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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AI Council brings together the brightest minds in data to share industry knowledge, technical architectures and best practices in building cutting edge data & AI systems and tools.

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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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ABOUT AI COUNCIL:
AI Council brings together the brightest minds in data to share industry knowledge, technical architectures and best practices in building cutting edge data & AI systems and tools.

FIND US:
Website: https://aicouncil.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aicouncilconf/
X: https://x.com/aicouncilconf

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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ABOUT AI COUNCIL:
AI Council brings together the brightest minds in data to share industry knowledge, technical architectures and best practices in building cutting edge data & AI systems and tools.

FIND US:
Website: https://aicouncil.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aicouncilconf/
X: https://x.com/aicouncilconf

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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ABOUT AI COUNCIL:
AI Council brings together the brightest minds in data to share industry knowledge, technical architectures and best practices in building cutting edge data & AI systems and tools.

FIND US:
Website: https://aicouncil.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aicouncilconf/
X: https://x.com/aicouncilconf

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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ABOUT AI COUNCIL:
AI Council brings together the brightest minds in data to share industry knowledge, technical architectures and best practices in building cutting edge data & AI systems and tools.

FIND US:
Website: https://aicouncil.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aicouncilconf/
X: https://x.com/aicouncilconf

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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👉 Sign up for our "No BS" Newsletter to get the latest technical data & AI content: https://aicouncil.com/newsletter

ABOUT AI COUNCIL:
AI Council brings together the brightest minds in data to share industry knowledge, technical architectures and best practices in building cutting edge data & AI systems and tools.

FIND US:
Website: https://aicouncil.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aicouncilconf/
X: https://x.com/aicouncilconf

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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👉 Sign up for our "No BS" Newsletter to get the latest technical data & AI content: https://aicouncil.com/newsletter

ABOUT AI COUNCIL:
AI Council brings together the brightest minds in data to share industry knowledge, technical architectures and best practices in building cutting edge data & AI systems and tools.

FIND US:
Website: https://aicouncil.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aicouncilconf/
X: https://x.com/aicouncilconf

Shirshanka Das spent a decade leading data architecture at LinkedIn where he was the co-creator of DataHub, Apache Gobblin, Databus, Espresso and other high scale data infrastructure projects. Today he is the co-founder and CEO of Acryl Data, listen and learn what problems they are seeking to solve.

Highlights:
[1:10] Leaving LinkedIn and starting Acryl 
[4:33] Datahub growth 
[8:12] Where will the data catalog market segment be in 5 to 10 years?
[12:07] Unlimited context within the operating system 
[16:08] Organizations adopting the right thinking behind metadata 
[21:00] Is the data catalog a stand alone category of data infrastructure 10 years from now?

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👉 Sign up for our "No BS" Newsletter to get the latest technical data & AI content: https://aicouncil.com/newsletter

ABOUT AI COUNCIL:
AI Council brings together the brightest minds in data to share industry knowledge, technical architectures and best practices in building cutting edge data & AI systems and tools.

FIND US:
Website: https://aicouncil.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aicouncilconf/
X: https://x.com/aicouncilconf

Get an update from Nick Schrock on the dagster project. This episode discusses the world of data orchestration at large, when and how to implement dagster, and the broader competitive landscape.

Highlights:
[0:34] The Dagster project and the problems it solves
[3:05] Software defined assets and how they work 
[4:55] Example of how this can be implemented 
[6:30] Promotion of Dagster pipelines from development to production
[10:34] Dagster cloud overview 
[13:15] When to adopt a data orchestrator 
[14:23] Will data orchestration be subsumed into larger data platforms or remain standalone? 
[18:10] The competitive landscape of data orchestration

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👉 Sign up for our "No BS" Newsletter to get the latest technical data & AI content: https://aicouncil.com/newsletter

ABOUT AI COUNCIL:
AI Council brings together the brightest minds in data to share industry knowledge, technical architectures and best practices in building cutting edge data & AI systems and tools.

FIND US:
Website: https://aicouncil.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aicouncilconf/
X: https://x.com/aicouncilconf