I’m Lucky 2020 has forced me, like many others, to reflect on my own privilege and why I’ve been able to accomplish what I have. I want to show gratitude towards the folks who helped propel my career where it is today. I had/have so many things going for me, and these people played a…
Remote Work 2.0 – Doing remote right; lessons from Zapier and what COVID Changes
Remote work is the future of technology. I first wrote about my feelings on remote work on the third post on this blog. Since then, I’ve only become more convinced. Remote work continues to be extremely desirable to the technology workforce. A survey that Zapier ran says that 74% of people would be willing to…
Best Business Neckbuds – Plantronics Voyager 6200 UC vs Jabra 75e vs Bose QuietComfort 35 vs Bose 700s – Headphones for remote work and video calls
One fact about working remote is that you end up on a lot of video calls. Building rapport is tough and body language matters, so being able to see someone and communicate is important. Bad audio is a huge problem when most of your conversations aren’t in person. Plus, if you like to work from…
Churn.fm podcast: Why churn cannot be measured with a single metric
Andrew Michael and I took some time to chat about churn metrics on his podcast churn.fm. We talked about the different between revenue churn, user churn, and logo churn. Plus, how startups should think about churn in their business at different stages. Give it a listen and let me know what you think! https://www.churn.fm/episode/why-churn-cannot-be-measured-with-a-single-metric/
The path to being the best data analyst: Help, Build, then Do.
The core competency of a data analyst is “Speed to Insight”. A data team often consists of many people, with many skills, using potentially overlapping techniques. This focus on speed distinguishes this role from data scientists or statisticians. Today I’m focused on answering questions about the business or about how users behave. I’ll refer to…
Looker vs Tableau vs Mode, etc. Business Intelligence and Data Visualization tools compared.
Post Updated: Sept 2020 While Looker has become my default option, you might consider Tableau, Mode, or Chart.io Data Viz tools can make or break the impact that a data team has on the organization. If your method of insight delivery is incompatible with your organization and team structure, you won’t have any success, no…
The data modeling layer in startup analytics – DBT vs Matillion vs LookML and more
Hey data team – why does the revenue in my dashboard not match the revenue in this other view? -Every Executive Ever If you’ve been in data analytics for any amount of time, I’m sure you can relate to a question like this. Often, the answer is that the analyst who did the calculation for…
Growth Hacking Your Job Hunt – 5 steps to grab your dream job
You can use growth hacking techniques to search for a new job and sell yourself into a position you want. This post details how I went about “growth hacking” my job search. Instead of waiting for recruiters or surfing job boards, I got proactive and took a page out of the sales playbook for some…
Segment vs Fivetran vs Stitch: Which data ingest should you use?
Data Pipelines and ETL can be ridiculously time consuming. Luckily, data-ingest-as-a-service tools are getting more robust with their pipeline offerings. We’ve all had this problem: “All of my data is siloed in different apps, and I want to be able to analyze it all in one place. What do I do?” My favorite…
Data Driven Decisions: Respect the numbers, then make your choice.
If you’ve been following me for a little while (in which case, hey, thanks!) you know that I am committed to helping build and grow companies in as data-driven a way as possible. From the early days of a company, I encourage founders to seek out experts in data analysis. That means both outside the…