The Data Stack Show - The PRQL: Zero Copy ETL: Myth vs Reality with Ruben Burdin of Stacksync

Episode Date: July 14, 2025

In this bonus episode, Eric and John preview their upcoming conversation with Ruben Burdin of Stacksync.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 Data Stack show prequel. This is a short bonus episode where we preview the upcoming show. You'll get to meet our guests 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 show. We are here again with Ruben Burdin and he joined us at Data Council. We did a little bit of a lightning round at Data Council, Ruben. So we'll take our time to dive deep.

Thanks for joining us again for your second slot on the show. Yeah, thanks so much for hosting. Great. Well, give us just a little bit of background for those who didn't hear the Data Council show. Give us a little bit of background on yourself and then just the one or two sentence overview of Stacksync. Yeah, perfect. So my name is Ruben.

I'm co-founder and CEO at Stacksync. So I am based here in San Francisco, California, building Stacksync with our team. I'm originally from France. So a bit of my background, you know, I did study computer science, double degree in computer science and one degree in business as well back in Switzerland. And then I worked as well in Germany and in Singapore. And actually, this is also where I got really in touch with the world of two-way syncing because I was working in a company and I was as a consultant and was in charge of putting

everything in place from accounting software to ERP to CRM. And all these tools to work in two ways, think so what I did in the CRM reflecting to the ERP and vice versa, and there were no products on the market. Like then I searched, I tried to build some alternatives myself with somehow workado, et cetera. And none of them really worked, it was really complex and I just couldn't leave the company

because everybody was afraid to take this work over. And this is where actually I realized, you know, like this is where I realized, you know, this is a big whale problem. Everybody's complaining it should exist. And so, and there I committed, you know, I started an entrepreneurial journey and now here we are, we did YC. So Stacksync, basically we were running for a year and a half, then we did YC, so Stacksync basically we were running for a year and a half and we did YC, Y Combinator in the Winter 24 batch and since then, you know, we moved to San Francisco and really got this explosive growth that we have at the moment. Awesome. Well, one thing that I'm excited to talk about is where two-way sync fits into the stack because there are a lot of companies who, you know, sort of use a

traditional sort of in, transform, out type loop. So I'm excited to dig into that and just learn more about two-way sync in general, dive deeper than we went last time. How about you, Ruben? What do you want to talk about? Absolutely. I'm super excited to talk about this two-way sync, what it fits in the stack, but as well as like, I'm very surprised how marketing is actually reshaping the perception of people on zero copy ETL, this kind of trend, you know?

And how actually exists. Right now, as we stand, it's most of marketing and little tech, right? And it's crazy how much these tech people actually go into this fantasy of vendors, you know, selling it. And so, yeah, extremely happy actually also to decode that a little bit further and yeah. Great, well, let's dig in.

Let's do it. 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.