Today on the podcast, I interview Matt Fuller, the co-founder of Starburst. Matt has worked in data for years ....

Highlights
[1:00] - How Matt got into data & the C-Store paper which led to him joining Vertica, an early columnar database prior to technologies like Hadoop, HDFS or Parquet
[3:45] - The increasing adoption of OSS data storage tools and the growth of the Hadoop ecosystem that ultimately led up to Presto/Trino
[6:00] - How Matt took the plunge as an engineer-founder to become a co-founder of Starburst and had to wear many different hats across customer support, GTM and product
[10:20] - Matt's experience as a bridge between customer problems and the engineering team, and how to tailor your discussions to the appropriate place in the org that the customer contact sits
[14:20] - How  OSS changes the GTM dynamic of an enterprise product
[16:30] - What Matt is excited about regarding the future of Trino - the lakehouse architecture and open formats for data lakes (like Iceberg), and the Starburst SaaS product (Starburst Galaxy)

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Mark your calendars for May 12-14, 2026 and join us for Data Council AI, the technical conference built by engineers for engineers. It's the only event where you'll be able to connect with 2,000+ practitioners for 3 full days of technical deep dives, battle-tested architectures and production insights in San Francisco, the heart of the AI world.

Visit us at https://www.datacouncil.ai/ for the latest updates or subscribe to the newsletter as we release more details about the 2026 event!

In this episode, I interview Eric Sammer, the founder & CEO of Decodable. Eric was previously an engineering manager at Cloudera, and before that the founder of Rocana, an early observability company that was sold to Splunk. Eric has an amazing perspective on the architecture of data systems based on his years of experience in the field. We chat about his thoughts on the opportunities and challenges specifically around streaming data.

Highlights:
[1:45] - Eric's start in ad-tech, which led him into the high-volume data world plus his experiences at Cloudera working on Avro, Parquet & Impala - an alternative to Hive & Presto
[4:45] - Eric's opportunistic path to starting a company as an engineer
[7:15] - Lessons learned while building his first company, Rocana, which was sold to Splunk in 2017, plus insights on the right way to find product-market fit 
[10:50] - Eric's thoughts on why the time for streaming is now and how the use cases have surpassed fraud, waste and abuse + his tech stack of choice (Debezium, Kafka & Flink)
[14:55] - How streaming fits in the operational data landscape (OLTP)
[17:10] - Eric's thoughts on the value in streaming analytics (OLAP) and how ML models might get bigger benefits from streaming than dashboards do
[22:20] - Preview of the Streaming Data track @ Data Council Austin '23 where Eric is the track host

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Mark your calendars for May 12-14, 2026 and join us for Data Council AI, the technical conference built by engineers for engineers. It's the only event where you'll be able to connect with 2,000+ practitioners for 3 full days of technical deep dives, battle-tested architectures and production insights in San Francisco, the heart of the AI world.

Visit us at https://www.datacouncil.ai/ for the latest updates or subscribe to the newsletter as we release more details about the 2026 event!

Josh Benamram is the the co-founder & CEO of Databand, a data observability company acquired by IBM. We’ll discuss Josh’s segue from an early career in venture capital, into becoming a product manager for a business intelligence company (Sisense) and then becoming a founder himself, where he eventually exited his company to IBM.

Highlights:
[2:00] - How Josh's start in finance led to his career in startups
[6:25] - How working on cloud data warehouse connectors at Sisense, plus the growing need for data engineering led to the insight to start Databand
[9:30] - Josh's thoughts on the difference between data quality & data observability and how vendors in this market have exploded
[15:20] - The story to sell Databand to IBM - motivation and key issues in the decision, and  how the mechanics of the relationship transpired
[19:45] - Josh's predictions on the data observability landscape for the future 

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Mark your calendars for May 12-14, 2026 and join us for Data Council AI, the technical conference built by engineers for engineers. It's the only event where you'll be able to connect with 2,000+ practitioners for 3 full days of technical deep dives, battle-tested architectures and production insights in San Francisco, the heart of the AI world.

Visit us at https://www.datacouncil.ai/ for the latest updates or subscribe to the newsletter as we release more details about the 2026 event!

Alexis is the co-founder and CTO of Datadog, which was founded in NYC in 2010. He shares with the Pete the origin story of the company, how & why raising capital was very different in that period, and their thought process as engineer-founders in arriving at the right product to build for their customers.  We also chat a bit with Alexis about his angel investing activity and what types of founder characteristics he looks for in an ideal angel investment.

Highlights:
[2:10] - Alexis nurturing his earliest startup ideas alongside his day job
[4:50] - Datadog’s early funding experience in NYC, and their 20k “pre-seed” round
[9:45] - How did they discover the right product to build?
[15:15] - How should engineer-founders think about the skills they need to start a company?
[19:00] - what Alexis looks for in founders from an angel investing perspective

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Mark your calendars for May 12-14, 2026 and join us for Data Council AI, the technical conference built by engineers for engineers. It's the only event where you'll be able to connect with 2,000+ practitioners for 3 full days of technical deep dives, battle-tested architectures and production insights in San Francisco, the heart of the AI world.

Visit us at https://www.datacouncil.ai/ for the latest updates or subscribe to the newsletter as we release more details about the 2026 event!

Brad is a repeat founder and is currently the co-founder of Census, an SF company that syncs customer data to go-to-market tools. Brad shares his path from initially joining a startup as an engineer and continuing on to become a co-founder himself.

Highlights:
[1:20]: on choosing Ruby for early stage product hacking & data integration
[5:01]: Brad’s path from AWS engineer to startup engineer to becoming a founder himself
[7:44]: insights on how to listen to customers and figure out the right product to build
[11:10]: how they handled customer discovery w/ multiple co-founders
[13:25]: on moving from prototype to product
[17:10]: perspective on what Brad is excited to be building at Census
[22:05]: on developing founder instincts + team building

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Mark your calendars for May 12-14, 2026 and join us for Data Council AI, the technical conference built by engineers for engineers. It's the only event where you'll be able to connect with 2,000+ practitioners for 3 full days of technical deep dives, battle-tested architectures and production insights in San Francisco, the heart of the AI world.

Visit us at https://www.datacouncil.ai/ for the latest updates or subscribe to the newsletter as we release more details about the 2026 event!

Pete chats with Wes McKinney, the inspiration behind many popular OSS data & data science tools like pandas, Apache Arrow, Ibis and others. We learn from Wes' experience in starting businesses around OSS tooling, and hear his thoughts on monetization, ecosystem building and challenges in starting his companies as an engineer-founder.

Wes is currently the co-founder & CTO of Voltron Data, which is building accelerated computing technologies powered by Apache Arrow.

Highlights:
[0:50]: Wes’ thoughts on monetizing open source software (OSS)
[3:10]: Potential ways of turning a library/utility into a business
[4:53]: Example of DuckDB Labs + Motherduck partnership
[7:05]: Advice that Wes would give other engineer-founders
[11:00]: Working with design partners & early customers
[13:02]: Building relationships across the Arrow ecosystem
[14:45]: What’s the true value of OSS from Wes’ perspective
[17:03]: Wes’ advice on personal brand building as an engineer

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Mark your calendars for May 12-14, 2026 and join us for Data Council AI, the technical conference built by engineers for engineers. It's the only event where you'll be able to connect with 2,000+ practitioners for 3 full days of technical deep dives, battle-tested architectures and production insights in San Francisco, the heart of the AI world.

Visit us at https://www.datacouncil.ai/ for the latest updates or subscribe to the newsletter as we release more details about the 2026 event!

Join us for an interview with Max Beauchemin, the original creator of both Apache Superset and Apache Airflow and the founder and CEO of Preset, the company built around Apache Superset.

[1:37] Motivations for building Apache Superset 
[5:30] Open source project KPIs 
[7:19] Differences between Preset and Superset 
[11:18] Superset deployment methods 
[13:02] Superset metrics layer (dbt integration)
[14:33] Superset embedded use cases 

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Mark your calendars for May 12-14, 2026 and join us for Data Council AI, the technical conference built by engineers for engineers. It's the only event where you'll be able to connect with 2,000+ practitioners for 3 full days of technical deep dives, battle-tested architectures and production insights in San Francisco, the heart of the AI world.

Visit us at https://www.datacouncil.ai/ for the latest updates or subscribe to the newsletter as we release more details about the 2026 event!

Pete interviews Lindsay Pettingill, CEO & Founder of Iggy. Iggy allows users to quickly understand physical locations to make better investment and management decisions. Lindsay gives us an overview of Iggy, how working at Airbnb informed founding Iggy, what neighborhood data is, and what the long term vision for Iggy is. Check it out!

Highlights:
[1:20] What does Iggy do?
[5:20] How did your experience working at Airbnb inform founding Iggy?
[10:06] Neighborhood data 
[13:22] Iggy’s long term vision (Wikipedia for places)
[14:50] Insights for founders from a founder 

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Mark your calendars for May 12-14, 2026 and join us for Data Council AI, the technical conference built by engineers for engineers. It's the only event where you'll be able to connect with 2,000+ practitioners for 3 full days of technical deep dives, battle-tested architectures and production insights in San Francisco, the heart of the AI world.

Visit us at https://www.datacouncil.ai/ for the latest updates or subscribe to the newsletter as we release more details about the 2026 event!

Join us for an interview with Shinji Kim, the CEO and founder of Select Star. She walks us through the data catalog landscape, where Select Star sits within that, how the startup thinks about data integration, and lastly she outlines how the data governance ecosystem is changing. Check it out!

Highlights:
[0:45]: Starting a company as an engineer (Concord Systems)
[6:15]: The connection between Select Star and Concord Systems
[10:57]: Controlling the inception of data so we know what ends up in the data lake
[14:05]: Data catalog market landscape 
[17:55]: What Select Star does 
[20:03]: Select Star’s approach to data integration
[21:55]: How the data governance ecosystem is changing

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Mark your calendars for May 12-14, 2026 and join us for Data Council AI, the technical conference built by engineers for engineers. It's the only event where you'll be able to connect with 2,000+ practitioners for 3 full days of technical deep dives, battle-tested architectures and production insights in San Francisco, the heart of the AI world.

Visit us at https://www.datacouncil.ai/ for the latest updates or subscribe to the newsletter as we release more details about the 2026 event!

Join us for an interview with Joey Gonzalez, one of the founding members of the UC Berkeley RISE Lab and the founder of Aqueduct. Aqueduct is helping take data science into production systems. Listen to this episode to learn more!

Highlights:
[1:48] How Machine Learning Became Useful blog post
[5:04] Building and deploying predictive models 
[8:36] Learnings from Turi 
[10:55] Real time prediction at Apple
[13:19] Founding story of Aqueduct
[16:42] How is Aqueduct differentiated from other projects out there 
[17:47] What is the status of the Aqueduct open source project today?
[18:56] Where are ML systems headed?

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Mark your calendars for May 12-14, 2026 and join us for Data Council AI, the technical conference built by engineers for engineers. It's the only event where you'll be able to connect with 2,000+ practitioners for 3 full days of technical deep dives, battle-tested architectures and production insights in San Francisco, the heart of the AI world.

Visit us at https://www.datacouncil.ai/ for the latest updates or subscribe to the newsletter as we release more details about the 2026 event!