pfduke02

Joined 14 years ago

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29
Submissions
18
Member since
Apr 17
CEO @ Mozart Data -- best contact is my last name @ gmail YC Badge:0x0686b25EBFc7210517d78A818eC0289FCA5240Bd
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Comment · 5 years ago
Best contact would be -- amadeus [at] mozartdata.com
Comment · 5 years ago
I'm curious what you've found works the best for finding people (employees, contractors, other resources) capable of drawing insights (or making heads/tails) out of the data? We're always trying to have a helpful perspective for customers - as well as wanting to give a great "push in the back" to get them going on that dimension as well.
Comment · 5 years ago
Comment · 5 years ago
Thanks!! More accurately put, you’re in good hands with Mozart Data. We have a product aimed to enable anyone to set up the data stack, without any data engineering needed. But ultimately, we want to help you be successful on your data journey, which is more than just a data stack - it is defining core tables, common analysis templates, and creating a great data culture.
Comment · 5 years ago
I’m in extreme agreement for part -- for a company to get value out of their data, you want someone skilled at data cleaning, cutting it properly, and teasing out the insights. Where I disagree is that the person can be a data scientist, but doesn’t need to be. I believe that there is a growing population of data savvy employees without that title, many of them might not even have data at all in their title (they are in business operations, marketing, finance, and sales) -- many of them write SQL and are very comfortable manipulating data in BI tools, R, Python, Excel, or GSheets.

I also believe that company context matters a lot. I think so much of getting started with extracting value from data is getting up the learning curve of understanding what it means (which columns have the truth). One of the reasons that we don’t have a lot of canned reports is that understanding these edge cases within a company often matters a lot (and that not accounting for the nuance can often lead to a misinference). With this in mind, the explosion of ETL solutions and products like Mozart Data means that others at the company can specialize in their business context, as opposed to needing someone who can do all aspects of data including engineering, data science, analysis, and communicating/presenting it.

Comment · 5 years ago
Thanks! As mentioned in other comments, we partner with and use PBF (Powered by Fivetran) for connectors we believe are best in class. We are committed to ETL reliability, and that ease of use/setup and automatically managing changes is critical for success. In addition to PBF, we leverage Singer Taps, and our team is adding to the long-tail of connectors.
Comment · 5 years ago
We have created our own transformation layer solution, which includes scheduling, run & version history, and lineage; we do not use dbt under the hood. We share a philosophy of being able to write transforms in SQL one layer above the BI tool -- this leads to greater consistency of downstream answers and allows for business users and analysts to write the business logic into the core tables.
Comment · 5 years ago
Thanks! We couldn't resist a good pun on "data orchestration."
Comment · 5 years ago
Functionality-wise that stack would be very similar! A core design principle of ours is that you should be able to have the power of a modern data platform even if all you know is a bit of SQL. So our product is functionally similar to a stack like Stitch+Snowflake+dbt (and we use some of those under-the-hood), but we try to wrap it all in an easier-to-use interface (e.g. typically to snapshot a table you write a few lines of config code, whereas in Mozart you just flip a toggle), and be more cost-competitive for smaller orgs.
Comment · 5 years ago
We partner with and use PBF (Powered by Fivetran) for some connectors, which we believe are best in class. In addition, we are using Singer Taps and have also custom built some connectors. There are no additional fees for extract-transform-load, whether Fivetran or any other ETL service (we cover those). The primary additional data costs are for a BI tool, though there are a number of free options to connect to.

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