The Data Stack Show

On this week's episode of The Data Stack Show, Eric and Kostas talk with Nick Fogle, co-founder of Churnkey and Wavve. Together they discuss how having a legal background can impact engineering decisions, dealing with privacy and compliance concerns, and selling Wavve and starting Churnkey as a result.

Highlights from this week's episode include: 

• Nick's background in economics and law and teaching himself to code (2:01)
• Thinking like a lawyer and trying to minimize risk to the greatest extent possible (4:23)
• GDPR and compliance (8:23)
• Blockchain contracts  (18:26)
• Unique challenges surrounding compliance with a cryptocurrency startup (21:41)
• Reconciling the right to be forgotten, GDPR, and blockchain permanence (27:16)
• Building Churnkey after developing it as a way to lower churn among Wavve users (31:31)
• How Churnkey's stack works (37:16)
• Crypto predictions (39:02)

The Data Stack Show is a weekly podcast powered by RudderStack. Each week we’ll talk to data engineers, analysts, and data scientists about their experience around building and maintaining data infrastructure, delivering data and data products, and driving better outcomes across their businesses with data.

RudderStack helps businesses make the most out of their customer data while ensuring data privacy and security. To learn more about RudderStack visit rudderstack.com.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This week on The Data Stack Show, Eric and Kostas talk with Jim Walker, the VP of product marketing at Cockroach Labs, about distributed systems, competing against the speed of light, and making data easy.

Highlights from this week's episode include: 

• Jim background of translating deep technical concepts into understandable English and his work at Cockroach Labs (2:23)
• The origin of Cockroach Labs and distributed SQL (6:10) 
• Living without Atomic Clocks (10:10)
• Having the speed of light as the ultimate competitor (13:49)
• CockroachDB’s users (19:35)
• Figuring out big data for transactions (25:14)
• Dealing with failure (35:04)
• Open source code, community, and consumption (39:26)
• Making data easy, and what's next for Cockroach (43:12)
• Bringing programming into marketing (46:18)

Mentioned Links:

• Spanner White Paper
• Raft & Paxos
• Michael Stonebraker 

The Data Stack Show is a weekly podcast powered by RudderStack. Each week we’ll talk to data engineers, analysts, and data scientists about their experience around building and maintaining data infrastructure, delivering data and data products, and driving better outcomes across their businesses with data.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

On this week's episode of The Data Stack Show, Eric and Kostas talk with John Marbach, senior growth manager at Grafana Labs. In this conversation, John discusses marketing ops and the blending of roles of data engineering and marketing.

Highlights from this week's episode include:

• Grafana Labs John Marbach Senior Growth Manager
• Introduction to John Marbach and working in the blurred lines between marketing and data engineering (2:14)
• How managing pipeline building and consuming data influences the use of downstream tools (6:28)
• Experiments in marketing (11:28)
• Exploring the role of marketing ops (15:35)
• How accruing technical debt can grind things to a halt (20:35)
• Matching the stack with the company's scale (24:48)
• CDPs and marketing to developers (28:40)
• Biggest challenges and barriers between data engineering and marketing (35:19)
• Takes on reverse ETL (39:07)
• Thoughts on cryptocurrency and the blockchain (44:08)

The Data Stack Show is a weekly podcast powered by RudderStack. Each week we’ll talk to data engineers, analysts, and data scientists about their experience around building and maintaining data infrastructure, delivering data and data products, and driving better outcomes across their businesses with data.

RudderStack helps businesses make the most out of their customer data while ensuring data privacy and security. To learn more about RudderStack visit rudderstack.com.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

On this week's episode of The Data Stack Show, Eric and Kostas talk with Peter Gao, co-founder, and CEO at Aquarium Learning. A former engineer at Cruise Automation, Peter and Aquarium Learning help ML teams improve their model performances by improving their data.

Highlights from this week's episode include:

• How getting hit by a drunk driver made researching self-driving cars personal for Peter (2:12)
• Filtering out the hype in self-driving car news to get a clear picture of its state today (6:52)
• The data required for a self-driving vehicle (13:56)
• Operation Vacation and how Aquarium can help provide the tools to make models better (16:53)
• Utilizing neural networks to index data (20:41)
• How Aquarium fits in the ML stack (30:25)
• Interesting use cases of Aquarium (33:59)
• Distinguishing subclasses of machine learning (40:05)
• Human involvement in machine learning (46:13)

The Data Stack Show is a weekly podcast powered by RudderStack. Each week we’ll talk to data engineers, analysts, and data scientists about their experience around building and maintaining data infrastructure, delivering data and data products, and driving better outcomes across their businesses with data.

RudderStack helps businesses make the most out of their customer data while ensuring data privacy and security. To learn more about RudderStack visit rudderstack.com.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

On this week's episode of The Data Stack Show, Eric and Kostas talk with Chris Bergh, the CEO and head chef at Data Kitchen. DataKitchen’s mission is to provide the software, service, and knowledge that makes it possible for every data and analytics team to realize their full potential with DataOps.

Highlights from this week's episode include: 

• Chris' background and how the lessons learned in the Peace Corps and at NASA apply to him today (2:03)
• Why AI left Chris feeling like a jilted lover (7:49)
• Most projects that people do in data analytics fail (10:12)
• Three things that DataOps focuses on (16:37)
• Comparing and contrasting DevOps and DataOps (22:30)
• The types of data that DataKitchen handles and building a product or a service around DataOps (29:29)
• Fixing problems at the source instead of just offering a tool to slightly improve things downstream (37:17)
• Where we are at in the process of how companies are going to run on data (41:43)

The Data Stack Show is a weekly podcast powered by RudderStack. Each week we’ll talk to data engineers, analysts, and data scientists about their experience around building and maintaining data infrastructure, delivering data and data products, and driving better outcomes across their businesses with data.

RudderStack helps businesses make the most out of their customer data while ensuring data privacy and security. To learn more about RudderStack visit rudderstack.com.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

On this week's episode of The Data Stack Show, Eric and Kostas chat with Jenna Lemonias, director of data science at The Atlantic. The Atlantic, a publication that's been around since 1857, is adapting with the times and is implementing and emulating some of the data science practices seen at big tech companies. 

Highlights from this week's episode include:

• Jenna's background in astrophysics and how she pivoted to data science (2:14)
• Differences in dealing with data at a FinTech company and then at a publication (4:40)
• The relationship between analog and digital data at The Atlantic (9:22)
• How The Atlantic structures its data science team (11:44)
• The role data engineering plays (14:42)
• Using natural language processing and machine-generated metadata (17:37)
• The Atlantic's data stack (28:22)
• The kind of data that's important to The Atlantic (29:44)
• Big projects forthcoming for the data science team (37:13)

The Data Stack Show is a weekly podcast powered by RudderStack. Each week we’ll talk to data engineers, analysts, and data scientists about their experience around building and maintaining data infrastructure, delivering data and data products, and driving better outcomes across their businesses with data.

RudderStack helps businesses make the most out of their customer data while ensuring data privacy and security. To learn more about RudderStack visit rudderstack.com.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

On this week’s episode of The Data Stack Show, Eric and Kostas are joined by the co-founders of Big Time Data, Rachel Bradley-Haas, and Alex Dovenmuehle, formerly of Mattermost and prior to that, Heroku. At Big Time Data, they work together to provide companies with the ability to derive value and insights from decentralized datasets, improve business processes through data enrichment and automation, and build a scalable foundation to enable a data-driven culture.

Highlights from this week’s episode include:

• Rachel and Alex's background and their goal to make data approachable for companies everywhere (3:09)
• The data stack journey: making decisions when you're small that allow you to grow with your data and your organization (12:28)
• The problems faced when a data stack isn't nurtured early on (15:59)
• Changes in data stack technology (21:32)
• How Alex and Rachel's roles at Big Time Data differ and interact with each other (39:00)
• Client use cases (43:34)
• Comparing the stacks of seed-stage startups, mid-sized companies, and giant enterprises (48:54)

The Data Stack Show is a weekly podcast powered by RudderStack. Each week we’ll talk to data engineers, analysts, and data scientists about their experience around building and maintaining data infrastructure, delivering data and data products, and driving better outcomes across their businesses with data.

RudderStack helps businesses make the most out of their customer data while ensuring data privacy and security. To learn more about RudderStack visit rudderstack.com.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

On this week’s episode of The Data Stack Show, Eric and Kostas are joined by Matthew Housley, CTO, and Joe Reis, CEO and co-founder of Ternary Data. These self-described “recovering data scientists” focus on teaching skills to build a solid foundation for organizations to work with their data.

Highlights from this week’s episode include:

• Joe and Matt’s background and expertise (2:44)
• Common threads and trends in the data sphere (9:39)
• Differences and commonalities between startups and enterprises and the way they deal with data (18:28)
• Discussing how the role of data engineering has evolved over the years and what it might morph into in the near future (27:52)
• The ideal data infrastructure and what future shifts excite them (39:52)
• How ML is shaping the data space (44:30)
• The state of real time (49:56)

The Data Stack Show is a weekly podcast powered by RudderStack. Each week we’ll talk to data engineers, analysts, and data scientists about their experience around building and maintaining data infrastructure, delivering data and data products, and driving better outcomes across their businesses with data.

RudderStack helps businesses make the most out of their customer data while ensuring data privacy and security. To learn more about RudderStack visit rudderstack.com.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

On this week’s episode of The Data Stack Show, Eric and Kostas are joined by Stefanía Bjarney Ólafsdóttir, the CEO and co-founder of Avo. Avo, which started in 2018, provides data analytics governance as a service, helping organizations make data-driven decisions to improve their customer experience.

Highlights from this week’s episode include:

• Stefania's background with mathematics, philosophy, bioinformatics and consumer mobile (2:39)
• Making pioneering decisions as head of data science at QuizUp (8:34)
• Is less more? Choosing fundamental parts of the customer experience and understanding them very well (16:56)
• Bringing data consumers closer to data producers (18:34)
• Avo mission to provide analytics governance as a service (25:09)
• Avo use cases (36:37)
• Focusing on event-based data (44:29)

The Data Stack Show is a weekly podcast powered by RudderStack. Each week we’ll talk to data engineers, analysts, and data scientists about their experience around building and maintaining data infrastructure, delivering data and data products, and driving better outcomes across their businesses with data.

RudderStack helps businesses make the most out of their customer data while ensuring data privacy and security. To learn more about RudderStack visit rudderstack.com.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

On this week’s episode of The Data Stack Show, Eric and Kostas are joined by Mike Luby, director of engineering at LeafLink. LeafLink is a cannabis industries B2B wholesale marketplace where thousands of brands can manage and track their orders and relationships.

Highlights from this week’s episode include:

• The infrastructure LeafLink provides for the cannabis supply chain and how it deals with compliance issues. (2:03)
• Structuring product management organization to launch high-velocity teams (8:08)
• How it started vs. How it's going (12:00)
• Containerization and leveraging AWS tools for LeafLink's stack (13:19)
• Shifting to an event-driven architecture (24:46)
• Using APIs to provide critical integrations for customers to automate and optimize their businesses (32:47)
• Keeping an eye for the future but building for today (36:56)

The Data Stack Show is a weekly podcast powered by RudderStack. Each week we’ll talk to data engineers, analysts, and data scientists about their experience around building and maintaining data infrastructure, delivering data and data products, and driving better outcomes across their businesses with data.

RudderStack helps businesses make the most out of their customer data while ensuring data privacy and security. To learn more about RudderStack visit rudderstack.com.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.