This week on the podcast, we’re sharing a special episode. Steve Hamm, the amazing host of The Data Cloud Podcast is stepping away from the show, and we want to honor all he has done to make the podcast what it is today.
This week on the podcast, we’re sharing a special episode. Steve Hamm, the amazing host of The Data Cloud Podcast is stepping away from the show, and we want to honor all he has done to make the podcast what it is today.
Over five seasons, Steve has hosted guests from countries around the world whose industries span across data, technology, supply chain, education, streaming, finance and more. Steve’s ability to showcase our shared humanity within each episode is one reason the podcast has been so successful. So, this episode features our “Let’s Get Personal” segments with guests from the last couple of seasons.
[00:00:00] Producer: This week on the podcast, we're sharing a special episode. Steve Hamm, the amazing host of the Data Cloud podcast, is stepping away from the show, and we want to honor all he has done to make the podcast what it is today. Over five seasons, Steve has hosted guests from countries around the world. whose industries span across data, technology, supply chain, education, streaming, finance, and more.
Steve's ability to showcase our shared humanity within each episode is one reason the podcast has been so successful. So, this episode features our Let's Get Personal segments with guests from the last couple of seasons. Thank you, Steve, and enjoy.
[00:00:42] Steve Hamm: Louqman, it's great to have you on the podcast today. And I, I'm really looking forward to this because I am a streaming media maniac.
And I really want to know all about how the advertising and personalization and all that kind of stuff works. So welcome.
[00:00:59] Louqman Parampath: Thank you for the invitation, Steve.
[00:01:00] Steve Hamm: We're coming to the end of the podcast. You know, we, we typically end on a lighter note, kind of more personal. And you're in the streaming business.
And I understand that you. Like, you like to consume your, your content via streaming as well. What are you streaming right now?
[00:01:18] Louqman Parampath: I mean, one of the things that I've been excited about streaming is just the fact that more and more sports is available in streaming. Yeah. It was, it was in many ways the last frontier for streaming, you know.
I mean, I'm a big soccer fan. I watch a lot of EPL, English Premier League, so happy to see that. I watch that and it's a little fragmented still. You have to go to multiple channels, multiple channels. Apps to actually see it, but I spent quite a bit of time catching up on my soccer every weekend. The shows that I watch right now are, you know, I was still watching Lincoln Lawyer from Netflix, you know, Last of Us and HBO Max.
These are some of the shows that I stream currently at my, in my home. You know, there's always a ton of shows that are available in many ways. And evidence of stuff to watch on TV right now.
[00:01:57] Steve Hamm: Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting that, you know, we've had the Oscars just earlier this week. I, I would imagine that immediately in the aftermath of the Oscars, there must've been a streaming bonanza, you know, just people, wait, I missed that.
Let's let me go take a look. Absolutely. You know, I, I saw you, you're familiar with RRR, the Indian, cause they did the big dance number on, on the Oscars. And I thought, Oh, here's some big, you know, Bollywood fun show. I went and watched RRR. It is a very serious story about an uprising against the British Raj.
That's right. And I was stunned and I said, but it has two big dance numbers in the middle of it. So it's really kind of amazing to see how entertainment and very, and some very serious stuff. Themes can be packaged in the same, in the same video. So
[00:02:47] Louqman Parampath: that's what the Indian film industry is known for, right?
It's always, they're all musicals and whatever, however serious the, the theme is, the topic is, you know, there's always a spot to show a song or two.
[00:03:01] Steve Hamm: Yeah. Yeah. That's, I think that's nice. It's good to have variety. Absolutely. Saad, it's great to have you on the podcast today. It's great to be here, Steve. So Saad, we typically finish the podcast on a more personal note or lighter note.
And I see from your LinkedIn profile that you're interested in causes, including economic empowerment and education. How do those issues fit into your life? I grew up in
[00:03:26] Saad Zaheer: Pakistan and I've been very fortunate. To have had the opportunity to go to some good schools, but also more importantly, be in the company of some amazing teachers, you know, all the way from my high school to when I came to college and.
You know, I've always firmly believed that education is the most important thing that we can do and invest in. So, any opportunity I get to speak to, you know, politicians in the local area when I go back home, I always emphasize or want to emphasize the importance of investing in education. I like to say that, you know, you can never invest Enough in education, the dividends of that always come back many, many fold.
There's a great statistic. I heard this from Susan Hockfield, who was the president of MIT back when I was an undergrad there. And, you know, she would, she used to quote this statistic where she said that after the war, World War II, every dollar that the US government has invested in research and education has returned about 40 back to the economy.
And I feel like if we take that. If you take that method and apply it to education across the board, not only in the United States, but also in third world developing countries and in Europe and China and Australia, we'll see that kind of math play out. So you can never invest enough. Again, I lead a very busy life with my work, but every time I talk to, you know, anybody who is influential in politics or policymaking, I kind of always emphasize to them that we want to, we should put more and more of our money and our investment in education.
Like, I live in a town here in New York. We pay very high taxes for our schools. Our schools have very well paid teachers because of those taxes, but then there's underprivileged areas, not only in New York, but also in other states where the taxes are not so high. So the teachers are underpaid and the kids over there don't get a great education.
And so I, I keep urging policy makers and politicians and representatives to direct both state and federal money towards spending that, spending that money towards the schools in those areas which, which are not able to afford the kind of taxes that, you know, we can afford here. So I think This is something that absolutely is like a huge area of interest for me.
Yeah. And the second thing you said was economic empowerment. I think the best way to affect change in the world is to enable people to be economically empowered. I firmly believe in that because when you Enable people to be able to move from point A to point B for work. You create opportunities for them to better their economic circumstances.
And again, on this area, you know, I, I like to think that the immigration laws that we have in the United States and in other countries where there's a lot of need for labor, for human resources, if they can be, um, Modified or improved so that labor can go from third world countries to countries where the labor is needed.
It's going to create a lot of economic opportunities for, for people. So most of, uh, the development in human history, I think has taken place when it's become easy for labor to move from point A to point B.
[00:06:49] Saad Zaheer: And I think a lot of this can be addressed through good policy, through sensible laws. And so that's something that I.
Always try to emphasize, you know, again, anytime I talk to policymakers or politicians or representatives to do, because I think those two are probably the most important things that we can do to address, you know, the challenges that we face in the world today, in addition to climate change, obviously. Yeah.
[00:07:14] Steve Hamm: Yeah. Climate change. That's a big one. It's becoming so apparent that what are the dimensions of the problem and the immediacy of it. But I, I frankly feel positive. I feel like with cloud, with, with data, with data analytics, with, We have the tools to solve these very, very complex systemic problems.
And for the first time, really. And I want to, I want to go back to something you said earlier about that at your core, you're a scientist. You see yourself as a scientist. And this idea of, that you, that scientists think deeply about very difficult challenges and that they have stamina, that they stick with a, with a problem for a long time.
And I think we kind of live in this, in this short attention span society, but But thank God for scientists, because we need them. And I want to for the work that you're doing. You know, you're obviously doing it for your company, but I think people like you make advances and the brilliance of them and the utility of them is shared.
The news gets around, the word gets around, the technology gets around. So thank you so much. This has been a great conversation. Alex, it's great to have you on the podcast today.
[00:08:33] Alex Izydorczyk: Great to be here.
[00:08:34] Steve Hamm: You know, we're coming to the end of our podcast and we typically end on a more personal note or a more, a lighter note.
And I understand that you were a strategy game nut when you were a kid. And this was like, even before, this was when you were a preteen. So you were a prodigy at this stuff. So how did that passion emerge in a preteen and how did it lay the groundwork for what you do now?
[00:09:00] Alex Izydorczyk: Yeah, it's, it's a great question.
I mean, I think I'm not unique at all in liking video games. I think, um, you know, in some ways, like it just so happened, I became interested in video games where you build things and, you know, I sort of liked, I mean, I think that there's video games that test your reflexes, reaction time and so on, and there's video games that basically, um, allow you to thoughtfully plan ahead and, and, and, you know, that was always more appealing to me.
Maybe, you know, nature versus nurture. And so that led me down this path of Age of Empires, and SimCity, and StarCraft, and so on. And, you know, in some ways, I enjoyed those games so much, you know, I secretly hoped that there were jobs in the real world that be the equivalent of simply playing those games.
I mean, and I've repeated this anecdote, but, you know, it's sort of like when you play SimCity when you're 12. Your conception of what a mayor does is sort of placed in the city, and you know, then you learn, disappointingly, that's not true. Um, but why couldn't it be true? You know, in some ways, you know, having a 360 view of your populace and how your decisions actually impact your city would be very helpful. Yeah.
[00:10:18] Steve Hamm: You know, it's interesting in my city, New Haven, and in other cities in Connecticut, we have an organization, it's called Data Haven, and basically they collect that data. They collect the alternative data for the city about the people, the condition of the people, the condition of their, their life conditions, all that kind of stuff.
So our mayor does have that information. So hopefully making good decisions. Their bigger problem usually is money.
[00:10:47] Alex Izydorczyk: Right.
[00:10:47] Steve Hamm: Not understanding what the problems are. It's, it's, it's getting the money to solve them. Well, you know, it's part of,
[00:10:53] Alex Izydorczyk: and this is part of the reason why, you know, some things such as I think, building a data, you know, solving this data challenge, do it as a commercial entity to make it sort of self sustaining.
But I think there's also a lot of very interesting nonprofit work going on. I mean, Raj Chetty at Harvard and his Opportunity Insights Project, which focuses on measuring income mobility. In the United States, I think is a great example of using this sort of alternative data in a similar way. Trying to get a real time sense of what does income mobility in the U.S. look like.
[00:11:25] Steve Hamm: Yeah, that's good. That's good. I'll have to look that up. Well, this has been a great conversation. I love your energy and enthusiasm, and I really think you are in a pioneer spot. I mean, I think this, you're right, that this integrating external data into the, you know, Into the, the formula for figuring out what the heck is going on around us is critically important.
And we're just at the beginning of it. And I, and I, I think our podcast listeners are really going to get a lot out of this one. So thank you so much for being with us.
[00:11:58] Alex Izydorczyk: Thank you for having me. This is fantastic.
[00:12:02] Steve Hamm: Jed, welcome to the podcast.
[00:12:04] Jed Clevenger: It's great to be here. Thank you, Steve, for the invitation.
[00:12:07] Steve Hamm: We're coming to the end of the podcast here and we typically close on a more personal or a lighter note.
And you kind of flicked at this earlier in the conversation about, you know, like how you managed to bridge between these two worlds and, and you talked a bit about math, math driven creativity to drive growth. So explain that a little bit more. I mean, first off, were you kind of a math genius in high school or something like that?
Or where, where does this come from?
[00:12:36] Jed Clevenger: Yeah. I don't know if I was genius. I was just excelled, excelled in math and things that. That make logical sense, just, just I can typically pick up fairly easily. The second part of the story, or the other half of the story is, my mom comes from a large family outside of Boston, and they were all artists, musicians, writers, poets, play instruments, and I always, like, I was surrounded by that growing up.
So a huge creative family. I tried my hand at a lot of them, and that just never took off for me. Right. So I love being creative and in a creative capacity and industry, but things need to make sense for me, too. So given the two sides of the brain or all my experiences, once I landed, At eBay into this scaled channel where we're, we're doing things at massive scale globally, but really the, the, the way to further the insights, the learnings, and ultimately the impact of marketing is to look at the data that that's coming back from the campaigns itself.
So when I could, when I could work with the creative teams on, Hey, what, what should the message be? What are we putting out in the market? And then understand the impact of that and further that through, through math and analytics. I just, I knew I found my home.
[00:13:50] Steve Hamm: Very, very cool. Yeah. Well, this has been a great conversation.
I mean, I, I really enjoyed talking to you. Marketing is kind of a dark art to me, even though with all the data, it shouldn't be, but still there's still aspects of it that, that, uh, I struggle with. So, but this has been clarifying, and I think it's been helpful to a lot of people. And I also thought that you gave some very good kind of guidance for people on the technical side.
We're not coding here, but I think, I think the principles and issues and insights that you brought up have been very good. I especially like when you talked about scale channels, looking for scale channels, experimenting, seeing what works, putting more investment in that, and then. Bridging over into, into this last idea, the idea of, of AI and creative iteration, just like how data analytics and creativity can really be matched up and how you can really accelerate improvements in creativity and, you know, bringing creativity to bear in, in marketing and advertising.
So I thought really fresh, we haven't had a, a, a podcast like this before, so I'm really grateful to be been on and thanks so much for your time.
[00:15:00] Jed Clevenger: Yeah, Steve, it's been a joy and a pleasure. I think, like I said, it's an exciting time to be a marketer. Marketing's all about storytelling and people always like a good story.
And so I feel like that is my job, how to tell the story and how to tell the Indeed story. But obviously we have a responsibility back to the business of the impact of the dollars and the stories that we're telling.
[00:15:21] Steve Hamm: Claudine, it's great to have you on the podcast.
[00:15:23] Claudine Ryan: Thank you. It's really nice to be here.
[00:15:25] Steve Hamm: Claudine, we're coming to the end of the podcast, and we typically end on a lighter, more personal note. And I understand that your parents immigrated to the United States from Germany, and you were born here, but you only spoke German for your first five years. What kind of challenges did you face? Did you face adapting to school here?
And how could the TalkingPoints platform have helped you?
[00:15:50] Claudine Ryan: So similar to many of the families that use TalkingPoints, I did grow up in an immigrant family and I was an English language learner in my early years. So my, my first language is German as, as, as you noted, and while my parents also spoke some English, they chose to have me speak only German so that it would be kind of locked in for life, which it still is.
They spoke some English, but they had limited understanding of the US education system and their role in supporting me. I'm a first generation college student in my family, so ultimately I was successful. However, I can only imagine what a difference TalkingPoints would have made to my educational experience.
I think my parents would have wanted to be involved. But never really knew how. I guess overall, when I think about it and I think about my experience TalkingPoints, I, I, I recognize regularly because we'd have so much one connection to our users. The parents care deeply about their children. They care deeply about their children, even if they aren't able to pick them up from school every day or.
Go to that, you know, back to school night or other school event where you have to be in person, because some of them are working multiple jobs and it's just not possible at all, but they really do care deeply. And even after five years of TalkingPoints, it still feels almost magical to me, the trusted connections that we're able to establish between educators and families.
that break through those barriers, um, barriers like being able to be there physically and present. And those are transformative to students. And it's really fantastic to, to feel like I'm part of an organization that is affecting that change.
[00:17:25] Steve Hamm: Well, it's been inspiring to talk to you today. I live in New Haven, Connecticut, which is a city of 135, 000 people, and 40 percent are non native English speakers.
And many of those Many of the kids are undocumented. So that there are lots of hurdles and lots of barriers to success. And it's amazing to see TalkingPoints and see how useful that could be here. So if you want an introduction, I'll make it.
[00:17:53] Claudine Ryan: Oh, yeah.
[00:17:54] Steve Hamm: Yeah. The other thing is, I mean, I just think, you know, there's so much excitement about AI right now, and it's really easy for me and the people at Snowflake to see how this will be useful for corporations to make them more responsive, make them more efficient, you know, more successful in all sorts of ways.
But talking to you, it really becomes clear how this technology can help regular people. And I think this is an area where I'd say we've, you know, it's underexplored in our society. And I hope that, that Many, many, many organizations like yours, but in different domains, start to look at AI and start to look at these new technologies and figure out how they can be used for regular folks.
So thank you so much for being on the podcast today. It's been great.
[00:18:46] Claudine Ryan: Absolutely. Thank you so much.
[00:18:49] Steve Hamm: Philip, it's great to have you on the podcast.
[00:18:52] Philip Zelitchenko: It's great to be here, Steve. Thanks for having me.
[00:18:54] Steve Hamm: You know, we typically end the podcast on a lighter and kind of more personal note. And I know I heard a little bit from you about how you, you kind of integrate or incorporate some ideas, some really kind of interesting data based ideas into your personal lifestyle.
So, and I, hopefully I'm stating that correctly, but it straightened me out. Anyway, talk to me about Lifespan, healthspan and mental span.
[00:19:23] Philip Zelitchenko: So it, it's in, in usual how it works is basically that it's not an idea that I, Rob. There's a person named Peter Atia. Yeah. Has a podcast called The Drive. He talks a lot about lifespan and lifespan is basically the amount of years that you, that you live.
Healthspan talks about how many of those years. are going to be healthy ears, so basically ability to move around and do what you want to do. And then there's a third leg to this, it's the mental span, it's from those ears that you can, you're alive, you can walk around and take care of yourself, how many of those, your mental headspace is going to be in a good place.
And I think these three areas are things that, Usually people tackle, but not in a structured way. And I think what people like Peter Artea and Huberman and other, and Debbie Sinclair, they, they touch upon the different areas and help build frameworks that help you on a daily basis in corporate things that will improve each of those areas for you as an individual.
So for, from the health spend side, a lot of it goes into the different blood tests that you can do and how medicine became more available. So for example, the top, I don't know if you know, but the 80 percent of deaths above the age of 50 are contributed mainly to cardiovascular health. That's the main reason.
Right. The second is, is basically cancer. And the third is, is things like Alzheimer's and neurodegenerative diseases. And there's things that you can do on a daily basis, A, from a monitoring perspective to see where you stand and B, from a preventative perspective, how do you do things on a daily basis to ensure that you're reducing the risk for an event?
Cause another fun fact, or not so fun, is that. The main reason for death above the age of 50 is cardiovascular events, and the probability of a person dying from a, from a first stroke, there's a 50 percent chance for a person to die on the spot, which is very high compared to any other disease that is on the horizon.
[00:21:25] Steve Hamm: Yeah, I think that's really cool. It's really interesting. You know, I'm forgetting who did this quote, but there's a famous quote, the unexamined life is not worth living. And, but it's interesting when you, when you start to think about, we now have tools, thanks to data, thanks to monitoring, you know, all these advances in science and technology and that we can really Know ourselves and our lives so much better than before and it's almost like the un, you know, the unanalyzed life is, is, you know, won't be as good as the one where you really understand your health, understand yourself.
Understand your psyche, understand your mental capabilities and what you can do and when you can do it and, and use that information to live kind of a richer and more fulfilling life. And it does get very personal, doesn't it? I mean, it comes down to the personal level.
[00:22:24] Philip Zelitchenko: Yep. No, definitely. I agree a hundred percent.
[00:22:29] Steve Hamm: Madhav, it's great to have you on the podcast today.
[00:22:32] Madhav Kondle: Same here, Steve. This is my first podcast. I'm excited.
[00:22:36] Steve Hamm: So, Madhav, we're coming to the end of a podcast, and typically we end on a lighter or more personal note. And I understand that you come from a retail family in India, your side of the family, your wife's side as well.
I'm just wondering, growing up in retailing in a very different world, what lessons, what basic lessons did you learn in your early years that have helped you in your career since then?
[00:23:04] Madhav Kondle: The basic thing of business, businesses are there to make profit, right? You should understand what am I selling. Does it cost me to make a product that I'm selling?
And how much am I selling for? At the end of it, it's all cost and revenue model. Coming from business family and being an engineer, I think one of the biggest challenges for engineers is they do not understand the domain or functional knowledge. You ask them to write a Java line of code. piece of code or Python, they'll write it, but they can't understand how it is being put in use or what is the purpose it is driving.
So having that family background of business helped me early on to transition from an engineer to a business analyst, to a solution architect, and to become a leader I am today. So that basic understanding of how consumer interacts with your brand. What does he need from the brand? They're all helped me.
So it was easy when I converse with the business leaders. I can understand their problem statement because they do not understand technology. But if somebody tells me that, Oh, we are. Seeing a higher return rate, I know what they are talking about. Coming from a business background helped me to understand business problems and translate it to IT and then can work with the engineers to build appropriate solutions.
[00:24:29] Steve Hamm: That's an interesting insight. But it's funny that even today, engineering and business really are separate tracks. And even in education, they're not really Brought together that much. I mean, for instance, I work with, with medical science. They have this thing called the MD PhD. So somebody who's a clinician and a researcher.
It's almost like in the tech world, we need people who are IT MBAs, something like that. And I know that there are places that do this kind of thing, but it seems like it's, we could use even more of it. David, welcome to the podcast. Great to be here. So, we're coming to the end of our podcast, and we typically end on a lighter note, a more personal note.
And I understand that you are a bicycling fanatic. I am. Yeah. What kind of bikes you got? What kind of riding do you do? Is there any kind of relationship between your work at Weight Watchers and your passion for bicycling?
[00:25:27] David Cohen: So, yes. I lost my bike. I lost 55 pounds at one point. I've been a triathlete for probably 30 years now.
I've, at one point, through all my startups, definitely gained some weight. Lost about 30 pounds on Weight Watchers as I was getting back into shape, going back to the gym.
[00:25:47] David Cohen: Going back to compete at nationals and worlds, which I've gotten a chance to do at times, my wife and I compete together. We've done such crazy things as, I think, one of our first Valentine's Day, we went to a wind tunnel to go AB test our bike positions in the wind tunnel to see which one has the least amount of drag.
So yes, my, my AV testing and my biking can both kind of play together. Interesting. Interesting. But in a normal weekend, that's kind of what we do is wake up. And, you know, this weekend was about 150 miles through the Hudson Valley and whatnot, but it is where I can kind of turn off and. Just as meditative as I'll get.
[00:26:34] Steve Hamm: I've had that experience though. I don't go out at 50 miles, but most I ever went was 82 miles. And I, at the end I fell over, so no, no damage done. Well, this has been interesting. I always enjoy the conversations with people whose businesses I just have a sense, you know, they touch me in some way. I mean, uh, the, the, the product.
is for regular people. And I think it's been really interesting to talk to you and to see how you're using technology on their behalf. I really enjoyed when you made that distinction between data driven and data informed. Because we can be slaves to data, either, you know, if we don't have enough data, we can't make a decision, or the data seems to be pointing in this direction, but hey, wait a second, You know, that's, that doesn't really fit with my worldview.
Can we test it? You know, that kind of thing. So I think those were, that was an especially valuable insight that you gave us today, but there were many more. So anyway, thank you so much for being our guest and good luck with the company.
[00:27:41] Producer: Thanks so much, Steve. Dive deep into the world of apps and generative AI from Snowflake.
Build Catch up on the latest announcements focused on building apps, data pipelines, and machine learning workflows in the age of LLMs. Watch now at snowflake.com/build.