The Data Stack Show - The PRQL: BI, Real-Time, and Data Tooling

Episode Date: April 8, 2022

Eric and Kostas preview their upcoming conversation with Max Beauchemin of preset.io.

Welcome to the Data Sack Show prequel. Okay, Costas, I have been reading a book on the history of science, which has been fascinating. And there was something I read recently that really struck me. So Einstein's special theory of relativity, I think it's called. There's like a special one and a general one. I'm not an expert, obviously. The thing that put him on the map, it was really interesting. His first major theory, scientific historians say someone else probably would have figured that out within about five years just based on what they know other physicists were working on around the world, which is really interesting. Now, his general theory, they said, was sort of breaking new

ground. Maybe no one would have thought of that, right? But the special theory apparently would have been discovered. And the reason I bring that up is because we just talked with Max, who invented Airflow and Superset, both part of the Apache Foundation. And he really talked about the process of inventing those in a similar way. He said, it wasn't like he just had a lightning strike and just sort of birthed Airflow on a weekend, right? It was built on a lot of other technology that a lot of other people inside companies had built. And he happened to sort of build it in the right way at the right time at the right company and was able to do that open source, which is super

fascinating. What's your take on that? Inventing new technologies that become widespread, like what is the balance of sort of the stroke of inspiration of an inventor and just sort of the context that they find themselves in solving a problem? Yeah, I don't think that, I mean, I totally agree with both what you described about Einstein but also what Max described. Like, I don't think that any of the innovations that we see out there is, you know, something that someone wakes up one morning and they're like, oh, I should do that, or something you got obsessed with something and they keep doing it until everyone else realizes that this is important and they also adopt. Right? Like that's a very romantic kind of, I'd say that like Hollywood approach and like how things happen.

But I don't think that this, no, I don't think, I'm sure that this is not the real, right, the people that you have around you, the problems that you have to solve for something to be different, the company that you work for, even the society that you're a part of, these are like, let's say, the context that of the earth drives innovation. And so there is a reason that you see so many products and so many new companies coming out from specific other companies, right? Like think about all the companies that were built because something happened at some point in Facebook or something happened at some point in Uber or something happened at some point in Lyft, right? So it's not like the easy explanation to that is that, yeah, of course, because these companies,

like they've got the best talent out there, but no, the talent on its own is not enough. You need to take the talent and put it in the right environment at the right time for these things to happen. And that's at the end, one of the greatest things about Silicon Valley. You are exposed to all these things that are happening and all these opportunities to actually invent something new. Yeah, it's amazing. Well, we had an amazing conversation with Max. That's just one thing we talked about. So the inventing of these tools, which is super interesting, but Preset, of course, the company he's at, is deep in the BI space. And me and he had some interesting thoughts around embedded analytics, the future of BI and all sorts of stuff. So you definitely want to catch this episode. Really interesting. You get some of the Silicon Valley lore of the invention of some tools that we know and use every day in the data space. And we also get to hear about what the future of AI looks like. So definitely catch us on the next episode.