The Data Stack Show - The PRQL: Making ERP Systems More User-Friendly with Emilie Schario of Turbine

Episode Date: September 11, 2023

In this bonus episode, Eric and Kostas preview their upcoming conversation with Emilie Schario of Turbine.

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. Kostas, what a fascinating conversation with Emily from Turbine. She's been on the show before, GitLab, Netlify, Amplify Ventures, just knows the modern data stack better than anyone.

And it's amazing that she's going after the ERP space. I mean, you know, what do you think about when you think about ERP? Because I think about really gnarly ETL jobs and transformations is what I think about because it's just like, the APIs are horrible, the schemas are horrible, the data types. I mean, just the amount of data type work that you have to do. It's insane. Yeah. I don't know, Eric. I think you might be surprised about what it's the first thing that comes in my mind

when we are talking about ERPs. For me, it's mainly lawyers and very complicated contracts in order to just go and do a demo and the pilot with a customer because they are using... Oh, right, because you actually built... You built batch load jobs for ERP.

Yeah, I mean, can we say names or the legal teams of these names can go after? I guess that probably is not like a bad idea for the popularity over there. So, so yeah, it was NetSuite and for the customer like to do the demo, they needed to make sure that legally they are like covered so there was a lot of back and forth with the legal team to make sure that they're getting the problems with Oracle.

Yeah, yeah. I don't know. It's super interesting. I think one of the most fascinating things to me was, you know, this is really interesting because we talk about data so much on the show. We talk about data products and the way they interact with data, the way they solve problems around data. This was really

interesting to me, and I think a really good... I'm going to think about this a lot over the next couple weeks. Emily probably knows more about data and data products than most people we've had on the show, right? Just in terms of the breadth, right?

Like of her experience. And when we dug in with her on the problem that they were solving in the ERP space, she described it actually as a function of software getting out of the way of the user, right? She didn't actually, I mean, we did discuss data and we discussed some of the peculiarities of accounting and inventory data, which is a very difficult problem and why incumbent ERPs that are these heavyweight crafty tools still exist. But she kept going back to the customer. I mean, we kept harping on that and she just kept saying, I'm just talking to our customers and I'm asking how their ERP is getting in the way of them doing their job. And we're just building a tool that gets out of their way so they can do their job better.

Sure, it's accounting data, it's inventory data, there are purchase orders. These are very challenging things. But for her, it was actually pretty simple. Well, how do you go challenge the big incumbent ERPs? You just build software that gets out of the customer's way as they're trying to do their job and that was so refreshing yeah and i think very i think it actually is expressive of someone who's a very good leader and who can understand how to build what will become like truly great software one day yeah 100 i think like at the, no matter like what you are building, like from, I don't know, like boring software that keeps notes for one person to going like building rockets, like at the end, like if you want like to succeed, you need to follow like these basic principle of talking to the customer and trying like to figure out how to build something better for the customer. We just keep forgetting that, like especially in

tech, like many times we think that like, okay, if I come up like with a new technology, that's all it takes, right? And actually it's interesting because we had like this conversation with here, like before the actual recording about blockchain and ledgers, right? And that's exactly what happened there. Like we saw that, oh, if we come up like with this new crypto technology and we expose all this complexity out there, it's so important and fascinating that people will just go and adopt it. And at the end, it didn't work like that. It doesn't mean that crypto cannot solve the problem.

It can solve the problem. And maybe better, I don't know. But the way the industry approached the problem was wrong. Technology at the end is just a tool. You need to go and do what Emily is doing. Listen again and again and again and obsess with finding like the right solution for your specific customer. So I would suggest to anyone like to go and listen to the episodes. It doesn't matter if you're a founder or you're leading a team or you're building something anywhere. I think keeping that principle in mind is super, super important.

And we can all learn from here. 100% agree. Well, thanks for listening. Really great episode. Check it out if you haven't. Subscribe if you haven't, wherever you get your podcasts, tell a friend, and we'll catch you on the next one.