Alex Dean: Snowplow bootstrapped until 2019
Alex Dean · Behavioral Data Creation for AI | Snowplow Co-Founder & CEO Alex Dean · Oct 24, 2022 · at 17:19
Alex Dean, Co-Founder and CEO of Snowplow, discusses the early history and funding strategy of the company during a fireside chat at Data Driven NYC.
0:00 / 0:06exact quote · 6.3s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“And so we basically built a team to do that and charged them for it and bootstrapped up till 2019.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Alex Dean
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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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.”