The Data Stack Show - 231: From Pre-Med to Product Strategy: Eric Dodds’ Journey in Data and Startups

Episode Date: March 5, 2025

Highlights from this week’s conversation include:Early Aspirations: Becoming a Doctor (1:09)The Shift to Business Studies (3:54)Father's Influence on Career Path (4:39)Interest in Statistics and Psychology (6:47)Networking and Early Career (10:24)Developing a Passion for Data (12:09)Joining a Startup Accelerator (17:30)Data and Engagement Metrics (21:39)Lessons on Data Fidelity (23:40)Entrepreneurial Journey in a VC-Backed Incubator (26:15)Software Engineering School Initiative (30:21)Growth and Market Timing (35:08)Post-Exit Consultancy Experience (36:36)Finding RudderStack (38:53)  Behavioral Data Revolution (40:44)Advice for Aspiring Product Managers (44:20)Understanding Customer Pain Points (46:29)Final Thoughts and Takeaways (47:03)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.

Hi, I'm Eric Dotz. And I'm John Wessel. Welcome to the Data Stack Show. The Data Stack Show is a podcast where we talk about the technical, business, and human challenges involved in data work. Join our casual conversations with innovators and data professionals to learn about new data technologies and how data teams are run at top companies. Welcome back to the Data Stack show.

We have a very special guest today. He's been on the show multiple times. So welcome Eric Dodds to the show. Not as a co-host today, but as a guest. I think it's your first time being a guest, if I'm right. Yeah. Thank you for having me. I know it's your first time being a guest, if I'm right. Thank you for having me. I know it's hard to- Having you on your own show, of course.

Work this into the calendar, but really appreciate it and excited to be here. Yeah, so let's jump right in. I think, I'm sure listeners are really curious to learn more about your background, so I'm really glad we're doing this. But start us off at the beginning, maybe not birth, but start us off at the beginning of your career. Yeah. Or education, wherever you want to start.

Sure. Well I think maybe a couple things that that may be fun to talk about and maybe give listeners a little bit more insight into me. I actually wanted to be a doctor, interestingly enough. I'm really glad that didn't happen. One of my best friends is a doctor. We room together throughout college. I'm really glad that didn't happen. One of my best friends is a doctor, we roomed together throughout college. I'm so glad he's a doctor and I'm not. I think that working in product is really where I need to be for sure.

But I think one of the reasons I wanted to be a doctor was I always loved taking stuff apart, figuring out how it worked, and putting it back together. So in high school, my dad and I took a car completely apart, I mean, literally everything apart and then put it all back together and restored it, and which is a pretty formative experience and sort of, I really loved that whole experience

and kind of was interested in precision and surgery and operating on a human was okay, there's a right way to do this. That was just very appealing to me and helping people. That was pretty cool. So that was pretty formative in my experience but I ended up taking a pretty different path in school. Interestingly enough, I had no plans on And interestingly enough, I had no plans on studying business or getting into data or anything like that. And it changed literally in a moment at college orientation in pre-med orientation was a, you know, there's this turning point, which is pretty wild. And I ended up switching from pre-med to business, which is pretty crazy.

Yeah. So I've got to ask you about the car. What kind of car was it? Yeah, it was a 1978 Jeep CJ7 so cool Not quite as old as like the army Jeep, but you know the cool jeeps with the round headlights Yeah, so and after you like did this like You know assembly disassembly process, did you drive it around? Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

Like daily driver? Yeah, totally. Yeah, cool. Yeah. Yeah, it was great. I mean, it was really cool. And we ended up selling it for a number of reasons. Once I went to school, it had a soft top.

It wasn't necessarily the most practical vehicle, commuting to college. Initially I went to college up in Pennsylvania, so I drove up the Eastern Seaboard, and so not the most practical drive for those purposes. Yeah. Okay, so you're in orientation. You've like, assume like selected the school based on like I wanna be pre-med,

in orientation. And then I think you told me before that essentially like you start the day in pre-med orientation, you end up the day in the business school orientation. Yes. Yeah. And this is a, I look back on this story and it really is interesting how much hinged on this, on this one moment, but we're sitting in pre-med orientation and I'm excited, oh, this is gonna be great.

I'm looking around, okay, these are gonna be my classmates and my teachers, et cetera. And my dad turns to me and he says, this isn't right. And I'm thinking, well, I mean, I've been preparing for this for a long time now and what isn't right? And he said, like, God is telling me you don't need to be a doctor.

And I was like, wow, OK. So I said, well, what should we do? And he said, I think we need to go to the business school. And how is that like character wise for him? Is this like something that happened a lot throughout your life or is this like one time this happened type of thing? No, no, actually.

I mean, we grew up going to church and you know, that was a big part of our, you know, a big part of our family life, but very much not, you know, sort of, I would say like charismatic. That was, it was a pretty, you know, that was a pretty, I wouldn't say shocking, but that didn't happen a whole lot. Right, right. It was very, in the moment I knew that it was a very serious thing, you know, and but I trust my dad, you know,

and so I said, what should we do? And he said, I think we need to go to business school orientation. And so we, we switched then and, you know, I sort of never looked back. And again, looking at where I am now working on product, especially in the world of data. I mean, there's just no question that it was absolutely the right thing, but it was a pretty, you know, you're 18 and. You know, you have had dreams of being a doctor for years and in a moment that sort of all changes. Was it immediate?

Did you sit down in the business school orientation and feel like, okay, like this is right now? Or was it like, I don't know, like I was kind of set on the other thing and it took a while to take. It wasn't necessarily, you know, this is just like, yes, you know? Right. But it felt like a really significant course change in a very short amount of time. I mean, in 10 minutes, you know, we go from one building to another on this campus, you know, with a pretty significant change in direction of career path. But it felt natural, if that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. we go from one building to another on this campus, internships that really like, hey, I want to do entrepreneurial type things or tell me more about that

Component. Yeah, I think that the theme of figuring out how stuff works Really carried through and it sort of transitioned from Mechanical more to mathematical and psychological. Okay. And so as I went through the business school You know you studied economics and finance and other things like that, which is, you know, those are pretty interesting, but I really enjoyed statistics and then anything related to psychology. So in the business school, that's a lot of consumer behavior, but I ended up taking a lot of psychology courses outside of that because it was, you know, it was really fascinating to me.

And so I think that probably was the foundation of getting into data or sort of the early seeds of getting into data. I mean, I just love statistics because it felt like this, like, holy cow, there's this tool set that you have that helps you describe things or answer questions that are really challenging to answer in any other way, right? And you can get a pretty high level of confidence doing that and you kind of combine that with psychology and consumer behavior and it's just a really fascinating world and so that I think was you know those were the things I probably wouldn't have said it at the time but looking back

those are the things that I really you know know, I put a lot of time into it in college because I enjoyed it. Yeah, sure. Yeah, this is something I think we've identified before too, is that I was also pre-med. I should have figured that out, you know, would have been nice to have figured out in freshman orientation to switch, but it took me a year and a half and lots of painful chemistry and biology classes that I did not enjoy for the most part. And a summer internship that I shared with you too. I had a summer internship at the morgue. I did a short rotation in surgery too which was cool but for whatever reason I somehow spent... It was supposed

to be like a thing where you rotate various places right somehow I ended up in the morgue it feels like most of the time right and yeah that that combo of like I didn't really enjoy the classes like didn't want to be you know working with dead people is that I prefer it alive people that makes me thankful for this you know sort, sort of sudden, you know, sudden direction change in my experience. Yeah, and then, and it's funny, I ended up doing the business thing too. And the funny thing about me is I never loved the math part. And people always assume like, oh, you do technology and whatever, you must be good at math. I mean, I can do a little bit of math, but like, it was, but I was always best at like in school like I did best

in English and it's a language thing I really enjoyed the language part of like sequel python like that was actually the thing that I liked about it which was a little bit different than what people said if you are if you enjoy language I really really enjoy writing and literature as well. And I think one thing that I've noticed is if you enjoy language, you probably are predisposed to enjoying or at least having a skill set and data, right? Because it's about clarity, it's about distilling ideas down. And it's much lighter on the math than I think people outside of it think. Unless, yeah, there's some exceptions, but the majority of the roles really are fairly light on math and it's heavier on communication and language.

Right. So, okay, so take us into, so you finish up school and then you go get an analyst job, go get a data job. Like what do you do right out of school? I graduated in 2008. So the job market- You take whatever job you can find. Was not exactly taught at that time. And I moved back in with my parents because it was kind of a wild time to graduate college.

And I got an internship at a marketing agency, basically, sort of saying, I'll do anything. And that's essentially what I did. I worked on design projects, had no idea what I was doing, had, you know, was learning Photoshop. I mean, all the crazy, you know, just really anything and everything I could get my hands into. And it was very hungry to learn and, you know, scared about the economy and trying to earn my spurs and turn it into a full-time job,

or at least get a bunch of stuff on my resume. And it was a great experience. I had a chance to work with some really big companies actually. And looking back, it was a really fascinating time to be working with companies trying to figure out marketing because of the state of the economy. So that was a great experience. And got to work on a number of technical projects that I think were the... I'd always been interested in technology and then working on stuff growing up, but worked on a number of large technical website app

type projects and loved the technical side. And I was thinking actually this past week in a different life, maybe if I had another dramatic direction change, it would have been into computer science. And I'm probably a software engineer. I probably would love to be a software engineer as a job, as an IC, I think would be just so enjoyable to me. But I ended up doing a bunch of data-driven marketing stuff, you know, and so that's probably why I'm in product maybe that combination.

Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, so I worked on a number of technical projects there and I think that grew my love of software generally, but it was a word of mouth marketing agency who did a bunch of really cool stuff and a lot of brand heavy work, etc. I just had this insatiable appetite for trying to use the statistics that I had learned in school to describe whether what we were doing was working or not. And boy was I naive on how difficult of a problem that is to solve, even in the best of cases.

So there's definitely a lot of hubris in that. I think I had a mindset of there's a way to figure this out and I'm going to go figure it out, which I think is healthy. Both my parents are entrepreneurs, both my grandfathers are entrepreneurs, so maybe it runs in my blood. It's like, there's a better way to do this. There's a way to figure out if all these marketing campaigns that we're doing are actually moving the needle.

And so I knew I wasn't gonna be at the agency forever, just because I had to answer that question for myself, actually, and so I started, you know, just started looking around once things once the economy had stabilized a little bit I started looking around for other stuff. Well, I mean, I don't know if this is true this isn't true of everybody but I see that like coming out of a business degree that depends on a little bit on like what type of focus you did in your degree but I see at least for my business degree, there was a really healthy, I think, theme

through the degree of, you know, return on investment and like the expectations of a business and then you jump into like a very brand-heavy, you know, marketing agency just purely from that like background I could see you coming in and then you mentioned like statistics, you know, another, you know, some courses you marketing agency just purely from that background I could see you coming in. And then you mentioned statistics, some courses you took, just being very like, oh, this is how you should think about this thing of how do we know that our customers are getting a return on their investment and that kind of basic business logic. I think I was wrong in both directions

far more than I even knew. So there's far more possible with data than I imagined. I mean, which was, it took me a while to figure that out, but it's incredible. And I've had the chance to do some truly, really neat like attribution projects at a very large scale, which has been so cool. And so definitely my imagination about what was possible data, a lot of those things were

real, but I also think I sort of underestimated the power of brand, right? Which is incredibly powerful, right? And you know, word-of-mouth marketing is incredibly powerful. It's also very hard to, you know, hardof-mouth marketing is incredibly powerful it also very hard to you know hard to measure but right yeah I think I was young and I just didn't know a lot about the world but there is a lot of cool stuff waiting for me right okay so you do that you've got a little bit of a hunger for something more data driven more you more measurable maybe. So what do you do from there?

Well, I told you that I had become really interested in software and technical stuff. And so I just started networking with friends of friends and, hey, I'm looking, I think, to get more into the technology side of things. I went to a local conference in the southeast, and at that point there was a group in Greenville, South Carolina, where I live, who were working as a remote design and front-end team for a really high-growth Silicon Valley startup. And so I had this conference and people would come in from these huge companies on the West Coast, these designers and developers and give these talks. It was really amazing.

And I met a number of people there and started to, I became more and more interested. Oh wow, these people are really, you know, it's the bleeding edge, right? What they're doing in Silicon Valley, especially around that time, right? Because if you think about, you know, the early 2010s, I guess, is around that time period. There's a lot happening in the world of consumer apps and design and user experience and AB testing and all of, you know, growth hacking and all of those things, which is pretty energizing. And through that networking ended up meeting a entrepreneur who was from Indianapolis but

had moved to Greenville because he has a really large family and just I think they were driving through Greenville one day and his wife said, this is great. This is it. This is the car and fascinating guy. I mean, he flew all around the country, you know, to tech stars events, investing in different companies and, you know, serial entrepreneur. And he was connected with a group called Startup America, and in partnership with Techstars, they were planting startup accelerator programs around the country. So this is an effort by the administration at that time to encourage entrepreneurship, encourage startups, startup activity.

And so one of the ways that they were doing that was essentially launching these incubators to encourage people to join, you know, and start these companies. And through a series of circumstances, there we ended up launching one of those in Greenville, I say we really it was this entrepreneur. But the timing worked out such that I was able to join him and help start that and help run a startup accelerator program, which looking back, I am just, it boggles my mind that he thought it was a good idea to bring me on because I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. But it was, I mean, I guess it was fairly low risk because he said, you know, I can pay you this much, which is basically nothing. And I can do that for whatever it was I mean I guess it was fairly low risk because he said you know I can pay you this much which is nothing

And I can do that for what you know whatever it was eight or twelve months And you know we'll see you know this is startup world right right and so I jumped in I mean I was Let's do this. I want to learn about this world, and it was a really just an amazing opportunity not only to learn from him but to get immersed into the venture backed software startups. Yeah. Okay. So you jump in there, you're going from brand agency stuff, working with big companies, like completely flipped to like, okay, VC backed startups. Was there an adjustment period for you there or a little bit but you know it's interesting to look back on my experience at the brand agency because I'll give you examples of two projects that I worked on

So one project was actually with double day publishing and it was working on launching a John Grisham like it was marketing for a John Grisham novel. I mean, he's written so many books. Right. That's cool. And we take social media for granted now, but back then it was, you know, people were still figuring stuff out. And so we ended up building a Facebook app

Which at the time was pretty cool. We ended up building a Facebook app That was sort of a like a gamified type competition, you know, cuz John Gershom has a huge following Mm-hmm, you know to create viral growth for this book launch and then another project was working for Best Buy and they were launching this concept of a musical instrument store within their existing real estate to compete head to head with Guitar Center. And interestingly enough, both of those were very,

the double day publishing project was very much like we're going to try to use technology, we're going to try to engage this community online and sort of leverage virality. The other one was very much a startup within a very large company. There was some adjustment period, but I had worked on some things that I think were fairly exploratory or fairly, I guess, early stage, you could say. So Facebook apps bring me back.

The only thing that comes to mind is Farmville. You remember that? Well, I mean, it was pretty cool. I think that a lot of that, I mean, the developer experience stuff and what people have built on Facebook has been really cool. They had a very robust tool set for you to build. An application, like a custom application that ran inside of Facebook and that was essentially software that you delivered to your audience through Facebook.

Well, between those two projects and the what I mean the metrics for sure. So I was digging into a lot of that and you know that that was I was constantly in you know Excel for Mac which back then was you know a great experience but you know you're at an agency and everyone's off yeah right so I remember going to the you know to the accelerator and it's like well just everything's on Google and I was like what and it's like Google like all of this it was awesome I remember so many things like that I mean we were just and it's like, well, just everything's on Google. we're using all these the latest tools right because that's what we do is invest in software startups so we're trying all these different things and yeah multiple times there's a tool it's like this is so great and then the startup just dies you know i know yeah more gets a more

good spot yeah yeah yeah but yeah so there was data and i think that's part of it just felt so hard to measure stuff right because it wasn't a core competency at the agency. So just spent days in spreadsheets trying to produce a number that I wasn't super confident in. Yeah, right. That was just always dissatisfying to me, for sure. Yeah, I had not the same experience, but a similar experience at times.

So being an analyst, like early days of my career, being an analyst where you're like, you work so hard to get something as accurate as possible. And then you realize that from your audience's perspective, they have no idea and they have such little idea that they couldn't even question to tell you if you were wrong. Yeah. Within some level of certainty, which is kind of a sad reality. Yeah. Yeah. I think also, you know, if I lived by myself, I would have like everything meticulously

organized, you know, and not because I'm, I wouldn't necessarily say I'm obsessive compulsive But I just I have strong opinions about everything having its place or like the way that things should be Which I see coming up and product a ton, you know, you know Thankfully I have like a wonderful wife and three kids who temper that you know and so Things you have like a workshop or something that can be like, I actually just this past weekend, I got a new tool chest and I organized all my tools and it's like, you know what?

That's enough. I don't even need to work on my practically therapeutic, right? It is totally is totally is. And it's like it closes and locks, you know, so no one can. I think that one of the things that I look back on some of those early things, and even at the accelerator program, I mean your early stage startup companies have no data, right? Right. I don't think I really understood the value of intuition and directional,

you know, like just understanding directionally what's happening, you know, I wanted to be very technically accurate. And there were times later on that was very helpful, that tendency was very helpful. But I also think that I was way over rotated on, you know, bringing the math problem to its final conclusion. Right.

Because that's, you have to do that in school, especially with statistics, right? It's like you sort of have to run it out to its conclusion. I mean, you know, whatever, we can talk about education at some other, but yeah, I think that, you know, I learned a lot about the value of intuition and directional data later on. Yeah. Yeah. And that was my same problem too, right? that I learned a lot about the value of intuition Yeah, that was a good lesson. on Sand Hill Road and doing pitch events and everything with a startup. So it was a true baptism. It's just actual Silicon Valley, even physically a lot. I don't think I know this. How many actually ended up being part of the incubator over the years that it was running?

Let's see. So the cohorts that I was involved in, I think probably three or four cohorts, and then there was sort of another branch of the accelerator that started with a different group of investors that was focused on the medical space. But at that point, we had spun another company out of the accelerator program. And in fact, I think that there's still a handful of companies, one of them had a pretty program. a good idea that I convinced them to drop out of college. I can't even believe I did this. I can't believe you did this either. I convinced them to drop out of college and come to Greenville, South Carolina to be part of this accelerator program. And it's like the success story of the portfolio. I mean, a really amazing, really amazing story for

those guys. Yeah, that's really neat. So you have the several different cohorts. Did you jump in with one of the companies that was in the cohort or was the thing you jumped in adjacent to this? It was adjacent. One of the challenges, and still in many ways is, but with things being remote now, it's less of an issue. But in the Southeast, there's not a lot of liquidity in the market for technical talent. And I would say if you think about a venture-backed startup, there are a lot of roles that there's just a higher concentration in the major tech hubs

for software engineering, product design, et cetera. software standpoint, but more manufacturing. That was a problem because if we had a company who would go on and raise a Series A, they would almost inevitably have to end up moving to another place so that they could hire talent very quickly. I need to hire five software engineers as soon as I possibly can. It's actually hard to do that in the southeast, especially with a stack, right? Because you're talking about Rails, Rails, JavaScript, just sort of the more modern

lingua franca of startups at the time. And so that was- For those of you that needs translating, Rust, Go, that's what it is. Yes, yes, exactly. Yeah, I mean really, yeah. Yeah, that is funny. And so that was for those of you that needs translating rust go. That's what yes. Yes, exactly. Yeah. I mean, really?

Yeah. Yeah, it is funny. I mean, gosh, what you can do now just like with an AI tools outrageous. But yeah, so that was, you know, it's fine. I mean, we want the companies to be successful and it's a fun, right? And so if you need to go to another place, that's fine. But we also have a vested interest in, you know, retaining companies here place, that's fine. they weren't teaching those languages in the universities, and so there was a learning curve anyways.

And so that was the goal, right? And so actually as part of the accelerator program, we just started a school for software engineering, right? So you essentially would start with a cohort in the accelerator program. And so these startups are going through a three-month incubation program. And so these startups are going through like a three month, you know, incubation program. And we would have just a handful of students start and they would learn JavaScript or they would learn Rails or you know, that's what you're teaching at that point, we eventually expanded things, you know, and then they would graduate and the idea was, okay, you sort of have this marriage, right? Of like, you know, you have

these companies who graduate from the accelerator program and the other people who graduate from the school, great, and they can hire each other. And what happened at the end of the first class or two was really interesting, because not everyone went to work for the startups, because you realize you have this marketable skill set and you can go make a bunch of money. And so a couple of people went to work for the startups

and stuff, which was awesome. And again, it wasn't that stark necessarily, but as people realized, wow, I can go actually get a career. And then we realized, okay, maybe there's something here beyond just having this internal program where we create talent. Other people regionally, other accelerators had heard about it and asked us to come look at doing something similar in their space, in their region. And so we ended up actually spinning out a different entity and I ended up running that which became a code boot camp. We didn't call it that at the time, but that's kind of what they're called now. And yeah, so that was the entrepreneurial venture that we spun out of the Accelerator program. That's it. So you, I don't think I knew this part of the story So you after you spun out part of the strategy was to continue to supply talent into startups You just got wider more geographically diverse. Yes. Yep. So we sort of anchored it with

You know incubators regionally. Mm-hmm and then it took on a life of its own and became its own, you know business in its own right because at that time there was significant demand for that type of education and rapid career transition. Yeah. Yeah. It makes a ton of sense because if you went a traditional schooling route and you got a computer science degree, you're not going to be learning Ruby at that time for sure. Exactly. Then you already had this network that you guys had developed through the incubator of other for sure. Exactly. And then you kind of already had this network

that you guys had developed through the incubator of other incubators and like, yeah, it's actually a really cool, in my opinion, a really cool growth story of like a really cool pivot and like something where you can use an existing network to really just drive really fast growth, which I'd love for you to speak to that. I mean, you guys took off pretty quickly.

Yeah. Yeah, it was certainly, yeah, well, I'll speak to the growth I mean you guys took off pretty quickly. Yeah. Yeah it was certainly, yeah well I'll speak to the the growth in just a second but the short version is that we expanded very rapidly so I think in the first you know in the first year we did these numbers aren't going to be right but I'll just we'll go with something directionally accurate. Yeah there we go. Yeah. Because it was kind of a blur. I could go back and look it up if I really wanted to nail it down. But I mean, we did between five and 10 campuses the first like a year and a half. And these are physical campuses in person.

So there's a real estate component. There's a legal component. We're going multi-state, which is pretty wild. Continued to grow pretty quickly. Within two to three years, we started to get interest from some suitors in the education space, who are really interested in our model and our ability to expand really rapidly. We ended up selling the company to one of the largest education conglomerates in the world. and sort of our ability to expand really rapidly. We ended up selling the company to one of the largest education conglomerates in the world.

Then the growth really accelerated from there because we had all the resources. That was a big reason we sold the business was to actually get access to their resources because that would help us expand the business. There are a number of things in education that are you know fairly difficult to figure out on your own quickly and so There were a huge help in those things and so the punchline is that we were the largest code school in the world So we had expanded internationally had launched campus in London and you know sort of tons of them all across the United States We had gotten into

we had started to build software and so we started to get into you know actually like remote learning and online education etc. and so yeah it was a wild growth period and that's really where I cut my teeth in terms of data and the data stack and using all of that to drive growth you know because I'd sort of dip my toe in the water in a number of different areas before but now it was Wow, you have like massive attribution problems trying to understand marketing that's happening in different regions Which is very different the same campaigns didn't work the same way tons of data flowing in Very primitive tooling at that point, you know relative to what we have now. It was just a totally different world tons of data flowing in,

very primitive tooling at that point. Relative to what we have now, it was just a totally different world. Doing these analyses were super hard. We wouldn't call it this back then, but sort of launching product-led growth through digital acquisition and a product. So yeah, it was a wild time. But it was also a lesson in market timing and distribution, right? Because we certainly made some good decisions, but we it was really good market timing and there

was huge demand and we already had a distribution network to your point. And so that was one of my biggest takeaways was wow, big market with good timing and like a pre you can exploit a distribution network like you can do a lot of you can do everything else wrong. Exactly. Yeah, that's awesome. So okay, from there, so you stayed on for a while and then after that, what was next? What was next after that very wild ride? Yes, yeah. So that was like baptism as a founder, an exit, getting a taste of being part of an extremely large multi-billion-billion-dollar corporation and realizing, okay, I'm definitely a startup guy. Don't let that.

Accidentally started a consultancy, so me and my co-founders wanted to stick together and do something else. We just started taking on projects, helping other companies, essentially advising on some together and do something else. there at the peak and then we started to see the decline from the inside, which was wild. We did some work with BMW on some of their mobile app analytics stuff, which is really neat. But I realized, okay, we're running a services business and I don't love that, but just as a business model it's not the most exciting thing, but we got to work on cool projects. And that's actually how I found Rudderstack. So we were, you know, things had kind of, we tried a bunch of different things.

We did some advising, we built some projects. We actually tried to start a startup, you know, through the agency. So a venture studio type model. Yeah. Ended up raising some money for it. COVID just completely wiped it out, you know, which was wild, but I mean, we were piloting stuff

for like Motley Fool. So it was like a pretty exciting thing. It was like a startup idea, just completely wiped it out, which was wild. that I had been digging into data and trying to do attribution and building a pretty primitive stack. In the previous company, all this new tooling is coming out. We're trying all of the new tooling, super excited about it, And I guess we call that the modern data stack, whatever buzzword you want to use. That was really where I focused and was very excited, just because I saw so many ways to solve problems so much more easily than I had experienced in the past.

And that's how I found Rutter Stack. who were trying to collect behavioral data at scale and do a bunch of different things with it, get it into a data warehouse, et cetera. And I remember finding RutterSack from their hacker news post. I remember I walked over to my co-founder and CTO and I was like, or maybe he came to me, either way. He spun up a Kubernetes cluster and we deployed this thing and he was like, dude, this is legit. And so, so yeah, and that's actually how we met John, because we were doing some consulting for your e-commerce company and you needed

to collect behavioral data. And so we deployed rudder stack and it's the longest running production instance of rudutterstack still. Still running today. Yeah. How many years is that? Five? Five? Plus?

Five years. I think it's over five years. Well, I mean, I still remember talking on, I guess it would have been Discord. I still remember talking to- Yes, Discord. That's before we switched to Slack. Yeah. Yes, Discord. That's before we switched to Slack. Yeah, it was one of the founding team members on Discord at like 10 o'clock at night, 9 o'clock at night, trying to figure out the open source version of a writer stack back then.

It was crazy, but yeah, it was such a good timing thing. We've got all this modern data stuff. It's not like this wasn't possible before, but it was just such a different cool spin on thing of we've got all this modern data stuff. It's not like this wasn't possible before, but it was just such a different cool spin on now we can collect all this behavioral data instead of having it trapped inside an ecosystem or a platform. It can be directly in your warehouse and you can do all sorts of creative stuff with it because you have more control and access to the data. for customers, because that's what we had done. And so that's what I did in my first time at RutterSac, was actually implement the product for our customers.

And so call it customer success or technical account management or solutions engineering. I mean, there was a handful of people back then. They weren't actually separate roles. So yeah, that's actually how I ended up at RutterSec. So we only have a few minutes left. Let's talk product a little bit. So you did a bunch of roles. Customer success and various marketing roles, growth marketing, product marketing. All those things kind of came together and turned into a product role for you.

It seems natural progression a lot of times to me, but I don't know. I think it's been very natural for a couple of reasons. I was a user of the product before joining Rutter Stack, rudder stack. It's really cool using some new APIs that we have. It's sort of like punching far above our weight class in terms of our ability to have a sophisticated stack. And so that was always for me the foundation of the, well, I mean, I had to, I was in the trenches day to day with customers for a while and then in marketing, Well, I mean, I had to, I was in the trenches day to day

with customers for a while. And then in marketing, being rooted in the product was just natural because I literally used Rutterstack every single day. I built all of these use cases, attribution modeling, analytics, marketing automation, all that sort of stuff I built internally using all the data from Rutter Stack. It was sort of like the, we say data team, but then we're also the consumers, we're the stakeholders with the use case. All of that was very natural, right?

Because we were just using the product every day. We built out several teams and then ended up working with our CEO on a couple of strategic product things. So like doing a bunch of research and going out into the market and talking with hundreds of companies and trying to understand problems. What would you say? So say I'm sitting at home like, hi, you know, I'm kind of interested in data Maybe interested in product and data and products are coming closer and closer together, right? Like I think that's the turn we sing. What would you tell somebody at home? That's like, hey, I really I like this stuff I like data. Maybe I like product and data together. What's some advice you'd give somebody? Mm-hmm advice in terms of career or

Hmm advice in terms of career or career as far as what experiences were key To get to you know where you are and maybe just general advice. Yeah. Yeah, I think that You know one of the things that's pretty surprising to me is how You know even a lot of people who work in product or product marketing don't know the product intimately. I mean, I'll give you just one example.

Have you read all of the documentation? And I'm not talking about like I browse through, but I mean thousands of pages the documentation. because I was on the ground with our customers, I was developing documentation, I was using the product. You know, and so that was very natural for me. But main thing I would say is, if you use the product to try to solve problems, you will position yourself to understand your customer's pain points when they talk about it.

And you'll be very intimately familiar with that, not on a conceptual level, but on a visceral level, pain points when they talk about it. when they're telling you what they're trying to solve. It's the foundation of everything in product, is understanding your customer pain point. If you're doing that, the data that you need to do your job I think will's actually the easy part in some ways. There are some technical aspects that can be hard. But if you get the first part right, you will know the data that you need for sure.

That is such good advice. We've talked about this before. I've had dozens of people reporting to me or to be an expert in this one person who decided to actually read the docs cover to cover and by far had the best success as far as like owning, you know, their area. And so that is such a simple, really quite boring thing. Yeah. But it's really good advice. So awesome. Well, thanks for being on the show.

Thank you for having me. Hopefully I can come back. Awesome. Well, thanks for being on the show. Thank you for having me. Hopefully I can come back. We'll invite you back maybe even next week. Thanks everybody for listening and we'll catch you next time. The Data Stack Show is brought to you by Rutter Stack, the warehouse native customer data platform. Rudderstack is purpose-built to help data teams turn customer data into competitive advantage. Learn more at rudderstack.com.