The Data Stack Show - The PRQL: Feature Stores and ML Ops with Simba Khadder of Featureform

Episode Date: June 26, 2023

In this bonus episode, Eric and Kostas preview their upcoming conversation with Simba Khadder of Featureform.

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. Of course. Let's do it. Let's do it. Wow, Kostas, what a fascinating conversation with Simba from Featureform. I feel like the conversation spanned such a larger footprint than just, you know, features and even ML Ops. I mean, we talked about so many different things. is that his background in trying to understand how to create a great moment for a user,

it's very clear that influences the way that he thinks about building technology that ultimately materializes into data points. Of course, we can call those features, there's embeddings and there's all sorts of technical stuff. data points. Of course, we can call those features. There's embeddings and there's all sorts of technical stuff. It's very clear that Simba is building a technology that will enable teams to use data points that create really great experiences. I think that comes from him facing the

difficulty of trying to understand why or why not, you know, of the millions of visitors, you know, the handful of people will subscribe. And that to me was really refreshing, because ML Ops is a very difficult space. Feature stores and all of the surrounding technology can be very complicated. There are a lot of players, but it's clear that Simba just wants to help people understand how to drive a great experience using a data point that happens to be derived, that happens to rely on a lot of data sources, and that happens to to be served like in a very real-time way. But to him, those are consequences. Yeah, a hundred percent.

I mean, okay, Simba is like a person, first of all, he has a lot of experience, right? Like he has been through many different, has experienced like many different phases of what we call JML or AI. And he has done that in a very production environment, right? So he has seen how we can build actual systems and products and deliver value with all these technologies, which obviously it's something very important for him today as he's building

his own company. And I think it's like an incredible advantage that he has. We didn't talk that much about, and maybe this is something that we should like have as a topic, like for another conversation with him to talk more about like the developer experience and like how like all this complicated infrastructure with all these different let's say technologies and all the stuff that we discussed together how we can deliver like an experience to developer that works with all that stuff to make him like more productive but what i'll keep like from the conversation that we had with him,

I think he gave an amazing description of what features are, what the beddings are, how they relate to each other, how we go from one to the other and how we use them together. And how, most importantly, all these will become some kind of like, let's say, a universal API for all these ML or AI driven applications in the near future. So I am going to say more about that because I won't like everyone to listen to Simba. He's much, much better than talking about that stuff. But there's like a wealth of very interesting information around all the things that are happening today in the industry

and will happen in the next couple of months in the industry. So, yep. I agree. I think if you want to learn about features, there's actually way more in here. And I think you'll learn about the future of what it looks like for MLOps and actually operationalizing a lot of this stuff. So definitely take a listen. If you haven't subscribed, definitely subscribe.

Tell a friend. And we will catch you on the next one.