https://anchor.fm/census/episodes/How-Do-You-Build-a-Data-Driven-Culture----Operational-Analytics-Conference-2021-ev8drs

Sean Lynch (00:00:00): If you want to kick us off with an introduction, that would be great.

Jeff Ignacio (00:00:03): Yeah. Happy to. Thanks, everyone. Thanks, Sean, for joining me and glad to join my good friend, [Sylvain 00:00:09], as well. I'm the head of revenue, operations and growth over at a venture-backed company out in LA called Upkeep. We sell a desktop and mobile application to the maintenance and reliability profession. As head of revenue operations, we support all the things that go to market. So, marketing, sales and customer success, really trying to create a steel thread for driving value from our prospects to customers and lifelong customers. So happy to join.

Sean Lynch (00:00:38): Awesome. Michael, do you want to go next? We'll skip over Max for now.

Michael Stoppelman (00:00:44): Sure. I'm Michael Stoppelman. I'm a software engineer by background and then joined my brother at Yelp. I was the sixth engineer, scaled the engineering team to 600. Was at Yelp for 10 years. Left Yelp in 2017, have been an investor since. Invested in a ton of data companies, was a series A investor in Confluent and [Hisora 00:01:10] and a bunch of other companies, and Census as well. So, happy to be part of this conversation.

Michelle Ballen (00:01:23): I can go next. Hi, everyone. I'm Michelle. I work at Billie, we're a direct to consumer body care company and I lead the data team there, it's a team of three. And if I had to classify the type of work that I do, I would say it's more along the analytics, engineering line.

Praveer Melwani (00:01:44): I think that's me next. I'm Praveer Melwani, I lead the finance and business operations teams at Figma. Figma is a collaborative interface design tool, been here for just under four years now. I joined the company, we're about 30-ish people. I think we got thrown in, I was probably one of the first five folks on the business side, and a lot of the fun that I got to see and build was the early data side, or data pieces, at Figma. So a lot of war stories to share there. And before that, got to spend some time with Sean at Dropbox, and been lucky to, I feel like we're one of the lucky ones, as one of the first few customers of Census out of Figma.

Sean Lynch (00:02:27): Max, you around?

Max Mullen (00:02:29): Yeah. Hey, I'm Max, I'm one of the co-founders of Instacart, which I'm sure you know is a grocery delivery company and we are actually really, really data-driven as a culture and as a company, sometimes even to a fault, which I can talk a little bit about, but I think it's something we've done since the very beginning. And we've learned over the years how to continue and scale that data-driven culture. And then I'm also an angel investor, proudly, in Census, but also in enough other data-based companies that I actually have a little theme of investing that I call DREAM, "Data, rules everything around me." So I love data companies and my wife works at companies in this space, and it's just a big part of my life.

Boris Jabes (00:03:14): Way to drop a rap reference right off the top.

Max Mullen (00:03:19): It's what the people want.

Sean Lynch (00:03:23): Thank you, Max. Actually, I'm wondering if maybe you can kick us off with this first question. So, just to set the stage, how would you define data-driven? What does it mean to be data-driven, especially, it sounds like, if you can take it too far, what are you taking too far?

Max Mullen (00:03:41): Well, as far as I'm concerned, what it means is using the data that's available to you and also the ability to create new sources of data to make the best possible decision at any given time. So, at Instacart, it's an expectation that anybody in any role is going to bring the data that we have in a clear and cogent way to help a team make a decision together. And that's table stakes for Instacart. And it applies not just in, of course, engineering product design, but also across our entire business.

Max Mullen (00:04:18): We'll ask that people bring data, where it's available to make decisions, and then where it's not available, we'll go and get that data. We'll run surveys, or we'll find data from third parties, and we'll try to be as smart as we possibly can, leading up to a decision. What I referenced earlier is is that you can also take that too far, and you can make no decision because you're waiting for the data to come in. You've all, I'm sure, had the experience of running an experiment and having that experiment not yet quite be statistically significant, and so you can't call that experiment, and it goes on and on. And there is a place, I think, in a data-driven company for using your intuition and your gut to make decisions before all the data is in. So there's two sides to the coin.

Sean Lynch (00:05:03): That's interesting because a lot of times companies will talk about the difference between, or they'll say, maybe, "Hey, I'm data-informed and not data-driven." It sounds like that's still in play in your definition. Is that fair?

Max Mullen (00:05:18): I think that data-informed is what most companies are, and data-driven is when you make a commitment to using all the data you have available to make the best possible decision. For example, resources at any company are scarce. You have certain amount of time, a certain amount of people who can work on a project, and you have a certain scope that you want to achieve. And so there's always trade offs. And if you're making those trade offs without running experiments or without gathering data, or without clearly communicating that data in each decision, then you're probably making suboptimal decisions. So I think being data-driven is the degree to which you optimize decision-making using data.

Sean Lynch (00:06:05): Got it. And I would love if other folks are interested in chiming in on this as well, but I'm interested in shifts here. Like in the companies that you've been in, or run, in the case of Max, where have you seen that evolve to being data-driven? How have you started to create that culture? Or was it there from the start?