The Data Stack Show - The PRQL: Do You Need Business Intelligence on Your Phone?

Episode Date: December 19, 2022

In this bonus episode, Eric and Kostas preview their upcoming conversation with Zach Hendlin of Zing Data.

Kostas, we just recorded a show with Zach Henlin, who is building Zing. And they do AI and analytics with the ability to query on mobile devices, which is fascinating. And he's a fascinating guy in general because he worked on the news feeds and curation at both LinkedIn and Facebook, which was pretty fascinating. And he talked a lot about how sort of distilling information in terms of curation actually was pretty informative in the way that he's approaching building Zing. But the question for you is, as a founder, someone who's run a business, someone who's both created and consumed a lot of BI, do you want that on your mobile phone? Does the fundamental premise appeal to you? For me as a founder, probably not. And the reason that I'm saying that is because, not because it doesn't have value, it's because you have like already so much noise around you and so much like communication that

you need to map and that's that adding, let's say another source of signal out there as a founder, right? I'm not talking now about like tactical things, like tactical situations where you go out there and you know, like you are in the field and you have to decide like the fruit that you're going to pick up and information to make this tactical decision, right? I'm not talking about that. That's yeah.

But as a founder in the space, like at an area where to be honest, like you probably don't even need that much data. Yeah. Probably wasn't the best question on. Oh, it is a good question because it leads us like to what is like important. And what is important is that there are like, data can be used like in many different ways by many different people. And the industry has reached the point of maturity where we need to start like thinking beyond, let's say, general solutions that can be good enough for

everyone. We're at the point where we need like to start optimizing for like specific needs and niches out there. And these niches are actually not small, they are big. So yeah, probably founders of an early stage startup, they're not going to need like a BI tool in general, to be honest, because you don't even have a business, so why do you need like a vintage for that? But yeah, I can see many cases out there of people like moving around and aren't like they need like to have access to this data. So yeah.

100%. I think the example that he gave of oil production and being in the field was fascinating, right? It makes a huge difference if your output changes by a couple of percentage points. That can happen really fast. And you actually need to be able to create more than just drill down functionality, but the ability to, you know, actually query data in a number of different ways on a device that matches your current context.

So fascinating conversation. Definitely listen in. We also learned some interesting things about newsfeed curation and even got a little bit ethical in talking about mobile device usage at the very end. So stick around if you want some moral discussion around screen time, which is always a nice spicy take. And Zach had some interesting thoughts. So thanks for joining us.

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