Data Radicals

How Extreme Focus Launched the Modern Data Stack with George Fraser and Taylor Brown, Founders of Fivetran

Nov 23, 2022

39:25

The modern data stack, sparked by the Redshift revolution and furthered by cloud-platform players like Snowflake and Databricks, forever changed the data integration landscape. Realizing that ETL tools badly underperformed in the cloud, Fivetran strengthened the stack with an ELT pipeline to perform transformations within the data warehouse environment.

George Fraser, Fivetran Co-Founder and CEO, and Taylor Brown, Fivetran Co-Founder and COO, join us in this episode to discuss their founding story — from Y Combinator to $5.6 billion valuation — and the hard reality that data’s role is often to prove your assumptions are wrong.

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“Taylor was the one who really locked onto this term years ago. I remember him saying ‘modern data stack, that's what we're doing.’ And it was not a commonly used term at the time. He's like, ‘that's the term we need to lock onto.’ Over the years it has really grown, but he has a decent amount to do with the present day popularity of that term.” — George Fraser

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Time Stamps

* (0:00) A deep dive into Fivetran

* (10:10) Navigating the product journey

* (15:02) Normalization vs denormalization

* (17:00) The power of saying “no”

* (20:15) Inventing the Modern Data Stack

* (27:26) The future of Fivetran

* (29:47) Making data-driven decisions

* (33:20) Advice for building your own data culture

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