Benn Stancil, CAO and Founder of Mode, is no stranger to The Sequel Show. He delivered some hot takes during his first appearance back in November of 2021, featuring an epic debate about how far analysts should be willing to go to persuade an executive. So, we thought we’d bring him back to wrap up the 2022 season with a spicy final episode. As you’d expect, if you listened to Benn’s first TSS episode, we’re continuing the streak with more controversial opinions. And it all started with a...

You’re in for a very special episode of The Sequel Show this week: This is the first-ever in-person recording in its history. Cyril Marques, Founder and CEO of Montreal Analytics, joined me at our headquarters in SF to talk all about the importance of investing in data (and, of course, he brought some swag with him). For those of you who might not be familiar, Montreal Analytics is a full-stack data consultancy that helps clients build a single source of truth for their analytics. After...

It’s always fun to reflect on how far we’ve come since the beginning – especially when it comes to sales, sports, and, of course, Census. Joining me on this journey is Peter Kazanjy, one of Census’s first customers! He also happens to be the co-founder and CRO of Atrium, a data-driven sales management software that helps sales managers use data to improve team performance. In this episode, Peter and I chat about how the sales industry has evolved with the increasing availability of data and...

What career path do you go down when blood churns your stomach? Data, of course. That’s where this week’s episode with data consultant and advisor, Sarah Krasnik, started: discussing how her exposure to cognitive science at John’s Hopkins (paired with a squeamishness for blood) left her looking for another way to influence people’s perception of the world with logic and information. So, she pursued data science. Leading a data engineering team at PerPay – an all-in-one FinTech app providing...

In this never-been-done-in-the-history-of-The-Sequel-Show episode, we’re bringing you a live recording from our data community event, Summer Community Days. In case you missed it, Summer Community Days was our two-day, free, virtual & practitioner-first conference that presented community expert sessions, keynotes, data hackathons, and local IRL happy hours in major US cities. This episode, featuring Emily Hawkins, was the keynote session kicking off the conference. As the data...

We’re taking data down a different path than usual this week on The Sequel Show. For EP 25, I spoke with Jessica Zhang, data scientist at Notion, a collaboration software hub for users to write, plan, and get organized. Although Jessica started with an “on-the-fly” decision to join a financial institution after college, it allowed her to learn all the data analysis bells and whistles and taught her how to connect the dots in large corporations. Of course, she evolved as the economy evolved,...

This week’s episode is a great one if you feel like you could use some guidance in your data career. For EP 24, I chatted with Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO of Brooklyn Data Co., a data and analytics consultancy that helps your team build a full modern data stack specific to your needs. While Scott might be deemed “unhireable”, the skills he gained during his early years of management consulting experience (conducting quantitative analysis, structuring unstructured problems, and...

This week’s episode is a great one if you or your team is focused on hiring data practitioners this year (like most teams). For EP 23, I had the chance to sit down with David Corea, senior analytics manager at CoderPad, a technical assessment software aimed at improving how we interview technical candidates. While CoderPad isn’t specific to interviewing data practitioners, it’s a great example of one of the many ways the data industry can learn from the best practices of the software...

This week’s episode is with one of my favorite data experts and thought leaders in the industry and I’m so excited to release it to you all. For EP 22, I sat down with none other than Tristan Handy, CEO and founder of dbt Labs. If you’re a dbt user (or a member of their massive online community), you probably know of Tristan, especially if you’re also subscribed to his newsletter, The Analytics Engineering Roundup (co-written by the also-awesome Anna Filippova). In the episode, we take a...

This week I’m joined by none other than Barr Moses, Co-founder and CEO of Monte Carlo Data and all around awesome data thought leader. Our conversation centered around how to ensure data teams focus on the right systems and goals and don’t waste time hyper-focusing on the wrong metrics. This is a great episode for data leaders and data ICs alike who want to get more out of their work and increase their impact.

This week I'm joined by Jessica Cherny, senior data analyst at Ironclad. Jessica is an amazing example of how to foster a genuine presence on the internet while building a career in data, and her episode is great one for folks looking to get into data or those who are at the beginning of their data careers. We touched on a lot of an interesting highlights from Jessica's education, career, and day-to-day data work, including how (and why) she joined Ironclad as a data team of one, why she...

This week I’m joined by one of my favorite data leaders, Egor Gryaznov, the co-founder and CTO of data observability company Bigeye. The thread that connected our conversation this episode was what it means to work with a "keeping the lights on" perspective in data, but we touched on a lot of great material, including Egor's time at Uber, how his first company convinced him to join their data team, how we can leverage computer engineering principles in data (and beyond), data warehouse...

In this week's episode, I sat down (virtually) with Marc Stone, head of the analytics team at ClickUp. Marc truly understands the challenges of going from being the only person working on data to running a very large data team and we tapped into his experience to extract some awesome lessons from his career. Some of the high points include topics like what private companies can learn from governments and nonprofits, how to think about data pipelines (especially when there's a human in the...

In this week's episode, I sat down (virtually) with Marc Stone, head of the analytics team at ClickUp. Marc truly understands the challenges of going from being the only person working on data to running a very large data team and we tapped into his experience to extract some awesome lessons from his career. Some of the high points include topics like what private companies can learn from governments and nonprofits, how to think about data pipelines (especially when there's a human in the...

Before we get into the episode notes, I want to take a beat to thank all of you for supporting the Show over the last year. It's been amazing watching it go from a fun way to connect with some of my favorite folks in data to a full, polished podcast (featuring even more awesome people). We couldn't do it without you and I'm looking forward to giving the best and brightest of our industry the stage in the coming year.  To kick things off with season 2, we have a great episode with Jeremiah...

In today’s episode, I talk with Erik Bernhardsson, the former CTO at Better.com and early engineering manager at Spotify. We talked about how to build recommendation systems (including whether you should build them at all). We also covered some best practices on building and scaling data teams, what the essence of music is, and whether data teams should be thought of as an engineering discipline (and what programming languages we should embrace in the data world). We also took a deep dive...

In today’s episode, I talk with Benn Stancil, chief analytics officer & co-founder at Mode. Honestly, this might be my favorite episode of the Show to date. We had a hearty discussion about data teams and Benn's perspective as someone who started his career as an analyst with an economics degree. Our conversation turned to more philosophical notes around what makes a data professional persuasive (and why that matters), why being wrong is OK (and sometimes a pivotal part of a successful...

In today’s episode, I talk with Lior Gavish, the co-founder and CTO of Monte Carlo. We talk about his security background, his previous company Sookasa, and the origin story of Monte Carlo, and much more (including the infamous data mesh). We also get into managing and detecting operational issues, what data managers should learn before installing alarms, and what it means to think with a “failure is a feature, not a bug” mindset. Bonus: If you’ve ever wondered if it’s better to be wrong...

Well, Sequel Show fans, we officially have some amazing theme music. Huge thanks to the talented Joe Stevens for our new theme song that makes all my synth-wave dreams come true.  In today’s episode, I talk with Stefania Olafsdottir, the co-founder and CEO of product analytics platform Avo. We covered an amusing amount of ground--as always in The Sequel Show--from the etymology of cow vs beef to the visualization of weather data. The meat of the show focuses on Stef’s early background as an...

In our latest episode, analytics engineer and community builder extraordinaire Claire Carroll sat down with us to talk about her journey from data analyst to analytics engineer to co-founder of analyticsengineers.club, an educational community for aspiring AEs. We cover a lot of ground, discussing her data-industry origin story, the fundamentals the next generation of AE should have in their toolkit, and the goals of her new training course. More broadly, Claire breaks down the gaps in the...

In this live episode with Snowplow CEO and Co-founder Alex Dean, we dive into all things Snowplow and data collection. Alex runs us through the history of Snowplow--how the company was born and how it evolved--as well as what parts of the platform have grown in complexity. We break down what it means to think about events in a mind-frame of abundance vs scarcity, how to adapt to ever-changing regulations around privacy, and data architecture and infrastructure best practices. Alex rounds the...

In this live recording, I'm joined by Nick Schrock, the creator of Dagster.

In April 2021, we hosted our first Operational Analytics Conference on Clubhouse. This is the full recording of the first session talking about the next General of Data Tool with this panel Boris Jabes - Founder & CEO at Census Christophe Bogaert - head of data platform at Tasman Analytics Scott Breitenother - Founder of Brooklyn Data Co. (and the first data hire at Casper) Emily Hawkins - data infrastructure lead at Drizly Zeeshan Qureshi-  tech lead & engineering manager...

In April 2021, we hosted our first Operational Analytics Conference on Clubhouse. This is the full recording of the fith session talking about the next data in product management with the following panel: Boris Jabes - Founder & CEO at Census Jeff Feng - a PM at Google Adam Kinney - principal PM at Mixpanel James Mayfield - co-founder of Transform Lauren Reeder - product lead at Segment Don't have time to listen to the whole session? you can get the best sound bit on...