The PRQL: Bridging Marketing and Technology Through Data-Driven Leadership with Brian Schwartz of SIZE

Eric Dodds 00:15
Welcome back to the show. We are here with Ryan Schwartz from size, which is an advisory firm for late stage companies, and they also do investing. We have a lot of questions about that, because it’s a really unique model and lots of other things to talk about. Brian, welcome to the show.

Brian Schwartz 00:44
Thank you for having me.

Eric Dodds 00:46
Well, give us a fascinating background. We were talking about movies right before the show because you have experience in that industry, but just give us a quick overview of your background. Yeah. So

Brian Schwartz 00:56
I’m a long time marketing guy who’s been at a digital agency in London for four years. Spent about six and a half years at DreamWorks Animation, doing marketing for the films and global retail marketing, and then, most recently, led global marketing for the lodging group at Expedia, focusing on all of our hotel and vacation rental partners around the world, kind of what I call life 2.0 which is post corporate world. I now advise a host of high growth companies send a handful of boards and kind of along the way, one of the companies I’ve been with for a while, I saw lots of problems happening within the business outside of the marketing world, things like supply chain and finance and HR, and decided to build an advisory group of former executives to be able to help these late stage companies across a variety of disciplines. And then the idea is, we get in there, we add a ton of value. We get a look under the hood, and then we couple that with an investment arm to be able to look to make strategic investments in companies that we’re advising.

John Wessel 01:51
So Brian, one of the topics we talked about before the show was the interaction between data and marketing teams. Data teams and marketing teams. It can be tense at times, and I think, but what I think you get that right? I think that’s one of the magic of these, like, really successful companies. So I wanted to begin with that topic. What’s another topic that you’re interested in talking about?

Brian Schwartz 02:11
Yeah, I think that’s a great topic. I’ve seen so many different Good, good things and bad things happen within the marketing, tech and data intersection. No, yeah, is another topic right now that’s very interesting to me. I also think enterprises and how they leverage data is very interesting to me. Everyone’s a little bit different in terms of their strategy. Some of them have tons of data but don’t do anything with it. Others have lots of data and are amazing with it. I’ve experienced both in my career, so I’m happy to kind of discuss and explore that as

Eric Dodds 02:43
well. Awesome. Well, let’s dig in.

John Wessel 02:45
Yeah, let’s do it.