The Data Stack Show - The PRQL: Simplifying Data Collaboration with Pardis Noorzad of General Folders

Episode Date: September 4, 2023

In this bonus episode, Eric and Kostas preview their upcoming conversation with Pardis Noorzad of General Folders.

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. And Kostas, this episode with Pardis from General Folders really got me thinking about economics a lot. I mean, I know that sounds weird.

But when you think about the idea of two businesses or two entities sort of collaborating around data, whatever that looks like, sharing one way, bi-directional or whatever, it's a huge infrastructure problem, right? I mean, the fragmentation makes it a nightmare for anyone who's had to do that, which is really interesting. But the more Pardis talked about it, the more you realize that the fragmentation on the

transactional side is actually far worse than it is on the infrastructure side. And so the infrastructure is almost a proxy for sort of the way that companies are trying to interact. And so I guess maybe you think about the Snowflake marketplace as an interesting sort of economic layer on top of their ecosystem that gives them a lot of market power. But if you actually zoom out and think about the economics of that in an infrastructure agnostic way, that's pretty crazy. So I'm going to be thinking about that a whole lot.

And that's just such a compelling idea in general from Parti. So that was my big takeaway. Yeah, 100%. I totally agree with you that there's some very interesting economic implication in all the stuff that we discussed about with parties. And that's what I'm going to keep also,

to be honest, because it is, let's say, an extremely strong signal that data is turning into actually kind of a commodity. Like, we will start, like, transacting on top of data. I mean, we were doing it already, but it was, like, more of, let's say, a niche kind of niche, right? Like, yeah, financial markets are known for like being ahead of their time in

like, transacting over data because data is actually like the most there, right? Sure, sure. Probably something similar might happen already, like with, like in the medical space, right? But what we actually see here happening is that we are rendering this new, I'd say that like era in a way where actually we're going to see a lot of economical activity on top of data. Something that is accelerated by this whole AI thing that is happening. But that's just a catalyst

that makes things go faster. It's not an enabler. It was there. People predicted that it will come and it seems that it's coming faster than we thought. So that's what I keep. And I would encourage everyone to go and listen to the episode

because there are, I think, some very interesting insights around what the future will look like. Yeah. We should do a shop talk on that because I hadn't thought about this, but you bring up the fintech industry transacting over data, right? And one thing that's really interesting is that what makes that possible is that you assign value to data that allows for transactions on a very wide scale across a very large number of people in the market. And I didn't even think about this being the beginning of an era where

you have all this fragmented data across all this fragmented infrastructure across all these different companies and beginning to see value being assigned to that even through the fragmentation is that's crazy. Brooks, we should do a Shop Talk. That's going to be wild. Yeah, a hundred percent. And just like to make something clear, it's not just like FinTech, even like traditional financial markets were doing that. Like if you go and see

like the traders in Wall Street or these HFT things or like the hedge funds, it's all about data at the end. And that's an interesting conversation I had with someone who came from there.

He's not doing that anymore, but he was saying that, yeah, the strategies, the algorithms, they all get known at some point. So all that is left at the end, that is consistent, is the data. Right. We're doing it. Okay. Yeah. I think we should do definitely a a shop talk and also like, maybe

like find people like to have like a panel or something like around that stuff. But before that, everyone should listen to the episode because these are like, well, there's a lot of like discussion around that with Partition. Yes. And I got to come clean on some past sins in terms of data collaboration with advertising data, which honestly made me feel really clean. So thank you for that opportunity.

Yes, you are forgiven. Thank you, Father. All right, well, thanks for listening to the Data Stack Show. Definitely listen to this episode. Great one. Subscribe if you haven't. Tell a friend and we'll catch you in the next one.