The Data Stack Show - The PRQL: What Does 10 Years in the Data Space Give You?

Episode Date: September 9, 2022

In this bonus episode, Eric and Kostas preview their upcoming conversation with Benn Stancil of Mode.

Welcome to the Data Stack Show prequel. Costas, we just had an awesome conversation with Ben Stancil, one of the founders of Mode, which has been around for actually a long time. You look at Mode and you like, if you are new to it, you think, OK, this is just like a modern, you know, sort of new data tool. But it's been around for almost a decade, which is pretty amazing. And I think one of the things that we both noticed about Ben's perspective is that it feels like he's been deeply immersed in the data space for a decade, right? Like his perspective on things is really, really deeply informed by being both a practitioner before the whole, you know, sort of data warehouse, you know, cloud data warehouse movement before the whole modern data stack movement, whatever that means. And so he has just a really informed perspective in general, which I appreciated so much.

What stuck out to you about his perspective in particular? I mean, I think like everyone who's like interested in like the markets today should listen like to the episode that we had with Ben because he's projecting like the experience that he has for like 10 years where the market has gone through like a huge amount of transformation, many things. Hold on, October. Yeah.

Like he has experienced like many, like, like, okay, consolidations of like markets, the creation of new categories, like building data products at a time that data was not like such a sexy thing, right? Like everyone was more into how we are going to build the next SaaS B2C product out there, right? So he has like a very deep understanding of how this market works, like what are the dynamics, like what has caused these changes. And he said, like, I think some very interesting insights, both about like today and tomorrow of the industry.

And, um, what I laughed was like, also like the part of the conversation about what he doesn't like, The market and the industry out there. So I would encourage everyone to go and listen to this episode. I know I'm not sharing that much, but I do it like on purpose because I want to, I really want like the people like to go and like listen to the episode and not just like keep what the two of us are sharing like on this prequel. Yeah. It's a really good one.

The conversation about what he didn't like that he sees happening in the market right now is one of the most helpful sort of like five minutes of, you know, perspective that I've had in a while. Yeah. I think the other thing I would say as another teaser, which this won't give away too much, so I hope I'm not letting the cat out of the bag to your disliking, Kostas. But in 2012, he worked on a data team that happened to be operating, I would say, like a decade ahead of its time. And there were some really unique business conditions and sort of like a go-to-market strategy that like created an environment where that just happened naturally. And so hearing about sort of what we would say is like

a modern data team structure occurring like before the term data engineering really got a foothold was absolutely fascinating. And I think gives us a really good historical perspective. So this is one you definitely want to catch. So subscribe if you haven't. We'll notify you when the new episode goes live and we will catch you on the next one.