The Data Stack Show - The PRQL: Bridging Marketing and Technology Through Data-Driven Leadership with Brian Schwartz of SIZE

Episode Date: December 16, 2024

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 Prequel. This is a short bonus episode where we preview the upcoming show. You'll get to meet our guest and hear about the topics we're going to cover. If they're interesting to you, you can catch the full-length show when it drops on Wednesday. Welcome back to the show. We are here with Ryan Schwartz from Size, which is an advisory firm for late stage companies. And they also do investing. We have a lot of questions about that because it's a really neat model and lots of other things to talk about. Brian, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me. Well, you have a fascinating background. We were talking about movies right before the show because you have experience in that industry. But just give us a quick overview of your background. We were talking about movies right before the show because you have experience in that industry, but just give us a quick overview of your background. Yeah. So I'm a longtime marketing guy. I was at a digital agency in London for four years, spent about six and a half years at DreamWorks Animation doing marketing for the films and global retail marketing. And then most recently led global marketing for the lodging group at Expedia, focusing on all of our hotel and vacation rental partners around the world, kind of what I call life 2.0, which is post-corporate world. I now advise a host of high growth companies, send a handful of boards. And kind of along the way,

one of the companies I've been with for a while, I saw lots of problems happening within the business outside of the marketing world, things like supply chain and finance and HR, and decided to build an advisory group with former executives to be able to help these late stage companies across a variety of disciplines. And then the idea is we get in there, we add a ton of value, we get a look under the hood, and then we couple that with an investment arm to be able to look to make strategic investments in companies that we're advising. So Brian, one of the topics we talked about before the show was the interaction

between data and marketing teams, data teams and marketing teams. It can be tense at times, and I think, but when I think you get that right, I think that's one of the magic of these really successful companies. So what do you think of that topic? What's another topic that you're interested in talking about? Yeah, I think that's a great topic. I've seen so many different good things and bad things happen within the marketing tech and data intersection. You know, AI is another topic right now that's very interesting to me. I also think enterprises and how they leverage data is very interesting to me. Everyone's

a little bit different in terms of their strategy. Some of them have tons of data, but don't do anything with it. Others have lots of data and are amazing with it. I've experienced both in my career. So I'm happy to kind of discuss that and explore that as well. Awesome. Well, let's dig in. Yeah, let's do it. All right. That's a wrap for the prequel. The full-length episode will drop Wednesday morning. Subscribe now so you don't miss it.