The PRQL: Simplifying Data Collaboration with Pardis Noorzad of General Folders

Eric Dodds 00:05
Welcome to The Data Stack Show prequel where we replay a snippet from the show we just recorded. Kostas, are you ready to give people a sneak peek? Let’s do it. Again, Kostas, this episode with Pardis from General Folders, really got me thinking about economics a lot. I mean, I know that sounds weird. But when you think about the idea of two businesses, or two entities sort of collaborating around data, whatever that looks like sharing one way, bi-directional or whatever. It’s a huge infrastructure problem, right? I mean, the fragmentation makes it a nightmare. You know, for anyone who’s had to do that, which is really interesting. But the more parties talked about it, the more you realize that it’s the fragmentation on the transactional side is actually far worse than it is on the infrastructure side. And so the infrastructure is almost a proxy for sort of the way that companies are trying to interact. And so I guess maybe you think about the Snowflake marketplace as an interesting sort of economic layer on top of their ecosystem, then gives them a lot of market power. But if you actually zoom out and think about the economics of that, in an infrastructure agnostic way, that’s pretty crazy. So I’m going to be thinking about that a whole lot. And that’s just such a compelling idea in general, from party. So that was my big takeaway.

Kostas Pardalis 01:44
Yeah, come up with saying, I totally agree with you that lists some very interesting, like economic implication, when all the stuff that like we discussed about with politicians, that’s what I’m going to keep also, to be honest, because it is, let’s say, an extremely strong signal that data is turning into actually kind of a commodity, like, we will start like transacting on top of data. I mean, we were doing it already, but it was like more of, let’s say, a nice kind of money, right? Like, yeah, financial markets are known for like being ahead of the game in, like, transacting over data, because data is actually like, the moles, right? Here. Probably something similar might happen already, like we’ve in the medical space, right. But what we actually see here happening is that we are entering this new Heartsaver like era in a way where, actually we’re going to see a lot of economic activity on top of data, something that these these accelerated by this whole AI thing that is happening, but that’s just a catalyst that makes things like go faster. It’s not an enabler like it was there. People predicted that it will come and it seems that it’s coming like faster than we thought. So that’s why they keep and I would encourage everyone like to go and like, listen to the episode, because there are like, I think, like some very interesting insights around like, what the future will look like,

Eric Dodds 03:28
Yeah, we should do a shop talk on that, because it’s, I hadn’t thought about this, but you bring up, you know, the FinTech industry, transacting over data, right. And one thing that’s really interesting is that what makes that possible is that you assign value to data that allows for transactions on a very wide scale across a very large number of people in the market. And I didn’t even think about this being the beginning of an era where you have all this fragmented data across all this fragmented infrastructure across all these different companies. And beginning to see value being assigned to that even through the fragmentation is that’s crazy. Brooks, shop talk. That’s going to be wild.

Kostas Pardalis 04:14
Yeah, 100% and just like to make something like, clear, it’s not just like FinTech, even like traditional financial markets, we’re doing that. Like if you go and see like the traders in Wall Street, like, all these HFT things, or like the hedge funds, it’s all about data at the end, because that’s an interesting conversation I had with someone who came from they’re not doing that anymore, but like he was saying that yeah, like the strategies, the algorithms, they all get known at some point. So all that is left at the end that it’s like consistent is the data. All right. It’s it’s Yeah, I think we should do definitely like a soft token also, like, maybe like find people like to have like a panel or something like that stuff. But before that everyone should listen to the episode because these are like, what? There’s a lot of like discussion around a lot.

Eric Dodds 05:19
Yes. And I got to come clean on some past sins in terms of data collaboration with advertising data, which honestly, Nikhil really clean. So thank you for that opportunity.

Kostas Pardalis 05:34
Yes, you are forgiven.

Eric Dodds 05:38
Okay. Thank you. All. Right. Well, thanks for listening to The Data Stack Show. Definitely listen to this episode. Great One, subscribe if you haven’t, tell a friend and we’ll catch you in the next one.