The Data Stack Show - The PRQL: Simplicity, SaaS, and the Art of Data Engineering with the Cynical Data Guy

Episode Date: August 11, 2025

In this bonus episode, John and Matt preview the next installment of the Cynical Data Guy. The Data Stack Show is a weekly podcast powered by RudderStack, customer data infrastructure that enables you to deliver real-time customer event data everywhere it’s needed to power smarter decisions and better customer experiences. 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 Datastack 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 Datastack show. We're here for our monthly installment of the cynical data guy. Matt, welcome back to the show. Yep, I'm back.

All right. We've got a few LinkedIn posts to react to. Matt, I'm excited to get your reactions to some of these. Got some juicy ones. So I will jump in with the first one right here. And let's see. So this one, this one I really enjoy. This is from Josh Hansen.

He does data at Clay, which is a marketing automation company. So I'll read it. As a data nerd, the rise of the GTM engineer championed by Clay feels a lot like the emergence of an analytics engineer ushered in by DBT labs. In both cases, a tool arrived at the perfect time and perfectly solved the problem teams we're facing. Data people rallied around DBT and it quickly became a core part of the modern data stack. It's now nearly ubiquitous. Now, RevOps marketing ops and sales ops are seeing something similar. The GTM engineer, powered by Clay, is becoming the go-to-solution for the complexity and fragmentation and modern go-to-market workflows.

And then today's fundraising news is a testament. You know, Clay raised $100 million at $3.1 billion evaluation with a link to an announcement. So, I know you're not a marketing guru, nor am I. I'm curious to your reaction to the analogy here. But I have worked in a marketing department before. That is true. That is true. I've actually worked in two marketing departments and quickly moved out of both of them.

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.