Episode 54:

The Center of the Modern Data Stack with Neil Rahilly of Mixpanel

September 22, 2021

This week on The Data Stack Show, Eric and Kostas are joined by Neil Rahilly, VP of product and design at Mixpanel. Rahilly has been with Mixpanel since 2012 when he started there as a software engineer. Their conversation dives into product analytics and takeaways from his time at Mixpanel.

Notes:

Highlights from this week’s conversation include:

  • Neil’s programming hobby turned into a career and how he cold-contacted Mixpanel for a job (2:28)
  • Lessons learned from nine years at Mixpanel (5:05)
  • Defining product analytics (8:06)
  • How Mixpanel has evolved into the product it is today (10:56)
  • The importance of Mixpanel’s real-time analysis (19:52)
  • Looking at Arb, Mixpanel’s own arbitrary segmentation database (23:44)
  • The business impact that the rise of the cloud data warehouse had on Mixpanel (34:56)
  • Sub-second latencies and real-time use cases (49:05)
  • Career advice from Neil (1:02:02)

 

The Data Stack Show is a weekly podcast powered by RudderStack, the CDP for developers. Each week we’ll talk to data engineers, analysts, and data scientists about their experience around building and maintaining data infrastructure, delivering data and data products, and driving better outcomes across their businesses with data.

RudderStack helps businesses make the most out of their customer data while ensuring data privacy and security. To learn more about RudderStack visit rudderstack.com.