you can figure out what doesn't work sooner rather than later.

Rob Collie (00:42:50): I think I just saw part of the matrix when you were talking, I saw some things that are almost interrelated, fundamental truths. So there's the Peter principle.

Paul Boynton (00:42:58): What's that?

Rob Collie (00:42:59): Whereas that you'll get promoted repeatedly by doing a good job until you finally get to a job where you're not very good. And that's where you stop. You end up being sorted by the machine into a place where you're not very good.

Paul Boynton (00:43:09): And it's kind of a funny concept.

Rob Collie (00:43:13): It is, right? So you got to be careful of this, both as an organization and as an individual. But then there's also the innovators dilemma. Where you've been successful and it gets you to a certain point and now you're kind of trapped by your own success.

Paul Boynton (00:43:27): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:43:28): Microsoft for a long time had this, exactly this problem, their success was all tied to the Windows platform. And so when something like Linux would come out, their only move was to demonize it, seemingly. Back during the antitrust case when I worked for office and Microsoft was being threatened with breakup, in the office org we were secretly going, "Yeah, break us up. Don't throw us in that Briar patch."

Rob Collie (00:44:02): Because we would then be free of the Windows monopoly. We could go build really good stuff for Mac. We could go build really good stuff for Linux. We may even build for Android. I don't know. The thing is we would be free to do what we wanted to do. What would be best for the productivity consumer without having to salute the Windows platform. Good news, bad news for Microsoft. The Windows platform has sort of lost, its it's still really important. I'm talking to you right now on a windows PC. When we run Power BI on our Windows PCs, but it's not the same stranglehold on the world of computing that it used to be by any stretch.

Rob Collie (00:44:38): And we were talking about this with Hope in a previous episode that I think that the changing of the guard to Satya was obviously there's a change of personalities and all that kind of stuff. But it also you just really kind of needed to get the old mindset out. The new Microsoft is a lot more open to collaboration and integration with many, many, many, many, many different platforms. Whereas famously Bomber basically slapped an iPhone out of an employee's hand in front of thousands of people at a company meeting.

Paul Boynton (00:45:11): My phone.

Thomas LaRock (00:45:13): I'm surprised he slapped the phone and not the guy across the face.

Paul Boynton (00:45:15): Yeah. I know, I know, both"

Rob Collie (00:45:19): Like two thirds of the people in that room are like slowly sliding their iPhones into their pocket at that moment.

Paul Boynton (00:45:24): Right? Yeah. Yeah. That was like bringing a Starbucks into 7-Eleven headquarters.

Rob Collie (00:45:32): Oh, you can not do that.

Paul Boynton (00:45:33): Yeah. That was, it was, it's criminal for sure.

Rob Collie (00:45:36): Let's get back to that. Let's talk about booze and data. These are popular things. The whole notion of category management, which is a retail thing, it's not just a liquor thing. Let's start there. How bizarre is this?

Paul Boynton (00:45:52): Yeah, very.

Rob Collie (00:45:54): So, let's say I own a massive retail chain. Let's say I'm in charge of it. I'm just the emperor of it. We'll call it Retail CO. Well, I need stuff to put on my shelves to sell I have relationships with all these suppliers, Procter & Gamble for soap and jillion products, whatever. And then I need to stock my beer aisle. And so I need to have relationships with all the alcohol and beer supplier manufacturers and all of that. I need to act in my own best interest. I need to, as a retail owner, I need to make the most money possible. So the first thing I do is I go out and I put all the suppliers in charge of what goes on my shelves.

Paul Boynton (00:46:36): It is bizarre. It works differently between categories. In the alcohol industry, what you described, absolutely correct. The category management role was born really out of, I think mainly groceries, I think is where it really started. So groceries, they have a bunch of categories and they need to procure products. They need to negotiate prices with retailers. They need to determine how those products are actually laid out on the shelves. It's not just random. And there's rent paid by these retailers for Primo spots, as well, on the shelf. Different areas of the store have of different price points. So trying to organize all of that procurement under some sort of procurement role really didn't make sense. So they split it out into the categories. They created a role called category managers. So there's the condiments category manager and the bakery category manager and so on and so forth.

Paul Boynton (00:47:35): Well, alcohol is really different. There are, what we call the planograms for alcohol are much more nuanced and complicated than a lot of other areas in the store. Toothpaste doesn't have as many subcategories and package configurations as beer does. And it's also not as costly to, I don't know, chill and stock and inventory. So most will retailers rely on the alcohol supplier to draw the planograms for how the beer is laid out in the store. Because that work is so intensive, it's not cost effective for the retailer to do so. And the retailer has the space. So they get to say ultimately what goes on the shelves and what doesn't. But because the suppliers want to put their products on the shelf, the retailer gets to say, "You want to do that? Fine, I'll just have you draw the sets for all the products though, not just your supplier company's products, but I want you to also determine where all your competitor's products go."

Rob Collie (00:48:51): Yeah, this gets weird, right? It's like, let's say I have five kids, which I don't, but if I did, it'd be like on one hand the analogies here would be like, "Turn into the five kids and say, 'Hey, between the five of you, I need you to figure out which one of you is the favorite one?"

Paul Boynton (00:49:07): And they get to sit in the front seat.

Rob Collie (00:49:08): Right, right, right. Or maybe more accurately is looking at the five kids and saying, "Okay, kid number three, you are my favorite. You get to decide how much food everyone gets."

Paul Boynton (00:49:21): Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's I like that. And there's a validation process. So you have what are called the captains, the category captains. And that's one of the larger suppliers. We're not going to give the privilege of drawing sets for Walmart, for the thousands of stores, Walmart stores, to some craft brewery in the middle of nowhere. Your Anheuser-Busch's, your MillerCoors, your Constellation Brands. These are organizations that hire interns, have large personnel in charge of drawing sets for all these stores. And it's a really, really big deal. And that's why suppliers also have category managers. So even though a supplier is only responsible for one manufacturer's collection or assortment of products, the demands from retailers are so great that it's worthwhile on your larger accounts to have category managers on the supplier side.

Rob Collie (00:50:24): It's just category managers all the way down.

Paul Boynton (00:50:25): So there's category managers for the retailer. And in many cases, a supplier alcohol special and it's a little gray. But there's a validation process. So let's say Constellation is category captain for a particular region of a retailer. They'll draw those sets. And then it goes through a validation process where the other major suppliers get to have a look and say, "Wait a second. I'm only seeing your product in this store. That's not okay." And there's a round table where they sit down with the retailer and so on. So, that's the minutia of it.

Rob Collie (00:51:04): That sounds like a lot of fun.

Paul Boynton (00:51:06): It is, it's very labor intensive and so space, they call it space planning. So space assortment, the right packages and the right geographies. You've got to look at the demand. Is this a high Hispanic area than import products? Your Mexican imports are going to have more weight than other ones. So now that I've introduced that, imagine all the other variables that can be introduced to optimize an assortment and the layout, the actual shelf and the orientation of products on a given space determines how much can fit.

Thomas LaRock (00:51:46): I'm trying to wrap my head around this. Because this is a really weird arrangement you're describing. And I had no knowledge of it, what level are we talking? Are we talking? I can't imagine my local liquor store down the street, everything has been laid out by somebody else. It's Damien, Damien's the one that decides where the beer ago. So are we talking like, this for Costco? Is this just for some other, what stores are being laid out?

Paul Boynton (00:52:18): Yeah, here's another fun piece here. So ultimately somebody has to put those packages on the shelf, right?

Thomas LaRock (00:52:26): Yeah.

Paul Boynton (00:52:27): So the alcohol industry is in a three tier system by law. So you have the suppliers, the distributors and the retailers.

Thomas LaRock (00:52:36): Right?

Paul Boynton (00:52:36): So the suppliers and the retailers traditionally are the ones that draw the sets and for the large retail change, those relationships are formalized. So, you'll have Walmart has a set of stores that all obey the same planogram. That's the law. This store must set the cooler to look exactly like this, every product in its place, so on.

Paul Boynton (00:53:01): At the lower level, like what you're talking about, mom and pop liquor store down the road, well, they get control over their own store. They don't really have access to the Walmart data. So they work with their distributor to determine what are the good products. What's kind of the good mix of things to put in my store so the liquor store will have a good idea of what sells. And they talk to the distributor to say, "Hey, here's what's selling, how's our stock? Look on these kinds of products. What's new?" And the distributor has that relationship.

Paul Boynton (00:53:37): But if you take it one step a little higher, 7-Eleven, for example, that's a franchisee model. So 7-Eleven corporate can't tell the 7-Eleven franchisees how to lay out their store, they can just recommend it. And even if they choose to accept it, it's the wild west for the competing distributors who then eventually show up and deliver the product. Because one distributor, it has the rights to Bud Light and another distributor has the rights to Modelo. So once the product is actually delivered, it's kind of the wild west. Now you can kind of sell on the fly and change things up.

Thomas LaRock (00:54:19): So I'm a distributor. I show up, I got my product. I'm going to stock the shelf. Do I just move something else out of the way?

Paul Boynton (00:54:28): It used to be that way. It used to be that way that you could really just go yoink, and just put that product in the back of the room, up still there, it still, I haven't stolen it. I've just taken it off the shelf.

Thomas LaRock (00:54:41): And then the other distributor switches it back. He's like, "Why is my stuff in the back?"

Paul Boynton (00:54:47): Exactly.

Thomas LaRock (00:54:48): Oh my God.

Paul Boynton (00:54:48): Exactly. And that's how it used to be. That's how it used to be, until we got the ability to draw these sets on a more systematized base. That's where this space planning really came from was to help sort of put more structure around it. But in the franchisee model and at these lower levels, it really, distributors also have category managers.

Rob Collie (00:55:11): Wow. I got a real Bugs Bunny, like Elmer Fudd type of vibe from that situation you just described. Can you imagine a cartoon where they keep switching each other's products out?

Paul Boynton (00:55:21): Oh yeah, it's unreal. Some of the things that you'll see where we were constantly having to check the retailer data and make sure the planograms were being followed, there were incentives provided to the franchisees for following the planograms. But we never knew. We never knew what was really on the shelf. And I think this is a great example of sort of where analytics leaves the computer screen. We had a situation where in Texas sales were down, and 7-Eleven just wanted to know why sales were declining in Texas. Well, there wasn't really a good obvious answer in the data. So my colleague and I just got in a car and started driving around store to store, trying to figure out what's going on. There was an increase in competition. Some of the bigger stores did have construction that slowed down sales, that's true.

Paul Boynton (00:56:17): But this is so funny. Our biggest discovery and recommendation to 7-Eleven was to put beer and wine to go signs outside of the stores in Dallas. All the other competitors had signage on the outside that said, "Beer and wine." You can't put particular brands, that was against the law, but you could put beer and wine in big, 80 point font block letters on the outside. And 7-Eleven was the only convenience chain that wasn't doing that. So, that's the kind of recommendations that we brought back. There's so much going on that at some point you just have to go out into the market and validate for yourself. What's actually on the shelf? What does the store look like? Is it dark and scary because they haven't replaced the lights, or is it super clean? And they just opened a hotel next door and that's why they're doing so well.

Rob Collie (00:57:15): It's funny. In a way we're coming from a world that was judged sort of strictly by human factors, like tribal wisdom and gut instinct and experience. And in a lot of ways we present data, a data driven technique as a superior method to that. You can't take it to an extreme, you have to integrate the two. And we talk about this with Michael Self, and he's been on a couple times. It's like this integration of the human knowledge with the data. There's no rules for how to do it right.

Paul Boynton (00:57:51): No.

Rob Collie (00:57:52): You can always have one overruling the other inappropriately. By the way, that story I told about the crew that I taught twice, their whole business, and the people in the room I was teaching didn't do this, but their whole business was shoppers. They would send people around to all of the stores in the country, various, and validate that the displays for various products were there, they were configured properly. If there had been a TV demo that was supposed to be running, was it actually running? Was it plugged in?

Paul Boynton (00:58:22): Oh yeah.

Rob Collie (00:58:22): Was it showing the right stuff? And most of what was being reported was ultimately all of that data that was being collected by hand. Now I'm sure a lot of that now you think that eventually we're be getting to the point where you still probably need a human to go in there, but you could just have them with the camera. And it's like doing some AI-driven image processing. I mean, you could certainly do that with the planogram. To see whether the planogram was accurate. You just walk down the beer isle with the camera and go back up to your car. By the time you're up to the car it's giving you a check mark or an X.

Paul Boynton (00:58:52): Yeah, they're trying, they're trying to do these kind of visual checks, putting weight sensors and things like that. I mean-

Rob Collie (00:59:00): Interesting.

Paul Boynton (00:59:01): It's a lot to manage. Just move so much.

Rob Collie (00:59:05): So even though I'm not naive about this industry anymore, I can still sort of bounce back to a naive perspective and I can tell two different stories about alcohol and data. On the one hand, I can say, "Look, alcohol has been here forever. It's a product that sells itself. It just isn't that complicated. People need their booze. And so it's just going to happen." I'm sure there's quite a bit of that personality in that industry. But then I could also say, "Oh my gosh, how perfect of a laboratory for data is this? It is a zero sum game being played against competitors with literally like at 7-Eleven, there are six doors to fridges that have beer behind them. That's it. It's not going to be seven tomorrow, it's six." And you know what? It's not just a zero sum game from the perspective of the various suppliers who are making beer, it's a zero sum game from the perspective of the retailer. There's nothing more optimization friendly then something that constrained.

Paul Boynton (01:00:24): Well said. It is the perfect, perfect industry for business intelligence to come and just shake things up entirely. I see predictive modeling. So being able to actually predict the velocity, what we call a velocity, just how quickly do products come off the shelf?

Rob Collie (01:00:48): Like in feet per second, or?

Paul Boynton (01:00:50): It can be measured in actually a variety of ways. But mostly they call days of supply. How much do you put on the shelf to ensure there's always something on the shelf? And then, how do those requirements compete with the requirements of other products and their demand? So being able to forecast, how many times do you buy beer on a Tuesday at 3:00 PM? Not too often. So even in a given week-

Thomas LaRock (01:01:19): Since the pandemic?

Paul Boynton (01:01:19): Even in a given week there's fluctuations in demand. So getting that level of granularity to say, "Oh, I have exactly the amount of product I need on the shelf when I need it." Huge. Assortment, making sure that you don't have redundant packages, packages that do the exact same thing for the shopper. Price. Huge, huge.

Rob Collie (01:01:39): Yeah, the old fashioned cave man, Rob Collie comes in now and says, "But look, once you get this stuff figured out, once you get it figured out, it's the same thing over and over again, every day, every place." Just know you-

Paul Boynton (01:01:53): But didn't you hear about our Lime-A-Rita? That's a 24 ounce can that's coming out this spring. Oh no.

Rob Collie (01:02:01): I did not.

Paul Boynton (01:02:01): Well, you should get rid of that other 24 ounce can and put this in place.

Rob Collie (01:02:09): I was literally setting up a suggestion, which is that if you're thinking about this, if you're listening to this and going, you're sort of thinking something along the lines of what I just said, it's not going to be like that. Here's another one that, listen, I love it when people steal things. So here's one that's, I'm presenting it as fodder for being stolen. There'd be no greater compliment than to have it stolen. I like to say the average has a population of zero.

Paul Boynton (01:02:31): That's cool.

Rob Collie (01:02:32): If you take all of the stores that have their own things going on and you average them all up, you're going to get a picture that painted for you. And you're going to assume, your next step is to assume that every store is basically doing about the same thing. They're all behaving the same way.

Paul Boynton (01:02:46): Yeah.

Rob Collie (01:02:46): So if you take everything that's happening at all of your stores and you blend it together into an overall average, you're going to get a picture. And the natural human thing to do is to assume that every one of those stores is basically behaving like that average. But in practice, you really go and look, most of the time you'll discover that every store is different. It's a bunch of different micro trends. And when you average them all up, you get a picture of a store that you go looking and there aren't actually any stores that look like that individually.

Paul Boynton (01:03:17): Right.

Rob Collie (01:03:17): And so being able to keep track of things, and this is another one of the places where a data-driven technique is just always going to be superior to just human instinct, you need to decompose it.

Paul Boynton (01:03:29): Oh yeah.

Rob Collie (01:03:30): You need to be aware of that. You were mentioning earlier different neighborhoods with different populations. As soon as you said something, I started thinking about, "Oh yeah. In the hipster neighborhood there's probably no middle class of beer, right?"

Paul Boynton (01:03:43): Oh yeah [crosstalk 01:03:44].

Rob Collie (01:03:43): It's only the high end and low end.

Paul Boynton (01:03:46): Yeah.

Rob Collie (01:03:47): Old Milwaukeen Pabst. And then the stuff that costs $5 a bottle.

Paul Boynton (01:03:52): Yeah.

Rob Collie (01:03:53): You know?

Paul Boynton (01:03:53): Yeah, for sure.

Rob Collie (01:03:54): You're not going to find Sierra Nevada Pale Ale in there, so over that, you know?

Paul Boynton (01:03:59): And how do you get to that information without just talking to somebody or looking at the rest of the market? Or you have a market, great beer market. We had this situation in Colorado, when it went to full strength, alcohol, we did a bunch of canvassing. And there is an area doing very well with beer sales, one store not selling beer, what's going on? Why aren't we selling beer? If you were looking at the numbers on high, you'd be like, "We're losing money. We need to get our product in that store." You go and you talk to the owner, they're Muslim, they're not going to sell alcohol. So where does that data point come from? There's this holistic, granular approach that just requires so much data and so much data collection that it wasn't possible in Excel. It just wasn't possible. Now we actually have a mechanism to go after that kind of information. It's enormous. I mean, being able to get to that level of specificity at the long tail.

Rob Collie (01:05:01): Even within a single small city, I've seen this. Different ends of that same city, people's preference for favorite cigarette or whatever is totally different than on the other end. And yet, again, the average tells you that every store sells three packs a day of this and four packs a day of that. Nope. No one sells three packs a day of that brand. There's one store that sells 11 a day.

Paul Boynton (01:05:25): Yeah.

Rob Collie (01:05:26): And the other sell none.

Paul Boynton (01:05:27): Right. Exactly. Right.

Rob Collie (01:05:29): It's just like, you've got to be careful.

Paul Boynton (01:05:32): For sure. There's so many great sort of narratives in that vein. I think in the alcohol industry it has a kind of special place with those narratives. Because the product set is so diverse and also its geographic reach is so spread out that you can just, there's a never ending number of variables that can have meaningful impact on purchase behavior.

Rob Collie (01:05:54): Yeah, everyone thinks that their industry [inaudible 01:05:58] is so special. I'm sure if we had someone on here talking about soap, they'd be telling us, "Oh no, soap is the most interesting and challenging, diverse-"

Thomas LaRock (01:06:08): Soap has Tyler Durden.

Rob Collie (01:06:10): Oh, it does, yes.

Thomas LaRock (01:06:12): It has that going for it.

Paul Boynton (01:06:13): So here's the other thing, what does a soap corporate event look like versus an alcohol corporate event?

Rob Collie (01:06:20): I'm not talking about how much fun it would be.

Paul Boynton (01:06:28): You know? You're right. And I'm not saying the alcohol industry is more or less opportunity just inherently than any other. I would argue that it is a strong candidate for focus at this point, because it's such an old industry that desperately needs it.

Rob Collie (01:06:47): Well it's an industry. And so as soon as you tell me it's an industry, this has been the repeated lessons since I left Microsoft, is that, oh my gosh, the world has, and this is good news, the world so much left to do in terms of improvement.

Paul Boynton (01:07:01): Yeah. And we're just talking about the retail perspective. That's not even including the actual manufacturing of the product and forecasting it, which could apply just across the board.

Thomas LaRock (01:07:13): See, I would expect that the big, in dev, the real suppliers manufacturers, I would suspect they have a team of data analysts doing all that. I can't imagine they don't.

Paul Boynton (01:07:25): You'd think. I mean, they're trying, I agree with you. They are trying, it's just hard. It's hard work. It's a difficult, it's challenging. It's just difficult work and there's not a whole lot of people in the world who just can do it is kind of the challenge.

Rob Collie (01:07:46): What would you say would be sort of like, I don't know, I'll just pick a number, top three opportunities in the alcohol industry for applying data more effectively?

Paul Boynton (01:08:01): Inventory management for distributors. So understanding inventory turns and how you're managing your inventory. The second one is incentives management. So actually this is pretty focused on distributors right now that I think about it. I just think that there's a lot of opportunity there.

Rob Collie (01:08:21): Well, they're right in the middle, literally. So it wouldn't, it's not a surprise necessarily.

Paul Boynton (01:08:26): Well, and they're also natural monopolies. So their competition is really against themselves. They're always trying to beat their best lap. The more efficiently they can get product from their warehouse to the store, the more money they'll they'll make. Because there's not another distributor in the area selling Bud Light. The Bud Light distributor is selling that Bud Light. So they're in a competition against themselves. So really nice self-contained there. So incentives are really interesting because different suppliers will provide different dollar amount and different criteria for meeting certain incentives for distributors. So, "Hey, we have a new product, Constellation Brands launches a new product." And if this distributor earns X number of placements, they get X number of money. And those are complicated. Those get really, really complicated. And in the hands of the driver, the person who actually goes out and delivers the product, they've got this big binder of a lot of cases, a binder of printouts that says, "Oh, if I sold this franchisee, these products, I'd make this much bonus to feed my family. Or I could say sell them this products, and for the month, eh."

Paul Boynton (01:09:41): You see what I mean? That arithmetic gets complicated very quickly and there's a lot of money on the table. So inventory management, incentives, dollar management, and then the third one more broadly, I think assortment optimization is probably the dark matter of the universe in alcohol. It's just such a black box to try and understand how packages when they sit next to each other, how they affect one another. So if you're ever wondering why there's a billboard worth of Bud Light, the 18 pack, seven ounce aluminum twist off bottle, do we really need all of those? And this isn't to hate on Bud Light. I'm just saying, where do you put that product? Where is it best served? Is it best served everywhere or just in a few places? So wrapping our heads around that I think is going to do quite a bit, quite a bit. Those are the top three.

Rob Collie (01:10:38): Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like you to know that I did not give Paul advanced warning, but I was going to ask him for the top three opportunities. He's just a natural look at that, you know?

Thomas LaRock (01:10:49): So if you'd like, though, I can help you. I know where to put the Bud Light.

Paul Boynton (01:10:57): Let me guess, hmm.

Thomas LaRock (01:10:59): Yeah, the Bud Light should go right next to the Bud Light Seltzer, and that should be in the garbage.

Paul Boynton (01:11:04): And that should be in the garbage, oh my gosh. Shade, shade, throne.

Thomas LaRock (01:11:09): Shade throne.

Paul Boynton (01:11:10): Speaking of Bud Light, I don't know how much time we're dealing with here, I'm just having a really good time with y'all.

Rob Collie (01:11:15): Same.

Paul Boynton (01:11:16): Okay.

Rob Collie (01:11:17): Time has no meaning.

Paul Boynton (01:11:18): Time has no meaning.

Rob Collie (01:11:19): In between these walls.

Paul Boynton (01:11:20): What is it but a direction of entropy?

Rob Collie (01:11:22): True. True. Totally. Yeah, I mean, that's how I think.

Paul Boynton (01:11:25): Yeah, right. So we're in a strange place in the alcohol industry where it's the, what got us here a ain't going to get us there, back to that. There's a lot of people retiring from distributors and handing off their business to either the next generation of that family, if it's family owned, or there's a lot of consolidation going on in distributors. There's just a lot of transformation in the industry happening right now. The fact that imports are selling, are growing faster and are about to overtake in total dollars your domestic premiums. This is a really flex point. And we're also getting all of this data and business intelligence, so we're looking for constant new ideas. Huge preamble to set up a really strange idea. I pitched, I attempted, I should say, to pitch to the brand team at Constellations that they should get involved in eSports somehow. Because the age group of people who are playing games and watching eSports is now really the alcohol drinking age.

Paul Boynton (01:12:29): And there's a really growing industry. I said that, and then not even a few months later, Bud Light came out with a Twitch channel and Miller came out with a Twitch channel. And the brand for Modelo is the fighting spirit, brewed with the fighting spirit. I mean, what a better matchup with fighting games or Counterstrike or something like that.

Rob Collie (01:12:51): Because nothing improves those quick Twitch reaction times quite like that.

Paul Boynton (01:12:57): Quite like a-

Rob Collie (01:12:58): 5% alcohol by volume beverage.

Paul Boynton (01:13:01): You're right. It doesn't, it's not really good for the competitors.

Rob Collie (01:13:04): Yeah.

Paul Boynton (01:13:04): But that's an example of just something that you just wouldn't have thought of, three years ago that alcohol companies would be sponsoring early 20 year olds playing video games. Bud Light actually, I just read yesterday, they're releasing a console, a game console, that chills two beers.

Rob Collie (01:13:26): What?

Paul Boynton (01:13:27): Yeah.

Rob Collie (01:13:30): My console is hot. I would use it to make coffee.

Paul Boynton (01:13:35): Not this one, this one is cold.

Rob Collie (01:13:37): You know, that makes as much sense as windows making a phone. When we have Connor on, we're going to talk about something called a Windows phone, and it's not what you expect.

Paul Boynton (01:13:48): These are strange new ideas the industry's having to grapple with and there's just so much cool stuff out there for alcohol to do.

Rob Collie (01:13:59): There's going to be a performance beer. You just know it. It's going to be a beer that has some sort of rainforest-

Paul Boynton (01:14:08): Like a [crosstalk 01:14:08] drink?

Rob Collie (01:14:08): Yeah. Kind of. But it's going to be like some sort of rainforest extract that supposedly offsets the effect of alcohol on reaction times. And there's no real studies that support this, except for the ones that were paid for by that particular manufacturer. And it'll be ...

Paul Boynton (01:14:25): Yeah. Brewed with a Tiger's roar.

Rob Collie (01:14:27): That's right. That's right.

Paul Boynton (01:14:28): You have tigers scream at the-

Rob Collie (01:14:31): No it's like tears of a hummingbird.

Paul Boynton (01:14:37): Something just bizarre, I wouldn't put it past them. There actually is a coffee alcohol, right? Not coffee flavored beer, but coffee with alcohol in it. Shooters with [crosstalk 01:14:51]

Rob Collie (01:14:50): Yeah. I actually got, I've ordered from Drizly one time, local beer delivery or whatever, one time. And so I get their newsletters and I swear, I got one the other day that said, "There's nothing quite like waking up to the taste of this coffee alcohol."

Thomas LaRock (01:15:08): Yeah. No, nothing [crosstalk 01:15:09].

Rob Collie (01:15:08): They just come right out and say, "This is your morning liquor."

Paul Boynton (01:15:13): What's it called? Hair at the [inaudible 01:15:14]?

Rob Collie (01:15:15): I have no idea. We call bad idea.

Paul Boynton (01:15:20): Bad idea.

Rob Collie (01:15:21): That will sell. It might sell great in the Rock. This is one of those products that we wish we could uninvent.

Paul Boynton (01:15:28): Yeah. Oh the, what, the pet rock?

Rob Collie (01:15:31): No. In the movie, The Rock, he talks about VX gas and says, to make it sound really bad he goes, "Listen, this is one of those things that we wish we could uninvent." It's that bad. It's that bad.

Paul Boynton (01:15:41): Oh I thought Rock with Sean Connery.

Rob Collie (01:15:42): It's not a good thing at all. We do not need tailored-

Paul Boynton (01:15:50): This is a bad idea.

Rob Collie (01:15:50): ... alcohol drinks for the morning.

Paul Boynton (01:15:51): Like Moon Shoes or the skip it.

Thomas LaRock (01:15:53): We already have Baileys [crosstalk 01:15:56].

Rob Collie (01:15:55): Yeah, that's true. A couple times I get upgraded, back when I used to fly, the early morning flight, it's leaving at 5:30 in the morning, it's yep. There's a lot of Baileys being dolled out on those flights.

Paul Boynton (01:16:10): Excuse me. Champagne, please. I like my mornings cold.

Rob Collie (01:16:13): Yeah, yeah. Well, if you need them cold. Just put them in the new Bud Light console.

Paul Boynton (01:16:20): You've got to check that thing out. I don't even know how it works. But I mean, really guys? Okay, that's maybe a little too far, but it's one of those things where it seems really dumb, but if you saw it, you'd be, "That's pretty cool." I don't know if I need to buy one, but I might come over to see yours every now and then.

Rob Collie (01:16:41): One of the ad campaigns for Bud Light Seltzer really struck me. This is a company with essentially infinite resources. They can execute anything, nothing's beyond them. They're going to do the absolute, most expensive, best research, whatever they can before they roll out an ad campaign. And there was this line in one of these ads, and actually it was repeated in multiple ads where this guy, and he actually says, it's slow so that you remember it. He says, "If you like Bud Light, you'll like Bud Light Seltzer. If you don't like Bud Light, you'll love Bud Light Seltzer." It's delivered almost like a joke. But these words were very, very, very carefully considered.

Paul Boynton (01:17:28): Yeah.

Rob Collie (01:17:28): They're aware of you're polarized. You don't have a middle of the road opinion about Bud Light. You're either in or you're out. And they say something that on the surface just sounds patently ridiculous.

Paul Boynton (01:17:43): Right. That no matter what, you're on the positive side of this.

Rob Collie (01:17:46): In fact, it is patently ridiculous, right?

Paul Boynton (01:17:49): Right.

Rob Collie (01:17:49): And yet, they know that's going to be effective.

Paul Boynton (01:17:56): Man, yeah, they really can do whatever they want.

Rob Collie (01:17:58): Yeah, that's not an accident.

Paul Boynton (01:17:59): Oftentimes do. And I oftentimes do.

Rob Collie (01:18:04): And I struggle with this, because we're a smart company marketing a smart service. So there's a tendency to try to explain to people, tell them the truth. Like here's why it's better and all that kind of stuff. And then you see something like that. And you're like, "What?" Maybe we should be doing something like, "If you like data, you'll love P3 or you'll like P3. If you don't like data, you'll love P3." Should we be that dumb? Should we just say something like that?

Paul Boynton (01:18:33): This is, ah gosh, sometimes simple is better. This reminds me something of the back and forth about pie charts, this whole hate. There's a hate defense fest against pie charts.

Rob Collie (01:18:49): Yeah.

Paul Boynton (01:18:50): And Bergs and I, another awesome P3 consultant, Bergs. We were talking and we have a client who was over the moon with a pie chart and a slicer on a page. I mean, we showed it as a draft of what's possible. They looked at it, thought it was the finished product and said, "This is," we're good. This is amazing. And that led to the phrase, "Just give a pie chart." You don't need to overthink it. It's simple, it works. You just give them a pie chart.

Rob Collie (01:19:24): Yeah. But then the chart police come in and they say, "But it's proven, the studies have shown that human are unable to appropriately," you got to say it in the Captain Kirk voice, "unable to appropriately compare the sizes wedges in a circle." So they say, bar chart or column chart instead. And yeah, I mean, a lot of pie charts do get really ridiculous. If you've got 30 slices in a pie chart, you're not conveying any information.

Thomas LaRock (01:19:51): We're going to head down a rabbit hole and we're going to spend like three hours.

Rob Collie (01:19:55): We're going to fight, is what we're going to do.

Paul Boynton (01:19:57): Oh, I love this.

Rob Collie (01:19:57): Yeah, let's get after it.

Thomas LaRock (01:19:59): It's like an anchor man.

Rob Collie (01:20:01): Now it's real. Now we're going to get-

Thomas LaRock (01:20:03): Yeah. All the groups are just going to come out from the alley.

Rob Collie (01:20:06): It's when we all stop being polite, start getting real, like on MTV's real world. Okay. So in college, I'm pretty sure that we were, we sort of had an internal trigonometry that allowed us to perfectly divide a pizza into three arcs.

Thomas LaRock (01:20:21): Yeah.

Rob Collie (01:20:22): No one was going to get cheated. I had a strong set of opinions about this stuff, but basically my stance is this, that the audience is kind of in a way they're almost always right.

Paul Boynton (01:20:31): Yeah, yeah.

Rob Collie (01:20:31): If you got an audience that says, "Listen, I want an oil gauge type of visual." They're telling you what they want. You might as well get them to engage with it, give them what they want.

Paul Boynton (01:20:40): Sure.

Rob Collie (01:20:40): And yes, the research on all these other sorts of things is valid. There is real science behind it and I'm not in the science denying camp.

Paul Boynton (01:20:49): Oh good. I'm glad you feel that the empirical research is, yeah.

Rob Collie (01:20:54): It's just that there's something that gets a little out of control when people sort of turn this sort of toughty purism into a defining character trait of who they are.

Paul Boynton (01:21:06): Oh yeah. That's definitely a lie, bridge too far.

Rob Collie (01:21:10): And a lot of people do this and it's like, "Okay, the world's not going to fall over if we use the wrong visual here, if everybody still likes it and they can make sense of it."

Paul Boynton (01:21:21): Yeah, talking about grades in art class.

Rob Collie (01:21:24): Well, I mean, there's psychology and physiology behind it. It's more legitimate than, it's more objective than the subjective art.

Paul Boynton (01:21:34): Well, yeah but there's good line work. There's good color. I mean, there's some general ideas there, but ultimately the audience matters, you know.

Rob Collie (01:21:40): I mean people at MVP summits, they used to walk around, some of them with badges, sewed on patches on their backpacks, that was a pie chart with a line through it, no pie charts. It was important enough to-

Paul Boynton (01:21:54): Wow.

Rob Collie (01:21:54): To essentially they bumper sticker it.

Paul Boynton (01:21:56): Wow, it was an identity.

Rob Collie (01:21:58): Yeah. I'm like, "Well, now you're in a weird spot that doesn't have any value. Don't do that."

Paul Boynton (01:22:06): I'm a no pie chart person. No, no pie charts.

Rob Collie (01:22:11): Yeah. Also another really good example of this is never do a dark background.

Paul Boynton (01:22:16): Oh, we've-

Rob Collie (01:22:17): Dashboard.

Paul Boynton (01:22:17): We've gone back and forth about this. We've gone back and forth.

Rob Collie (01:22:19): I'm fine. The science indicates it's maybe, I'll be generous, and let's say it's 60/40 that white background dashboards are more readable as opposed to dark background. But if the dark background dashboard is three times as likely to be engaged with, there's still more throughput through my dark dashboard funnel than the other person's funnel.

Paul Boynton (01:22:43): They're easier to read is supposed to translate to usability. That's what gets lost sometimes is that, "Okay, great. You've measured the degrees of contrast." But ultimately that comes down to how many calories are people spending in their brain to think about your report?

Rob Collie (01:23:00): But then the whispering voice comes in and says, "But coolness matters."

Paul Boynton (01:23:05): Oh yeah.

Rob Collie (01:23:06): "It just does," you know?

Paul Boynton (01:23:07): Yeah.

Rob Collie (01:23:08): And every application on the planet has now added a dark mode.

Paul Boynton (01:23:11): Yeah.

Rob Collie (01:23:12): And people are rabbit about this, might as well. We actually have one person we worked with, another consulting firm that said to me, and this person only consults with the big league, only ever is talking to C-suite executives and some of the largest organizations in the world. And we were talking about this and laughing and he goes, "Yeah, listen, if you're not using dark dashboards to communicate with these people, you're just missing it. It's free money, just free money." And he's right. It's cool.

Paul Boynton (01:23:44): Yeah.

Rob Collie (01:23:45): You see a movie and they're looking at some sort of dashboard display. It's always going to be a dark dashboard on a movie.

Paul Boynton (01:23:50): Dark dashboard on a movie, usually some kind of color. And sometimes images are really, really helpful for the background to have a kind of faint sort of suggestion of an image. So I'm definitely not anti-color on backgrounds. I think from a developer standpoint you get a lot more color option when you just have a lighter background. But hey, your audience matters. If the brand guidelines say. "All dashboards have this logo scheme or color background." Well, that's what you're going to do because those are the brand guidelines. And you just want to be consistent I think more than anything else, right? You just want to be consistent. You don't want to be flip flopping between dark and light backgrounds and the same report. You don't want to have a suite of reports that have dark backgrounds in one place and light backgrounds in other place. You make up the rules as you go. But there are some general principles like consistency and contrast and things like that. So no, I'm not anti-color background.

Rob Collie (01:24:50): Oh I'm glad to hear that.

Paul Boynton (01:24:54): I have opinions. I'm going to have opinions.

Rob Collie (01:24:54): I bet you do. I bet you do.

Paul Boynton (01:24:56): And I tattoo them to my back.

Rob Collie (01:24:59): In places that no one sees.

Paul Boynton (01:25:01): Right, right. Yeah. Like I have a tattoo, it's just a filled in rectangle with a line through it. Like, no dark background.

Rob Collie (01:25:09): No bevels.

Paul Boynton (01:25:12): I am all about drop shadow though. I do love drop shadow.

Rob Collie (01:25:15): Oh, you goosh. Are you 12 years old?

Paul Boynton (01:25:24): I love it, I do love it.

Rob Collie (01:25:25): Yeah. Well, Paul, this has been a blast. We haven't even talked about everything we planned to talk about.

Thomas LaRock (01:25:31): We're going to have you back on.

Paul Boynton (01:25:32): I love that.

Rob Collie (01:25:33): It's terrible.

Paul Boynton (01:25:34): Talk about woofing and interceptive shipments and-

Rob Collie (01:25:37): Woofing and-

Thomas LaRock (01:25:40): And pie charts.

Rob Collie (01:25:41): And pie charts. We'll definitely talk about some pie charts.

Paul Boynton (01:25:43): More about pie charts later after this break,

Rob Collie (01:25:46): We're going to get Luke to tell some of his liquor industry tales. He's got a couple up his sleeve from back in the college days. I was going to put you on the spot at some point, Luke, but we just, we ran out of time, you know?

Paul Boynton (01:25:57): I just really enjoyed the conversation. I really am doing something that I love, I'll just say that my mom is famous for. She says, "I wish two things for my children. Number one, I pray for them in profession, a career that brings them joy and fulfillment." And I have that, and I definitely have that, and I'm not just pandering. I really do experience joy and fulfillment in this role. And the second thing is that she prays for us to have the love of our lives. And it's carefully ordered there that first comes the joy fulfillment from a professional career, then comes the love of your life. So definitely, I feel like I've checked the box on the first one and look forward to a long stay.

Thomas LaRock (01:26:44): You left the second one out. You checked the first check box.

Paul Boynton (01:26:47): Oh yeah.

Rob Collie (01:26:48): She's going to listen to this maybe.

Paul Boynton (01:26:50): She is. She is.

Rob Collie (01:26:52): You better not leave that check box unchecked. Come on.

Paul Boynton (01:26:55): Liz, I love you.

Rob Collie (01:26:58): There you go.

Paul Boynton (01:26:58): There you go.

Rob Collie (01:26:58): There you go.

Paul Boynton (01:27:00): Rob, not so much. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. You're great. You're great. Thank you.

Thomas LaRock (01:27:07): Sadly your boss is kind of a jerk though.

Rob Collie (01:27:12): I'm mostly harmless.

Thomas LaRock (01:27:13): Mostly harmless.

Announcer (01:27:14): Thanks for listening to the Raw Data by P3 Podcast. Find out what the experts at P3 can do for your business. Go to powerpivotpro.com. Interested in becoming a guest on the show? Email Luke P, L-U-K-E-P @powerpivotpro.com. Have a data day!