The Data Stack Show - The PRQL: Solving Identity in Marketing vs. Security

Episode Date: February 6, 2023

In this bonus episode, Eric and Kostas preview their upcoming conversation with Jeff Chao of Abbey Labs,

Welcome to the Data Stack Show prequel, where we talk about the show we just recorded to give you a sneak peek, a little taste of what's to come in the episode that will be published. We had Jeff Chow on, a three-peat guest, Costas, which is really cool. And we've had the chance now because the show is actually, I guess I can say a couple of years old. And we've had the chance now because the show is actually, I guess I can say a couple of years old now, we've had the chance to follow him through his career a little bit. So we met him when he was at Netflix. He was on the show when he was at Stripe and we just had him on and he started a new company called Abby. And Costas, the part about the show, of course, this isn't going to surprise you, that I love the most is talking about solving identity problems. Now, Abby's focused on solving identity and security problems inside of an organization. But the way that Jeff talked about it was so similar to identity challenges that I've faced on the marketing side for years, which is really fascinating. So what's your take on that?

How similar are those? I mean, from the point of view of like what kind of methodologies and techniques you can use, I think they're pretty similar. Like at the end, you pretty much do the same thing. You try to create some kind of graph there that associates different identities into one, right? So it is the same thing.

The difference, of course, like in the details, like you have a completely different problem space. You have very different sources of data. Like, and actually like one of the interesting things is that You have very different sources of data. And actually, one of the interesting things is that in security you start with the existence of an identity, right? You have identity. While in marketing you try to surface identity, which is slightly different or makes the problem

much more noisy. But of course, also the implications are completely different, right? If someone steals an identity as part of a security incident, that's probably, let's say, a different problem to have than not figuring out one out of ten of your users. Slightly worse than sending someone the wrong coupon in an email? Probably, yeah. Yeah, probably. So... I don't say that one is bigger than the other. It's just like a very kind of problem.

Fundamentally, from a technical perspective, the methodologies that you are doing, like the tools that you are going to use are like probably quite similar. And I think that's like a great example to communicate to people like why there is like a huge difference between building a technology and getting a product to market.

Yeah, yep, I agree. I think, so one thing I do have to call this out, he said that solving identity in the context of marketing is an inspiration. So being in, you know, marketing being an inspiration. I mean, you are like, you are for many people. I have to call that out. Like the one redeeming thing we've talked about,

you know, marketers doing on the show. We still stop considering marketing as the bad actor. That's true. That's true. How can you imagine our life without marketing? Like so forth. Maybe we need to start talking about sales,

but we can do a shop talk on that. What I was going to say before shining a spotlight on marketing was that I actually think, and this is, you know, definitely listen to the show because of this. I actually think that it's the reverse. The way that Jeff is approaching solving this problem inside of a company, I think, puts certain principles up front that make the challenges way easier. And graph was one thing that he talked about, right?

Considering the problem in the context of using graph technologies as a primary component of the stack, whereas in marketing generally, when you get to graph, you've sort of gone through a huge amount of pain doing a lot of different things. And then you sort of get to the point where, you know, okay, we're going to use Graphics Selfless. And I loved that. And that was a great example, to your point, of Jeff really bringing a unique mindset into this and sort of thinking about the first principles of this in a different way.

So I love that aspect of the show too. Absolutely. I totally agree. And I can't wait to have him again like in a couple of months because he's like a very new company. And then like in a couple of months from now, like he will have like many more

like stories to share with us. So we should do that. We will. All right. Well, definitely catch this episode. Jeff is one of our favorites. Jeff is a subscriber to the show. So if you want to follow in the footsteps

of someone who's built technologies at Netflix, Stripe and other companies, definitely subscribe and we'll catch you on the next one.