Latest / Agentic Conversations (formally mlops.community) / The Rise of Modern Data Management // Chad Sanderson // #226
Transcript
- 0:00My name is Chad Sanderson. My title is Chief Executive
- 0:03Officer. My company is gabled AI.
- 0:07Well, I drink tea. Does that count instead of
- 0:09coffee? Welcome back everyone.
- 0:11We are in another ML OPS community podcast session.
- 0:15I am your host Dimitrios. And today talking with Chad
- 0:17Sanderson, he dropped a few bombs on me and this is probably
- 0:21I think this is the third time that he's been back.
- 0:24And to be honest, he does not disappoint anytime.
- 0:27He is one of the greatest thought leaders in this space of
- 0:32data platforms, data quality, data engineering, you name it.
- 0:39He has strong stories. And I think the reason that I'm
- 0:44able to latch on to the stories that he tells is that he
- 0:48encompasses and articulates what people are feeling and talking
- 0:52about in the community, on LinkedIn, just in general so
- 0:57well. And he harps on why it doesn't
- 1:02need to be like this. First of all, he talks about the
- 1:04problem. He has a deep understanding of
- 1:07the problem from his experiences as a data engineer, and he knows
- 1:11that data engineers can be a bottleneck sometimes when you
- 1:14have these different roles, like a data scientist or a data
- 1:18analyst are asking a data engineer to go and figure out,
- 1:22go debug why my data isn't coming in the same format that
- 1:26it was a day ago or why my machine learning model all of a
- 1:28sudden is going haywire. And I think it's a data quality
- 1:31issue. He's able to talk and harp on
- 1:35why data engineering does not need to be 90% debugging.
- 1:40He also goes through what it looks like, what a traditional
- 1:45analytics system looks like, what a traditional data platform
- 1:48system looks like, and how these systems currently break down and
- 1:54why he has set out to fix it. What he's doing at his new
- 1:58company, Gable was really cool to see because I knew him when
- 2:03he was at Convoy and he was talking a lot about the problems
- 2:06that they were having there and also the issues that they were
- 2:09trying to solve. And he mentioned that.
- 2:12And then he went out and for the last year and a half, he's been
- 2:15talking to just about everyone in the data space, talking to
- 2:18companies small and large about how they are running their
- 2:22systems. And he's in a lucky position
- 2:24because he is so well known, he gets to have access to so many
- 2:29different people in different sized companies, different
- 2:32maturity levels and different quality of their data
- 2:37infrastructure. And he can show what it looks
- 2:43like in all of these phases and where there are common problems
- 2:48across all company sizes, maturity levels, you name it.
- 2:53Let's get into this conversation with my man Chad.
- 2:58And as a little aside, a little secret, he's going to be
- 3:02speaking at the AI Quality Conference.
- 3:05We've got a few tickets left, so come join us June 25th in San
- 3:10Francisco. Ohh.
- 3:12Yeah. And of course, if you liked it,
- 3:14give us a share. Let us know what you thought of
- 3:16the episode. Rate us on Spotify, subscribe on
- 3:21YouTube, all that fun stuff. We will talk to you on the other
- 3:23side, Chad Sanderson. It has been a year since we
- 3:33talked, I think, and when you came on last time, we were
- 3:37beating the drum about data quality.
- 3:39It's probably more pertinent than ever before.
- 3:44I want to know though. It's been a year, man, what has
- 3:48changed? Well, in the last year that
- 3:51we've talked, there have been some meaningful, meaningful
- 3:56changes. One, I got married so, so
- 4:00congratulations, That was great. That happened in October and
- 4:04then #2 it started a company left Convoy.
- 4:07I now have a a business called Gable dot AI and we are, we are,
- 4:15we are off to the races building founders journey is very
- 4:20interesting and different than what I've done before, but
- 4:23pretty rewarding as well. I believe it.
- 4:26So I want to get into Gable a tonne because you pretty much
- 4:31created this term data contracts and I know you are thinking
- 4:37deeply about data contracts and how to help productize that
- 4:42idea. Before we go into that rabbit
- 4:46hole though, you've been talking with people for a year, maybe
- 4:50over a year on how they're implementing their data
- 4:53pipelines, what their data architecture looks like.
- 4:56Do you have insights for us and anything that you've learned
- 5:01when it comes to setting up proper data infrastructure?
- 5:06Yeah, that's a good question. So I think there's a few major
- 5:10trends that are starting to emerge that are different from
- 5:15the last few years, especially the the sort of data bubble,
- 5:20I'll call it of the early twenty 20s where it was the midst of
- 5:26COVID, the interest rates were still low and so growing
- 5:31startups could afford a pretty large bills for their data
- 5:36infrastructure, Snowflake, Databricks, a whole host of
- 5:41tools, even if they didn't have that much to show for it.
- 5:45That's something that we're seeing is starting to change.
- 5:48Less companies are starting to assume that the data will
- 5:52inherently be valuable and that teams will just be able to find
- 5:58value within it. And more companies are starting
- 6:01to demand from the beginning that data teams have a good idea
- 6:06of how that data will be used and how it will generate ROI
- 6:10before the infrastructure exists.
- 6:13And this is actually a callback to the way the data
- 6:17infrastructure used to be set up and created in the 80s and 90s,
- 6:22before storage and compute was decoupled.
- 6:25If you're a company like Ford and you wanted to invest in it
- 6:29in a data warehouse, this was an incredibly expensive task.
- 6:33And so you had to think very carefully, not just from a cost
- 6:38perspective, a literal, you know, storage and compute cost
- 6:41perspective, but from a human capital cost.
- 6:44How many people are we going to be deploying to answer some data
- 6:47question? How many data architects?
- 6:50We'll, we'll need to have some tool that's handling all the
- 6:54ETL, doing the transformation in some centralised place, what we
- 6:57do with the data. And so this is where you you see
- 7:01the data warehouse becoming a very popular friend, not because
- 7:05it was like a generic system that sat on top of all data, but
- 7:10because it was very, very useful for answering a specific set of
- 7:13questions that drive that we're driving business value.
- 7:16And So what we're seeing is teams starting to think a little
- 7:20bit less about building U an end to end stack from day one, or
- 7:26primarily thinking about analytics as the main use case
- 7:30for data. The lateral.
- 7:32The latter is actually a pretty important point because
- 7:36analytics for a very long time in a company's life cycle is not
- 7:40going to deliver massive business value.
- 7:42It's more so getting you information about the product.
- 7:45And so it makes sense why product teams really want
- 7:48analytics. But this is very different from
- 7:51something like invoice reconciliation, which has an
- 7:55actual cost to it. And if you don't do it well, it
- 7:58can impact the business negatively.
- 8:00Same thing with machine learning.
- 8:01And we're beginning to see a rise in more of those, what I
- 8:04would call operational use cases for data as the primary use
- 8:09cases of data infrastructure. And that requires the
- 8:11infrastructure to be built a little bit differently.
- 8:14Have you seen people do this wrong?
- 8:17Well, I think it ties back to to the analytics use case, because
- 8:21oftentimes the impetus for our data investment comes from
- 8:26product teams who want analytics for their their product
- 8:30Organisations can build their data infrastructure in service
- 8:35of analytics and not in service of operational systems.
- 8:39So as an example, a very common analytics data pipeline is
- 8:45you've got Snowflake for storage, you've got a data lake
- 8:48and you can just throw all the data that you care about in
- 8:51there. You've got something like
- 8:53Fivetran to just quickly plug into these services or, or
- 8:57databases and move the data into something like Snowflake.
- 9:01And you've got debt sitting on top of it to very quickly and
- 9:04rapidly transform it. And then you have an analytics
- 9:07tool like Looker. This is a very common setup for
- 9:10early stage companies and teams. Basically thousands of teams
- 9:15have have been using this. The problem is, is like that
- 9:18setup does not actually scale nor does IT support the
- 9:22operational use cases. One, there's a quality and
- 9:25governance issue there, which is if we are extracting data from
- 9:29the data producers using a tool like Fivetran, and the producers
- 9:33haven't taken any level of ownership over that data,
- 9:35meaning they're not treating it as a product, they're not
- 9:38treating it as an API, They're not, you know, thinking about,
- 9:43they don't have any accountability to it.
- 9:45Then when something changes, it means it is 100% the
- 9:49responsibility of the data teams to deal with that change.
- 9:54Now, in an analytics world, that's OK because if the change
- 9:58affects your dashboard, the company doesn't lose any money.
- 10:01You just go in and and fix whatever the issue is.
- 10:04But if it's a machine learning model or it's an AI system, it
- 10:08actually does have an impact. You can't just go back
- 10:11retroactively and fix things like, especially if you don't
- 10:14know about the change. Like if you've got a, let's say
- 10:17that your model is training every night and you have a data
- 10:21quality issue that maybe you're test didn't catch for some
- 10:24reason, then your model is going to be retrained on, on bad data
- 10:27and the predictions will start having a real financial impact
- 10:30on the company, right? That's one instance, but invoice
- 10:33reconciliation is another. Like if we, if we don't catch
- 10:36that problem in a certain time window and deal with it, there
- 10:40are real, you know, physical consequences.
- 10:44And that means there has to be ownership, there has to be
- 10:47visibility of the data as it flows to the system.
- 10:50There has to be very clear expectations that are divine
- 10:53defined. There has to be some feedback
- 10:57loop from the, from the person that's using the data to the
- 11:00person who's producing the data. There's a whole sort of set of
- 11:04features and functionality that we could talk about.
- 11:06But I think the best way of summarising it is in, in the old
- 11:09world 80s and 90s, you had centralised data management.
- 11:13And you can think about centralised data management in
- 11:15the same way you can think about the management of like a, like a
- 11:18library, right, where you've got, you've got books coming in,
- 11:21they get stored in a catalogue, you've got a librarian and
- 11:24they're responsible for what comes in.
- 11:26They know everything that goes out.
- 11:28They're, they're checking what comes in and what goes out.
- 11:31They're organising the books in a certain way so that they're
- 11:34easily findable and discoverable.
- 11:36And, and you have a staff of librarians and this is their job
- 11:39and it's what they do all day. And I think I read that the
- 11:42average number of books was like, you know, 20,000, like
- 11:4520,000 books in a library, which is not all that money.
- 11:49Many, if you're thinking in terms of like data sets, right?
- 11:51Some companies have hundreds of thousands or millions of, of, of
- 11:54data sets. And what that was sort of the
- 11:58old way. And what we're moving to is, is,
- 12:01is the Federated way. It's like, well, we don't have
- 12:04these librarians anymore that are these centralised kind of
- 12:07people managing all the data in the company in determining who
- 12:10gets to have access and who who doesn't.
- 12:12So how do you do this in more of a Federated environment where
- 12:17the people who are actually writing the books are making
- 12:21those books available to the people who who want the books?
- 12:23What does that system have to look like?
- 12:26And you'll find that it looks a lot more like like a bookstore
- 12:30or like Amazon, right? Something like that.
- 12:32And I think that's the change we're undergoing in in data
- 12:34right now. The question that came to my
- 12:37mind directly, as you were saying that is just how can we
- 12:41make sure that if we are writing a book, other people come, and
- 12:46in this metaphor, they come and buy our books.
- 12:51And it's not like I just write a book for nobody to read.
- 12:55Yeah. So that is 1 area where the
- 12:57metaphor slightly falls down because in Amazon, right, the
- 13:01purpose of writing the book is to sell it.
- 13:03But in data, the purpose of producing data may not be for
- 13:08other people to use it. I might produce data as an
- 13:11engineer because I need that data to run my application,
- 13:14right? Like if I'm, if I'm collecting
- 13:17data about a customer goes to my website, I ask them to fill out
- 13:21a form and includes their, their name, their age, you know,
- 13:26whether or not they've bought any new socks in the last three
- 13:28days. I will use all of that
- 13:30information as the owner of that service to do interesting things
- 13:34like maybe I want to send them a gift card for their birthday.
- 13:37Maybe I want to show their name on their profile page.
- 13:41If I know they haven't bought any new socks in the last three
- 13:43days, maybe I'm going to show socks as like the number one
- 13:46item for them to buy in their list of referred items.
- 13:50I like I'm actually using that data for something.
- 13:52And so I'm not thinking about how other people in the company
- 13:56might be using that data as well, right?
- 13:59Like if, if I am, if I'm saying, hey, this is useful to me.
- 14:02The way most organisations work is that the data teams will come
- 14:05in and look at all of this data that's stored in transactional
- 14:08system. And they will say, well, this is
- 14:10actually really important data for me too.
- 14:12Like we would like to know what the average age of all of our
- 14:17customers are. Maybe there's something
- 14:19meaningful we want to do with that.
- 14:20Or we want to know like whether or not, you know, people have
- 14:24bought socks in the last three days, Like, is that a relevant
- 14:26question for us to continue asking?
- 14:29What should we be showing them in those cases?
- 14:32And so they will use tools like 5 Trend, these like data
- 14:36extraction tools, to kind of forcibly rip the data out of the
- 14:40hands of the engineers that are producing them and put that data
- 14:43into their own environments where they can analyse it.
- 14:47And now you have this problem, right, where the engineering
- 14:50team is kind of making the changes to the data that they
- 14:54really care about that makes sense for them.
- 14:56And that might mean changing stuff, right?
- 14:57They might decide, hey, I've got today in my database, I've got
- 15:01sort of a first name field and a last name field, but I don't
- 15:04think that's relevant, you know, we're wasting space or whatever.
- 15:07So I'm gonna create a single column that's just called name.
- 15:10Now, as long as it's as long as it is only affecting me, that's
- 15:15no big deal, right? It's just my service.
- 15:17I've built my service in a way that can handle that change.
- 15:19But if these downstream teams are extracting data and they're
- 15:23expecting, you know, maybe they're putting into some
- 15:26marketing automation or something and they're always
- 15:28expecting first name, last name to be in different fields.
- 15:31And I've just broken that downstream marketing automation.
- 15:34The problem I feel is not that these product engineers don't
- 15:38care, it's that they don't know, right?
- 15:41Like if you go to any application developer and you
- 15:45ask them do you know how your data is being used and you know
- 15:50where dependencies on you exist and and what it's being used for
- 15:55and how valuable it is to the company.
- 15:57Most of these developers are going to say no, I, I, I have no
- 15:59clue. And if they don't have any clue,
- 16:02then to your point, they are not able to even start thinking of
- 16:06how do I make this data available in a safe structured
- 16:09way to make it accessible and to make it fit for purpose in the
- 16:12application world. It makes total sense to try to
- 16:15build in, you know, in this very decoupled way where I'm not
- 16:20stepping on anyone's toes. I can move as fast as I want
- 16:23within my own service. I don't have to depend on or
- 16:26rely on anyone else. I can and and the whole purpose
- 16:29of that is is speed. And the reason speed is
- 16:32important is because this is the age of rapid iteration and rapid
- 16:37experimentation. We know that some features are
- 16:39not going to work with customers.
- 16:41We know some will. The faster that we can ship
- 16:43things and we can try things out, the more that we could, you
- 16:46know, kind of hill climb our way to to some sort of of meaningful
- 16:51success with that product. But data is not like that.
- 16:56If I am computing a metric called profit, by definition
- 17:03that metric will take a dependency on some other metric
- 17:07called revenue and another metric called cost, and the
- 17:11revenue metric will itself take a dependency on the variety of
- 17:16sources of revenue within a company.
- 17:19When I worked at Microsoft, you know, one source was Bing Ads
- 17:23revenue. And then you also had all the
- 17:25revenue you got from selling Windows.
- 17:29And then you got the revenue you had from the the Microsoft
- 17:32Store, right? These are all kind of sources of
- 17:34revenue. And then if you trace that line
- 17:36all the way back, then you can split it out into the
- 17:38individual, you know, line items.
- 17:41And so you could there, there are these chains, these trees of
- 17:45dependencies that form when you're trying to answer
- 17:49questions on data. And that cannot be decoupled,
- 17:53right? It's impossible to decouple
- 17:54that. And so and, and when you, when
- 17:57you step back and you actually look at how the data flows
- 18:00throughout a company, it does look more like a supply chain
- 18:03where you've got a producer of kind of the raw materials.
- 18:07And these might be the the logs that are being emitted from some
- 18:11service. And then that data gets
- 18:14transformed in some raw layer or silver layer of a data warehouse
- 18:21into a bit more normalised, a bit more kind of aggregated.
- 18:24And then they get transformed yet again into a domain.
- 18:29And so here's all the events for a particular business unit.
- 18:34And then from there, they're transformed again into a
- 18:38particular metric. And then it's sort of on, on and
- 18:40on it goes. And if there's any break in the
- 18:43chain at any point, then it has a ripple effect to everyone
- 18:48downstream that is leveraging that data.
- 18:50And so like one of the things we've kind of been dancing
- 18:53around while we're having this conversation is this idea of
- 18:57change management, right? If I am a software engineer and
- 19:01I'm trying to make changes to my code, there are very well
- 19:05understood systems on how to do that without causing damage to
- 19:10everyone else that is dependent on that code.
- 19:12And we call this DevOps, right? So if I'm, if I'm an engineer
- 19:17and I'm adding a new feature that goes through a process,
- 19:21there's unit tests and there's integration tests and there's
- 19:25pull requests. So humans look at these changes
- 19:29and then I get a diff so I can there's things that they could
- 19:32easier for the humans to actually review the changes.
- 19:35And then there's a whole process that sort of runs to merge the
- 19:38branch, the the back into sort of the main trunk of the code
- 19:43base. And then there's a whole process
- 19:45of ensuring that deployment is safe.
- 19:47And then there's tools like Launch Darkly that allow you to
- 19:51to toggle that feature on and off.
- 19:53And then you've got tools like Amplitude and Mixed Panel that
- 19:56actually track how the business users or how the users that
- 20:01engage with that feature. All of this is change
- 20:03management, right? I've made a change.
- 20:05I want to make sure that that change was safe and it had the
- 20:08intended effect. But if you look at the data
- 20:12world, none of that exists, right?
- 20:15None of that infrastructure I just talked about exists.
- 20:17So and data changes just as frequently as as software
- 20:21changes. If, if, if I'm an engineer and
- 20:23I'm making a change to my database, that's data changing.
- 20:27If I'm adding a new event that is emitted every time a user
- 20:31interacts with the feature, that's, that's, that's data
- 20:34changing. If I'm, if I'm removing an
- 20:36event, that's, that's data changing.
- 20:38So data is changing all the time, yet there is no system for
- 20:43the teams actually leveraging that data to give any sort of
- 20:46human in the loop review or, or feedback.
- 20:50There's no sort of integration testing for data.
- 20:54There's no way to actually check to make sure that the data is
- 20:56flowing the, the way that it is supposed to.
- 20:59These are all things that you detect after the fact, right?
- 21:03Like way after the changes have already happened.
- 21:05And generally you're looking at the, the, the outcomes, the use
- 21:08case like you're looking at, you're saying your machine
- 21:10learning model has failed. And that's how I know that a
- 21:14data issue has occurred. Yeah, all of a sudden the
- 21:18dashboards are starting to go wild, and it's like, ohh, maybe
- 21:21that was because my data was a little bit dirtier than I had
- 21:23thought, and it exchanged one too many hands, or somebody did
- 21:29something upstream that I have no idea how or what.
- 21:33And then I have to go and be a detective and figure out what
- 21:38exactly who was changing what and where did they change.
- 21:42It ohh, yeah, well, I think it's on it's on both sides of the of
- 21:46the workflow as well. There's definitely the workflow
- 21:48of the a thing has changed. I I've been impacted.
- 21:52How do I root cause this and what do I do moving forward?
- 21:56Usually that work is put onto the data engineer, because if
- 22:00you're a data scientist or an analyst, you don't know that
- 22:04it's it's very. Hard just saying hey, it stopped
- 22:07working. What's going on?
- 22:08Why is this like going all haywire?
- 22:10Why did this happen? I have no idea.
- 22:12All I know is that it's impacting me.
- 22:14So I'm gonna escalate it to my data engineering team.
- 22:16And then data engineering is usually the one that has to
- 22:19trace the lineage and say, OK, well where is this data actually
- 22:23coming from? I can try to manually figure out
- 22:26the services that that may have changed.
- 22:28I can look at the pull requests over time.
- 22:30Then I have to go and talk to the owners of those PR's and
- 22:33say, did you make a change? Did did it impact this?
- 22:36I have to manually investigate it myself.
- 22:38And then I have to convince them that they need to, to roll that
- 22:41change back or put in a fix into their PR.
- 22:44And that takes time, right? Because they don't really care.
- 22:47It doesn't affect them. So it goes on to their backlog.
- 22:49It may take weeks, it may take months.
- 22:51And then once the fix is actually put into place, now I
- 22:53need to do a backfill. And, and that's the data
- 22:56engineering team. And usually there are way fewer
- 22:59data engineers in a company than there are data scientists or
- 23:02analysts. So they become a bottleneck,
- 23:05right? They're getting all of these
- 23:06requests. They're kind of like stacking,
- 23:08and it's very hard to address them all.
- 23:10That's sort of one side of the problem.
- 23:12And then the other side of the problem is, well, if you don't
- 23:16trust the data to be accurate and if there is no clear
- 23:21ownership of the data, that means it is your responsibility
- 23:25as a data scientist to make sure with, you know, 100% confidence
- 23:31that this data means semantically what you expect it
- 23:34to mean. That there is validation rules
- 23:36in place, That, you know, if anything changes, you are going
- 23:40to at least know about it. And hopefully it doesn't totally
- 23:43blow your model up. And that takes a lot of time.
- 23:46And we're in work too. In fact, I think I've read like
- 23:4875% of data science time, it's been on validation.
- 23:51And that might seem like, oh, well, that's just kind of the
- 23:53state of the world. But this is not how software
- 23:56engineers work. They don't spend 75% of their
- 23:59time trying to figure out if the API that they're ingesting is
- 24:03giving them the right thing or not.
- 24:04Like they trust that API because it is an API, right?
- 24:09There is like it's very clearly documented exactly what this
- 24:14thing is that they're consuming, right?
- 24:17What what it means, how to use it.
- 24:19And and because that API exists, it means they can take a
- 24:22dependency on it and justice refer back to the documentation
- 24:26and the usage and the spec on how to manage it properly.
- 24:29And when you think, you kind of think about data in that way,
- 24:33data is an API too, right? When when I'm taking a
- 24:36dependency on data coming from some database, it's just, it's
- 24:41just another interface. And yet I'm doing that without
- 24:45the contract, right? There's that word that a
- 24:49software engineer gets when they are leveraging an API for their
- 24:53services. Like I'm taking the dependency,
- 24:56but I'm not getting any of the guarantees.
- 24:58I'm not getting any of the ownership, no, none of the
- 25:01trust, none of the documentation.
- 25:03And I think like this is one of the big things that that needs
- 25:05to change. All right, real fast, I want to
- 25:08tell you about the sponsor of today's episode, AWS Tranium and
- 25:11Influencia. Are you stuck in the performance
- 25:14cost trade off when training and deploying your generative AI
- 25:17applications? Well, good news is you're not
- 25:21alone. Look no further than Aws's
- 25:24Tranium and Influencia, the optimal infrastructure for
- 25:28generative AI. AWS, Tranium and Influencia
- 25:32provide high performance compute infrastructure for large scale
- 25:38training and inference with Elms and diffusion models.
- 25:42And here's the kicker, you can save up to 50% on training costs
- 25:48and up to 40% on inference cost. That is 50 with A5 and A0.
- 25:54Whoo. That's kind of a big number.
- 25:57Get started today by using your existing code in frameworks such
- 26:00as Pytorch and Tensorflow. That is AWS, Tranium and
- 26:05Influencia. Check it out.
- 26:07And now let's get back into the show.
- 26:09So how are you doing it? Are you basically in, I'm
- 26:13thinking about those tests that you can get when you go to the
- 26:16doctor and they check to see if your veins are clogged or not.
- 26:21And they put something inside your veins and then the blood
- 26:24pumps all through the body and you can see where there are
- 26:28places where you have like friend clots or parts of the
- 26:34veins that aren't working as well because it's been tracked,
- 26:38right? And I think it's like blue dye
- 26:40or something. And so under the special
- 26:42machine, you can see like, OK, these veins are not working that
- 26:46well and you have a clear picture of it.
- 26:49I almost feel like you need to do that where you put a stamp on
- 26:53the data. And if it comes out of this API,
- 26:57then it is with this like pedigree and you know these
- 27:01things. But then if anybody takes it and
- 27:03then they use it and you then have that data downstream from
- 27:09three or four different transformations or uses or
- 27:13people have touched it in many different ways, you can still
- 27:18retrace it because it has almost like all the different pedigrees
- 27:22as it's gone through this supply chain.
- 27:26So the the way, the way that we think about So what you're
- 27:29describing right now is sort of a, I think a more advanced form
- 27:32of of data lineage. And if folks in the audience are
- 27:35not familiar with data lineage, it's essentially the process of,
- 27:39of starting from the that either the, the looking at the
- 27:45generally it's sort of looking at an analytical environment and
- 27:49parsing through SQL and basically stepping through each
- 27:53query and understanding how that query was built.
- 27:58What table does it rely on and what table does it produce.
- 28:01And when you can answer sort of all of those questions for every
- 28:05query in your data environment, then you effectively have this
- 28:08big grass. And the graph shows you how one
- 28:13column flows to all these other different tables and views in in
- 28:18the company. And this is really great if
- 28:21you're using a tool like Snowflake or Databricks.
- 28:25And the reason why is because these companies have effectively
- 28:30built abstraction layers on top of data.
- 28:32They have created the interface, which as an example would be
- 28:35Snowflake SQL. And everybody knows how to
- 28:38interact with Snowflake SQL. And you also have tools like DBT
- 28:41that sort of write the transforms.
- 28:42And DBT also provides an interface that's even easier to
- 28:45use than Snowflake SQL. And they actually sort of manage
- 28:48a lot of this lineage work for you.
- 28:51The problem is generally not downstream, right?
- 28:54So, and by downstream, what I mean is what happens to the data
- 28:59after it arrives in some environment that a consumer of
- 29:03the data can do something with it.
- 29:06So it could be a notebook, it could be snowflake, it could be
- 29:09data bricks, right? It's somewhere.
- 29:11As long as I can access the data as like a data scientist, the
- 29:15problem is not really there. It's everything prior to that
- 29:20because where that data is coming from doesn't have nice
- 29:25clear abstractions. It's the Wild West, right?
- 29:29Like the data could be coming from.
- 29:32We could, we could have a Python script that's pulling, pulling
- 29:37out Excel spreadsheets and dumping these like CCVS into a
- 29:41data lake and then pushing that on some cadence into our
- 29:45analytical database. And anyone at any point time can
- 29:49go in and make a change to the structure of that file.
- 29:52And we would never know about it until it actually reaches us,
- 29:56which is too late. It could be a software engineer
- 29:59that is adding a new, you know, adding new logging to some
- 30:03feature that they've they've created.
- 30:05And then we're pushing that event via Kafka into a into a
- 30:09database. And then from the database,
- 30:10we're going into the analytical environment.
- 30:13And so if I don't know that, if I don't have the link between
- 30:18the analytical environment in the event code, I will always
- 30:22have to, that will always be a manual slog for me because I
- 30:26will have to make that connection myself.
- 30:28And this is, this is sort of the state of the world for a lot of
- 30:31data scientists. It's like there is that gap
- 30:34between when the data actually lands in some storage system and
- 30:39what's going on before that. And so when people talk about
- 30:43like a source of truth, that's what they're talking about,
- 30:46right? When someone says, Hey, I want
- 30:48to know the source of truth of these transactions, they're not
- 30:51talking about the table and snowflake.
- 30:53They're talking about the actual moment that the invent of a
- 30:57transaction occurs. And what does that mean, right?
- 31:02What is the underlying code that is producing that interaction
- 31:06and, and where can they find it? So in terms of in terms of what,
- 31:11what Gable does, there's a few things.
- 31:16Gabel is a, is, is kind of a, a meaty platform.
- 31:19We tackle this problem and in modular pieces, people can use
- 31:24any number of the modules that we produce or they can tie them
- 31:28together into a more seamless experience, which is where it
- 31:30really gets magical and powerful.
- 31:32But the core of the platform is what I would call our our our
- 31:36API's. Like we can build a consistent
- 31:42abstraction on top of many different types of data sources
- 31:46automatically. So if you think about what
- 31:51actually makes up any data source, there's really only two
- 31:54components. There's the structure of the
- 31:56data. So that would be the schema, the
- 31:59data types, column names, stuff like that.
- 32:03And the and the semantics like what?
- 32:04What does that structure actually mean?
- 32:06What does any particular column or row mean in the real world?
- 32:10And then there is the contents of the data itself.
- 32:13So those values that I would expect from that data, the if,
- 32:20if I have 5 categorical values in some particular field, I
- 32:25would never expect there to be a six or or 7th suddenly appear
- 32:28like maybe my system is not built in such a way to to deal
- 32:31with that. Or if someone, if I have an age
- 32:34field, I would probably not expect their age to ever be less
- 32:37than 0 or greater than, you know, like 300, unless they're,
- 32:42you know, you've. Got putting conditions and
- 32:45almost like guardrails onto the data so that people understand
- 32:49OK, no matter what and how tainted things can get, the data
- 32:54is not going to come out like this.
- 32:56And if it does, we need to figure something out.
- 32:58Are you alerting people if it does show up like that?
- 33:01Or is it just not allowed and you get like a null?
- 33:05Or it's it's a bit of both. So the, so the there's sort of
- 33:08a, a flow that happens the, so there's really like 4 main steps
- 33:12in Gable. The first step is the
- 33:13identification of these data sources.
- 33:15And we have some magical AI driven mechanisms to scan a code
- 33:21base and to automatically figure out where in code is data being
- 33:26produced. And so that could be a, you
- 33:31know, we can figure out here is all the database, all the
- 33:34database tables that are being produced, that are being all,
- 33:37all the structures that exist in your code.
- 33:39Here's all the event code that's being produced.
- 33:41We could connect to some file structure like S3, scan through
- 33:47S3 and then figure out for each file, is this file related to
- 33:52data? Does it have a schema and stuff
- 33:55like that? Or is this more of like a non
- 33:57data related file? Is it just like a Word document
- 34:00or something like that? Once we have all of those, and
- 34:03we could do this for 3rd party stuff too, Salesforce, SAP,
- 34:06whatever, it doesn't really matter.
- 34:07But once you kind of have all of those identified, then we can
- 34:12extract structure and we can extract contents of the data and
- 34:17we can represent those in a standard format.
- 34:20So it doesn't matter if it's a Postgres transactional database,
- 34:25if it is a, a segment event, a Python dictionary, you know,
- 34:30a.net executable, a Java whatever.
- 34:35All of that data can be extracted and and sort of
- 34:38organised and formatted and in in the exact same way.
- 34:41Once that's in place, we can then automatically enrich that
- 34:46data with lots of useful information O because we're
- 34:50injecting ourselves into the Git sort of version control platform
- 34:54of choice. So GitLab, GitHub, whatever, you
- 34:58can extract the ownership on the repo level, right?
- 35:03Like who is the person that actually owns the code that is
- 35:06producing this data? That is true ownership.
- 35:09You can extract how that data asset has changed overtime and
- 35:15then you can also extract how are these assets actually
- 35:18connected to each other. Like where do we see the same
- 35:22information in in different assets?
- 35:25And that's sort of the lineage graph that I mentioned before.
- 35:30Once you have that, and that all happens sort of automatically
- 35:33now. Once you have that, now you can
- 35:35start to have humans come into the loop and a human can say,
- 35:39OK, well, I have some expectations on this particular
- 35:43data. And those expectations might be
- 35:47the constraints you mentioned. So there might be some specific
- 35:51constraints that you have in mind that a machine would never
- 35:54really be able to figure out. Or maybe machine could figure it
- 35:57out by doing some profiling, but we're not, we're not there yet.
- 36:01Or it might be something like an SLA like hey I you know I always
- 36:04expect there to be 1000 events emitted over this time period
- 36:09and if that number ever drops it means something is probably
- 36:13wrong. What we can do then is based on
- 36:16the expectation, we can alert when we detect a change is going
- 36:22to happen or has happened. So if you're in CICD, for
- 36:26example, we will know is the structure of this code event
- 36:31going to change based on a PR? Hey, a software engineer has
- 36:35decided to get rid of a column that you, the data scientists,
- 36:40are using. We know that before that
- 36:42happens, same thing for thing new things being added.
- 36:46The other option is to look at the contents of the data and to
- 36:49say, hey, the contents of the data have changed in a way that
- 36:52are going that's going to affect your machine learning model.
- 36:55We're going to tell you about that before the pipeline is
- 36:58actually run and cause all that damage.
- 37:00Which I imagine just seems like magic for anybody that you
- 37:04talked to or that you're working with, because they're like, Oh
- 37:06my God, that is going to be a lifesaver for me.
- 37:09I've been spending 75% of my time trying to figure this out
- 37:12and now you're just telling me it's going to work.
- 37:14That's incredible. Well, there's a lot of things
- 37:17that you get for free with a system like this that I think
- 37:20are really cool. I mean, one thing is because
- 37:23we're registering the source data, then you get a nice sort
- 37:29of catalogue of all of your data sources, which is the things
- 37:32that most data people actually want, right?
- 37:35Like I said before, they don't want, they don't care as much
- 37:38about the tables. And then from there they can,
- 37:40they have to go back to the sources anyway.
- 37:42They just want the sources. And that's something that we we
- 37:45get, we get that for free because of this registration
- 37:48process. Same thing with the change
- 37:50management. Live change detection is a big
- 37:54part of our platform. We have a change log, so it
- 37:57shows over time, how has a data asset changed?
- 38:00Who actually made the change, What was the change?
- 38:03It's all the context that's very relevant for the teams that are
- 38:07consuming all this information. And there's a bunch of other
- 38:10things too around like data contracts and how do we agree on
- 38:15them and how do we collaborate as the data evolves.
- 38:18The thing that was most meaningful to us when we built
- 38:21this is how do we help the data producer O the engineer or the
- 38:27salesperson or whoever is generating this data understand
- 38:30that they are not in an isolated environment anymore?
- 38:34And as long as we can integrate with GitHub or GitLab, because
- 38:40we're automatically scanning and profiling this code and figuring
- 38:45out what it's connected to and who is dependent on it.
- 38:48We can provide that feedback without them actually having to
- 38:52do anything. Meaning if if I'm a software
- 38:55engineer, I'm just kind of going about my day-to-day work and I'm
- 38:58shipping features and I decide to change some SQL code that
- 39:03exists somewhere in my system, I will be told by Gable, hey,
- 39:07you're about to change records that other people in the company
- 39:11are using. Here are the people in the
- 39:13company who are using these records.
- 39:15Here is what they are using those records for.
- 39:18You need to go and speak to them before you make this change.
- 39:22Or at the very least, you should write up a summary of what this
- 39:26change is going to be. And Gable will manage
- 39:29communicating that to the right people, right?
- 39:31So it's not about like applying AI magic to turn the data,
- 39:39resolve all data quality issues or something like that.
- 39:42It's applying the AI magic to bring the people together and
- 39:45have closer connectivity when it comes to managing and creating
- 39:49data in the first place. Yeah, just that awareness is
- 39:52gotta be so brilliant for teams. I'm curious about you a year,
- 39:59year and a half ago left Convoy with ideas on what was going to
- 40:04be the most valuable. It seems like you had a pretty
- 40:06clear vision. But it's been polished over the
- 40:11last year and a half. What is one or two features that
- 40:17people have been asking for nonstop and you're you're almost
- 40:22like are surprised by these features because for you that
- 40:27was a non thing, but now you're talking to a lot of different
- 40:30companies. I think something I wasn't
- 40:33expecting is how much of an end to end system teams really want.
- 40:39My initial goal when I set out was can we build something that
- 40:44by pressing a button can scan all this code and then and
- 40:51figure out, you know, where, who, who, who owns that data?
- 40:56What does this actually mean? And put the constraints like the
- 41:00CID constraints in there and really, really start to treat
- 41:03data as, as, as another step in the DevOps process.
- 41:07That was my main goal. It's like bringing DevOps to to
- 41:10data and using data contracts as the vehicle to do that.
- 41:14What I found though is that people have a much broader
- 41:17vision of what data contracts are.
- 41:19So there's the CID approach that I mentioned, but people also
- 41:23want contracts for cataloguing purposes, right?
- 41:25Like I get all of the source data in one place and I can
- 41:28actually, you know, sort through that source data and sort of
- 41:32segmented by domains. People also want the live change
- 41:37detection on their data sources. So I wanna see how you know, I
- 41:43want to know when someone makes an update in Excel in real time
- 41:48so that I can either protect myself or protect my data
- 41:52consumers on a on a platform team.
- 41:54And I, I never want these issues to actually reach the analytical
- 41:58database in the 1st place right. So there, there was a lot more
- 42:01interest in that than we originally thought.
- 42:04And I would say I've also been surprised at ohh, Sorry, go
- 42:08ahead. I was just looking at how far
- 42:12upstream you are going. You're thinking like very far
- 42:18upstream. And if you can catch this in the
- 42:22moment this data is created, I think that's where you want to
- 42:26live. Yeah, our goal is to go, go all
- 42:29the way, all the way upstream. I I think that there.
- 42:33All the work maybe? All the way I I think that there
- 42:35are. Some places.
- 42:36Where you just you, you can't do that or there are problems that
- 42:40are that are introduced outside of that sort of core Data
- 42:44source. So, so for example, you know,
- 42:46you may have a, a human that is entering some data into a text
- 42:51field and they just enter in something that should never be
- 42:54entered. Like it doesn't make any sense
- 42:56and doesn't work with your, with your pipelines or your, your
- 43:02dashboards. And you, you can't really catch
- 43:04that during the CI CD workflow because there's no code being
- 43:07changed. But you would be able to catch
- 43:09that, you know, basically as as soon as that data becomes
- 43:14accessible through some system from moving it from that like
- 43:20front end interaction to to either the database or the
- 43:24analytical database. And so you want to try to catch
- 43:26that as soon as humanly possible.
- 43:29But really I, I think that the future is going to be all about
- 43:33code and also direct integration with any platforms or, or source
- 43:39systems that modify data like Excel or Google Sheets or
- 43:43Salesforce or SAP. Like a lot of data work happens
- 43:46in these products and there really is no oversight for data
- 43:52quality or data governance. You know, if I'm a salesperson,
- 43:55I'm going to change around my Salesforce schema in a way that
- 43:58makes sense for me and my team in the way that I want it.
- 44:01But if that sales data is really critical to downstream teams,
- 44:05like there's no real way of them knowing that or, or
- 44:07understanding that. And so all of that like change
- 44:11management and change detection CID, these are all places we
- 44:15want to insert ourselves. I want to just look at the other
- 44:18side of this, which is if you didn't have that, it's it's like
- 44:24you have to then go and manually and each one of these systems
- 44:29try and create something that says, hey, Alert me if this ever
- 44:33gets changed. And just thinking about that
- 44:38almost gives me a headache on all these different data sources
- 44:41on all these different people that you're interacting with.
- 44:44Maybe for a small team at a startup, you're running fast.
- 44:47It doesn't matter that much. And you can deal with that
- 44:50technical debt once you find product market fit or you start
- 44:53like taking off. But if you're at a gigantic
- 44:56company, just the amount of people that are working at that
- 45:00company that you would have to interface with to try and figure
- 45:03out like how in am I going to protect my assets, which are
- 45:11these things that I've been working on for the past whatever
- 45:14three to six months. And I thought I was having
- 45:16success with them. But little did I know somebody
- 45:20that I have no idea in some random department changed
- 45:25everything and now I don't know why but I gotta go debug it or I
- 45:29got asked by data engineer to debug it.
- 45:32Yeah, exactly. There's right at these big
- 45:35companies, there are, are thousands of people potentially
- 45:38who all touch different parts of the data that you're using.
- 45:42And, and you have no clue. A lot of these teams have, you
- 45:46know, thousands of, of microservices, 10s of thousands
- 45:50of of data sets of hundreds of thousands of CVS.
- 45:57You know, there's just enormous, enormous amounts of data and
- 46:00it's very, very unclear where it all comes from and, and what it
- 46:04means and why it exists and, and when it changes.
- 46:07And so any, it's not just any change that happens, it's, it's
- 46:12anytime you want to use that data, you have to go.
- 46:14There's actually, there's sort of this relatively narrow safe
- 46:18zone where you've already gone out and done all the work to
- 46:22understand what the data is and where it's coming from and what
- 46:24it means and all that. And that takes a lot of time.
- 46:26And then there's, you know, all the changes that could
- 46:29potentially happen to that data because it's plugged into so
- 46:32many sources. So you've kind of got this like
- 46:35relatively infrequent window where everything's OK,
- 46:40everything is safe and you've just kind of like perpetually
- 46:43got your fingers crossed that that, yeah, like today is not
- 46:46going to be the day. But but it always is the day at
- 46:50at some point, right? At some point the the day comes
- 46:53and and when it does come, it's it's very scary and it's a it's
- 46:57a big problem. That's why I've been championing
- 47:00for the Data Engineering Appreciation Day.
- 47:03Yes, they did. Engineers definitely need that.
- 47:06So before we jump, what was the other feature that surprised you
- 47:10that people were asking for a bunch?
- 47:12Yeah. Well, I, I think the other thing
- 47:14that was surprising to me was that how excited data producers
- 47:21and software engineers were about this.
- 47:24I think that data teams really, really underestimate is a bit of
- 47:28a like Stockholm syndrome going on.
- 47:30I think where they've probably tried in the past to go to their
- 47:34engineers and say, Hey, I need you to own this data or I want
- 47:36you to be more thoughtful about me.
- 47:38And they kind of got brushed to the side or the engineering team
- 47:40said, hey, this doesn't really matter.
- 47:43But when, when I I think that may just be the perception.
- 47:46When I've talked to data producers, they all seem to
- 47:50acknowledge the problem. They're like, yeah, we
- 47:52understand that this is an issue because we get asked about it
- 47:55all the time. The the issue is like, I, as a
- 47:59software engineer don't have a mechanism to help them with
- 48:03this, right? All of the solutions that I'm
- 48:06given is like, well, you need to be very thoughtful about what
- 48:09data lands in this table. But I don't know anything about
- 48:12Snowflake. I don't know anything about
- 48:14Databricks. I don't know anything about the
- 48:16data lake. I don't know about the ETL
- 48:18systems that you're using. I don't know anything about
- 48:20debt. So it's like, in order for me to
- 48:22help you with this problem, I have to learn like four or five
- 48:27different tools. I also don't have any way of
- 48:30like, if something does go wrong, I don't know how to
- 48:32resolve that. I, I don't, I don't know how to
- 48:34root cause it. I, I don't even know how to
- 48:37figure out if it was a big deal or not.
- 48:39I don't know what right or wrong even looks like.
- 48:41So there's like this whole list of requirements that need to be
- 48:46met in order for a producer can take ownership.
- 48:50And if those, if those questions are not answered, then this just
- 48:53seems like a very murky, unclear, difficult problem.
- 48:57And they, they don't know how big of an investment it's going
- 49:00to be. And so they don't do it.
- 49:02And so when they see that the way the way that we tackle this
- 49:05is, ohh, this is all DevOps. This is just another step in the
- 49:09workflow that I already run where we're accounting for data
- 49:13the same way that we account for security or the same way that we
- 49:16account for code quality. And if I do make a change that's
- 49:20not good, I'm going to be told, and I'm going to be given all
- 49:23the context on everyone I need to talk to and why I need to
- 49:26talk to them and what good actually looks like and what I
- 49:30need to do in order to progress this pull request forward.
- 49:34That is very exciting. Like it turns this from kind of
- 49:38a nebulous, unclear, very confusing problem to something
- 49:42that is very clearly scoped, very clearly defined, and fits
- 49:45into the workflows that they already use.
- 49:47So that is what I think is probably the biggest and most
- 49:52interesting thing to me is just how much software engineers have
- 49:55gravitated towards these solutions.
- 49:59Are you interfacing more with the DevOps teams or is it data
- 50:02engineers? Is it a little bit everybody?
- 50:04It feels like since the surface area is so big, you have to make
- 50:10sure that you are on top of it with each one of these people
- 50:14and that you understand their needs just as much as anybody.
- 50:18Else, yeah, I mean, I, I think the data engineers are in data
- 50:22platform teams are, are probably still the folks that we talked
- 50:26to the most because they, they they're impacted the most, they
- 50:30have the most. There's the.
- 50:33Most they're both for them. If there's data quality, right?
- 50:35Exactly for, for the data consumers.
- 50:39So the data scientists and the analysts, they're also impacted,
- 50:43but they're impacted in a different way.
- 50:45They're usually not the ones kind of doing all the root
- 50:47causing and, and the lineage, like all the stuff that takes a
- 50:50bunch of time. They just want to make sure that
- 50:52it doesn't happen and they don't really care how it happens.
- 50:55And then on, on the side of the data producers, they don't want
- 50:59to cause people pain. They don't want to be seen as
- 51:02the bad guy. And they certainly don't want to
- 51:05be in a situation where the, the, the whole company knows
- 51:08that they were the ones responsible for an outage to
- 51:11their machine learning model, right?
- 51:13Like that's what they want you want to avoid, but they, they
- 51:16just don't have the systems to do it.
- 51:18And, and so we, we sort of, we kind of started in the middle
- 51:21and then we work our way out. What my guess is, is that over
- 51:24time we will go the same route of the dev SEC OPS kind of
- 51:31workflow. I think dev data OPS will become
- 51:33a term that most DevOps teams and most engineering teams are
- 51:38using. And that means like selling,
- 51:41mainly selling into the software engineering organisation.
- 51:44And like in the same way that software engineers, they,
- 51:46they've now started to realise that security is a critical part
- 51:51of their workflow. They can't just pass that off to
- 51:53someone else in the organisation and kind of wipe their hand
- 51:55cleans of it. It's their responsibility too.
- 51:58If they don't do security best practises from the beginning,
- 52:02then hacking and fraud will inevitably happen and all you
- 52:05can do is deal with it. In the same way, if you don't do
- 52:08data management from the beginning, data quality issues
- 52:10will happen and you just have to deal with it.
- 52:14And that's not, that's not acceptable anymore in the age of
- 52:18of artificial intelligence. Maybe in the age of analytics it
- 52:20was it was acceptable, but but now it's becoming a lot less
- 52:23acceptable. It's so funny you mentioned that
- 52:27because I was just a cube con 2 weeks ago and every other booth
- 52:31was a security booth. And so it is very much
- 52:35understood that there are no excuses for any type of security
- 52:40breach. So I do see this vision where
- 52:43you're like, we cannot use these excuses anymore for poor data
- 52:48quality or just for poor data practises because so much of the
- 52:53business is relying upon this. You have so many different use
- 52:56cases that are coming from the data.
- 52:58And if you can quantify that, even better.
- 53:02And it feels like when you have things set up and you know where
- 53:08the data sources are and you know how the data is being used
- 53:11and that rich lineage, you can tell, OK, this data is giving
- 53:16us, it's generating a whole tonne of money through these
- 53:19machine learning models or through this, these other
- 53:23examples that you showed. I think that is another one that
- 53:26just like gives it shows the teams the value of the data in a
- 53:32way that is irrefutable. Yeah, exactly.
- 53:35I I think that we are gonna start to see a big shift over
- 53:39the next 5 to 10 years, not just in the tools, but in the
- 53:44companies that are using data. And it will split from companies
- 53:49that are using data for analytics primarily.
- 53:52And those companies will invest in low cost tooling, O very
- 53:57cheap storage and compute, very cheap analytic systems, probably
- 54:01open source. And then on the other side,
- 54:05we'll be companies that are actually using data to make
- 54:07money. AI ML is obviously one example,
- 54:11but there are other ways that you can monetize data or use
- 54:14data to save large costs. Invoice reconciliation is one
- 54:18example that I mentioned. And those companies are going to
- 54:22have to treat data like a product from the very moment of
- 54:26its inception. And that means not just putting
- 54:29quality into place downstream, but upstream as well.
- 54:34Beautiful man well I always appreciate coming on here I'm
- 54:38super excited to get to meet you in person for the conference we
- 54:41are going to be talking about this so much we're going to
- 54:44spend the whole day talking about quality.
- 54:47I had to have you there because when I think about quality, I
- 54:52you're like one of the first people that comes to my mind.
- 54:55And it's, it's almost like we couldn't have a conference about
- 54:59quality, AI quality, data quality without having you
- 55:03there. So yeah, this is going to be
- 55:06fun. It's going to be a whole lot of
- 55:07fun. And we're going to get to talk
- 55:08about this stuff all day long. Amazing.
- 55:11Well, I can't wait for it and I will.
- 55:14I will show up in my Sunday best and I'll I'll cut my beard and
- 55:18so I don't look like a wild man out of the case.
- 55:21That's it. Actually on a not so serious
- 55:24note, I was thinking like should we do some kind of a a theme
- 55:29like a Hawaiian shirt or something?
- 55:32So if anybody has any ideas, throw him at us because I am
- 55:37open to it. Right now.
- 55:38It's not too late to figure out what the theme or what the fun
- 55:42things that we're gonna do are. We're already going to have a
- 55:44comedian there. We're going to have some jam
- 55:47sessions happening. So beware of that too.
- 55:52I don't know the quality standards on those.
- 55:55We may need a tool like Gable to check on the upstream
- 56:00possibilities of the quality and given the stamp of approval for
- 56:05the musical session qualities, but you'll see when you come.
- 56:12I guess that's that's the fun of it.
- 56:15Hold up, wait a minute. We gotta talk real fast because
- 56:18I am so excited about the MLB's community conference that is
- 56:22happening on June 25th in San Francisco.
- 56:25It is our first in person conference ever.
- 56:27Honestly, I'm shaking in my boots because it's something
- 56:29that I've wanted to do for ages. We've been doing the online
- 56:33version of this. Hopefully I've gained enough of
- 56:36your trust for you to be able to say that.
- 56:38I know when this guy has a conference, it's going to be
- 56:42quality. Funny enough, we are doing it.
- 56:45The whole theme is about AI quality.
- 56:48I teamed up with my buddy MO at Colina who knows a thing or two
- 56:53about AI quality, and we are going to have some of the most
- 56:58impressive speakers that you could think of.
- 57:01I'm not going to list them all here because it would probably
- 57:03take the next two to 5 minutes, but just know we've got the CTO
- 57:08of Cruise coming to give a little keynote.
- 57:11We've got the CEO of u.com coming, we've got Chip, we've
- 57:17got Linens, we've got the whole crew that you would expect.
- 57:20And I am going to be doing all kinds of extracurricular
- 57:24activities that will be fun and maybe a little bit cringe.
- 57:30You, you may see, hear or see me playing the guitar.
- 57:33Just come. It's going to be an awesome
- 57:35time. We'd love to have you there.
- 57:37And that is again, June 25th in San Francisco.
- 57:41See you all there.