MDS Newsletter #28

Aayush Jain -

Hey all,

We really hope you are finding our newsletter informative and fun. Each week we try to bring the latest from the data world so that you guys can keep pace with everything happening in this amazing space. Don't forget to share it with the data nerds around you!

Let's take you through this week's edition.

Community Speaks

This week's question- As a data leader, what are the key skills that you look for while hiring a new member for your team?

You can send answers by replying to the email or writing to us at letters@moderndatastack.xyz

Last week's question: What are the inconvenient/harsh truths about data jobs?

Sometimes decision makers in your company will make a request to the data team for a dashboard that they say is very important. They might even specify exactly what they need. You spend hours putting it together and delivering it only to find out later they never look at it. The harsh truth is that this is the fault of the data team or analyst and not the requestor. As a data professional your job is to surface insights to help your employees make better decisions. If you don't spend time figuring out what that decision is, why it is important, and how the data can help make the decision easier then there is a good chance that you won't deliver what they actually need. In my experience, most decision makers don't know what they actually need or how to visualize the data to easily consume it. That is your job to figure out, not theirs.
Kelly Burdine, Director of Data Science and Analytics at Wellthy

  • Lightdash is an open-source BI alternative to Looker, built for analysts on top of the modern data tools they already use and love. Lightdash brings your visual layer together with your data modeling and transformation layer, creating a single source of truth for data metrics for teams.

    Category: Business Intelligence and Metric Store

    Lightdash has raised a total of $125K in funding over 1 round. This was a Seed round raised on Aug 24, 2020.
  • Tealium connects customer data across web, mobile, offline, and IoT so businesses can better connect with their customers. Tealium’s solutions include a customer data platform with machine learning, tag management, an API hub and data management solutions that make customer data more valuable, actionable, privacy-compliant and secure.

    Category: Customer Data Platform

    Tealium has raised a total of $263.9M in funding over 9 rounds. Their latest funding was raised on Feb 3, 2021 from a Series G round.

Good reads and resources

  • No magical toothpaste for data quality cavities: Just like any brush or toothpaste alone can’t ensure safety from dental cavities, using the best tools for data quality alone can’t ensure data hygiene within your platform. Instead, it’s consistently following a well-defined process that can ensure both - cavity-free dental health and data hygiene within your platform. In this article, Sandeep Uttamchandani shares his experience and learnings from leading data & AI products. He talks about 10 well-defined processes that can get you started with building data hygiene within your platform.
  • Building and scaling Meesho’s data ingestion platform to 2 million RPM: Meesho is an online shopping site for fashion, electronics, homecare & more! It does around 90 million orders a month, that’s roughly 3million orders per day. It’s huge. But their existing data ingestion system couldn’t keep up with this hypergrowth and became insufficient over time. In this article, Ramiz Mehran has talked about how they built & scaled their data ingestion system to keep up with their fast pace business growth with constantly growing data volume.
  • The 20 most popular data engineering tools in the Nordics: After talking to a lot of companies within the Nordic region, the team at Validio curated a list of the 20 most popular data engineering tools within the region. In this article, Richard Wang has discussed in detail the findings of the 20 most popular data tools that companies are using within the Nordic region. He also dives into the cloud warehouse adoption by companies in this region and shares some interesting points.
  • Why We Switched Our Data Orchestration Service: Spotify is one of the largest music streaming service providers in the world. Within Spotify, 300+ teams run 20,000 batch data pipelines defined in 1,000+ repositories - daily. The majority of these pipelines rely on two tools: Luigi and Flo. In 2019, the data orchestration team at Spotify decided to move away from these tools. In this post published by Guillaume Perchais, the team details why the decision was made, and the journey they took to make the transition.
  • From measuring traffic to driving company strategy: The data journey of a (fictional) mattress company: As the business grows, the data needs of the company also changes. The data needs and ambitions at the start look completely different to the needs and ambitions at the end of this journey. This starts with asking simple, foundational questions about audience and products – questions that can be answered with packaged analytics solutions. As business grows these questions become more complex, different solutions are needed and after a certain point the only viable solution is a modern data stack.

    In this article, Megan Taylor has explained the data maturity journey and the common road bumps an organisation faces through an example of a fictional mattress business. As the business expands and data needs and questions become more and more sophisticated, there comes an inflection point when the mattress company makes a switch from using multiple point solutions to an investment in the modern data stack

Upcoming data events and webinars

  • Mozart Data is hosting a webinar on How to Choose the Right ETL Tool on April 20 at 11 AM PST / 2 PM EST

    The speakers at the event will help you through the evaluation and decision process for choosing the right ETL tools for your organisation.
    Register here.
  • Data.world Spring 2022 Summit will be held on April 7 at 11 AM CT. This is going to be a free virtual event, where speakers will talk about data mesh, open data, knowledge-first, and much more.
    Register here.
  • Tradepass is hosting BYTE'22 Big Data and Analytics Summit from 12-13 April. The event will attract 1000+ Big Data & Analytics professionals from the leading public and private organizations across ASEAN.
    To know more about the event and registration click on the link.


Data startup funding news

  • Tinybird raised $37 million in a Series A funding round.

    Tinybird helps developers and data teams build data products over analytical data, at any scale.

    This round of funding was led by CRV, Singular and Crane along with the participation of angel investors Amit Agarwal (Datadog CPO) and Guillermo Rauch (Vercel CEO).

    Read the full story here.
  • Data.world raised $50 M in a Series C round of funding!

    data.world is an enterprise data catalog — an inventory of all data assets within an organization.

    This round of funding was led by  Goldman Sachs. Prologis Ventures, Shasta Ventures, Vopak Ventures, Sandbox Insurtech Ventures, and individual investors Paul Albright, Zachary Karabell and Scott Stephenson also participated in Data.World’s Series C.

    Read the full story here.
  • Glean raises $7 million in a seed funding round!

    Glean is the fast way to standardize your metrics and start finding insights in your data. It is building the most intuitive way to visualize data and make it interactive.

    This round of funding was led by Ilya Sukhar at Matrix Partners with participation from angel investors Elad Gil, Dylan Field (Figma), Shana Fisher, Scott Belsky (Behance), Cristina Cordova, and data angels like DJ Patil (fmr US CIO) and Anthony Goldbloom (Kaggle).

    Read here.

MDS Jobs

  • Drizly is looking for ‘Director of Analytics Engineering’
    Location- Remote, Boston, MA
    Check out Drizly’s data stacks here
    Apply here
  • MoonPay is hiring a ‘Senior Analytics Engineer'
    Location- Remote (UK, Spain, Portugal)
    Data Stacks- dbt, airflow, BigQuery, Looker, Postgres
    Apply here
  • Whatnot is hiring a ‘Data Engineer’
    Location- Remote - North America
    Data Stacks- Dagster, dbt, Snowflake, Sigma, Hex
    Apply here
  • Point is hiring a ‘Senior Data Analyst’
    Location - Remote, Palo Alto, CA
    Data Stacks- dbt, Snowflake, Fivetran, Airflow, Hightouch.
    Apply here
  • Mynd is hiring a ‘Data Engineer’
    Location- Remote
    Data Stacks-AWS, Fivetran, Airflow, dbt.
    Apply here

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