The Data Stack Show - 187: Startup Lessons and Torch Passing with Kostas Pardalis

Episode Date: May 1, 2024

Highlights from this week’s conversation include:Kostas Passes the Baton as Co-Host of the Podcast (0:24)Reflecting on the Podcast (2:56)New Co-Host John Wessel and His Background in Data (4:34)Kostas Journey in Data (10:55)Rudderstack's Explosive Growth (21:28)The Podcast's Inception and Marketing Activities (24:19)Evolution of the podcast (27:22)Memorable guests and experiences (28:29)Connecting with industry leaders and key innovators in the space (33:05)Kostas' new venture (36:26)Advice for the new co-host (42:17)Final Thoughts and Takeaways (44:47)The Data Stack Show is a weekly podcast powered by RudderStack, the CDP for developers. Each week we’ll talk to data engineers, analysts, and data scientists about their experience around building and maintaining data infrastructure, delivering data and data products, and driving better outcomes across their businesses with data.RudderStack helps businesses make the most out of their customer data while ensuring data privacy and security. To learn more about RudderStack visit rudderstack.com.

Hey, Data Stack Show listeners. We were so excited that we got to meet a few of you live in San Francisco at Ruddersack's Data Modeling Workshop around identity resolution. And we have another one of those events coming up in London. It's on May 15th, and we would love to see you there if you're in London or close by. The workshops are great. It's super fun. We'll have some snacks and drinks afterwards, and you'll get to meet not only other like-minded data people, but also potentially a few show listeners. So you can register at rudderstack.com slash events. See you in London in a few days. Welcome to the Data Stack Show.

Each week, we explore the world of data by talking to the people shaping its future. You'll learn about new data technology and trends and how data teams and processes are run at top companies. The Data Stack Show is brought to you by Rudderstack, the CDP for developers. You can learn more at Rudderstack.com. All right. Welcome to the Data Stack Show. We're here today with Kostas. Welcome back to the show. I think I can say that.

We're thrilled to have you on. And tell us a little bit about your background and how you've come on the show today. Yeah, thank you so much. It's a very unique experience for me to be honest. My first time as the guest of a show. I've been so far one of the hosts. So I'm thrilled. I don't know how it will go, but we have a lot of things to talk about the show itself. Hopefully we'll come up with some very funny moments of like what happened in the past three years here with the whole team. Reveal a little bit about what it takes to produce a show. Talk about the value, why people do that that i think it's one of the things i haven't really

talked that much me and eric like why we kept doing this and we'll see we'll improvise a little bit i think it's going to be fine it's going to be different but it's going to be a lot of fun yeah maybe some behind the scenes takes. Be fantastic. You didn't even talk about what you've learned after three years of interviewing all sorts of data professionals, Kostas. Or maybe you don't want to talk about that. Is that too difficult?

Emotionally. No. Spending so much time with one of the best go-to-market persons that I know. That's you, Eric. I don't want to produce an episode where people will just listen to that episode and will learn everything. The best thing they can do is go through all of the 300 episodes.

Oh, that's true. There's so much knowledge in there. And fun also. It's so much knowledge in there. I don't want... And fun also. It's not just knowledge, right? I don't like to ruin that experience. So I'll share a little bit, but I'll keep it more on the teaser level.

I'm sorry, my beloved audience. I'll torture you a little bit, but trust me, it's for your own good. Now that is a master of marketing, right? Learn from the best. All right. Well, let's dig in and reflect on a couple of years of doing the Data Sack Show. Let's do it. All right. So this is probably one of the most unique episodes of the show. In the intro, listeners, you probably heard a new voice. You probably noticed that Costas is the guest.

So we owe you an explanation. Costas is actually moving on from being a host of the Data Sack Show, which is very bittersweet. But he's going to tell us more about his next adventure and then my good friend john wessel is jumping in as a co-host so i guess actually this is weird because i have to say welcome to both of you castus welcome to the show as a guest i think for the first time is this your first time as a guest on the show? I mean, yeah, like on this show.

And in general, I don't think I've ever been like a guest at a podcast show before. No way. This is literally your first time being a guest on any podcast. Yeah. And it's your own podcast. Yeah. I've been only a host so far. Now I'm the guest.

Wow. Excuse any mistakes, people. I'll try to be at least as good as all the guests we had so far and keep you entertained and hopefully help you learn a few things. But we'll see. Yeah, that's my first time. Yep. All right.

Well, welcome. You're doing great so far in front of the mic. And John, welcome to you and welcome as a co-host. Yeah, I'm excited to be here. Okay, well, let's actually, John, let's start with you. So we need to do a little bit of background for both of you. So John, tell us about your background and how did you even end up getting on the radar of the show and becoming the co-host? Yeah, so Eric and I actually worked together previously. I was working for an e-commerce company. Eric was working as a consultant for us. And we found RudderStack through Eric in the very early open source days. So I believe, Eric, correct me if I'm wrong,

I think that company's still the longest running production instance. Do we still hold that record? Yes, it is the longest running production instance. And in fact, okay, to tie this together full circle, Kostas, you had started at RudderStack around that same time and were running product at RudderStack around the same time, very early days. Okay. And the instance is still there running? Yeah.

So this is your handiwork, Kostas. The product work that you did is still there running. Yeah. So this is your handiwork, Kostas. The product work that you did is still bearing fruit. That's awesome to hear. I mean, there's... I think like outside of... I think like people might hear more of

my relationship with Rutherstack because of like this show. But yeah, like there's a lot of learning and like very unique experiences that I had at Rutherstack, primarily because, like, literally, I was there, like, from, like, the beginning. And it's always amazing for anyone who has ever, like, built something, when, like, after

a couple of years, like, you meet with people and they tell you oh, you know, keep using that or we use that. And that's something that I hear also from users of RouterStack. I even hear from people like Blendo, my first

company when I started. It's one of these things that you don't really think when you start a company or doing a startup in general, but it's very surprising and very rewarding. So it's always great to see that the stuff

that you build actually, they're still out there and they create something even if you are not around anymore so that's great yeah total so we met a long time ago you kind of met costas you know by prophecy yeah i mean i was eric i was reflecting on that and i still i remember this moment when we're first setting it up i was in discord you know you had a discord group back in the day and i'm just thinking if maybe costas would have been

in that same group and i remember i was working out like nine or ten o'clock at night and and then sumi dev you know your ceo was in there chatting away helping people in the discord group at night. So I went back and I actually, I did find that like, oh yeah, I did chat with them directly during the setup in the early days. So that, yeah, that was pretty cool. But yeah, Costas, you may have been in that same group as well. Oh yeah, I remember the Discord. I remember also doing the migration to Slack, which was like a big decision back then, because it's...

Were you there, Eric, when we did the migration? What happened before you came? No, we ran... Well, you know, here's startup lore for you. We ran both of them for a while. Do you remember that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember that.

So you were... Okay. You were here when we started the migration. But it's... Yeah, it remember that. So you were, okay, you were talking about when you started the migration, but it's interesting how the size of the problems are different between different states of the companies, but they always feel the same as how big they are. I'm sure if you reflect now on the decision of migrating

or even destroying a community and restarting it in another medium, now you'll say sure, whatever. It was a couple hundred people, nothing crazy compared to what it's now.

Back then it was like, oh wow, can we afford to lose this crazy community? Would we ever consider putting our IPO at risk by impacting 23 active users out of 117 totally? It's interesting, yeah. Yeah. 23 active users out of, you know, 117 totally. It's interesting. Yeah. Okay. So, John, give us the brief. So fast forward from there and give us the path from, you know, implementing data infrastructure at that e-commerce company to today.

Yeah. So I guess it's been about a year now. So started out doing consulting, mainly focused on Snowflake and Snowflake implementations. And then especially, you know, for my time working out to you and said, hey, we have this podcast. You should be my new partner in crime. So very excited to have you on the team. Yep. Good to be here. All right, Costas.

How do we even do a background? Like, have you ever given your background on the show? I guess that's kind of a weird thing to do at the end, but. I don't know. I don't remember. Probably maybe fragments of it, because of like the... Right. You have to go back and listen. That was what you were saying in the intro.

Yeah, of course. Like, no matter what I say today, like, there's some, you know, like, hidden gems that you have, like, to go and discover. They will probably change your life to the better. You should definitely do that. But yeah, I can give my background. So, oh my God, where to start from? So I usually start from like 2014.

That's when I started like my first company, Blendl. But okay, obviously I was doing like things before that too. So I've been like my whole life into technology one way or another like like grew up with computers like from the 80s to like the 90s where the internet came to greece where i'm originally from i remember like my first... Actually, I was connecting... So the first time that I connected to a network, we didn't have access to the internet in Greece. So it was just like local BBSs. And at some point, they brought the connection and the whole country had one IP. Actually, not the whole country. The whole provider, the ISP that I was connecting through had like one IP, right?

Back then we're like, okay, the World Wide Web was like very new. There were like stuff like Gopher that like some people might have not even like heard about. So I've seen technology like was always like a big part of my life. Always like I studied computer engineering and software engineering, computer science. And then at some point was trying like to figure out what I want to do because I was always between, I want to do a PhD, but don't want to do a PhD. So I was always like for a couple of years, I was kind of like working and doing like

some research at the university in Greece and at the same time like working as a software engineer. And then in 2013, I was like, okay, I'll start a company, I'll do a startup. Didn't have a lot of context around that stuff. Actually pretty much zero. Also Greece is not exactly like the place back then to find people to talk about these things. But anyway, we decided to do it. So we started at the beginning, trying to figure out what to build.

We were trying to build a product around some kind of proxy over REST APIs. So it was like a developer tool. We had like a first version of it. We had zero idea how to take this to market. So it was like brutal. We literally had like, we didn't know what we were doing outside of like writing software.

And then at some point, because we left our jobs, started like looking for some funding, super hard to find funding in Greece. By the way, at that time, we entered the peak of the financial crisis in Greece. So even if there was funding, let's say it was even harder to find capital. That's where we decided decided and we got an opportunity to relocate to Israel, Tel Aviv. So we moved there.

I lived there for a year. That was probably one of the decisions that I don't think I can communicate how transformative it was for me and how much it changed my life. It was... I don't know.

Outside of what happened with the company, I think like on a personal level also was like, like crazy transformation, like getting out there in the world and seeing like how the world like operates and how small you are, but like insignificant, but at the same time, like how much opportunities you have, like to do something if you persist. That was like something that's, it's like kind of a gift that I got from like moving there. And that's where that idea that we had back then turned into like what Blender became. So we got access to people that were primarily like building companies here in the valley.

Started like doing like some discovery with them. And we realized that, oh, like, you know what? Like APIs are cool, but like people don't care that much about integrating with APIs. What they care more is like how to get access to the data behind the APIs. That was like a big problem back then. And that's how we decided to start building some kind of ETL platform, but focusing on pulling data out of web services. Back then, I had no idea that we were actually kind of defining a new category. Not only us,

obviously, because at that time, it pretty much started around the same time with Fivetran and StanceData. But it was the beginning of the category creation. Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It wasn't a thing back then to use a SaaS service to go and do what was called, after a couple of years, ELT? And I remember back then we started the big innovation that drove all these things was also Redshift. Redshift was, let's say, the first, in a way, cloud data warehouse that allowed companies of any size, or almost any size size to start getting access to something that before that it was

primarily Fortune 500 type of companies that had access to. Yep. And that's how like the story with Blender started. Went back, returned back to Greece at some point, kept like growing the business, trying to fake really hard that we are a Silicon Valley company, although we were in Greece. And that took me to 2019, when I started looking for opportunities to bring the business here in the valley,

because we couldn't grow anymore from Greece. And that's where I got to the next part in my story, which is Rutherstack. So there were like a couple of different opportunities of like how we could keep like moving forward with Blendo. One of them was to merge with Rutherstack. And that's what happened. We joined the Rutherstack team. I came here. I moved here in the Bay Area in 2020, beginning of 2020. Joined the team there at, like, it was like a very early stage.

It was, so the team in the Bay was Somerde, the CEO. Brett, I think, had joined about a week before I came. And then I came. So it was like pretty much like the three of us outside of the engineering team. You, Eric, came like a little bit later.

And then with RadarStack, I wasn't the founder, obviously, but like I came with a very founder mentality and I wasn't the founder, obviously, but I came with a very founder mentality and I don't know, for me, Rutherstack kind of feels like the second company that kind of started and it's always had a very special place in my heart, both because of the things that I've learned, but most importantly, about the people that I had the opportunity to work with.

Some of these people are here in the show too. Go ahead. Yeah, I was going to ask, what are some of your early days memories? So, you know, startups are pretty crazy in the beginning, but what are some maybe good or even some close call type memories from the early days when you were with the team? With RadarStack or with Blender?

Yeah, with RadarStack. Either, either. I was thinking RadarStack, but either. Yeah, whichever comes to mind. Yeah, the thing, I mean, Routerstack and Blender are like two very different experiences. Because the problems that

we were facing or I was facing, let's say, were like completely different. So one of the things that I've learned by doing Routerstack after Blender was how different a playbook and an experience is like to build the company that enters like an existing market because Rutherstack was doing that

and starting a company that is like actually in the category creation phase and both have their own like pros and cons right it's not like oh my god like category creation is. And both have their own pros and cons, right? It's not like, oh my God, category creation is so hard. It is hard, but it also has the luxury of less pressure in a way. Because actually, the fact that the market has no idea what you are doing is kind of like the great equalizer. And that's what actually allowed us at the end to do something with Blender, right? Because we had zero chances of competing with the companies here in the market otherwise. But it didn't matter that the companies were here in the Valley because the markets were like,

we don't care. We don't know what we are talking about. Fivetran, if you talk with them, they will tell you. They reached the point of almost shutting down the company at least once. So it doesn't really matter how much money you have at that stage. It's a very slow process where the market needs to be educated. And that allowed us, although being so far away and with much less resources, to actually survive

for that long and create team bucks. As I said, I talk with people and they say, oh, Blender. Yeah, I use that. When I was also trying 5G, I was evaluating that product too. That obviously changed after, let's say, we crossed the chasm,

as they say here, like the Stanford MBAs. After that happened and the market was like, oh yeah, this is something that we need, being here in the Valley actually was like a huge, almost like a moat if you were competing from outside the valley. Now, with Rutherstack, I experienced almost the opposite experience in the sense of with category creation, you have a very slow, lengthy growth. But with Rutherstack, it was explosive. The growth that I've seen the company

in these two and a half years that I stayed there was mind-blowing. It was like, wow, what is that? Better for Somerdev to share the numbers and all that stuff. But it was insane. It wasn't an accident that the company... Because when I joined at the pre-seed stage and when I left was just a little bit after we raised our Series B. And we went from that to Series B in almost two years. Which is a good proxy to tell what kind of growth

we were experiencing with RadarStack. The other thing with Rutherstack that I would say that was like a crazy lesson for me is that how things are cyclical in general because you see

Rutherstack was entering an existing market. You can call it like CDP, you can call it whatever you want, doesn't really matter. But the fact that you are entering an existing market doesn't mean that there's no opportunity to go and build like something like really big

and almost starting like a new category or subcategory, let's say. Because what happens with RadarStack is that you had segments that had defined the category, let's say. But segments, in a way, was like kind of early. And they built everything around like the concept of SaaS, right? But the timing was great for Rutherstack because Rutherstack came at the turning point like in the markets where the data teams came in

and they were like, hey, like this data cannot live only like on downstream applications like Google Analytics or Marketo or like Salesforce. We need to have this data also on our data lake or our data warehouse. And actually, we need to own that. But now we have a different persona that needs to operate that. So you pretty much need a new category of product to go and serve the market. So that's what I really appreciate as a learning from being there with RadarStack and experiencing that.

And it's like a huge contrast to what Blendo experience was. Yeah, that's really interesting. So tell us some about the podcast. Maybe think back on the early days of the podcast. Think about some of your favorite guests. What are some memories that come from the podcast? Yeah, so the podcast came in... Actually, it was an idea of... Like, it was it was an idea of

like it was some of this idea like the CEO for other stack was like I didn't know that yeah it was his you always said it was your idea no I never said that I know I just

I don't know it was here's what happened No, I never saw that. I know. I just bring you up. I don't know. No, it was... You invited... It was... Here's what happened. Like, okay, we were talking about what we can do at Rutherstack, like, for, like, go-to-market and, like, marketing activities, right? So, okay, like, everyone was throwing ideas out there.

Actually, the podcast was... Before the podcast ended. After starting the podcast, we were doing webinars. I have some interesting stories to tell about that. But the thing with the podcast was that it was brought as an idea, but no one was very excited to be the host. So, like, okay, I'll give it a try. So, like, why not?

I mean... And I started looking how to do it. I got so overwhelmed by, like, trying, like, to figure out the production, how you publish these things, how you edit audio, how you record it. It was like, oh my God. I remember I was one of these platforms that you find

freelancers to help with that stuff. And I was going through conversations. I was completely lost. I was like, help with that stuff. And I was going through conversations where I was completely lost. I was like, okay, that's... The ecosystem was way worse back then. There's a lot more tooling around it even over the last couple of years. Back then, it was even more primitive.

Yeah, 100%. But at the same time, keep in mind that podcasts, I was exposed to the podcast as a platform when I came here in the States. I never had experience with podcasts before. Even now, I think now is probably podcasts have started getting traction in Greece. I don't know about the rest of Europe, but at least in Greece now, you start seeing people doing podcasts and people listening to podcasts. So it was a very new platform for me.

I wasn't really listening to podcasts. I had an idea of what it is, but I wasn't really into it. And that's where Eric came at some point and pretty much saved me because he helped, like, find the first agency. I mean, we still have, I think, the same agency that took care of, like, all the production stuff. Which was, like, okay,, like it's very important. And I think I've done, I don't know, like a couple, I don't know, five, less than 10 probably episodes on my own before I asked like Eric, if he wants to join us as a co-host

and the rest is kind of history. I mean, we... Since then, like, we kept doing it together. And we've reached how many episodes now? Like, it's probably close to 300, maybe? Hmm. No, I think it's 200. 200? Okay. But we've never missed a single week.

We have never missed a single week. We have never missed a single week. A hundred percent. Just books just messaged us. But we've never missed like a single week, which is, for me, that's amazing. Yeah. What are some of your memories too? Yeah, go ahead.

But Eric, fill in for some of your memories too after Costas. Okay, for me, the podcast was and still is like an amazing tool for learning and connecting with people as a host. I had the opportunity to meet with literally some really smart and accomplished people because of the podcast. And not just connect with them, but also engage in very, I don't know, rewarding conversations with them. I don't know what the audience thinks about the format that we have but like pretty much the format of this podcast is just me and eric and our curiosity there's no script we don't have we don't have like an agenda before we start like the episode yeah we do like

a little bit of like a conversation with the guest just before we start recording of like okay what the direction should be and like put some like guardrails and not being like completely you know like random in our conversation but in general the the conversation is like very organic and it's driven by like it's what I would probably, not probably, like, what I would have as a conversation if I was having a coffee with that person. Right? And actually, at the beginning, we had questions. I remember, like, I was doing that, like, even, like, the first, especially, like, the first episodes where I was doing it on my own. I would have, like, questions.

It was really hard for me, like, to go, like, first of all, of all, it felt very fake in a way, because I would ask a question, but the way that the answer was coming, then the next question didn't fit that well. It was weird. Then at some point, it was really hard for my brain to follow that. So I was like, I don't know. I think it's better to just not have a script and not have questions and just chat and see what we can take out of this. And that's how it happened. I don't know if I can tell one specific guest or episode that's... I think all of them are in a way special to me.

I think I would make a... I don't know. It would be unfair to say that that's my best episode or something like this. Yeah. Because at the end, it's all about like the interaction with the people and like the process and that's the, let's say the how the formats evolve. To the point actually, like that's like an interesting, like when we did our first, that was last year, at Data Council.

So I was there with Brooks and we were doing some like live kind of interviews with like people. I was literally going outside and grabbing people and bringing them in. I was like, hey, let's come in and chat. You know, like I've heard something interesting or it seems that you're working on something interesting or I just want to connect with you come in and like we can you know like chat and I think that's the essence of this so I know Eric if you disagree but yeah I think you know we've kind of said it a little bit tongue-in-che years, but we've told guests that in some ways the show is a chance. It's been a chance for us to satisfy our curiosity. Yeah. if we've ever really mentioned this on the show, but in some ways, it's just reflective of the conversations

that we've already had, to your point, but just between us, right, or between, like, a small group of people, because we are super interested in, you know, data technology and the process of taking that technology to market, the people behind it. I mean, we talked about that stuff

before we started the show. We talk about that stuff outside of the show, not just with people on the show. So yeah, I agree with that. It really is just in many ways kind of recording conversations that we would already have with the added benefit of getting these amazing people involved in the conversation, which is kind of crazy to think about. You know, John, you were, you asked about some memories and like Costas, I mean, over almost 200 shows, it's hard to pick the specific ones. But, you know, I think one of the things that I think about a lot with the show is how thankful I am that we've had the opportunity to connect with who in the data

world would be considered legendary, right? I mean, you're talking about people who have invented industry-defining technologies that are used to deliver experiences to billions of people around the entire world. And that is just incredible. If you had told me at the beginning of the show, when we started doing this, when we had no idea what we were doing, that we were going to be able to do that have it would have seemed so aspirational and so far away and we get to talk to those people all the time now which is just really cool but i think the other thing that's been the other thing that's been really cool to see is that and this sounds so basic but those people are just they're still still people, you know, like, yeah, they have thoughts and

opinions and emotions and, you know, they, they've done some really cool things, but it's, you know, they're, they're still just people at the end of the day and they have their own story. And I think that's the other thing that I've really, you know, that I've really appreciated about the show is that we get to meet these people and not just talk about yeah the thing that they're most famous for that there's a wikipedia article about yeah yeah 100 and i think like the you hear stories that are like wow i mean like it's like life journeys that are so unique and it's a big part of the value that we as hosts like are getting like from connecting with these people and using the show as a medium like to do that.

So yeah, that's and, and you have the opportunity to spend enough time like with them but i think that's like the beauty of like the podcast like the podcast as a platform right like you have you spend enough time with them like to connect it's not just like hey like let me take an interview where i send you a couple of questions and you send back. It's much more of a human connection that's happening. That's how you see people that came back more than once to the show. It's not that we were doing that because we're like, oh, that's something that's going to increase our numbers or whatever. It was primarily driven by the joy of connecting with these people and the feeling of a need to continue connecting and using the platform to do that.

Yep. Okay, Costas, we're close to the buzzer here. But John and I need to know, you know, you have a lot going on, which is, you know, squeezing your time, which means that, you know, you need to move on from being a host of the show. But what's taking up all your time are you retired and you're just playing a lot of golf are you yeah i haven't learned golf yet if anyone

wants like to volunteer like to teach me i hear it doesn't take that much time to yes to you know what I tried I tried once and actually I was impressed of like how much more difficult it is than it seems like when you watch someone on TV yeah like it's kind of crazy like the kind of coordination that you

need like on your body or I don't have any coordination on my body. That's probably also true. So yeah, if anyone wants to teach me, happy to spend some time. Those of you in the Bay Area with a golf membership, please reach out to Costas. Yeah, I'm available for that.

But no, I'm not into the retiring phase yet uh i'm starting something new actually so that's the main reason that i'm also like i need to let's say take some distance like from the show regardless of like how difficult it is for, because it is something that's... Okay, it was part of my life these past three years. But yeah, I'm starting something new. So after I left Starburst about a year ago, I started looking for what is going to be my next opportunity. When I came to the States,

I came with like the goal of like starting a company again. Like I have, that's, that's the thing that I really like doing. That's zero to one thing. That's like what I really also like enjoyed. That's why I'm saying that with Radarstack, although I wasn't like a founder, like kind of I was a natural fit because it was at the zero one phase and

you paid on that and that's what like really made it like so special to me. So yeah, starting something new, I have the luxury to say I'm doing something new that is in stealth, which I never had the opportunity to do before. Do you have that on your LinkedIn? That's always... Yeah. I did it. I was like, I have to do it.

I have to... Yeah, that's a rite of passage. I mean, you moved to San Francisco to start a company and if it's still happening, you're like, how are you going to raise money? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly.

I... Going back like to the journey of like how it started. So after leaving, started working on like the idea that I had. In parallel, like looking for a co-founder. Lucky to find my co-founder in June, Jonny Michael. He was in Tekton before.

Started working together. Started around October, the fundraising process. Got our turn sheet in December. Finalized the whole seed round about a month and a half ago. Now we are in full building mode. In stealth, but in building mode. We are in the data infrastructure space. I mean, that's what I've been doing all these years.

And I started, let's say, from the periphery, as I usually say, like more on the ingestion layer. That was Blendo what was doing. Then RadarStack also, like data infrastructure piece that does a lot of like ingestion. And then I always wanted like to go more at the core where like the data is like processed and managed. I had a huge opportunity to learn a lot about that stuff being around like the creators of Trino, Martin, Dane, and David. I've learned so much from these guys. And yeah, we are building a new processing, data processing platform. But I'll stop here about what the product is because I have to keep the luxury of being in stealth.

Yeah, I was going to say, you have to live up to that LinkedIn badge. Well, it's time to launch. You should consider podcasts as a channel. Oh, yeah. Maybe, I don't know. Hopefully, the data stack will give me the opportunity to talk more about it. We'll see. I don't know.

We'll have to check the schedule. Yeah, of course. If I can fit in the schedule. Oh, man. Okay. I have one last question for you, Kostas, and this is a good way to hand off the baton to John. What advice do you have for John? Because he has some pretty big shoes to fill. No pressure, John.

We'll be spending a lot of time together and Costas has been an incredible co-pilot. So what advice do you have for John, Costas? What advice? Don't think too much. Don't overthink. In general, try to just be curious

and ask the questions that you care about. And enjoy your time together with Eric. He's a great buddy to have on the show. He's a great host to have on the show he's a great host

he's the one who at least in our case bringing all the fun in the conversation and yeah that's the only thing have fun and be curious and ask the questions

that you would ask anyway. And don't overthink. I like it. That sounds like pretty good life advice in general, actually. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, find your... You know, there's a lot of shows out there.

At the end, I think what matters is to make the show reflect yourself in a way like being part of who you are right because at the end it's just three or four people talking to each other right so

at the end that's what is going to be delivered and I think if you try to create a veneer or like something that you are not like people will see that so yourself and like be curious you will have the chance like to

ask questions to very interesting people I'm excited about that part take advantage of that and hopefully like I'll I'll have the chance to co-host in the future as a guest host too oh yeah you can't get out of it

that easy I don't want to alright well thanks everyone for listening thank you John and Costas for taking us on a trip down memory lane John welcome to the show so excited to Thank you, John and Kostas, for taking us on a trip down memory lane.

John, welcome to the show. So excited to knock out another 200 episodes alongside you. And Kostas, keep us posted on your stealth startup. And I want to be the first to know when you're ready to talk about it publicly. Of course. Thank you so much, guys. Yeah, thanks, Eric. We hope you enjoyed this episode of the Data Stack Show. Be sure to subscribe on your favorite

podcast app to get notified about new episodes every week. We'd also love your feedback. You can email me, ericdodds, at eric at datastackshow.com. That's E-R-I-C at datastackshow.com. The show is brought to you by Rudderstack, the CDP for developers. Learn how to build a CDP on your data warehouse at rudderstack.com.