Ali Dasdan

CTO, Dropbox · 1 appearance on the record.

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

executiveengineerscientist@alidasdan ↗LinkedIn ↗dropbox.com ↗

Holding a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Dasdan is an engineering executive specializing in distributed systems, search, and AI/ML infrastructure. Before becoming CTO of Dropbox, he served as CTO of ZoomInfo and led engineering for Atlassian's Work Management products.

13statements → 8claims → 0claims resolved → 4.23/5average certainty → 1.23/5average debate potential → 4.0/5argument clarity · the sources →

8 not checkable as stated how the 8 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

8 assertions · 1 insight · 4 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 8 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 0 are resolved, and 8 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 Ali argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Argument clarity: do they answer the question? how? →

4.0 / 5 directness 4.2 · coherence 4.1 · precision 3.7 · compression 3.3

answered every one of 13 assessed questions directly

This is a score against a rubric. It is not a rank. Every host question → answer exchange is scored with names hidden on directness, coherence, precision and compression, 1–5 each, on meaning alone: disfluencies are ignored, and only raw unedited episodes count. This is the score that measures thought. Every scored exchange, scores shown → · The rubric and its checks →

How they sound: speaking style how? →

271 words/min while actually speaking · 48.9 um and uh per 1k words

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 6,653 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 said13 Episodes1

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

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Dasdan's past teams built custom Kafka alternatives to handle 100 petabytes

“In the past, when we were doing data platform, there was no Kafka, for example, we created a Kafka-like system ourselves, but we are lucky that, yeah, we created an HBase, sort of HHive-like system ourselves with hundred petabytes of size of data, right?”

Ali Dasdan Sep 19, 2024 ▶ 22:36 AI at ZoomInfo: Superpowering GTM teams | Ali Dasdan, CTO, ZoomInfo

Assertion Not checkable as stated

ZoomInfo claims its homegrown NLP outperforms major external vendors on quality

“Chorus still runs its own, our own homegrown NLP technology. We are doing it because our quality, we believe every time we compare, it's actually pretty good. Actually, we are beating, you know, we've been well-known well-known vendors. Plus it's cheap for us,…”

Ali Dasdan Sep 19, 2024 ▶ 24:41 AI at ZoomInfo: Superpowering GTM teams | Ali Dasdan, CTO, ZoomInfo

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Adding generative AI call summarization boosted ZoomInfo Chorus's NPS by 20 points

“And the absolute increase in MPS was just amazing, like almost like 20 points. Because people loved what they were getting with that.”

Ali Dasdan Sep 19, 2024 ▶ 25:50 AI at ZoomInfo: Superpowering GTM teams | Ali Dasdan, CTO, ZoomInfo

Insight

Real-time AI apps require abstraction layers to handle LLM provider outages

“Yeah, I think you have to create a layer on top of these at a minimum, right in the end, whether Entropic or OpenAI, you know, they're companies, right, they sometimes have stability issues, right, if they're down, so what they're gonna do about that? Since ou…”

Ali Dasdan Sep 19, 2024 ▶ 38:00 AI at ZoomInfo: Superpowering GTM teams | Ali Dasdan, CTO, ZoomInfo

Assertion Not checkable as stated

ZoomInfo engineers accept over 25% of GitHub Copilot's code suggestions

“And our acceptance rate for code suggestions was around 25%, actually over 25%, which is interesting in line with the recent research that GitHub published.”

Ali Dasdan Sep 19, 2024 ▶ 44:36 AI at ZoomInfo: Superpowering GTM teams | Ali Dasdan, CTO, ZoomInfo

Assertion Not checkable as stated

ZoomInfo operates two distinct core data platforms on different technologies

“On top of it we have actually two data platforms. One is for all the data that customers, you know, need and our products need, and there's another one that's for internally focused for our internal customers, and they're built on different technologies.”

Ali Dasdan Sep 19, 2024 ▶ 9:14 AI at ZoomInfo: Superpowering GTM teams | Ali Dasdan, CTO, ZoomInfo

Assertion Not checkable as stated

ZoomInfo employs around 300 human researchers for manual data verification

“We also have a good number of researchers about, 300 of them.”

Ali Dasdan Sep 19, 2024 ▶ 14:54 AI at ZoomInfo: Superpowering GTM teams | Ali Dasdan, CTO, ZoomInfo

Disclosure

ZoomInfo selected Anthropic over OpenAI and Google for call summarization

“We are using Anthropic, we are using OpenAI, we are using Google, but for that one, we released Anthropic.”

Ali Dasdan Sep 19, 2024 ▶ 27:45 AI at ZoomInfo: Superpowering GTM teams | Ali Dasdan, CTO, ZoomInfo

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Dasdan: ZoomInfo Copilot users report saving about 10 hours a week

“No, it was released in production, so in May before May, actually, it was in beta. 27 or so thousand customers. I mean, people were saying that they save about, like, 10 hours. Literally one day a week, they were saving by using Copilot.”

Ali Dasdan Sep 19, 2024 ▶ 31:49 AI at ZoomInfo: Superpowering GTM teams | Ali Dasdan, CTO, ZoomInfo

Disclosure

ZoomInfo replaced over a dozen traditional machine learning models using generative AI

“Actually, it simplified our life because the typical way of, you know, extracting the features and creating a model and the training and all that, so just it, in some of the cases where we had more than a dozen models that completely were regenerated using Gen…”

Ali Dasdan Sep 19, 2024 ▶ 32:17 AI at ZoomInfo: Superpowering GTM teams | Ali Dasdan, CTO, ZoomInfo

Disclosure

ZoomInfo rents GPUs in Oracle Cloud to run open-source models

“We are actually renting the GPUs in Oracle Cloud, actually.”

Ali Dasdan Sep 19, 2024 ▶ 36:43 AI at ZoomInfo: Superpowering GTM teams | Ali Dasdan, CTO, ZoomInfo

Disclosure

ZoomInfo deployed GitHub Copilot to all engineers for daily use

“Then we deployed to all, all of our engineering. So everybody's using this daily in their interactions.”

Ali Dasdan Sep 19, 2024 ▶ 44:30 AI at ZoomInfo: Superpowering GTM teams | Ali Dasdan, CTO, ZoomInfo

Assertion Not checkable as stated

ZoomInfo's technical organization numbers roughly 900 to 1,000 people

“It's roughly, you know, we're at 900 people, close to a thousand people”

Ali Dasdan Sep 19, 2024 ▶ 7:48 AI at ZoomInfo: Superpowering GTM teams | Ali Dasdan, CTO, ZoomInfo

Appearances (1)

Episode	Date	Speaking time
AI at ZoomInfo: Superpowering GTM teams \| Ali Dasdan, CTO, ZoomInfo	Sep 19, 2024	30m

Ali Dasdan

The record, in short

Argument clarity: do they answer the question? how? →

How they sound: speaking style how? →

Appearances (1)

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