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 ...
Mar 31, 2021•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 epi...
Mar 24, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 enterprise...
Mar 17, 2021•58 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 Quiz...
Mar 10, 2021•59 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Mar 03, 2021•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast On this week’s episode of The Data Stack Show, Eric and Kostas are joined by Daniel Gremymell, head of data at Policygenius, Inc. Policygenius, an insurance marketplace, strives to make it easy for people to understand their options, compare quotes, and buy a policy all in one place with help from licensed experts. Highlights from this week’s episode include: What brought Daniel to Policygenius and how his background in industrial engineering and statistics impacts what he does (1:49) Policygeni...
Feb 24, 2021•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast On this week’s episode of The Data Stack Show, Kostas is joined by Willem Pienaar, tech lead at Tecton to discuss machine learning, features and feature stores. Highlights from this week’s episode include: Willem Pienaar's background in South Africa and southeast Asia and from Goject to Tecton (1:58) Tecton was founded by the builders of Uber's Michaelangelo (6:37) Defining features and their life cycles (10:05) Comparing a feature store to a database (16:40) Data architecture in a feature store...
Feb 17, 2021•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast On this week’s episode of The Data Stack Show, Eric is joined by Duc Haba, an AI researcher and enterprise mobility solution architect consultant who most recently did AI consulting work with Cognizant. Their discussion revolves around demystifying artificial intelligence and why so many people either fear AI or place too much trust in it. Duc talks about some of the AI projects he has worked on, some successes and some failures, and points to how the data biases that humans bring into the model...
Feb 10, 2021•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast On this week’s episode of The Data Stack Show, Kostas and Eric are joined by the risk data engineering manager at Intuit, Alex Lancaster. Alex has been with Intuit, known for its products like QuickBooks, TurboTax, Mint and more, for 15 years and was part of a recent massive and successful re-architecturing from on prem to cloud-based. Highlights from this week’s episode include: Alex and his role at Intuit (1:51) Data marts at Intuit (2:57) Revolutionary changes in the data engineering space in...
Feb 03, 2021•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast Season One of The Data Stack Show is in the books, and in this episode, Kostas and Eric take a look back at some of the biggest takeaways, trends, and topics from the season. With some great guests already set for season two, the next slate of episodes is shaping up to take an even deeper dive into the world of data and the people shaping it. Key points in the conversation include: Patterns with data warehouses and data lakes (3:38) Looking back at the people behind the data and their stories (8...
Jan 29, 2021•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast On this week’s episode of The Data Stack Show, Kostas and Eric are joined by the co-founders of Iteratively, CEO Patrick Thompson and CTO Ondrej Hrebicek. Iteratively helps companies know that their data can be trusted by helping capture clean, consistent product analytics. Today’s conversation digs into the behind the scenes of Iteratively and how trust in data can help accelerate the velocity of an organization. Highlights from this week’s episode include: Patrick and Ondrej’s background and t...
Jan 20, 2021•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week on The Data Stack Show, Kostas and Eric are joined by Arian Osman, a senior data scientist at Homesnap who is also nearing the end of his PhD in computational sciences and informatics and is the developer of an e-commerce clothing brand. Homesnap is designed for both homebuyers and agents to access data from the MLS (Multiple Listing Service), providing real-time, accurate information to all parties involved. Highlights from this week’s episode include: Arian’s background and an overvi...
Jan 13, 2021•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week on The Data Stack Show, Kostas and Eric are joined by Stephen Bailey, Director of Applied Data Science at Immuta. Immuta is a startup that focuses on enabling data teams to have really fast, efficient, and understandable access controls on their data. Highlights from this week’s episode include: The problem that Immuta solves (2:04) Stephen’s background researching how the brain works (4:56) Immuta’s stack (15:09) Leveraging metadata (18:02) The main use case for Immuta is simplifying ...
Jan 06, 2021•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week on The Data Stack Show, Kostas and Eric are joined by Jason Haupt, data science lead at Bind, a no-deductible health insurance company determined to give immediate answers and clear costs before point of care. Jason’s unique background of having a Ph.D. in particle physics and working at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN have informed the way he goes about approaching data at Bind. Highlights from this week’s episode include: Jason’s background in particle physics and his path to Bind ...
Dec 31, 2020•55 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week on The Data Stack Show, Kostas and Eric are joined by Ioannis Papapanagiotou, senior engineering manager at Netflix. Ioannis oversees Netflix’s data storage platform and its data integration platform. Their conversation highlighted the various responsibilities his lean teams have, utilizing open source technology and incorporating change data capture solutions. Key points in this week’s episode include: Ioannis’ background with academia and Netflix (4:42) Comparing the data storage and...
Dec 09, 2020•57 min•Transcript available on Metacast On this week’s episode of The Data Stack Show, Kostas and Eric finish part two of a conversation about Earnnest, a digital platform originally designed for facilitating real estate transactions. In the previous episode , they talked with the CTO and co-founder Daniel Jeffords, and in this week’s episode, they talked with the other co-founder, Andrew Elster, CIO and chief architect. Andrew describes more about Earnnest’s stack and their decision to utilize Elixir and talks about their vision for ...
Dec 03, 2020•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week on The Data Stack Show, Kostas and Eric are joined by Axel Delafosse, founder and CEO of Pool, a messaging app designed to help couples spend less time deciding what to do and spend more time together. Axel shares his story of how he went from having his idea being shot down in person by Paul Graham to being accepted for Y Combinator. While Pool is still a young startup, Axel offers wise insight from lessons he’s learned along the way. Highlights from this week’s episode include: Pool ...
Nov 19, 2020•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week on The Data Stack Show, Kostas and Eric chat with Daniel Jeffords, CTO and co-founder of Earnnest , a financial tool for the real estate industry. Earnnest’s digital platform allows buyers to securely and electronically deposit funds directly to an escrow holder and keeps agents, buyers, and escrow holders in the loop with automated emails and tracking information. Highlights from this week’s episode include: Earnnest’s approach to the way payments are handled in an antiquated real est...
Nov 11, 2020•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week on The Data Stack Show, Reza Shafii, vice president of products at Kong Inc . discusses open source projects and products with Kostas and Eric. Kong is a cloud connectivity company best known for being the creator and primary supporter of Kong, the most widely adopted open-source micro service API gateway. Highlights from this week’s episode include: Being a self-proclaimed middleware geek (2:17) Middleware explained (5:41) Kong as a company, open source project, and a brand (10:44) Dr...
Nov 06, 2020•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode of The Data Stack Show, hosts Kostas Pardalis and Eric Dodds talk with Nicholas Ziech-Lopez, director of product strategy at MessageGears. MessageGears is designed to reduce data friction for marketers by connecting directly to a brand’s data source and using their live data. This episode centered around the world of CDPs and where MessageGears fits in that space. Highlights from this week’s episode include: Nicholas’ arrival at MessageGears and the company’s background (2:20) Me...
Oct 28, 2020•56 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week’s episode of The Data Stack Show features a conversation with hosts Kostas Pardalis and Eric Dodds and guest Jack Naglieri, founder and CEO of Panther Labs. Panther, a San Francisco based startup, is an open platform that helps security teams detect and respond to breaches in cloud-native environments, providing a modern alternative to traditional SIEMs. Highlights from this week’s episode include: Introduction to Jack and Panther Labs (2:33) The different pillars of data security (10:...
Oct 21, 2020•59 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this week’s episode of The Data Stack Show, Kostas Pardalis and Eric Dodds are joined by CTO and Co-Founder of Holistics, Huy Nguyen. Holistics takes an approach to business intelligence and data analytics that they call DataOps. They focus on data team productivity and company-wide access to insights. Important points in the conversation included: Introduction to Huy and Holistics (3:12) Approaching BI with more than just visualization (8:59) How friction between different roles within an or...
Oct 14, 2020•56 min•Transcript available on Metacast On this week’s episode of The Data Stack Show, Kostas Pardalis and Eric Dodds are joined by Slapdash co-founder Ivan Kanevski. Slapdash describes itself as the operating system for work. Slapdash emphasizes reducing the time people spend controlling their computer in relation to the time they spend expressing their intent. Key topics discussed were: Starting Slapdash and expanding on tools from working at Facebook (3:31) Being client agnostic and working with the tools that people bring to the j...
Oct 07, 2020•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this week’s episode of The Data Stack Show, Kostas Pardalis and Eric Dodds chat with Mason Stewart, the lead engineer at Bookshop.org . Bookshop is an online bookstore with a mission to financially support local, independent bookstores. Their hope is to help strengthen the fragile ecosystem and margins around bookselling and keep local bookstores an integral part of our culture and communities. Among other topics, today’s conversation talked about making what some might call boring decisions ...
Sep 30, 2020•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this week’s episode of The Data Stack Show, Kostas Pardalis and Eric Dodds connect with IFTTT data scientist Peter Darche. IFTTT is a free platform that helps all your products and services work better together through automated tasks. Their discussion covered a lot of ground involving their data stack, their use cases and clearing up once and for all how to pronounce the company’s name. Background on IFTTT (2:12) Peter tells the proper way to pronounce IFTTT (3:34) An overview of IFTTT’s tec...
Sep 23, 2020•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week on The Data Stack Show, Kostas Pardalis and Eric Dodds continue their conversation about Ruby, a start-up designed to help families navigate their financial situation in some of life’s most challenging moments, by talking with the Nashville company’s CTO Sam Bledsoe. This follow-up discussion digs into how their data engineering and marketing setups co-exist and how they rely on Azure. Sam’s background and more info about Ruby (2:11) Privacy-related challenges at the intersection of ba...
Sep 16, 2020•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast On this week’s episode of The Data Stack Show, Kostas Pardalis and Eric Dodds are joined by Nic Discepoli for the first of two conversations about Ruby, a startup where he is the customer analytics lead. This Nashville-based company is designed to help families navigate their financial situation in some of life’s most challenging moments, often corresponding with a medical event. Their conversation included topics like: Launching Ruby and Nic’s involvement in the company (3:35) Realizing that tr...
Sep 09, 2020•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode of The Data Stack Show, Kostas Pardalis and Eric Dodds talk change data capture (CDC) with DeVaris Brown, co-founder and CEO of Meroxa. Their conversation digs into the benefits of utilizing CDC and how Meroxa is using it. Highlights from the conversation include: Introduction to DeVaris and Meroxa (3:24) Why CDC has more traction today (6:58) How CDC is changing the way we build products (12:52) Where CDC is playing an important role (21:11) The experience that Meroxa delivers (...
Sep 02, 2020•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this week’s episode of The Data Stack Show, Kostas Pardalis connects with Satyam Krishna, a data engineer at Grofers , India’s largest low-price online supermarket. Grofers boasts a network of more than 5,000 partner stores, a user base with three million iOS and Android app downloads, and an efficient supply chain that allow it to deliver more than 25 million products to customers every month. Satyam offers insights into how he helped build the data engineering function at Grofers, how they ...
Aug 27, 2020•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode, Kostas Pardalis sits down with Utkarsh Gupta, senior engineer of data science at 1mg, India’s largest online healthcare platform. Together they discussed 1mg’s data infrastructure, its response to the global pandemic and how data drives their product and their business. Highlights from the show included discussions about: Utkarsh and 1MG’s background (1:32) 1mg being based on a bedrock of data (4:25) Business analytics (5:33) Effects of COVID-19 pandemic on business (11:40) Desc...
Aug 19, 2020•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
