Best Dbt Labs Inc Podcasts (2025)

1
8: From Law School to Nigeria's FinTech Data Chef? Damola Onabanjo 36:24

20h ago36:24

36:24

In this episode of Data Career Transformations, Bolaji interviews Damola Onabanjo, a business intelligence manager at Kuda, who shares her unique journey from an international law graduate to a data professional. The conversation covers her love for cooking shows, her role at Kuda, the transition from law to data, the importance of mentorship, and …

1
7: From Clown School to Director of Analytics: Wade Wachs 45:37

8d ago45:37

45:37

In this episode of The Data Career Transformations Show, Bolaji interviews Wade Wachs, the Director of Information and Analytics at Liquid Web. Wade shares his unique journey from juggling and clown school to building a data-driven culture in a web hosting company. The conversation explores the evolution of data roles, the challenges of self-servic…

1
The evolution of databases (w/ Wolfram Schulte) 54:17

11d ago54:17

54:17

In the first episode of our new season on developer experience, the cofounder and CTO of SDF Labs, now a part of dbt Labs, discusses databases, compilers, and dev tools. Wolfram spent close to two decades in Microsoft Research and several years at Meta building their data platform. For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podc…

1
6: From Pastry Chef to Head of Data at dbt Labs? Erica Louie. 36:54

15d ago36:54

36:54

In this engaging conversation, Erica Louie shares her unique journey from aspiring pastry chef to Head of Data at dbt Labs, with host Bolaji Oyejidehighlighting the importance of empathy and communication in the data field. Erica discusses the skills and milestones that helped him climb the career ladder, the challenges of hiring for data roles, an…

1
5: From Video Gamer to Principal at Infinite Lambda: Michael Han 37:01

22d ago37:01

37:01

In this episode of The Data Career Transformations Show, Bolaji Oyejide interviews Michael Han, Head of Product at Infinite Lambda. Michael discusses his journey from finance to data science, the evolution of data roles, and the importance of effective communication and domain knowledge in the data field. Michael shares insights on the day-to-day r…

1
4: From Math Tutor & Barista, to Analytics Engineer & Analyst! Lauren Benezra & Paige Berry of dbt Labs 42:28

29d ago42:28

42:28

n this engaging conversation, Bolaji, Lauren, and Paige explore their diverse journeys in the data analytics field, discussing their career paths, the accessibility of data science, and the importance of collaboration and communication within data teams. They share personal experiences with data disasters, technical challenges, and the ever-present…

1
2: From Mobile Apps to Staff Engineer at Teads: Christophe Oudar 35:42

2M ago35:42

35:42

Bolaji interviews Christophe Oudar, a Staff Software Engineer at Teads, who shares his journey in data engineering, the challenges he faced, and the successes he achieved. Christophe discusses the vibrant dbt community, his career progression from junior to staff engineer, and the importance of mentorship and continuous learning. He also delves int…

1
1: From Self-Driving Cars to Lead Data Engineer @ phData: Bruno Souza de Lima 37:08

2M ago37:08

37:08

Bolaji interviews Bruno Souza de Lima, an analytics engineer with a unique background in autonomous driving and programming. Bruno shares his journey from studying mechanical engineering to becoming a key contributor in the analytics community, emphasizing the importance of sharing knowledge, effective communication, and mentorship. He discusses hi…

1
Building a data team from the beginning (w/ Daniel Avancini) 50:12

3M ago50:12

50:12

Daniel Avancini is the chief data officer and co-founder of Indicium—a fast-growing data consultancy started in Brazil. There are a lot of data consultancies around the world, and a lot of them do great work. What has been so fascinating about Indicium’s journey is their HR model. Rather than primarily hiring experienced professionals, they decided…

1
Data engineering at Snowflake (w/ Rahul Jain) 44:04

4M ago44:04

44:04

A look inside at the data work happening at a company making some of the most advanced technologies in the industry. Rahul Jain, data engineering manager at Snowflake, joins Tristan to discuss Iceberg, streaming, and all things Snowflake. For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://…

1
The intersection of UI, exploratory data analysis, and SQL (w/ Hamilton Ulmer) 50:37

5M ago50:37

50:37

Hamilton Ulmer is working at the intersection of UI, Exploratory Data Analysis, and SQL at MotherDuck, and he's built a long career in EDA. Hamilton and Tristan dive deep into the history of exploratory data analysis. Even if you spend most of your time below the frontend layer of the stack, it is important to understand the trends in both the prac…

1
Making data movement as reliable as electricity (w/ Taylor Brown) 46:40

5M ago46:40

46:40

Fivetran recently passed $300 million ARR and has over 7,000 customers globally. Taylor Brown, the cofounder and COO of Fivetran, joins the show to talk about Fivetran’s moat, the impact of AI on the data ingestion space, and open table formats and catalogs. For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newslett…

1
Data as an assembly line (w/ Cedric Chin) 51:11

6M ago51:11

51:11

Cedric Chin runs Commoncog—a publication about accelerating business expertise. He joins Tristan to talk about the analytics development lifecycle, how organizations value (or misvalue) data, and why “data teams are not some IT helpdesk to be ignored.” For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, he…

1
The data jobs to be done (w/ Erik Bernhardsson) 42:55

6M ago42:55

42:55

Erik Bernhardsson, the CEO and co-founder of Modal Labs, joins Tristan to talk about Gen AI, the lack of GPUs, the future of cloud computing, and egress fees. They also discuss whether the job title of data engineer is something we should want more or less of in the future. Erik’s not afraid of a spicy take, so this is a fun one. For full show note…

1
Coalesce 2024 edition: What’s next for data teams? (w/ Scott Breitenother) 44:23

7M ago44:23

44:23

Show description: Scott Breitenother, founder of data consultancy Brooklyn Data Co., joins Tristan at Coalesce 2024 in Las Vegas to discuss the early days of dbt, the evolution of data teams, and what's next for the dbt community. For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.…

1
The current state of the AI ecosystem (w/ Julia Schottenstein) 45:44

7M ago45:44

45:44

Former co-host Julia Schottenstein returns to the show to go deep into the world of LLMs. Julia joined LangChain as an early employee, in Tristan’s words, to “Basically solve all of the problems that aren't specifically in product and engineering.” LangChain has become one of, if not the primary frameworks for developing applications using large la…

1
Creating value from GenAI in the enterprise (w/ Nisha Paliwal) 45:20

8M ago45:20

45:20

Nisha Paliwal, who leads enterprise data tech at Capital One, joins Tristan to discuss building a strong data culture for in the world of AI. She is the co-author of the book Secrets of AI Value Creation. For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com. The Analytics …

1
Developer productivity on GitHub Copilot (w/ Eirini Kalliamvakou) 53:59

8M ago53:59

53:59

Dr. Eirini Kalliamvakou is a senior researcher at GitHub Next. Eirini has built a career on studying software engineers, how to measure their productivity, how developer experience impacts productivity, and more. Recently, Eirini has been working on quantifying the impacts of GitHub Copilot. Does it actually help software engineers be more producti…

1
The rapid experimentation of AI agents (w/ Yohei Nakajima) 45:55

11M ago45:55

45:55

Yohei Nakajima is an investor by day and coder by night. In particular, one of his projects, an AI agent framework called BabyAGI that creates a plan-execute loop, got a ton of attention in the past year. The truth is that AI agents are an extremely experimental space, and depending on how strict you want to be with your definition, there aren't a …

1
Funnel analytics and AI models for event sequences (w/ Misha Panko) 44:09

12M ago44:09

44:09

Misha Panko has worked in data for a long time, including on high performance data teams at Uber and Google. Today, Misha is the co-founder and CEO of Motif Analytics, a product focused on helping growth and ops teams understand their event data. In this episode, Tristan and Misha nerd out about the state of the art in computational neuroscience, w…

1
From Moneyball to Gen AI 37:37

12M ago37:37

37:37

Eric Avidon is a journalist at TechTarget who's interviewed Tristan a few times, and now Tristan gets to flip the script and interview Eric. Eric is a journalist veteran, covering everything from finance to the Boston Red Sox, but now he spends a lot of time with vendors in the data space and has a broad view of what's going on. Eric and Tristan di…

1
Being Pro-Human in the AI Era 50:09

1y ago50:09

50:09

Barry McCardel is the co-founder and CEO of Hex. Hex is an analytics tool that's structured around a notebook experience, but as you'll hear in the episode, goes well beyond the traditional notebook. We're big fans of Hex at dbt Labs, and use it for a bunch of our internal data work. In this episode, Barry and Tristan discuss notebooks and data ana…

1
The 2024 Machine Learning, AI & Data Landscape (w/ Matt Turck) 36:22

1y ago36:22

36:22

Matt Turck has been publishing his ecosystem map since 2012. It was first called the Big Data Landscape. Now it’s the Machine Learning, AI & Data (MAD) Landscape. The 2024 MAD Landscape includes 2,011(!) logos, which Matt attributes first a data infrastructure cycle and now an ML/AI cycle. As Matt writes, “Those two waves are intimately related. A …

1
How the Media Covers Gen AI (w/ Matthew Lynley, Supervised) 48:15

1y ago48:15

48:15

Matthew Lynley is a bit of a hybrid. He's been a long-time journalist covering enterprise tech, currently in his fantastic AI and data newsletter Supervised, and he's also been a hands-on data practitioner. Matthew has covered the analytics tech stack, but this time Tristan turns the tables to get Matthew’s perspective on the rise of Gen AI as a to…

1
AI's Impact in the World of Structured Data Analytics (w/ Juan Sequeda, data.world) 48:18

1y ago48:18

48:18

Juan Sequeda is a principal data scientist and head of the AI Lab at data.world, and is also the co-host of the fantastic data podcast Catalog and Cocktails. This episode tackles semantics, semantic web, Juan’s research in how raw text-to-SQL performs versus text-to-semantic layer, and where we both believe AI will make an impact in the world of st…

1
The End of the Modern Data Stack (w/ Benn Stancil, Mode) 45:46

1y ago45:46

45:46

Benn Stancil, cofounder and CTO at Mode, returns to The Analytics Engineering Podcast to discuss the evolution of the term "modern data stack" and its value today. Tristan wrote on this idea for The Analytics Engineering Roundup in Is the Modern Data Stack Still a Useful Idea? For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's…

1
Data Mesh Architecture at Large Enterprises (w/ Moritz Heimpel and Ben Flusberg) 46:07

1+ y ago46:07

46:07

Moritz Heimpel from Siemens and Ben Flusberg from Cox Automotive have very similar jobs. They both act as stewards of the data strategies at large, complex companies. In this episode, we get into what it’s like to collaborate with data at scale. Ben and Mortitz share their experiences adopting a data mesh architecture and what that looks like at th…

1
Let's Talk About Data Vault (w/ Brandon Taylor and Michael Olschimke) 44:04

1+ y ago44:04

44:04

If Data Vault is a new term for you, it’s a data modeling design pattern. We’re joined by Brandon Taylor, a senior data architect at Guild, and Michael Olschimke, who is the CEO of Scalefree—the consulting firm whose co-founder Dan Lindstedt is credited as the designer of the data vault architecture. In this conversation with Tristan and Julia, Mic…

1
Navigating AI Complexity (w/ Jonathan Frankle) 46:20

1+ y ago46:20

46:20

Jonathan Frankle is the Chief Scientist at MosaicML, which was recently bought by Databricks for $1.3 billion. MosaicML helps customers train generative AI models on their data. Lots of companies are excited about gen AI, and the hope is that their company data and information will be what sets them apart from the competition. In this conversation …

1
Career Growth in Data Roles (w/ Hubspot's Kasey Mazza at Coalesce 2023) 29:17

1+ y ago29:17

29:17

In this conversation with Tristan recorded at Coalesce 2023, Kasey Mazza, an analytics engineering manager on the RevOps team at HubSpot, discusses the roles of data analysts and analytics engineers, the importance of building internal data communities, and the evolving landscape of data teams. Watch Kasey’s Coalescse 2023 presentation The career g…

1
Operationalizing Your Warehouse, Streaming Analytics, and Cereal (W/ Arjun Narayan of Materialize and Nathan Bean of General Mills) 42:23

1+ y ago42:23

42:23

It turns out data plays a big role in getting cereal manufactured and delivered so you can enjoy your Cheerios reliably for breakfast. We talk with Arjun Narayan, CEO of Materialize, a company building an operational warehouse, and Nathan Bean, a data leader at General Mills responsible for all of the company's manufacturing analytics and insights.…

1
Roche’s Data Transformation Journey (w/ Yannick Misteli) 40:05

1+ y ago40:05

40:05

Yannick Misteli is the head of engineering for the go-to-market domain at Roche, a $250 billion multinational pharmaceutical and diagnostics company. Roche was an early supporter of dbt Cloud, and Yannick helped move his team of 120+ engineers to a modern data stack. He always finds a way to push the boundaries to make a large company founded in 18…

1
The State of Databases Today (w/ Andy Pavlo) 48:28

1+ y ago48:28

48:28

Andy Pavlo is a professor of databaseology (he says it's a made-up word) at Carnegie Mellon and currently on leave to build his own company—OtterTune, which uses AI to figure out the settings to get the best performance out of databases. He is one of the preeminent minds on databases and a die-hard relational database maximalist. We talk about the …

1
Bring Your Own Data to LLMs (W/ Jerry Liu of LlamaIndex) 42:53

1+ y ago42:53

42:53

Jerry Liu is the CEO and co-founder of LlamaIndex. LlamaIndex is an open-source framework that helps people prep their data for use with large language models in a process called retrieval augmented generation. LLMs are great decision engines, but in order for them to be useful for organizations, they need additional knowledge and context, and Jerr…

1
Ramp's $8 Billion Data Strategy (W/ Ian Macomber and Ryan Delgado) 49:19

1+ y ago49:19

49:19

Ian Macomber, head of analytics engineering and data science at Ramp and formerly the VP of analytics and data engineering at Drizly, and Ryan Delgado, a staff software engineer at Ramp, have played pivotal roles in establishing Ramp's data team from the ground up and are spearheading the development of their comprehensive roadmap. In this conversa…

1
dbt Labs on dbt (w/ Daniel Le) 30:40

2y ago30:40

30:40

Daniel Le is the CFO at dbt Labs where he has built multiple teams. He is also the former head of FP&A and operations at Zoom, and he helped scale FP&A as the former finance director at Okta. In this conversation with Julia, Daniel shares his view as CFO on the challenges SaaS companies face and the importance of finance teams creating a holistic v…

1
The Arc of Data Innovation (w/ Bob Muglia, former CEO of Snowflake) 47:59

2y ago47:59

47:59

Bob Muglia likely needs no introduction. The former CEO of Snowflake led the company during its early, transformational years after a long career at Microsoft and Juniper. Bob recently released the book The Datapreneurs about the arc of innovation in the data industry, starting with the first relational databases all the way to the present craze of…

1
It's 2023, and Privacy Is Now Fun! (w/ Ian Coe of Tonic.ai + Abhishek Bhowmick of Samooha) 47:39

2y ago47:39

47:39

Advances in ML have transformed data privacy from a regulatory necessity into an opportunity to improve the work of data people. Synthetic data for modeling + testing is one example of a hard thing that's now easy - and in this conversation with Tristan and Julia, Ian + Abhishek cover many other ways that privacy can actually be a skill that propel…

1
Julia, Pedram Navid + Taylor Murphy Recap Data Council 42:03

2y ago42:03

42:03

Julia just got back from Data Council in Austin, a conference organized by Pete Sonderling, where lots of startups share what they're building, data practitioners go to learn in hands-on workshops, and of course investors go to spot the next big trend. In this episode, Taylor Murphy (Head of Product & Data at Meltano) + Pedram Navid (Founder, West …

1
Cloud Warehouse Cost Optimization (w/ Niall Woodward + Brad Culberson) 45:54

2y ago45:54

45:54

Brad Culberson is a Principal Architect in the Field CTO’s office at Snowflake. Niall Woodward is a co-founder of SELECT, a startup providing optimization and spend management software for Snowflake customers. In this conversation with Tristan and Julia, Brad and Niall discuss all things cost optimization: cloud vs on-prem, measuring ROI, and tacti…

1
dbt Labs + Transform Join Forces on Metrics (w/ Nick Handel + Drew Banin) 43:09

2y ago43:09

43:09

Nick Handel, as co-founder at Transform, helped develop the popular open source metrics framework MetricFlow. Drew Banin, a co-founder at dbt Labs, helped build the initial version of the dbt Semantic Layer, which launched last year. Transform was acquired in February by dbt Labs, and in this conversation with Tristan, they talk through their colle…

1
What Can Generative AI Do for Data People? (W/ Sarah Nagy + Chris Aberger) 48:29

2y ago48:29

48:29

Sarah and Chris are both at the forefront of bringing the promise of gen AI to our actual work as data people—which is a unique challenge! Precise truth is critical for business questions in a way that it’s not for a consumer search query. Sarah Nagy is the CEO of Seek AI, a startup that aims to use natural language processing to change how profess…

1
3rd Party Data, Demystified 45:26

2y ago45:26

45:26

Auren Hoffman currently serves as the CEO and Chief Historian at SafeGraph, a data-as-a-service company he founded, which provides primarily location data. In this conversation with Tristan and Julia, Auren shares how truly few companies are making use of 3rd-party datasets today, how opening up more datasets to public research could help us solve …

1
A Romp Through Database History (w/ Postgres co-creator Mike Stonebraker + Andy Palmer) 47:44

2+ y ago47:44

47:44

Mike Stonebraker is a veritable database pioneer and a Turing Award recipient. In addition to teaching at MIT, he is a serial entrepreneur and co-creator of Postgres. Andy Palmer is a veteran business leader who serves as the CEO of Tamr, a company he co-founded with Mike. Through his seed fund Koa Labs, Andy has helped found and/or fund numerous i…

1
What Does Apache Arrow Unlock for Analytics? (w/ Wes McKinney) 47:08

2+ y ago47:08

47:08

Wes McKinney is the creator of pandas, co-creator of Apache Arrow, and now Co-founder/CTO at Voltron Data. In this conversation with Tristan and Julia, Wes takes us on a tour of the underlying guts, from hardware to data formats, of the data ecosystem. What innovations, down to the hardware level, will stack to lead to significantly better performa…

1
Minimum Viable Experimentation 45:37

2+ y ago45:37

45:37

Product experimentation is full of potholes for companies of any size, given the number of pieces (tooling, culture, process, persistence) that need to come together to be successful. Vijaye Raji (currently Statsig, formerly Facebook + Microsoft) and Sean Taylor (currently Motif Analytics, formerly Facebook + Lyft) have navigated these failure mode…

1
The Data Generalist's Vision Quest (LIVE w/ Stephen Bailey) 26:37

2+ y ago26:37

26:37

The first LIVE IRL episode! Stephen Bailey, data engineer at Whatnot and writer of an incredibly entertaining data substack, joins Tristan for a follow-up conversation to Stephen’s Coalesce talk, “Excel at nothing: how to be an effective generalist.” You can read Stephen’s writing at https://stkbailey.substack.com/. For full show notes and to read …

1
Why You'll Need Data Contracts (w/ Chad Sanderson + Prukalpa) 48:42

2+ y ago48:42

48:42

WARNING: This episode contains detailed discussion of data contracts. The modern data stack introduces challenges in terms of collaboration between data producers and consumers. How might we solve them to ultimately build trust in data quality? Chad Sanderson leads the data platform team at Convoy, a late-stage series-E freight technology startup. …

1
How Does Data Drive Growth in Practice? (w/ Abhi Sivasailam) 49:53

2+ y ago49:53

49:53

Abhi is a growth and data leader, and an excellent Twitter follow. Most recently, he was Head of Growth and Analytics at Flexport, where he helped the company to grow 10x over the past 3 years. Previously, Abhi led growth and data teams at Keap, Hustle, and Honeybook. In this conversation with Tristan and Julia, Abhi explains his methodology for se…

1
Katie Bauer: Data Scientists Are Not Pizza 43:25

3y ago43:25

43:25

Katie was a founding member of Reddit's data science team and, currently, as Twitter’s Data Science Manager, she leads the company’s infrastructure data science and analytics organization. In this conversation with Tristan and Julia, Katie explores how, as a manager, to help data people (especially those new to the field!) do their best work. For f…

Podcasts Worth a Listen

Dbt Labs Inc Podcasts

Podcasts Worth a Listen