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Nick Rockwell

Chief Information Officer, Braze · 1 appearance on the record.

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executiveengineerfounderoperatorLinkedIn ↗braze.com ↗

Nick Rockwell is the Chief Information Officer at Braze, where he leads corporate IT, data governance, and AI transformation. He previously served as Chief Technology Officer at The New York Times and Condé Nast, and as Executive Vice President of Strategy and Operations at Fastly.

11statements → 4claims → 1claims resolved → 3.55/5average certainty → 2.27/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated →

1 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 3 not checkable as stated how the 4 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

2 predictions · 2 assertions · 4 opinions · 1 insight · 2 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 4 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 1 is 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 Nick argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
The NYT had over 4 million paid subscribers in Q3 2018
“Yeah, a little higher than that one year, a bit higher. I think that was the third quarter number.”
Nick Rockwell Jan 17, 2019 ▶ 0:57 Fireside Chat: Nick Rockwell, CTO of The New York Times (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)

How they sound: speaking style how? →

254 words/min while actually speaking · 37.3 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Nick Rockwell: only 6 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. Their coarse estimate from 6 raw tape exchanges is ≈4.5/5, shown at half point precision because the sample is small.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 3,806 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 Nick Rockwell said on the MAD Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Prediction Not checkable as stated
Cloud giants will turn backend open-source software into a corner case
“So I just think Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are, like, absolutely, like, moving far, far away from the pack in terms of their ability to create infrastructure software. So I feel like from now on it's like their game to write our databases and our message qu…”
Nick Rockwell Jan 17, 2019 ▶ 19:02 Fireside Chat: Nick Rockwell, CTO of The New York Times (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Opinion
The NYT cannot build a viable business on third-party tech platforms
“We don't think it's a good delivery vehicle for our product, and we also don't think we can build a business in any of the platforms, really.”
Nick Rockwell Jan 17, 2019 ▶ 28:32 Fireside Chat: Nick Rockwell, CTO of The New York Times (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Opinion
Rockwell calls BigQuery Google Cloud's most differentiated and unequaled feature
“Yeah, that, that, that was, and I would say still is the most differentiated element of GTP, and I think it's still unequal, at least in like cloud accessible mass you know, large scale available databases, that kind of thing.”
Nick Rockwell Jan 17, 2019 ▶ 14:39 Fireside Chat: Nick Rockwell, CTO of The New York Times (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Opinion
AWS's instance-based business model forces customers to pay for unused capacity
“Amazon's core instance-based business model, which is basically predicated on selling me a lot of things that I barely use and forcing me to pay for them.”
Nick Rockwell Jan 17, 2019 ▶ 21:41 Fireside Chat: Nick Rockwell, CTO of The New York Times (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Insight
Pursuing complete cloud portability leaves key features and value behind
“If you're trying to, like, be completely portable you're leaving a lot on the table.”
Nick Rockwell Jan 17, 2019 ▶ 27:05 Fireside Chat: Nick Rockwell, CTO of The New York Times (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Assertion Supported
The NYT had over 4 million paid subscribers in Q3 2018
“Yeah, a little higher than that one year, a bit higher. I think that was the third quarter number.”
Nick Rockwell Jan 17, 2019 ▶ 0:57 Fireside Chat: Nick Rockwell, CTO of The New York Times (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Opinion
NYT subscriber growth in 2018 extended beyond the 2017 'Trump bump'
“I think we really passed the Trump bump a while ago, probably even mid to late-thousand 17, so what we saw in 18 was something different was actually, I think, real momentum, and the beginning of Well, not the beginning, but the continuation of our sort of acc…”
Nick Rockwell Jan 17, 2019 ▶ 1:10 Fireside Chat: Nick Rockwell, CTO of The New York Times (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Disclosure
The New York Times migrated almost all infrastructure to Google Cloud
“This is like the culmination of a long process that we'done to migrate almost everything we're doing to Google Cloud. I'm still a certain asset running at Amazon. So in general, we're doing all of our data processing on Google's data infrastructure now and mos…”
Nick Rockwell Jan 17, 2019 ▶ 12:53 Fireside Chat: Nick Rockwell, CTO of The New York Times (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Cloud competition will drive a tenfold increase in compute efficiency
“Provided there's sufficient competition between the cloud platforms, which I think there is, where it ought to drive, you know, a tenfold increase in efficiency and Compute, I would think, and you know, corresponding cost savings”
Nick Rockwell Jan 17, 2019 ▶ 22:00 Fireside Chat: Nick Rockwell, CTO of The New York Times (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Disclosure
The New York Times plans to hire up to 400 product engineers
“But yeah, we're hiring a bunch, and I guess I mean, still in, in the scale of doing, like, product development, that's, it's, that's not a big number, or I guess just to a total of maybe 375 to 400 engineers working on the product.”
Nick Rockwell Jan 17, 2019 ▶ 2:41 Fireside Chat: Nick Rockwell, CTO of The New York Times (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
The New York Times sees 150 million unique visitors per month
“We see a hundred and fifty million uniques in a month”
Nick Rockwell Jan 17, 2019 ▶ 15:44 Fireside Chat: Nick Rockwell, CTO of The New York Times (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
Fireside Chat: Nick Rockwell, CTO of The New York Times (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC) Jan 17, 2019 17m
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