Ahmed Elsamadisi
Founder & CEO, Narrator. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveengineer@ae4ai ↗LinkedIn ↗narrator.ai ↗
Ahmed Elsamadisi is the founder and CEO of Narrator, a data modeling platform built on the Activity Schema framework. Before founding Narrator, he established the data engineering team at WeWork and developed AI algorithms at Raytheon and Cornell's Autonomous Systems Laboratory.
1shows
1appearances
17statements
1resolved
0supported
1contradicted
0%fully supported
Everything Ahmed Elsamadisi said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Elsamadisi: Buying Looker requires hiring five to six BI engineers
“All it ends up doing is you end up having to hire a team of five or six BI engineers to write LookML and maintain these systems for you.”
Elsamadisi: Companies can replace hundreds of database tables with one time-series table
“So, instead of hundreds of fact and dimension tables, you can just have one time series table centered around a customer.”
Elsamadisi: Narrator reduced 40-hour Looker queries to just 10 minutes
“We've taken queries that were taking, like, literally 40 hours in Looker, and we've dropped them down to, like, 10 minutes. Queries that cross billions of rows end up happening in, like, seven to eight seconds on a warehouse.”
Elsamadisi: Redshift, Snowflake, and BigQuery perform identically on long tables
“The speed improvement on Redshift and versus Snowflake versus BigQuery becomes interchangeable. Because what they handle is for those edge cases, we have like a bunch of, like Snowflake is really good at a bunch of small tables everywhere trying to load a memo…”
Elsamadisi: Data tools tend to add more complexity than they solve
“Tools tend to add a lot more complexity than they actually end up solving.”
Elsamadisi: Traditional data software builds dashboards, not answers
“Well, it turns out that all these tools and all these systems are designed to help you build dashboards, not really answer questions.”
Elsamadisi: Any business data structure simplifies to customer, activity, and time
“Your business can be broken into three simple things. Customer doing some activity in time.”
Elsamadisi: A working single time-series table eliminates need for 20-30 data engineers
“If a single time series table worked, you wouldn't have 20 or 30 data engineers building tables to answer questions.”
Elsamadisi: Time and customer identity replace foreign keys when relating multi-system data
“Instead of depending on foreign keys to relate the data, you can actually just use time and customer.”
Elsamadisi: Activity stream queries reuse consistent structures to bridge disparate systems
“The really fascinating thing here is that the query is so consistent. I can literally reuse the same query and combine layers of questions, all using the same structure, all being answered by the same table, bridging these systems invisibly.”
Elsamadisi: Single-table activity streams guarantee all dashboard numbers will always match
“There's only one table. Everything will always match.”
Elsamadisi: Answering data questions provides a company's biggest competitive advantage
“The thing about data questions is that no matter how painful they are, it is a company's competitive advantage, and that's what makes the biggest impact on whether a company can succeed and outdo its competition.”
Elsamadisi: Cross-system data queries take weeks due to unlinked identifiers
“There's no foreign key that ties these two systems together. There's no way to deal with different user identifiers. You would have to just go to your engineering team, And ask them to copy that data in all these different places, and then you deal with other …”
Elsamadisi: WeWork's 45-person data team spent over $1M with little impact
“We actually spent over a million dollars, a lot of time and resources. We had a 45 person data team, and then very little impact.”
Elsamadisi: WeWork maintained 3,000 dashboards without resolving its data issues
“We had 3000 dashboards, and it was not helping.”
Elsamadisi supported 16 companies across five industries using one time-series table
“This allowed me, as a single person, to support 16 different companies using five different industries, all using the same time series table.”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Ahmed's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 MADLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Narrator | 1 | 17 | 0% 0/1 | full record on the MAD Podcast → |