The Data Stack Show - Data Council Week (Ep 7) - What’s Next for Data Council? With Pete Soderling of Data Council

Episode Date: April 28, 2023

Highlights from this week’s conversation include:The origin story of Data Council (0:39)Developments for the future of Data Council (2:42)The emphasis of AI and ChatGPT at this year’s conference (3:54)The support of the data community (5:31)Biggest changes and innovations in the industry (7:10)What’s next for the Data Council? (10:46)Getting connected with Data Council (13:07)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.

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 back, everyone. If you are following along, we're here at Data Council and we have been recording in person this week. So if you're rejoining us, thank you. If this is your first episode here from Data Council Week, welcome.

We have Pete Soderling here, the founder of Data Council and the Data Community Fund. So one, we're extremely grateful for him taking time out of what is obviously a busy week for him to sit down with us. And two, just really excited to hear some updates from him. We talked with him last year, so this is becoming an annual tradition. Super excited. Pete, welcome. Thanks. It's great to be here. Great to have you guys here at the event recording shows again. Yeah. It's great to be here. Yeah. Good to have you guys here at the event recording shows again.

Yeah, we're thrilled to be here. I think we're on our eighth show so far, so it's been a great week. And Pete, last year, I know you talked with Eric about kind of the origin story of Data Council. We'd love to hear kind of a quick rehash of that. And then if you tell us kind of like you just heard before we hit record here, just some really new, exciting things that are happening this year and also have a vision for kind of hey what's next yeah for sure so data council was the world's first data engineering conference i started it we grew up out of a meetup

i started in 2013 and became a conference in 2015 so this is our ninth year of data council conferences now and the community has grown by leaps and bounds. We've sort of been fortunate to track not just the data engineering and data infrastructure communities and the growth there, but also we turned Data Council into a full-stack conference several years ago. And so we cover models and science and analytics and building AI products and have become very much a full a full stack conference for B2B, largely B2B data builders. And this year has been no exception. This year, what's changed is there's more people here. We've had around 200 more people at the event, which makes all the rooms full, the hallway track more exciting, the office hours more engaging. So that's been quite exciting to see the growth in the attendees. And we're also three days this

year instead of two days. So that gave us a lot more surface area for a lot more talks. So I think we had almost 100 speakers at our speaker dinner, for instance, this week. That's amazing. Yeah. So there's been a lot of growth in all the angles. And I think in terms of content, we really leaned into the Gen AI stuff this year. We had a whole track on generative AI. We had a keynote panel on the topic as well with folks from Jasper and GitHub and Databricks and Hex and others. So that was pretty incredible.

And I encourage people to go and check out that talk, especially on YouTube, once we get that launched. And then for the future, we're excited to continue to develop content and service area data council around data products, because it's not just all the technical layers of the stack that are of interest to people here. It's weaponizing that into data-oriented products. And so we had a building data products track again this year, but we're even tossing around ideas about maybe doing a designing for data track next year, which would welcome designers into the community because there's special challenges around designing the next generation of interfaces that maybe haven't even been thought about yet for Gen AI and data tools in general.

So we're interested in exploring that area, too. So if there's folks listening who might want to potentially participate in that, they should definitely reach out. Yeah, that's awesome. That's really exciting. And I can say just being around for the past few days, the engagement among the attendees with all the classes and workshops has been, I mean, the most I've ever seen at a conference. So really great. If you have a chance to come next year and you haven't been, definitely check it out. You said you really kind of leaned into the generative AI thing this year, which just blew open, you know, with chat GPT, what, a couple months months ago how did y'all kind of have the

foresight to make sure that was such an emphasis this year well i think the cool thing about data council is the community that we've built sort of is self-sustaining and it's a bit future-proof it's resilient all on its own and that's because you know we had a sufficiently broad theme of of folks working in data and interesting data technologies and working in different roles but i mean as the world has sort of changed or twisted or pivoted or you know gone more down this llm gen ai track it turns out that we have a bunch of people in the community who have been either leading that charge or building those systems in smaller ways previously. So there's just a wealth of depth of knowledge to draw on. So it wasn't that

novel or hard for us to sort of slightly turn the ship in that direction because a lot of these folks were already here. So I think that's the power of the community. Sometimes networks and communities are fairly haphazard and they're kind of like rough around the edges and they're not necessarily like built you know purpose built to solve particular challenges or problems but but their power is really in their resilience and I think being able to sort of tack on and direct the conference and point it towards things that people are currently interested that are related to data is the power of being able to sort of tack on and direct the conference and point it towards things that

people are currently interested that are related to data is the power of having this network. And so we've definitely seen the benefit of that. It's so cool. And it is such a, I mean, it's been cool for me to see like the fabric of the network is clearly so tight. I've been kind of following along on Twitter and you just see how many people that are here are grateful for each other and being able to connect. A lot of folks probably have never connected in real life.

And it's just been cool to see that and see how supportive everyone is of kind of the greater data community. Yeah. And another example of that is DJ Patil's keynote that he gave this morning. You know, we've been trying to get DJ at the conference or thinking about it for years. And this was the year that stars aligned. So DJ, who is the former first US chief data scientist ever, I mean, it's pretty rad to be the data scientist for an entire country. And it was very significant when he was talking about the COVID response that he was pulled into from a US policy perspective. The team, the SWAT team that he built with some engineers and data scientists,

those were people who have been speakers at Data Council before. So it's like we knew that we were collecting experts here at Data Council and they've been useful to the world. They've been useful and not just in building tooling companies or doing significant things inside tech companies, but now they've been successful and influential even in helping the country respond to you know the global pandemic that we all went through and that those were folks that have been sort of card carrying members of data council for some time so that's been exciting to see so cool places yeah so it has been a year since like the last Data Council,

and there are many things that happen in the world, right? It has been quite a year. And I want to ask you also about generative AI, but before that, what have you seen happening in the industry this one year? And more particularly, because one of the great things with Data Council is the visibility that you get into what's the innovation that is happening in the data space right now. You pretty much can find all the interesting and new vendors out there that they are doing something. And everyone is talking about the economy slowing down like everything is going wrong i don't know everyone's like depressed but what have you seen happening in this one year like what's the state

let's say of innovation in this space again outside of generative ai because it's a very unique kind of like black swan event here but uh tell us like a few things about this and also how you feel about it how confident you are are for the future and what's happening. Yeah, well, we're definitely continuing to see a tool explosion overall and Matt Turk's mad landscape, which, you know, it's almost sort of indistinguishable these days. But the company is because there's so many logos on the slide and, you know, that's a bit of a joke, perhaps, or a representation of the industry that's a little humorous, although it's very serious work that Matt does in collecting and categorizing all these tools. So for some reason, it seems like data engineers and data people really like to build their own tools. And there's no question that there's going to be

some collapse and some consolidation in these markets. So, you know, we're watching to see exactly where that might occur. I mean, for instance, like one space is the Metrics Layer, which has seen some, you know, interesting consolidations or pivots away from companies and pivot away from that space for various reasons. DBT launched something in the space this year, which was significant. So there's kind of been a little bit of, you know, I think that's one market where there's maybe a little bit of angst in terms of, you know, founders who have tried to start things there and aren't sure exactly what to build next or if they should even, you know, keep going.

So some interesting things like that I think have emerged. When it comes to the Gen AI stuff, one thing I see a lot of is companies that are building NLP to SQL tools or features. Can something like that be its own product or does it need to be built on top of, is it a feature of a sort of broader data aggregation or analytics platform? I think there's a lot of founders, you know, wrestling with that question. And also, you know, my opinion is that just sort of concatenating strings of SQL and throwing them into the void might not produce the high quality results that people expect.

And so it actually, interestingly enough, it kind of comes back to a semantic layer or perhaps a metrics layer. It's like, it's almost as if, you know, more of our tools need to be informed by this elusive metrics layer, just so that some of the power, for instance, in this example of some of the Gen AI stuff, actually has a hope to work. So it's interesting to look at some of the interplay across some of the dynamics that we see here at Data Council. Of course, we have our front row seat because we look at so many companies and so much content to prepare for the conference. But those are just a couple of random insights that pop to mind. Yeah, that's great.

And what's next for Data Council? We're close to the end of the event this year. Can you share a little bit about your plans for next year? Yeah, so Austin has been really good to us. We want to bring the conference back to Austin next year around the same time. Folks called it spring break for data geeks this year and we kind of like that that that label it was quite fun and again because we were

three days there was more surface area at the conference in the evenings for people to meet each other and attend parties and you know there were many fun, like overlapping parties, multiple overlapping parties every single night by our friends, by you folks, Rudderstock and from others who are, you know, seminal, like important and seminal in the data space. So that was very exciting to see. I want more companies to come to Austin and have their off sites during the week of Data Council. Right. that are off sites during the week of data council, right? So we're starting to kind of fill up more of the week at data council and more companies are benefiting from that and also using it to build a sense of ecosystem and community around it. So we might have a big blowout closing party next year.

We've never done this in the past. And so that's one thing i there's no clear announcements made yet so maybe i shouldn't even be talking about it publicly but just in the spirit of transparency you know we kind of want to go out with a bang next year hopefully and we're we have some ideas that i can't talk about specifically yet i mean it's austin right like it is the capital of music so that's right there has to you have to do something it's going to right? It is the capital of music. That's right. You have to do something. I don't know if it's going to be next year or the year after, but you're definitely going to do something.

We're thinking Madonna, so we'll see. That would be great. And Austin is also an amazing city. I don't know if you have any thoughts of doing it somewhere else, but that's the fact that it it's an opportunity for me. Like to visit Austin, it does make it easier. Folks love Austin, geeks love Austin, and it's just such a fun city that I don't feel like we want to change

that dynamic anytime soon. It's just working so well. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, Pete, thanks again. You're busy running around and just appreciate the time. Quickly, before we sign off here, if folks want to get involved with Data Council, kind of become a part of the community, obviously, keep in touch about kind of what's coming up next year, where should they go?

Yeah, best way is to follow us on Twitter at Data Council AI. And we usually release our CFP for the community several months before the event. So probably by this fall, like say October or so, we'll kick off the CFP process. This year we had, I think, 250 submissions to be a speaker at Data Council. So it was very hard

to choose. But the appeal and the intention of the community, the intention of the community to support us has been obvious. So folks can keep up with us on Twitter and stay up to date on announcements that way. Cool. Sounds great. It was at Data Council AI on Twitter. Pete, thanks so much for joining us. Listeners, thanks so much for joining us. Listeners, thank you all for joining us. We'll catch you next time. 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, Eric Dodds, at eric at datastackshow.com. That's E-R-I-C at datastackshow.com. That's E-R-I-C at datastackshow.com. The show is brought to you by Rutterstack,

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