Alex Dean

Co-Founder and CEO, Snowplow · 1 appearance on the record.

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founderexecutiveauthorengineersnowplow.io ↗

Alex Dean co-founded Snowplow in 2012, leading the company from an open-source event-tracking project into an enterprise behavioral data and customer context platform. He is also the co-author of the technical book Event Streams in Action.

10statements → 3claims → 0claims resolved → 4/5average certainty → 1.8/5average debate potential →

3 not checkable as stated how the 3 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

3 assertions · 1 opinion · 5 insights · 1 disclosure · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 3 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 0 are resolved, and 3 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 Alex argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

How they sound: speaking style how? →

267 words/min while actually speaking · 43.5 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Alex Dean: no usable question→answer exchanges 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: 4,576 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 →

What they said10 Episodes1

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

Insight

Alex Dean: Data exhaust from SaaS tools is poorly suited for AI models

“Increasingly people are finding that this data exhaust is not well suited to AI, to advanced ML use cases.”

Alex Dean Oct 24, 2022 ▶ 3:10 Behavioral Data Creation for AI | Snowplow Co-Founder & CEO Alex Dean

Opinion

Alex Dean: Google Analytics is poorly suited outside retail and publishing

“Google Analytics, for example, it's pretty decent if you're a news publisher. It's pretty good if you're kind of a standard retailer. Once you go outside of those you know, it, it's much less kind of tailored to those other industries.”

Alex Dean Oct 24, 2022 ▶ 23:24 Behavioral Data Creation for AI | Snowplow Co-Founder & CEO Alex Dean

Insight

Alex Dean: Behavioral data predicts form fraud better than demographic data

“If you're filling out a form fraudulently, actually, your behaviors are super different from if you're filling it out genuinely. So like, you know, a fraudster will probably copy-paste their name into a box. It's not really their name. And so that signal's bee…”

Alex Dean Oct 24, 2022 ▶ 25:24 Behavioral Data Creation for AI | Snowplow Co-Founder & CEO Alex Dean

Insight

Alex Dean: Schematized data creation accelerates feature engineering and model training

“Because you're deliberately creating this data, because you're creating it in a very schematized way, it's much quicker to get to the feature Engineering, it's much quicker to get to the model training.”

Alex Dean Oct 24, 2022 ▶ 4:51 Behavioral Data Creation for AI | Snowplow Co-Founder & CEO Alex Dean

Insight

Alex Dean: Sentence-like syntax makes behavioral data highly predictive for ML

“If you describe behavior, human behavior in that way, you get to very, very granular descriptions of what's happened in the past, and those are highly, highly predictive for machine learning.”

Alex Dean Oct 24, 2022 ▶ 9:14 Behavioral Data Creation for AI | Snowplow Co-Founder & CEO Alex Dean

Insight

Alex Dean: Early-stage B2B software adoption happens city by city

“I think a lot of tech is adopted almost city by city, and so I think that one of the things we got right in the early years was focusing on a few cities like New York, Berlin, London, to really grow the scene there, and then you get positive word of mouth.”

Alex Dean Oct 24, 2022 ▶ 18:00 Behavioral Data Creation for AI | Snowplow Co-Founder & CEO Alex Dean

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Alex Dean: Strava generates four billion events per day using Snowplow

“Strava's been a Snowplow customer for some time, and they generate four billion events per day with Snowplow, and that drives into Snowflake, and then they build all sorts of cool data apps on the other side of it, including a lot of the Strava UI and a lot of…”

Alex Dean Oct 24, 2022 ▶ 1:51 Behavioral Data Creation for AI | Snowplow Co-Founder & CEO Alex Dean

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Dean: COVID-19 drove widespread retail adoption of Snowplow's platform

“Before COVID there was not very much adoption of snowplow in retail. And then basically what happened is through COVID these big retailers in the UK, US and beyond really started building out data teams, really started taking their kind of digital experiences …”

Alex Dean Oct 24, 2022 ▶ 14:14 Behavioral Data Creation for AI | Snowplow Co-Founder & CEO Alex Dean

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Dean: Thousands of organizations use Snowplow's open-source technology

“So we've got thousands of organizations using our open source technology.”

Alex Dean Oct 24, 2022 ▶ 10:22 Behavioral Data Creation for AI | Snowplow Co-Founder & CEO Alex Dean

Disclosure

Alex Dean: Snowplow bootstrapped until 2019

“And so we basically built a team to do that and charged them for it and bootstrapped up till 2019.”

Alex Dean Oct 24, 2022 ▶ 17:19 Behavioral Data Creation for AI | Snowplow Co-Founder & CEO Alex Dean

Appearances (1)

Episode	Date	Speaking time
Behavioral Data Creation for AI \| Snowplow Co-Founder & CEO Alex Dean	Oct 24, 2022	21m

Alex Dean

The record, in short

How they sound: speaking style how? →

Appearances (1)

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