Ahmed Elsamadisi, Narrator CEO, is a roboticist by training and one of the first engineers at WeWork. Now he's changing how the world tells stories with data.

Ahmed Elsamadisi built the data infrastructure at WeWork before realizing every company could benefit from his team’s innovation. Traditional star schemas aren’t the best way to manage data. Ahmed instead pioneered a new approach using a single-table column model better suited for real questions people ask. He launched Narrator in 2017 to make it easier to turn data questions into answers and has since raised $6.2M from Initialized Capital, Flybridge Capital Partners, and Y Combinator. Ahmed received his BS in Robotics from Cornell. Hear from a pioneer (and tech provocateur) how new data wrangling techniques are making it easier for mere mortals to get more value out of their data.

Listen and learn…

1. How a roboticist who got his start building self-driving cars and designing missile defense systems ended up redefining how data is stored 2. Why traditional approaches that require SQL to access data are broken 3. How a single-column schema eliminates the complexity of joining systems and tables 4. Why it’s easier to tell better stories with data using temporal relationships extracted from customer journeys 5. Why Snowflake, Redshift, and BigQuery are really all the same… and data modeling is the place to innovate 6. What it means to replace traditional tables with activities… and why they’ll eliminate the need for specialized data analysts 7. How to reduce data storage costs by 90% and time to generate data insights from weeks to minutes 8. Why data management vendors are responsible for bad decisions made using your data 9. What is data cleaning and how you should do it 10. What is a racist algorithm 11. Why querying data with natural language will never work 12. Is the WeCrashed version of Adam Neumann’s neuroticism accurate? Hear from someone who lived it...

References in this episode:

Google’s LaMDA isn’t sentientChandra Khatri • from Got It AI on AI and the Future of Work Derek Steer • from Mode on AI and the Future of Work Barr Moses • from Monte Carlo on AI and the Future of Work Peter Fishman • from Mozart Data on AI and the Future of Work Ahmed • on Twitter