You Say Data, I Say Dayta

In the latest installment, I chat with Denzil Eden, the founder of Smarty about entrepreneurship, AI, and what it takes to be a founder.

Denzil is the founder of Smarty. Smarty is a venture-backed startup, and it is the intelligent companion for the busy professional. The company helps you find focus, combat overwhelm, & plan perfect days using AI.

Previously, she was a PM and software developer at Microsoft while also doubling as an adjunct lecturer for computer science at Foothill Community College and San Francisco State University.

Denzil has a Bachelors in Computer Science and Engineering and a Masters in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, both from MIT.

Resources mentioned in episode:

Smarty
Figma
Open AI conference

In this episode, I chat with Thierry Tremblay, the CEO of Kohezion, a leading low-code platform designed to democratize the development of database applications.

He's on a mission to prove that you don't need deep coding skills to effectively manage data. Under his guidance, Kohezion has carved out a niche for itself by offering an intuitive, customizable solution that enables users to build their own applications without coding.

In addition to steering Kohezion, Thierry contributes to the wider tech community by mentoring emerging entrepreneurs.

At his core, Thierry is dedicated to simplifying technology for businesses of every size, ensuring they can leverage powerful tools to streamline their operations without getting bogged down in complexity.

Robert Hodges is CEO of Altinity, which helps enterprises build real-time analytics using ClickHouse.

He has been working on databases as well as the applications that use them since the early 1980s. The journey included Sybase and Oracle in the 1990s, MySQL and PostgreSQL in the early 2000s, followed by analytic databases starting in 2010.

Robert's technical interests include distributed systems, open source software, and Kubernetes.

He is stoked to be part of the next wave of technology based on open source analytic databases. It's a privilege to help users discover creative new uses for data and technology!

In this episode, I have a lovely conversation with Sean Languedoc about the successes and challenges of building and leading businesses.

Sean Languedoc has built or led 5 companies in technology over a 30 year career. 2 wins 2 losses and 1 that's winning now.

He's an angel investor and mentor to many. His latest venture OUTFORCE DOT AI helps companies get the best matching outsource agencies and not get fooled by outsourcing agencies that promise the world.

In this episode he gives away the secrets of how and when to outsource and how and when NOT to outsource.

In the latest episode, I speak with Beate Chelette about how authority figures and ideas develop through data.

Beate Chelette is the Growth Architect and founder of The Women’s Code. She creates strategies, designs process maps and blueprints for visionaries and leaders who want to maximize their profits and scale their impact.

A first-generation immigrant who found herself $135,000 in debt as a single parent, Beate bootstrapped her passion for photography into a highly-successful global business and eventually sold it to Bill Gates in a multimillion-dollar deal.

She is “One of 100 Top Global Thought Leaders in 2021” by PeopleHum and “One of 50 Must-Follow Women Entrepreneurs by HuffPost.

She is the author of the #1 International Award Winning Amazon Bestseller “Happy Woman Happy World – How to Go from Overwhelmed to Awesome”

Recent clients include Amazon, Chevron, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, the Women’s Legislative Caucus of Cal State University Dominguez Hills, the Greater Los Angeles Realtor Association, Advertising Agency TracyLocke and thousands of small businesses.

Resources mentioned in the show:

Instagram
Facebook
LinkedIn
Twitter
Beate's website
Beate's podcast

Data is changing the construction industry too! In this episode, I chat with April Moss, the COO and Co-founder of DigiBuild, a Y Combinator-backed construction software company.

The company has one of the largest, sustainable, and global supplier networks. It uses AI to help customers save vast sums of money and precious time.

Resources mentioned in the episode:

ICS

Construction Technology Institute

HUD

In this episode, I chat with Kevin Marcus about the many pieces of data used in marketing.

We cover many concepts such as probabilistic and deterministic models, correlating IP addresses with a timestamp, mobile IDs, data wrangling, among many others!

Kevin is the co-founder and CTO of Versium. A serial entrepreneur, Kevin is a technical evangelist with 20 years experience architecting highly scalable commerce and database systems. He is an advisory board member and alumni of University of California-Riverside.

Analytics is changing everything - even golf! Don't believe it, listen to this episode!

If you are not a golf fan and have never picked up a club in your life, that doesn't matter. This edition will give you perspective on how the sport can be systematized and analyzed with statistics and Python.

In the latest installment, I chat with co-founders and brothers, Matt and Will Courchene about their site, data golf, that is transforming the sport!

Matt and Will Courchene grew up just outside Ottawa, Canada spending their winters playing hockey and their summers playing golf.

They were both studying Economics in graduate school when they began applying their statistics skillset to PGA Tour data for fun.

At first they posted the occasional blog post to a simple wordpress site, but it has since evolved into the data-driven golf analytics website known as datagolf.com.

You are probably wondering about Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, and their impact on you, your business, and the world. 

In this episode, I chat with Paul Blankley and Ryan Janssen about LLMs, AI, and the semantic layer - where they were in the past, what they are doing today, and their impact on our future.

Paul and Ryan are the Co-founders of Zenlytic, the world’s first self-serve BI tool. 

Paul is the Co-founder / CTO of Zenlytic, a self-serve BI tool that uses LLMs to provide a simple chat interface to complex business data. He's worked in data for 7+ years and is passionate about all things data and AI. He has a master's from Harvard in Data Science, and he lives in Denver, CO, where he spends his free time snowboarding, running, and rock climbing.

Ryan is the CEO of Zenlytic. Prior to co-founding Zenlytic, he worked as a software engineer and a venture capitalist and private equity investor.  He has a masters degree from Harvard in computational science and an MBA from Oxford.  Fun fact: Ryan has lived in 4 countries across 3 continents.

Other Resources Mentioned in the Episode:

Finding Asteroids Down the Back of the Couch: A Novel Approach to the Minor Planet Linking Problem

Office of Planetary Defense

Attention is All You Need Whitepaper

Chelyabinsk Event

Semantic Layer Explained

Lump of Labor Fallacy

Data is changing our customer experiences and the rate of change has accelerated rapidly over the past 3 years.

In this episode, I chat with Jason Agouris about how this is happening. 

Jason is a highly energetic leader and experienced digital business executive who brings immense knowledge to the software engineering team. 

Jason is well-rounded in business management, technical workflow analysis, and product development. 

His specialty is understanding complex systems integration from retail to fintech, apps, franchise transactional data integration, data flow affecting application development, and strategic business collaboration tools that reduce labor duplication while creating new profit opportunities. 

His focus is on working through fundamental sources of truths in model and workflow to unlock speed, scale, and agility

With an ambition to create excellent business through digital excellence, Jason has proven himself to be a valuable asset to any business, team, and partnership.