The Data Stack Show - The PRQL: AI and the Super Evolution with H.O. Maycotte, CEO at FeatureBase

Episode Date: April 10, 2023

On this bonus episode, Eric and Kostas preview their upcoming conversation with H.O. Maycotte of FeatureBase.

Welcome to the Data Stack Show prequel, where we replay a snippet from the show we just recorded. Kostas, are you ready to give people a sneak peek? I am, I suppose. Let's do it. Let's do it. Wow, Kostas, what an episode with H.O. Maycott. I mean, his story was amazing, but feature-based seems like quite a technology.

I think my biggest takeaway was actually his optimism. And I thought it was interesting. He had a lot of self-awareness about his own optimism. But, you know, he started with telling his story about growing up in rural Mexico without a lot of technology and how that influenced his view of what was possible. And he's really carried that through. And you heard multiple times throughout the episode, I was so insistent that we wouldn't cash anything. He just has this persistence about we shouldn't have to face these limitations. I think feature-based is a really interesting manifestation of those characteristics of

him because he really has overcome some amazing things with a pretty wild piece of technology. Yeah. And like, okay, I have to say something here, which I found amazingly fascinating. It has to do with a person, like the human being, like HL. It might sound that you have a very stubborn person, right? And that's needed to go and get something that hasn't been created before and get it to the point where it is adopted and people use it. But at the same time, it's, I don't know, probably the only person that has

demonstrated an extreme level of flexibility. And what I mean by that is the story of how they started the company, they went to the enterprise, they had product market fit, and then they decided that we want to build something even bigger and that required to pretty much go back to zero and start again. That's wow. From a founder perspective, being able to do that and take this amount of risk

requires, of course, to be very stubborn with your vision, obviously, but also a lot of flexibility at the same time. And I think this whole episode and this whole conversation is like a testament of how important the vision and the belief of the humans behind the technology is for the success of the technology. Of course, we talked a lot about technical things, but this, I think, comes next.

It's more important to understand these qualities and how important they are. And then documentation is out there. We can just go and read it. So yeah, that's what I'm keeping from this episode and some of the reasons that I would encourage everyone to

go and listen again. Absolutely. We also talked about the future. We did. It was pretty wild, and he has some pretty exciting predictions about a super evolution that's coming upon us quickly so yeah we also talked about biology and he's an ambassador of the future right he's an

ambassador of the future so yes definitely check it out if you're interested at all in the next super evolution bitmap features and super fast database technology and just generally a really optimistic and engaging, brilliant person. We will catch you on the next one.