Sources of Inspiration

Part of being in the discussion is listening to the discussion.

I don’t want to live and think in a vacuum, and actively try not to. Listening is my biggest key to inspiration. A few people have asked about what blogs and podcasts I soak in, so here it goes.

Blogs

Two newsletters come to mind as always being in the conversation within the analytics engineering community:

• Benn’s Substack: Out of the box opinions (like on Excel) and comments on data news (like Snowflake’s acquisition of Streamlit).

• Analytics Engineering Roundup (by dbt Labs): Weekly summary of hot takes from dbt Slack.

There are several other individuals whose writing particularly speaks to me, and I often find myself going back over and over again to their work:

• Technically: Written by @itunpredictable, each article is a step-by-step breakdown of a single technical concept. My latest favorite is the overview of GraphQL.

• Lenny’s Newsletter: Everything product and community, from what it takes to be a PM to how popular apps got their first 1000 users.

• Data Operations: Data operations might mean different things to different people, but to Greg Meyer it’s bringing a programmers mindset to various areas of business.

• Data People Etc: Stephen Bailey unpacks the hard conversations that all analytics teams struggle with, like what a source of truth really means at different stages of an organization.

• Digital Native: Consumer, tech, and beyond. A stew of different topics, all backed by data. For example, here Rex goes into growth trajectories of startups in fields from climate to finance.

Part of listening is staying in the loop, both on data news, conferences, funding, and VC chatter. For venture news, I try to keep up with:

• Data Council Newsletter: Even though I wasn’t able to make the Data Council Conference in Austin this year, I can certainly tell that many data startups begin the conversation within the Data Council sphere.

• ffVC Newsletter: A weekly rundown of resources, reads, and threads that appeal to folks in VC.

• Enterprise Weekly by Work-Bench: Weekly news highlight in venture, top finance reads, as well as a list of closed rounds each week.

Podcasts

Starting again with recurring references, these podcasts always seem to be in the conversation:

• Analytics Engineering Podcast: Tristan and Julia interview various founders and practitioners in analytics engineering.

• Data Engineering Podcast: Focusing on data and analytics technology, this podcast is a great place to hear from leaders of data tooling companies themselves what problems tools try to solve. Recent highlights include deep dives into Apache Pinot and DuckDB.

“Tech” podcast is such a broad description. Tech news? Culture? Neither? What I mean by tech podcast is one where the goal is to make engineers better practitioners. For tech-heavy content I go to:

• Software Engineering Daily: Interviews with leaders and practitioners in software and tech. A great way to stay on top of the problems software and data engineers try to tackle daily.

• The Stack Overflow Podcast: DevRels from Stack Overflow discuss tech tools, news, and community. On the pod you could hear everything from Notion as a second brain to crypto.

• The Backend Engineering Podcast: As techy as it gets, the show unpacks recent news in software engineering like the AWS outage, Google’s linux patch, and more.

• OSS Startup Podcast: Interested in open source tools? Tim Chen (Essence VC) and Amanda Robson (Cowboy Ventures) interview founders that build companies founded upon open source communities.

Looking at tech from the lens of financing and scale, these podcasts aim to make technical founders and technical managers better leaders:

• 20VC: Interviews with serial entrepreneurs and VCs, insight into scaling companies from the perspective of finance, culture, hiring, and more.

• In Depth: First Round interviews various leaders and entrepreneurs in their network, culminating to a guide for building from the ground up.

• Equity Podcast: TechCrunch outlines trends in the startup world, including unpacking what benefit Demo Days really hold.

• Acquired: Not to be confused with the Acquired LP show—basically, the history of successful people and projects from Taylor Swift to Sony. This pod wins for best researched.

And the one that rules them all that I won’t dare to miss every Wednesday morning:

• Non-Technical: Alexis Gay from Twitter herself interviews influential folks ranging from business to tech. Recent guests include entrepreneurs, VCs, and even politicians. Every pod is unbelievably entertaining.

Final Notes

There are so many more people with amazing insight in the space, but I’ve highlighted the most recurring content that I find thought provoking. If you have any recommendations, please comment!

Thanks for reading! I love talking data and VC news so please reach out. I’d love to hear from you.