The Joe Reis Show Joe Reis

What's up with Finland and data? I think Finland might have among the strongest contingencies of data practitioners in the world. Pound for pound, Finland might rule the planet for data competencies.



I chat with the The Finnish Data Mafia, jokingly my friends who are responsible for the upcoming Helskini Data Week.

Just wrapped up a course with Sol Rashidi on transitioning your career from practitioner to leader. The notion of "success" kept recurring, so I spend this podcast unpacking it. What is success and why should you figure out what it means for you?

This wasn't the interview I expected to do. I thought I'd interview Nick Freund about his startup, Workstream. Between the time we scheduled our podcast and when we hit the record button, he shut down his company. That's a pretty major shift, to say the least.



What's it like to shut down a company? Nick discusses the various pivots of his startup, trying to raise capital in a brutal funding environment, the data tooling landscape, the process of shutting down a company, and much more.



This is an emotional episode, and I'm glad we got the opportunity to make it happen. I feel like stories like Nick's are all too common, yet rarely vocalized in the brutally honest way that Nick describes his story.



Nick's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nick-from-workstream/

I've had plenty of discussions over the last couple of weeks about data teams - what are they, and how do I measure their success? I dive into a distinction I make about data teams - enterprise vs product - and some key ways to gauge them.

Doug Needham is an OG DBA and data architect who built DataOps workflows back in Desert Storm (!) and has managed to stay very current with data to today. We talk about data architecture war stories, the hard work to do generative AI in the enterprise, and much more. Enjoy!

Some things happened over the last day that I need to call out. Women and other underrepresented groups need to be treated better in tech and data. Whether it's all-male panels at conferences or mansplaining on social media, I'm pretty embarrassed and irritated by how women are treated in our industry. My message for this episode - stop being a d*ck.