This week’s episode is a great one if you feel like you could use some guidance in your data career. For EP 24, I chatted with Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO of Brooklyn Data Co., a data and analytics consultancy that helps your team build a full modern data stack specific to your needs. While Scott might be deemed “unhireable”, the skills he gained during his early years of management consulting experience (conducting quantitative analysis, structuring unstructured problems, and creating something out of nothing) are what makes Brooklyn Data Co. so good at what they do. In the episode, we take a look at Scott’s career journey, what makes management consulting so intense, the importance of tool conventions, prioritizing career learning over your salary, why your track record and wisdom are more important than your title, and how to empower others through data.
Some of our topic highlights include:
As always, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the episode over on Twitter @borisjabes.
Want to discuss the best practices we covered in this episode? Come hang out in The Operational Analytics Club, where all your favorite data leaders gather to sharpen their skills.
Know someone that you think would be an awesome guest on The Show (hint: you can totally nominate yourself)? Reach out to our content and community team.
Resources:
Music by the talented Joe Stevens: https://www.joestevenssound.com/
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
Hey folks. This is Boris Jabes, and you're listening to The Sequel Show. This week, I spoke with Scott, the founder and CEO of Brooklyn Data. They're a full-stack analytics consultancy. They work with organizations of all sizes to build out their modern data stack. And Scott's had really a great career and tremendous visibility into all the ways in which people take advantage of data. Before Brooklyn Data, he was the VP of data at Casper, and before that, a consultant. And we spoke basically all about prioritizing your career and your career learning.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
So when we talked through this, we kind of worked through his career, and we talked about how management consulting is super intense and why, and how to think about your learning in a career versus your salary, and how trust is earned through work and wisdom rather than through just title and name. And so it was a really fun conversation. Scott's really knowledgeable, always a fun conversationalist. I hope you enjoy this as much as every conversation I get to have with Scott. Hey Scott, it's nice to see you.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
Nice to see you as well.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
I guess only you and I get to see each other. The audience doesn't get to see us, which is good news today.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
Good news. I think everybody is in fact lucky that they do not get to see us.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
Yeah. This is the part they don't know. I definitely have a face for radio. So this is probably the ideal way for people to interact with me.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
100%. I mean, I invest in a lot of lighting products and everything for my setup because I got to maximize what I can get into this terrible raw material that is my face.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
I mean, the pandemic has been really interesting. We've all had to start investing in this style of equipment. Now you're on Zooms a lot, so okay, I guess try to look a little better. Audio, you're going to have headphones all day. So maybe get more comfortable ones.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
100%. Literally, my office is like my bonsai tree. I'm constantly tweaking it. You don't even want to see what my desk looks like.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
Oh, interesting. Do you think, even if the world reopens, I mean, I guess it is reopening now as we record. Do you think you'll be so attached to this office that you have groomed?
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
Oh, I'm unhireable. Literally, you cannot put me in an office. Literally, the shame of people seeing my setup kept me limited. But now, I don't have that. I mean, two-inch standing desk with multiple sets of panel lights and boom mic. I need an intervention at this point before I bury myself.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
I didn't realize to what degree we are contained in our eccentricities by being in an office. That's actually very true. And people get to be their ... I actually have not ever had this conversation with someone about, if you're at home now, you can really be as eccentric as your spouse will allow. And if you have your own room, then you can really get pretty eccentric.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
Well, and obviously if you have your own room, it really doesn't matter. But I think it's also we're going in a completely different direction. We should probably come back to data at some point. But I would say that I would consider myself as an extroverted introvert. This remote thing is the perfect way where I can control my surroundings and be my ideal, opt my setup for my productivity and my personal happiness and wellbeing, and get to engage through this portal that is a video call or anything with someone who's equally comfortable in their setup. This is amazing to me. I mean, I would love a little bit more human contact than we've had the last couple of years.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
A little bit.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
Maybe more than a little bit.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
But it is equalizing, I agree. It's kind of equalizing for conversation. For example, height no longer has to play a part. And so that can probably subconsciously ... I may be revealing that I'm not that tall. I've never known.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
I'm a six foot seven. I'm pretty big.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
Genuinely, this is how I know you're going to [inaudible 00:03:55].
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
You're telling me I should sit up. I should get better posture when I'm on my calls. I hear what you're saying.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
You're definitely not pulling that off. But see, even there, it changes potentially how people talk to each other. And so it's equalizing, I think, in a good way. But yes, I think we all miss a little bit of human contact. Well Scott, why don't you tell people the journey of how you became unhireable, since that is the way you sit now?
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
I think that from a very young age, I was destined to be unhireable.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
So let's call it destiny.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
This is a nature versus nurture debate for my unhireability. It's interesting. I feel like I've always kind of a little bit been the odd man out or not fit a particular mold. I think maybe starting, I studied business. I went to Babson College. And business [inaudible 00:04:40].
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
Did you know what that meant? Did you know what that meant when you went to college?
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
Business, you do business stuff. Business is interesting because I don't know. I wanted to build something. My parents both had businesses. I kind of both knew what it was and didn't know what it was. It's business. But how about this? At Babson, there's one degree, you can a degree of business and then you have different concentrations. My concentrations were entrepreneurship, global business management. So now, I've started my own company that has employees, team members in 11 countries. So I feel like somehow I'm doing what I studied.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
Wow! Have you gone back to speak to the students to tell this is the way?
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
No. The what not to do. Don't do that.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
I like by the way that implied kind of subconscious ambition of I need to start something and I need to be global. I'm going to bookend my skills.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
And if I fall anywhere on that spectrum, I'll be fine. I will say that degree was well worth it. So I studied business. I went into management consulting where I worked my butt off.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
The rumors are true?
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
Tons of hours for four years. I started my career there. It created such a fantastic skill set of being quantitative, analytical, structuring unstructured problems, creating something out of nothing. But literally, I have very few memories from those four years. It's just fogging because I was so ... I think my brain didn't defragment for like four years. So I have glimpses. But it was a fog. It was intense.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
There's also a lot of travel in management consulting.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
There was a bit of travel. Where I worked, we didn't do as much travel. But we lacked in travel, we made up for in all nighters.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
Wow.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
They sent me to Tokyo for two and a half months.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
That's a lot.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
I only saw Tokyo on the weekend. So it was literally, for all intents and purposes, Monday through Friday, I could've been literally anywhere. I got in when it was still two in the morning. But on Saturday and Sunday, I was in Tokyo, which was kind of cool.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
Yeah. It's an amazing set of incentives. So your bosses are incentivized to generate billable hours, I guess. And I guess the company doesn't care about you. The client doesn't truly care about you, Scott, because you're not their employee. So is this like what leads to a crazy amount of hours? Why is management consulting so intense?
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
It's really interesting because it's not like I felt coerced in any way. It was pursuit of excellence. The pursuit of ... The 80/20 rule is true. We tried to get as close to a hundred percent as possible. And every incremental percentage point of accuracy and fidelity, every 80%, you just have to work and work. And it taught me work ethic. And it taught me how to shoot for kind of high quality and excellence. I don't look back at those four years and say I made a mistake at all. It was phenomenal. I met phenomenal people. I built amazing skills. I got to work in London, Germany, Tokyo. I got responsibilities well beyond what I was qualified for. And I grew and I learned more than ever. And for better, for worse, it made me who I am today.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
Did you know what that job would be like? What makes people pick management consulting right out of college?
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
This is how much of a loser I am. I studied consulting. In my undergraduate degree, I did consulting projects. We did pseudo consulting projects where we'd go into companies and we'd do a consulting project for them. So I knew what I was getting myself into.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
You get attracted because it's a great experience, first work experience to start your career for someone that's kind of highly motivated, intelligent, but indecisive, can't pick your career path. And it's like, no one's going to say, "Oh! You spent four years in consulting? You wasted your life." It's like, "Oh! You spent four years in consulting. You built a good skillset and you saw a million different things and you learned something."
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
But there are just a lot of folks that are attracted to consulting because they don't know the exact path. But I also think that's not a bad thing. Truly, I learned what I didn't like. And I learned what I did.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
It's so interesting you say this because there's very few, I think, careers or jobs or companies that pitch themselves that way. And yet, so many people are likely in a suboptimal career in life, I mean literally writ large, because as an adult, there's very little opportunity to perturb, to try like a variety things. And so you don't know.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
You don't get so many at bats.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
Exactly. And the cost, there's a fairly high opportunity cost to switch complete careers. Switching completely is fairly costly, if not super costly. And so-
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
That's a whole nother debate. It shouldn't be as costly, but it.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
But it is. And so like the odds of us ever discovering that working at the library is actually the thing we would most love to do is highly unlikely, just because you don't have the opportunity to try a bunch of stuff. And so the idea that you say management consulting is not declaring a major, but in real life, it;s -
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
A hundred percent. I think that's very well said. But it's great. And I think the beauty of it is people would come stay a year, 2, 3, 4 years, and nobody took it personal when they left. It was fun. Thanks for being on the ride for so long. And now that you've found your bliss, go do it. And I think there are some folks that find their bliss is in consulting, and it's not the ones you think. Sometimes it's the one you think, and sometimes it's not. But it's just a really cool thing where it's not like, "Oh! You're leaving this company. What are you doing to the firm?" It's like, "Oh great, thanks for coming for a few years. And thanks for all your amazing contributions."
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
But the breadth of things you do in that situation, everyone has an image of management consulting. Definitely sounds like always you think of very young people giving much older people orders, like way ahead of their station. That's probably the image people have in their minds. But like you said, it's a lot of number crunching. It's not like you did sales at one place, marketing at another place, finance at another place, computer science at another place. You broadly were in the analytic function, finance function at each of these places or not really?
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
And so each consultant has their own specialty. We really focused on more strategy and kind of due diligence work. And so we were literally brought in to answer a question. Should we buy this company? Should we not buy this company? Should we expand to this country? Should we this country? And so the subject matter might be different. Literally, I remember one of my very first projects was for a company that recycled fuel oil. And it's almost comically ...
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
Remember the Simpsons where Homer is sucking out the grease, he's like stealing grease from restaurants. It's kind of something similar like that. And then I would be doing a project to an oil and gas, and then a project for a major international airline. You're answering strategic questions, but in very different industries. But to your point, you're using the same skill sets, which is you're very quantitative, you're very analytical. And I think I would say it was very technical, but Excel was my jam. We would destroy Excel. Do things to Excel-
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
So you had to live on a windows machine, right? Obviously you were not on Mac.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
No. We even had modeling machines, special desktops, that had more CPUs and a laptop so we can run more-
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
So they could crunch Excel?
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
You're using all local research, you're not using cloud for this.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
I love it. The kids of the day are going to be like, "What are you talking about?" So it's like this is your query execution warehouse. It's like, "Let's get a fatter Excel machine to run our Excel worksheet."
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
And this is how I'm not crazy old, but I'm fairly old, to the point where that was Windows when the 64 bit operating systems came out. And you can use more RAM and things. It wasn't guaranteed that you had a 64 bit operating system on your laptop and stuff like that. I mean now, I think all the companies have gotten to using more cloud resources where it's kind of infinitely elastic and scalable. But back then, how you scaled, you would do it through the modeling computers. And I had projects where I literally lived at the modeling computers 24/7 for six months.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
Sometimes I oscillate between, as an industry, we haven't moved as far forward as people might think and then in some ways we have. So I remember my first team. So I started my career at Microsoft. And my team had a decent number of old timers. And it was kind of weird because I was like, "Shouldn't y'all be retired?" I was that young snot nose kid like, "Shouldn't y'all be like rich and retired?"
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
You've really changed.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
And they're like, "Boris, you don't understand dot-com crash and how bad it was." And they would even tell me like, "Dude, you don't understand. I've been divorced." And I was like, "Okay. I don't need to know. I'm 24. Like I don't need to know these things."
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
But I remember there was a guy who was talking about how just a few years earlier, not years and years before, but just a few years earlier, he'd often have to do work from home, nothing weird there. But laptops were not omnipresent and were weak. So he would just take the desktop from the office in his car and just take it home, which to me sounded insane. But it's really not that crazy. It's just a box. It's not that crazy. But he'd just pop it in his car and take it home so he could work from home. And it's like, yeah, you took an entire desktop to your house.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
I mean, you just think ... Anytime I think we haven't changed, you ask kids like, "How do you signal with your hands that you're on the phone?" We would go like this, with finger, thumb up, pinky down.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
No one's going to see that now.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
No one's going to see it. I mean, no kids would do that. They'd hold a big phone style [inaudible 00:13:45]. I don't know, try to show them a rotary phone and show what that's like.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
But the rotary phone was at least ... I mean, now you're looking at a pretty long time scale.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
I know. But at least we knew who had one or something like that.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
Do you know which ... There's a piece of software, I would call it, iconography, that subsisted for a very long time when it shouldn't have. And I think it's finally kind of disappeared from software is the floppy disc icon to save things.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
I love the floppy disc.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
Which it's meaningless to anyone now. What does a disc have to do with saving? What is a disc?
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
What is a disc? Oh man. A lot has changed. A lot has changed.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
A lot has changed.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
So we should ... Nothing has changed and a lot has changed. We're still button mashing, but now you use cloud resources.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
I mean, look, we're still using SQL, which was invented 40 years ago.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
But that was not for sure. Five years ago, five to seven years ago, people were saying SQL is dead. And it kind of shows you that it isn't kind of ... Things ebb and flow.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
They ebb and flow, but I think this is where I'd say the move to the cloud, for example, that you talk about you work on cloud resources is obviously an innovation and change from having a lugged desktop and there's no remote. But I think the way we program, and I mean this in the broadest sense of the term, of course it's evolved.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
I even think of a lot of people on our team who do, let's call it, front end programming, not even data. Just regular old making websites. They think it's so much more modern and productive than it once was. And it's improved, but not by the orders of magnitude people think relative to the 1980s. It's improved, no question. But I just think it's sometimes-
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
It's easier.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
Yeah. And then you have the old line of-
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
I think it's easier and faster, but it's not a step change. I agree. But devil's advocate, Redshift, big query came out in 2012. Snowflake was GA in 2014, 2015. Prior to that, it was really freaking hard to make a data warehouse. And so to your point, is that a step change? No. You could do some sort of cloud warehouse or cloud resources. But it's just so much easier now.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
I think the way I'd paraphrase that I guess is we've definitely added a zero to how many people can take advantage of this stuff. Technically, there's a dude who'd be like, "I was there in the eighties when you connected to the mainframe database and you wrote a sequel query." And it's like, "Looks kind of the same as what you kids are doing now."
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
But that was a heck of a lot of work to set up. It was super expensive. You needed to work at a company that supported. Your connection was like 300 baud modem, which no one knows what I mean when I say that anymore. But that, like you said, is now so easy that so many more people can do it. And I do think that's a step change in terms of the number of people.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
A hundred percent. But now they can do more with it.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
Totally. I'm not trying to say that we haven't moved forward. That would be very unusual given that I work in technology. I was just saying there's just so much more to come. So management consulting made you discover that you were into what after those years?
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
I was very quantitative and analytical. I guess I always knew that, but it really put the discipline to understand how to kind of do rigorous quantitative analysis, how to solve ... Problem solving is actually how to walk into a situation with a blank sheet of paper and come out with a solution, whether it's quantitative or qualitative or just something like that. It taught me that and taught me how I like it.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
Got it. Have you answered question everyone's thinking about right now? Are there more wheels than doors?
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
Oh man! There's so many questions like that. I did a lot of case study interviews. And it kind of gave me the confidence that I can just jump into a situation that I didn't have a lot of context in and ask good questions and become reasonably knowledgeable quickly. And it gives you that skillset to just jump out of a helicopter into a new situation and learn it.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
And so that's kind of what I did. I was like, "Let's go to a startup." And so I moved to New York. Was living in London at the time. I moved to New York with my wife. And I was like, "I hear about these startups and tech and things like that." I literally just started reaching out to anybody that I could find on LinkedIn that I was like vaguely kind of connected to, and just had coffee.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
And so I took a sabbatical for my consulting job. And I set a goal of having at least two coffee meetings every day and going to three to four meetups a week. And I did that for about a month and a half. And that's how I kind of met ... Actually, a lot of the early folks, members of Locally Optimistic, the data slack group that I started with a few other folks, a lot of them came from just those conversations.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
And I kind of collected data points. And I almost did like a due diligence. I used to do content due diligence and data and startups. And I kind of formed a picture, which was more than I knew before, a fraction of what I know now being on the other side of what data is. And ended up, dumb luck, right place right time, getting a job over at Casper as their kind of director of data.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
And Casper did well. I grew a 15-16 person team. And it was like right at the time of this modern data stack. We started with of course a PostgreSQL read replica. And then we hooked up to a massive Excel sheet. And we had big laptops, big laptops because we were doing it all locally. And then we switched to Redshift, Stitch, Looker and DBT. And I have to remember. I don't remember how we got introduced to the Fishtown folks. But we were their first consulting client.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
And so they helped us implement DBT, I guess 2015, 2016. You know, it was a really cool opportunity to come into an industry and into a role without any of that legacy tech and just be able to learn this. I feel very lucky and very privileged to have learned the modern data tech from the start and been able to be there from the early days.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
It's funny to think that you already have ... Even though people are just discovering it, you can actually safely say that you even have scars of the modern data stack.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
Of course. I mean, I remember before DBT tests were there. I remember before the docks were there.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
Yeah. You can almost go like, Back in my day of the modern data stack, which is brand new-
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
There wasn't even a paradigm. You have these source models and intermediate or staging models and product model.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
Names of things and archetypes.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
I remember when I think it was Drew from DBT labs showed us first this kind DAG visualization that they'd just created. Our DAG shook because it couldn't sort itself out. There were so many nodes and it was recursive. And it literally would just shake on the screen.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
That's kind of funny.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
And if you look at any companies from that time that started with DBT, their DAGs looked like that because nobody knew. I mean, literally Star Schema versus Wide Tables, people lost hours of sleeps and weeks of research on that back then. None of these, it was both the technic tools, but also the paradigms. And so really cool today that folks can just hit the ground running and know what to do and all the tools work together. And it's easy to stand something up, and you know how to design the table.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
I also like to imagine now that you were one of these people who open up the Excel spreadsheet and go like, "You have cyclical dependencies in your Excel. This is an amateur Excel spreadsheet. Has anyone taught you how to write Excel?" You probably were Excel snob at some level after a certain amount of skill.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
I think I was welcoming to all levels, but I did have high standards. Yes, I would-
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
There's good Excel and bad Excel is my point.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
Just like there's clean and dry code and kind of I guess wet code, there's dry Excel. The folks that are in Excel in and out, there's ... And actually we used to ... This is really getting into the Excel depths. One of the companies I worked before was really known for doing rail franchise bids. So in the UK, a company like Virgin would bid to operate a section of the rail. And we had to make an Excel model and submit it to the British government, had to follow rules. So just not like you had Excel practice, but you actually had Excel rules that your file had to ...
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
The same way there's like an IRS form. You're saying the Excel file you submit must follow a certain pattern?
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
Uh-huh.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
Nice. That is government defined.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
Government defined. It's bonkers. But actually, there were genuinely very smart things that they did.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
Hold on. It could be way worse. It could have been pencil and paper. The fact that it was an Excel spreadsheet was already such a improvement probably over whatever it was before that.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
A hundred percent. It was great. Honestly, the rules were smart and they were ... Actually, even though I don't have to submit it, a rail franchise bid to the UK government anymore, I still use all those rules.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
That's pretty good. I mean, we should see if it's out there somewhere like that because I think people, there's an initiative. With any technology, old, new, that you discover, that a single person discovers, first, you're like, "I'm trying to understand what it can do." And then you're kind of stretching your level of mastery of it.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
But then once you reach some level of mastery, then I think you're right that there's this idea of you develop conventions, specifically with powerful tools. So if a cool is limited, then you don't need to, because it only does a certain set of things. You don't need a ... Let's take the most beautiful simple tool. A wrench can only be used a certain way. You don't need conventions. But Excel or take your pick, SQL as a broad thing, or programming like with modern programming languages-
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
The more flexibility and the less opinionated a tool is the more you need conventions.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
The more you need conventions. And so that's a really interesting kind of thought that you eventually either individually or as a team, more likely you have to come up with a set of conventions and that's how you will be productive. Otherwise, there's just too many sharp edges, too many ways to use these products. And Excel is a fairly unlimited product.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
And it's not even just optimizing so Scott can work with Boris. It's like Scott, six months from now, can work with Scott now. What was this idiot doing? Honestly, the amount of times you pick stuff up, six months, that's what you learn. You get screwed a few times by that. And you're like, "Okay, cool. I'm going to spend an extra 10% of time making this nice and clean and documented for future self so that I don't curse my name throughout."
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
When you realize that we are so fallible and our brains are very actually subpar, it's like, "Oh yeah. You can screw yourself in the future." That's great. Well, hold on. One question about getting into Casper, hold on. Did you do a little side analysis before going in or did they just go like, "Hey, director of data, it should be fun." Or were you like, "Let me analyze the mattress market and determine whether this is a good idea."
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
I mean, it seemed like a good company, good people. And it was the first job=
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
You see, Scott. Years of management consulting, all this ability to analyze companies, whether you should buy them, sell them, expand them, they seem like good people. I'm just going to join these good people.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
I was a management consultant trying to get into a startup. Beggars can't be choosers. I still have no idea. I mean, I appreciated them hiring me and I'm grateful for the founders of Casper hiring me. I have no idea why they hired me.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
How big was the company at the time?
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
Number 16.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
Oh, wow. Yeah, that is really early. You know what I would say? At that size, for a lot of people who think about going to startups, you can attempt to do a venture capital/management consultant analysis of a 16 person company. But it would be dwarfed by how happy you will be based on the human beings on the other side. That should actually be probably the highest kind of-
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
Analysis will help you avoid some stinkers, not going to help you find the ones that you're going to join a 16 people and they're going to be a billion dollar company. I mean, at the end of the day, you just have to answer the question and answer like, "If I spend the next 18 months here, will I learn? Will I grow? Will I enjoy myself?" And if the answer is yes, let's do it. I mean, I think there's almost a risk of analysis paralysis of saying like, "Is this the right market?" Who cares? Honestly, you can learn so much from working at a failing company.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
And life is, in a weird way, circuitous and long. Not realize that what you do there is that you meet people that you will then build something much more foundational in your life later. You don't know. And so I agree. People, it's so hard to predict the far future. Will you be happy in the present? Will you learn? Will you be around people that you like?
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
Learning is the thing that I think few people, not enough people, index. And I think the challenge is a hot take. I think the supply and demand for some talent these days have pushed salaries to a point where people are weighting compensation more than learning. And I'm not saying do an unpaid internship. That's not what I'm saying.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
I'm saying that if you are between company A and company B, and they're both paying you really good. And company A you'll learn more, but company B has a $50,000 signing bonus, because for some reason they haven't been able to attract talent or something like that, the math is such that I think people are ... And again, I'm not saying go for something where you don't make money. But I think that there are just some companies just throwing money out and folks are ...
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
It's making the decision. And I don't even blame the people because it's not financially responsible to turn down that much money. I think that it's making the equation really hard. It's making it hard to say, "You know what? This is where I'm going to learn the most, or this is where I'm going to be the happiest." When this company is throwing a $50,000 kind of bonus to you.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
I agree that you're stretched on two ends. If the number that you're offered is large, then you're kind of contending with, "But wait a second. This is sufficiently changing that maybe I should sacrifice other things." And I'm sure a lot of people work in, what is it? Investment banking for just the dollars.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
But on the other end, it's very difficult for anyone I think as an employee or even as a founder, you experienced this at the other end of the spectrum. But it's like, "What is market?" It's this nebulous thing. And you're not really running a perfect auction on yourself kind of. And so knowing what that feels, it would be kind of weird.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
So the line between is this unpaid internship? Let's put that on one extreme. And then the kind of investment banking salaries, let's put it at the other extreme. Where are you supposed to be in there? And what should satisfy you? All that stuff is really hard to know. And of course sadly we're memetic creatures. So you think about your friends and people you're around. And so I shutter to-
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
I've never been caught a memetic creature before, but I'll take it.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
I think a little bit, right? You might not be. You said you're a magical introvert extrovert. So maybe you're not.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
I am. But it's nice to hear it that way. I guess it's a very privileged to be able to give that hot take, because honestly I found that whenever you prioritize learning, the money follows. And actually, in a business, in an industry that's so hot, like data, the more you learn, the more you are valuable. And so I've always prioritized learning and it seems like the money's come. But I know that's a very privileged thought.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
Of course. And let's not kid ourselves. Luck is a part of the equation.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
I think it's 99.9% luck.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
The thing that you made me think about is, and I'm only thinking about this now looking back, but similar to you, in my first job, I worked my ass off. Perfectly good career, nothing to complain about whatsoever. But that wasn't even the highest paying job I could have taken. I took the lower paying job.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
But I remember I was working my off. And I remember, I didn't think about it as like, "Am I learning right now?" That wasn't the thought process. I think I was too young and stupid to think in that way, the way that you have framed you should think about the compound learning in a job. But the fact that I was willing to work hard without thinking about my remuneration, it wasn't in my mind, I wasn't going home every night going like, "It's a good thing I worked those extra three hours. I'll get a salary bump." I wasn't-
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
The cool thing is when you first get money, it's the first time you've actually got money. So it's the coolest thing in the world.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
Of course. And I think I remember the first time I got promoted, and it was like unexpected. I was like, "Oh! This is cool." Of course-
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
It's very cool.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
Very cool. But I think the fact that I was willing to work hard tells me that I must have been learning because why else would I be so motivated? And so it's almost like if you look at a job and you think, "That's fine, it's a good salary, but seems like it would be chill." That almost tells me that you're not ... If you're not eager to spend time on it, that means you're probably not going to learn much. Intellectually, it won't be the right challenge. Go ahead. I was going to say I had a short, very short, stint, Scott, of I'm talking three months, maybe six of doing something.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
His hands are very close together for-
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
No one can see that. My hands are close together of doing what you would call management consulting or I guess consulting, let's just call it consulting, not management consult. There was no management. It was architecture consulting, let's call it, software architecture consulting. And it was per hour workday. I have never got paid like that before. And I didn't like it at all because there was very little challenge for me. They wanted to just know what's already in my brain. And I found myself being very unmotivated, despite the money.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
And I think what motivates you, the characters that motivate you ebb and flow over time and change. And not everybody is going to be career motivated. I mean, I think for me it's always been, I don't know. I guess I'm a really boring person. I like working and I've always liked my jobs.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
Also I suppose that's something that not everyone gets to say, but that's a good place to be.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
I love solving hard problems. Literally, every day I get to wake up, and at Brooklyn Data, people come to us with hard problems. So they're only bringing Brooklyn Data in for hard problems. And at this point, now that we're 60 plus people, I'm only brought in when it's a really hard problem. Every day, I literally get to solve complex problems. It's like the coolest thing in the world. For me, it's a dream job.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
Scott, what's the difference between Brooklyn Data as a consulting entity, as a consultant, so to speak, versus management consulting.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
There's so many levels. And I guess I'll talk higher level and then we'll get tactical. We're run and operated differently. I feel like in management consulting, it is not necessarily a sustainable place where you can work long term. You're traveling, you work long hours, as a team member, exactly. What we want to do is build a place where ...
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
I always felt like my sample size and most people sample size of career is very small. I either had a boring 40 hour job or a super interesting 80 hour a week job. How do we create an interesting 40 hour week job? And so that's what we'll do is create someplace where you can be for 2, 3, 4, 5, 10 years, where you can ... There's no coasting. People literally come to Brooklyn Data for hard problems.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
But the idea is you work 40 hours from the comfort of your home or whatever environment you want, and you solve hard problems. And at the end of the day, your brain feels like ... I don't actually go to the gym. So I don't really know if this is what happens. But the way your muscles would feel like if you worked out, I feel like that's what my brain feels like every day. And the idea is like you do ... Literally, I-
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
Should I start selling brain supplements as opposed to like body supplements?
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
Pretty much. The idea is that you come home at the end of the day, you're like, "I used my brain today." And I do think the brain is a muscle that can atrophy or can be kind of exercise regulated to get to peak performance. Well, I guess where I'm going is what we're trying to do is build something that has kind of the excitement, the breadth of learning opportunities of a management consulting, but the structure and the culture of an in-house data team.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
So for example, Brooklyn Data is actually nine separate teams, nine separate we call them kind of engagement teams. And we're actually going to change the teams pretty soon. But essentially, nine teams, each with a manager who comes from a data background and a collection of data engineers, analytics, engineers and analysts. And they operate as a self-contained data team across one or several clients. And so what we're trying to do is kind of give that intimacy of having a small data team-
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
So they build the vision between them.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
And you know your teammates, you're working closely. But actually people, and so that's what-
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
It just grew by five people while we were talking? That's amazing.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
Exactly. So we're 65 people this week. And we ended last year at 42 people. So we've added 22, 23 people in the last ... But we're essentially the size of a data team that you would have at a 2000 person company, when you think about it like that. So we have the resource. So you essentially are in a pod that feels like a small, early stage startup, but with the resources of a ...
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
We have a style guide, we have infrastructures code. We have documentation, we have trainings. We have a PR template. When you join Brooklyn data, the first 30 days, you get a JEA board that tells you everything that you need to do. Update your slack profile, do this training, do this.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
But they don't do this at Accenture or Bain?
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
I mean, it's a little different. And so there's some pages that we need to learn from that book. So when I started, I was at LAK consulting. The first two weeks are training as a cohort. I think we're now at Brooklyn Data the size where we can do kind of cohorts.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
It's kind of neat. I think we have, on Monday, more people will start that day than any other day ever. And I was like, "It's so weird." I was like, do I start-
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
And do you remember when company was actually smaller than the number of people who were starting on Monday.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
Yeah. That's ridiculous and true.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
It makes the brain hurt. And so we're different. I think also as opposed to, I guess, traditional management consulting, we try to really blend and be part of our clients teams, work closely with them, know their names, just really get in there and be part of the team and integrate. And I think-
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
Whereas you're saying in management consulting, it's all just numbers. It's all just a spreadsheet.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
I mean, you're getting in, you're getting out. I think a lot of times in management consulting, and I'm trying to think. It's really about building a sustainable place to work, I think.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
I think you've sold me very well on what it's like, the advantages as an employee, as a team member. It does sound very different. What does a company hire you-
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
I'll be looking for your job application.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
What is it? In the world, there's all these companies you can hire as consultants, in the world, across the board. What is it that a company hires you to do that a management consultant would never be involved? You said you helped. They were like, "Should we buy this company? Should we not? Should we expand?" That's not what Brooklyn Data is hired to do by the client?
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
Correct. So we're brought in. We're brought in when a client has a specific data challenge, like I don't know what sales we did yesterday, or a broader kind of data challenge actually, which is like, "I need to implement a modern data stack or become more data driven." And usually the first one, I need to know what sales are is the symptom of the broader challenge. So it's always the broader challenge, which is kind of coming in and helping with the data strategy.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
And so what we do really well is we've got resources and really trained people to kind of pattern recognition. We go in, we literally spend the first two to four weeks interviewing stakeholders, looking at what they've got. And we deliver this report. And it's a kind of a recommendation, "Here's what your finance team said they need. Here's what the marketing team said they need. Here's where your stack is and where your capabilities are. And that's technology, but also people in process. Here's your team. Here's the internal processes. And here's the people processes and technology you need to put in place."
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
I always think about consulting as you should be doing this yourself anyway. I mean, yes, there's greater expertise on the outside. But sometimes I'm like, "Why aren't they doing that themselves?" How come you're able to do those interviews better than they can?
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
Because I've done about 2000 of them in my life.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
Got it. So you're saying you can actually introspect their company better than they can because they don't know what questions to ask basically?
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
Yeah. I mean, I think I'm pretty sure that in the first three weeks, we can deliver a report. It tells them their history, where they're going, what they need, better than someone they can hire ahead of data who would deliver it in 90 days. So we can do it in two weeks to three weeks with an external person.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
Here's the thing. It's not like we're smarter. But this is all we do. We've probably worked with 70, 80 clients. And we're really good at ... We know what questions to ask. We know what's the latest state of data. I'll give you another example.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
If you're in an in-house data team, you're going to set up your data warehouse. When was the last time you set up a data warehouse? Three, four years ago at previous job? Literally at this point, we set up one data stack every week, Brooklyn Data, every week. And so there's a couple things there.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
We get repetition. It behooves us and we're incentivized to do infrastructures code and documentation so that each time it's better. And then each time we set up a data stack is an opportunity for us to reinspect and revisit our assumptions. I mean, what is the best ingestion tool to do for this? Has Firebolt or Clickhouse gotten to the point where we should seriously put them into consideration?
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
And so we're revisiting this every week. And so what our clients come to do is we don't do anything that they're not capable of doing. But we will never know the deep down intricacies of the business to the extent that they will. But we'll be able to get in there real quick, learn enough to really customize it. And I think there are some places that really just say Snowflake, Fivetran, Looker every single time. We work with those tools very regularly and we love those tools. But we customize the solution every single time.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
I'm a firm believer that the majority of what happens in a company is making sure it runs well, moves fast, has agility. And then a lot of other things can be solved if you have that. And I say this as I don't know how to run big oil or whatever. But when you were talking about management consulting, I thought a lot about these big questions about should we buy this company? It's worth $3 billion. Should we spend $3 billion to buy this? Or should we expand into Asia after having been ..."
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
These are super important strategy questions. Do you miss that? Because in a way, what I'm hearing, maybe I'm misinterpreting, is you are ... It's not that what you're solving is tactical. But it's health of the business itself is what you're helping improve rather than, "Our CEO has been debating whether to do A versus B." They don't bring you in for that, right?
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
So I guess two points there. I mean, this is going to kind of be tooting your horn. I think with tools like Census, we are now getting closer to activation. So we're building data infrastructure that isn't just answering questions. It's actually leading to top line growth. That's kind of point number one.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
Point number two is I do think the world is changing to the point where big company, let's call it big oil or whatever, that's probably not as good, big electric power, solar power, is going to ask a question. And they're going to say, "Hey legacy management consultancy, give us a pitch." And then we're going to raise our hand. It's like, "Hey, we'd like to pitch too."
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
And instead of delivering an Excel model and documentation or Alteryx model or something like that, we're actually going to take our recommendation, model it in DBT, model it in your warehouse, put it in your BI tool and actually link it to kind of to an activation platform or something like that. And we can do that because we've built your whole data stack. And so I do think there's a really cool opportunity. It's not going to happen in the next 18 months, 18 to 24 months. But I do think that we will be more involved in answering strategic questions for our clients.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
Do you think by being external, you're imbued with an ability to persuade a kind of a trustworthiness that is different than the people inside the company?
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
A hundred percent. The minute you've been hired, they've decided to trust you. You convinced them the minute they hired you. You've convinced them to hire you and convinced them. I mean, there's still opportunity to screw up and say stupid things and lose that trust. But you're coming in from a place of trusted advisor. And that's kind of what we view as ...
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
And honestly, we take that very seriously. So we will be the first to tell our clients when we should leave like, "Hey folks, this is getting big enough that you should hire an analytics engineer yourself." And we'll train them and dial down, and we'll maybe be more data engineering and data leadership. But we will be the first to tell them because I mean, it's the long game. We want our clients to be successful. We want them to tell their friends. And honestly, I want to run my business ethically. We are trusted advisor and we take that trust seriously.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
I sometimes wonder to what degree is that trust earned through the work and the wisdom, and how much of it is imbued by the title, the name, the external relationship, et cetera? Do you see what I mean?
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
Yeah.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
The job titles can do this. They can completely fool you just by the name. Oh! He's a data architect. That must mean something. Of course, we do that because we all assume we're well intentioned and so the person who gave that person that title felt that it was earned. And so I've had this conversation a few times now around, I spend so much of my time, and you do too, of making sure the data's accurate, make sure it's all connected, that it's put to good use. All that stuff. And I spend less time thinking about how to affect change in an organization. But I want to. And so it's like, do you have superpowers, just as kind of because you're Brooklyn Data? Do you have organizational change kind of superpowers?
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
I would say it's on a scale. I think we do more so than an in-house person. Do we have the name of McKenzie or kind of one of those companies? No.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
Some day.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
I think we are starting to get a brand name a little bit. But I think that isn't more significant than just the contributor of us being external. It's external plus a little bit of a brand versus McKenzie is external plus a lot of a brand. External is the big driver. I mean, we've been brought in by a C level executive that's made a major commitment to bring us in to help solve a problem. And we're ideally set up for success. That senior executive's introduced us to folks, sent out an email round.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
It was very shocking to me when I first started consulting because pre Brooklyn Data, we didn't have a name. It was just me. It was literally Scott Breitenother under an LLC. It was actually Scott Breitenother LLC until the end of 2021 when we officially switched Brooklyn Bata Company. And the minute I went from being in-house Scott to external Scott, a switch, literally, people started listening to ... It was not like I was saying anything different. And actually, it's an interesting challenge because sometimes we'll come into an organization, we'll talk to the data team, and we'll have to have frank calls like, "You're doing it all. You're saying the right things."
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
They're like, "I've been saying this." They're going to be like, "I've been saying that exactly. Why have they not been listening to me?"
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
And what we're going to do is we're going to ... Hopefully, our goal is not to step on the toes of the internal data team. It's not to take their job. It's to make them look like heroes. And so what we want to do is sometimes we have to have the talk. It's like, "It's going to seem weird when we say the exact same thing that you've been saying, and they listen. And that's not an indictment on you or any commentary on you or your ability. It's just organizations are weird and people are weird. Psychology is weird."
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
This is the thing. That, to me, is, I didn't want to lead you to this, but I had a feeling this is true.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
Oh, it's a hundred percent true.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
So let's see if you can judo this into some advice for people who are in those roles, who believe they are saying the right things, but they're not able to affect change and you're not there. How can they be more like Scott in their ability to make change?
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
And I think there's just a couple things there. I would say the first is that there are some organizations that will never change. Will not change anytime soon because of leadership, because of something. And even if I was there, I could not change them. I wouldn't even be hired because they're not in a frame of mind where they want to change.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
And in those situations, you need to leave and you need to leave fast. You're not a volunteer, you're not a charity worker. You have a career. You have no loyalty. If you feel like you are pushing a rock up a hill, trying to get buy in to make obvious changes to invest in data in the organization. You've tried for months, you've tried different tactics. Be persistent. And if you don't get it, leave. There's enough demand at good organizations that are willing to commit to change because it's a big change and it's a big investment. Then you should go there.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
If you are in an organization where you think is possible to change, there's a lot of psychology. You want to start anchoring yourself as a senior. So you want to start anchoring yourself as a senior member of the team. And so it is very weird and it's kind of hard to explain what that is.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
I remember very early in my career I'd manager that said like, "Scott, you're acting too junior." And how do you know what too junior is until you've kind of seen what senior is? But you know what I'm talking about. It's how you conduct yourself. It's a lot of your persona and who you are. People don't realize the best executives are very in control of their persona and how they act in a room in a meeting. And so truly trying to be and become the type of person that your organization listens to and respects, it's different for every single organization. There's little things. It's constantly how you dress a little bit.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
Yeah. I was about to say, there's a bit of form over function in this.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
Form over function. It's how you speak. And I think executives tend to like top down communication where you lead with the point and then go into backup. And junior folks tend to kind of do it like a research paper where you build up to the argument. And in fact, what's really hard for data people is data people are trained to give options and pros and cons.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
At a certain level, you need to make the decision and say, "There was also option B, C and D. I chose A because I know we're focused on growth and not on profitability this quarter." Literally, and that is the biggest mind shift for people in data to go from showing five options, poking holes in all of them and letting someone else decide, to deciding, or at least making a recommendation saying, "I know the lens that this executive will be making this decision. And so I'm going to make a recommended decision so that they can ...
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
Literally, all the executive wants to do is click the buy now button on something. They don't want to dig in. And so if you give them something that's a buy now button, and it makes sense, and they trust that you are interpreting this situation and this decision with the same priorities and values that they would, you're their favorite person.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
I could not agree with you more. It's deep down again, and insert all the human flaws, first of all, I think by default, we want to trust. This is why conman succeed. You want to trust. And execs, you're stressed about a million things all the time. There's no end in sight to the problems you have to go tackle.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
And so I completely agree. Not only will that work better if you can say, "This is the thing we need to do." If delivered in the right way in that kind of thing that you said, all the little form over function parts, I will actually look at less justification. I will require less proof. And because I want this thing off my plate, I want it to be out of the will we, won't we, what will we, into we're doing. I want that desperately, maybe more than the person who's presenting.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
And I think most people, and me for sure, it's default to trust. And then things go wrong, then yeah, I'll be unhappy. And we'll deal with it. And to me, seniority is achieved by having sufficiently made those bets that panned out, because if you keep doing that and they pan wrong, then you won't become true senior. That's the problem. There's risk in trying to become this way. But the fast path, like you said, to true seniority is act like it.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
Fake it till you make it.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
Be right. Yeah.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
I mean, I have a rule, fake till you make it. I mean, if I had an autobiography, it would be Fake It Till You Make It, the Scott Breitenother Story. I mean, there's things that you shouldn't fake. You shouldn't fake anything that you feel uncomfortable from an ethical, a security -
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
You should have integrity, you shouldn't-
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
But I think too many folks wait until they tick all the boxes to jump to that next level. We went in so many different directions. We did not talk about data at ... We were brainstorming some topics about data and modern data stacks. We've talked about literally none of those things.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
Oh, no. People are going to be like, "What's this podcast about?"
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
A data podcast, not about data edition.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
I think, Scott, everyone does want to figure out how to be more impactful in their personal career in data. And you exemplify that, make no mistake.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
You know how to butter me up. Honestly, I mean, it's just always learn, always be working with great people. And I would also say actually my number one thing is be humble and ask questions and elevate other people because truly you are more successful ... The people around me success breeds my success. Never be envious of other people's success. Never throw peanuts at people. Elevate people around, you build people up, help people, just help people.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
And I just kind of try to throw positive energy onto the universe. And honestly, it seems so silly, but just I love helping people. And I love chatting with people and getting to know them and their goals and trying to be helpful. And it seems to just come back. So I would say throw positive energy onto the universe.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
Yeah. I think if I were to try to one up that, so to speak, if-
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
One up my positivity speech.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
Unbelievable positivity is I think where I've discovered the most like joy is not just helping people, because of course, I agree with you. That's its own reward in a way. But when I see them, and this is maybe more management than it is, but I think in data, you definitely see this in the field is if I can, for lack of a better word, empower someone else, that's a Eureka. It's like teach a man to fish versus give a man a fish. I really do feel like that is a very special feeling. When they have that aha of like, "Wait, I can take control of this spreadsheet. I can do things, I can." It's unbelievable.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
People invent ceilings and limits and things like that. You talk to people that want to do ... I want to do A in my career, then B my career, then do C. I'm pretty sure you're qualified to do C right now.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
You would be amazed. The way you frame that is actually so spot on. I have met the world's most ambitious founders who also put artificial ceilings on themselves. It just happens.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
And the sad thing is I think most people don't know what they're capable of, and they're capable of ... People are capable of amazing things. And if not building a company, it could be building a family. It could be kind of a hobby. It could be just ... It's pretty impressive what people can do.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
I think we actually ended up ... This ended up being a sales pitch for going to work for Scott. It's what it sounds like to me.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
It was not the intent, but it's pretty special over at Brooklyn Data. I love my team. Literally, I get to work on hard problems with smart people and people I learn from every day [inaudible 00:54:38].
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
In my experience, by the way, everything else eventually fades away. And it's just we are, again, human. So the people you work with is ultimately what makes work fun and enjoyable. Like you said, you learn from your peers. And if you're not, you should work somewhere else. And this is good. We're at time. But I also hear that if you work at Brooklyn Data, you get to nerd out on all sorts of cool tech. So Hey, and that's what Scott and I were supposed to talk about. But next time.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
We were supposed to talk about. We should do a part two where we actually talk about technology though. I mean, that would-
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
Okay. We've covered everything we know about human beings.so we've checked all the boxes.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
Everything we know about human beings.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
That's everything we know about human beings. So next is what we think about Firebolt and data warehouses and accessibility and UI and SQL and transformation. We'll talk about all that next time, in next episode sort of.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
Continued on The Sequel Show.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
To be continued. Well, I think that's how I feel every time I talk to you. So hopefully, we'll find another avenue for that. But listen, thanks for taking time today. And I mean, Scott, it's always fun to talk to you.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
Always fun. I will see you, Boris.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
See you.
Scott Breitenother, Founder and CEO, BDC:
Until later, thanks for having me. See you.
Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-founder, Census:
Well folks, until next time, this is The Sequel Show. Special thanks to Joe Stevens for our theme song. And thanks to all of you for listening and supporting the show. If you haven't already, subscribe anywhere you listen to podcasts to get notified for our future episodes.