Data Renegades Podcast

On episode 9 of Data Renegades Podcast, CL Kao and Dori Wilson of Recce sit down with Wes McKinney (Posit PBC, Composed Ventures). They explore how AI coding agents are reshaping software development, why data infrastructure remains surprisingly resistant to automation, and what semantic layers mean for the future of analytics. Wes also shares bold predictions about “radical accountability” in software and the changing bar for startups. Tune in! https://hubs.ly/Q045dHD_0

The most predictive feature in the world's first coffee recommendation system? Favorite salad dressing. Bryan Bischof's coffee team at Blue Bottle reshaped his survey with questions a great barista would intuitively know to ask. They added questions that baristas suspected were predictive but would never ask in a cafe. The features that predicted best were unintuitive to the data scientist. Domain expertise made the dataset dramatically stronger. Listen to the full episode wherever you get your podcasts. #DataScience #MachineLearning #RecommenderSystems

Scott Breitenother built Brooklyn Data Company from his apartment into a 100-person data consultancy. He was in every Slack conversation, solved every problem, made every decision. The org moved fast, but it never learned to operate without him. That lesson reshaped everything about how he's building his next company. Scott is now co-founding KiloCode, an open source AI coding agent, with Sid Sibrandi (the founder of GitLab). Their operating model is deliberately extreme: no collaboration for collaboration's sake, no warmup periods for new hires, no decision gates that exist purely for comfort. New engineers ship code on day one. A working MVP feature by end of week. In production the next. Their data team is one person. Pedro runs the full data stack using KiloCode and the dbt MCP server. He ships more than a team of four used to. The unit isn't one data engineer. It's one data engineer plus a fleet of AI agents. Our Founder/CEO CL Kao and Head of Data Dori Wilson sat down with Scott for an hour on Data Renegades and covered a lot of ground: How the modern data stack lost its magic and why he hasn't had an "aha moment" in data in years. Why he calls AI tools exoskeletons, not replacements, and what that framing changes about the conversation. His Slack bookmark hack for founders who can't stop jumping into every thread. Why he believes data teams that are two years behind engineers on tooling adoption can't afford that gap anymore. What "kilo speed" looks like when code is cheap and bureaucracy is the real bottleneck. And his take on data democratization: he was never a fan of "everyone should know SQL," but AI might finally let him have his cake and eat it too. Scott doesn't hedge. When CL asks if every data team should adopt this model, the answer is just: "Yes. We need to be making full-stack data folks that can move faster and use their exoskeletons." Listen wherever you get your favorite podcasts. #DataEngineering #AIAgents #AICodingAgent #AgenticWorkflows #DataTeams #OpenSourceAI #FullStackDataEngineer #Analytics

On episode 7 of Data Renegades Podcast, CL Kao and Dori Wilson of Recce speak with Bryan Bischof (Theory Ventures, Rutgers University) about what it really takes to build trustworthy data and AI systems. Bryan shares hard-earned lessons from recommender systems at scale, the quirks of embedding spaces, and why good tooling still matters. They also discuss the future of analytics, agents, and data team culture. Tune in! https://hubs.ly/Q041srJG0

CL Kao & I talked with Bryan Bischof about truth-seeking in data, the "too many backpacks" bug at Stitch Fix, and why self-serve analytics is nowhere close in our latest Data Renegades Podcast episode. Bryan's built recommendation systems at Blue Bottle (yes, salad dressing predicts coffee), led ML at Stitch Fix, headed data at Weights & Biases, shipped Hex Magic at Hex, & now leads AI at Theory Ventures. He's also a Math PhD, O'Reilly author, teaches at Rutgers. Nbd. As an ex-academic myself, I loved this convo & he had some wonderfully spicy takes: → Truth-seeking is the north star. "If you have a successful career built on glazing people, I kind of hate you." → Self-serve data analytics? "We aren't even on the same outer rim of a galaxy." → The backpacks bug: latent space pitfalls & why out-of-distribution items end up "close to everything" → BigQuery UI "feels like someone designed it to punish me." (He's not wrong.) It's a really fun episode for your commute. Listen to wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. #DataEngineering #DataScience