Summary of 59. Catch the Tornado with Brad Buda, co-founder of Census

00:00:00 - 00:40:00

Census is a data analytics platform that helps companies keep track of their customers and identify long-term prospects. In the video, Brad Buda discusses the origins of the company and how it has grown over the years. He also talks about the challenges of managing a large team and the importance of feedback loops between managers and developers.

• 00:00:00 In this episode, Brad Buda of Census discusses the unique qualities of their data analytics platform, Census. He also talks about the growth of data tools in the current market, and how they've been able to keep themselves relevant for a long time.
• 00:05:00 Brad Buda explains how he got interested in software engineering and how he progressed through the various levels of education needed to pursue the field. He then tells the story of how he landed his first software engineering job at Amazon and how his experience working on Amazon's Simple Q Service helped shaped his current career path.
• 00:10:00 Brad Buda, co-founder of Census, tells the story of how Amazon's platform service division evolved from a logging pipeline to the AWS cloud platform and then on to CloudWatch and other AWS services. Buda also talks about the importance of starting a startup bug.
• 00:15:00 Census is a startup that uses data warehousing to help enterprises identify which of their customers are likely to become long-term customers. The founders had worked on integrations for Amazon and a customer data management product before founding Census.
• 00:20:00 Census is a tool that co-founder Brad Buda says solves the problem of data synchronization, which is harder than triggering events. It has many different integrations, and Buda believes that its value is not only in its syncing abilities, but also its central management of customer data.
• 00:25:00 Census is a master data management platform that helps companies put sensors in the middle and build master data for customers. The company has received support from investors such as Sequoia Capital and Anderson Harvester. The team has grown to include several employees, and founder Brad Buda regularly checks Slack to see if anyone is joining the team for the week.
• 00:30:00 The video features Brad Buda, co-founder of Census, discussing how the company has grown and evolved over the years. He notes that, as Census has become more successful, it has been harder to manage individual contributions due to the company's rapidly-growing size. Buda discusses the challenges of transitioning from being an individual contributor to a manager, and discusses the importance of having a feedback loop between managers and developers.
• 00:35:00 Brad Buda discusses the trends in low code and no code programming, and how census is using these technologies to streamline their workflow. He also talks about the future of sensors and how they will need to scale to handle trillions of records.
• 00:40:00 Census is a synchronization platform that can scale up without sacrificing quality. One of the things we think a lot about is data quality, and unlike other generation CDP tools, Census is really focused on making sure that every last bit of data that we think is accurate is synced. This includes both ensuring within our product that we're doing the right thing and providing our customers tools to do the same. We've been doing a lot of data testing work in the product to help validate that your data is what you think it is and to detect if one of your syncs goes off. We also have a lot of ideas in place to reduce the latency of synchronization and move to more real-time applications. The fastest that you can sort of move data through the modern data stack is around 90 seconds, which is a lot faster than what we think of as the batch you know data warehousing jobs of old. It's really gratifying when we tell a customer here's how you can use Census to do x and they do x, but it's way better when they say wow we never thought of that before.