Matthew Brandt didn't know analytics was a potential career option until he started managing websites with Google Analytics. Matthew is Canadian, spent most of his life in Switzerland, and went to high school in Japan. He attended the EHL hospitality school at Lausanne, and was part of the 70% who left the hospitality field after graduation to start his career in analytics. From data engineering to data architecture to reverse ETL, Matthew has done and seen it all. To merge his love for hospitality and technology, Matthew founded a food tech startup based in Zurich. In this episode, you'll hear about Matthew's wide-ranging experience including livestreaming about analytics on Twitch, working at a fintech SaaS company, and co-founding a food-sharing startup. Predicting customer churn at a fintech SaaS company Before Matthew entered the world of livestreaming, he had a "normal" job working for a SaaS company. The company provides account software for small businesses in Switzerland. Swiss tax law is very complicated so this company helps businesses with getting all this back office tax stuff figured out. Matthew was originally hired as a marketing analyst. Out of 40 people in marketing, Matthew was the only one actively working with data. Originally, he was cleaning up data, auditing data, figuring out business workflows, and understanding relationships between entities. A jack of all trades. The company wanted to reduce churn but didn't have the technical infrastructure to get there. Matthew introduced Salesforce and the ETL model to the company to create a clean set of tables and schemas. He ended up using machine learning to produce different outcomes so that the company knew which parts of their operation to fine tune and optimize. The model would help them identify which customers are most likely to churn. For instance, customer who hadn't logged in in a long time were most likely going to churn. This was an interesting behavioral exercise since the customer already made the psychological decision to cancel. But we were able to identify these customers before they made that decision. Keeping a foot in the analytics world with conferences and livestreaming While Matthew's full-time job is working on a food tech startup (more on this later), he still keeps a foot in the analytics world. He runs AnalyticsCamp, for instance. AnalyticsCamp is an "unconference" focused on data analytics, data visualization, business intelligence, and UX research. If you are based in Switzerland, this might be the perfect conference for you to attend if you're in the data analytics field. What's more interesting are Matthew's forays into the livestreaming space. I've never met someone who is providing education and creating a community around data analytics through Twitch. During the pandemic, Twitch grew by 82% in terms of hours watched. Like many people stuck at home, Matthew went onto Twitch and started watching music, science, and technology streams. He discovered that many people were developers and many people were doing live coding streams. Something about teaching analytics on Twitch interested Matthew, so he thought he'd give it a shot. He discovered it had to be edu-tainment. I jumped on one of Matthew's livestreams and it's just as Matthew said: it's a mix of learning and entertainment. I think this might be the first time I've mentioned a Twitch livestream as a way to learn about analytics and tech: a href="https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1624169656?