The PRQL: Do You Need Business Intelligence on Your Phone?

Eric Dodds 00:00
Ok Kostas, we just recorded a show with Zack Hendlin, who is building Zing Data. And they do AI and analytics with the ability to query on mobile devices, which is fascinating. And he’s a fascinating guy in general, because he worked on the news feeds, and curation at both LinkedIn, and Facebook, which was pretty fascinating. And he talked a lot about how sort of distilling information in terms of curation actually was pretty informative in the way that he’s approaching buildings in but the question for you is, as a founder, someone who’s run a business, someone who’s both created and consumed a lot of BI, do you want that on your mobile phone? Does the fundamental premise appeal to you?

Kostas Pardalis 00:55
Or me as a founder? Probably not. And the reason that I’m saying that is because not because it doesn’t have value it because you have, like, already so much noise around you, and so much like communication that you need to mark knots that are adding, let’s say, another source of signal out there as a founder, right. And we’re talking now about tactical things like that, or situations where you go out there, and it’s, you know, she’s like, you’re in the field, and you have to decide, like, the food that you’re going to pick up and information, make this tactical decision? I’m not talking about that. That’s the founder in the spirit of like, early on, where to be honest, like, you probably don’t even need that much data in a

Eric Dodds 01:51
yeah, probably wasn’t the best question.

Kostas Pardalis 01:53
Oh, it is a good question. Because it gives us like to what is like important, and what is important is that there are like, data is, can be used, like in many different ways, by many different people. And they just have reached a point of maturity, where we need to start like thinking beyond, let’s say, general solutions that can be good enough for everyone. We’re at the point where we need like to start optimizing for, like specific needs and niches out there. And these leases are actually not more of their be. So yeah, probably founders have an early stage startup, they’re not going to need, like a BI tool in general, to be honest, because you don’t even have a business to wipe from that. But, yeah, I can see many cases out there of people white moving around and sound like they need to have access to this data. So yeah.

Eric Dodds 03:03
And the result, I think the example that he gave of oil production, and being in the field was fast, right? It makes a huge difference. If your output changes by a couple of percentage points that can happen really fast. Yeah. And you actually need to be able to create more than just drill down functionality, but the ability to, you know, actually query data in a number of different ways on a device that matches your current context, you know, which is so fascinating conversation. Definitely listen in. We also learned some interesting things about newsfeed curation, and even got a little bit ethical and talking about mobile device usage at the very end, so stick around if you want some moral discussion around screen time, which is always a nice, spicy take. And Zack had some interesting thoughts. So thanks for joining us. Subscribe if you haven’t tell a friend and we’ll catch you on the next one.