StarZero All shows Try the podcast clipper →

Ahmed Elsamadisi

Founder & CEO, Narrator · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

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.

17statements → 5claims → 1claims resolved → 4.29/5average certainty → 2.71/5average debate potential →

0 supported 0 partly supported 1 contradicted 4 not checkable as stated how the 5 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

5 assertions · 9 insights · 2 disclosures · 1 what if · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 5 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 1 is resolved, and 4 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Ahmed argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable contradicted claim

Assertion Contradicted
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…”
Ahmed Elsamadisi Nov 13, 2019 ▶ 18:26 How to Answer Data Questions Without Being Miserable // Ahmed Elsamadisi, Narrator (Data Driven NYC)

How they sound: speaking style how? →

316 words/min while actually speaking · 9 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Ahmed Elsamadisi: only 1 usable question→answer exchange on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 3,540 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

Everything Ahmed Elsamadisi said on the MAD Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Insight
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.”
Ahmed Elsamadisi Nov 13, 2019 ▶ 3:43 How to Answer Data Questions Without Being Miserable // Ahmed Elsamadisi, Narrator (Data Driven NYC)
Insight
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.”
Ahmed Elsamadisi Nov 13, 2019 ▶ 6:15 How to Answer Data Questions Without Being Miserable // Ahmed Elsamadisi, Narrator (Data Driven NYC)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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.”
Ahmed Elsamadisi Nov 13, 2019 ▶ 17:47 How to Answer Data Questions Without Being Miserable // Ahmed Elsamadisi, Narrator (Data Driven NYC)
Assertion Contradicted
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…”
Ahmed Elsamadisi Nov 13, 2019 ▶ 18:26 How to Answer Data Questions Without Being Miserable // Ahmed Elsamadisi, Narrator (Data Driven NYC)
Insight
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.”
Ahmed Elsamadisi Nov 13, 2019 ▶ 2:16 How to Answer Data Questions Without Being Miserable // Ahmed Elsamadisi, Narrator (Data Driven NYC)
Insight
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.”
Ahmed Elsamadisi Nov 13, 2019 ▶ 4:40 How to Answer Data Questions Without Being Miserable // Ahmed Elsamadisi, Narrator (Data Driven NYC)
Insight
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.”
Ahmed Elsamadisi Nov 13, 2019 ▶ 5:39 How to Answer Data Questions Without Being Miserable // Ahmed Elsamadisi, Narrator (Data Driven NYC)
What-if
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.”
Ahmed Elsamadisi Nov 13, 2019 ▶ 6:47 How to Answer Data Questions Without Being Miserable // Ahmed Elsamadisi, Narrator (Data Driven NYC)
Insight
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.”
Ahmed Elsamadisi Nov 13, 2019 ▶ 8:44 How to Answer Data Questions Without Being Miserable // Ahmed Elsamadisi, Narrator (Data Driven NYC)
Insight
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.”
Ahmed Elsamadisi Nov 13, 2019 ▶ 9:58 How to Answer Data Questions Without Being Miserable // Ahmed Elsamadisi, Narrator (Data Driven NYC)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Elsamadisi: Single-table activity streams guarantee all dashboard numbers will always match
“There's only one table. Everything will always match.”
Ahmed Elsamadisi Nov 13, 2019 ▶ 11:25 How to Answer Data Questions Without Being Miserable // Ahmed Elsamadisi, Narrator (Data Driven NYC)
Insight
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.”
Ahmed Elsamadisi Nov 13, 2019 ▶ 0:31 How to Answer Data Questions Without Being Miserable // Ahmed Elsamadisi, Narrator (Data Driven NYC)
Insight
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 …”
Ahmed Elsamadisi Nov 13, 2019 ▶ 1:23 How to Answer Data Questions Without Being Miserable // Ahmed Elsamadisi, Narrator (Data Driven NYC)
Disclosure
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.”
Ahmed Elsamadisi Nov 13, 2019 ▶ 4:12 How to Answer Data Questions Without Being Miserable // Ahmed Elsamadisi, Narrator (Data Driven NYC)
Disclosure
Elsamadisi: WeWork maintained 3,000 dashboards without resolving its data issues
“We had 3000 dashboards, and it was not helping.”
Ahmed Elsamadisi Nov 13, 2019 ▶ 5:13 How to Answer Data Questions Without Being Miserable // Ahmed Elsamadisi, Narrator (Data Driven NYC)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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.”
Ahmed Elsamadisi Nov 13, 2019 ▶ 10:15 How to Answer Data Questions Without Being Miserable // Ahmed Elsamadisi, Narrator (Data Driven NYC)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Elsamadisi: WeWork's data team managed 3,000 tables and 700 transformations
“We had 3000 tables, 700 transformation tables”
Ahmed Elsamadisi Nov 13, 2019 ▶ 5:30 How to Answer Data Questions Without Being Miserable // Ahmed Elsamadisi, Narrator (Data Driven NYC)

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
How to Answer Data Questions Without Being Miserable // Ahmed Elsamadisi, Narrator (Data D Nov 13, 2019 15m
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 400 conversations transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.

Try the podcast clipper Learn more