Episode 85: Ad Exchange, Stream Processing, and Data Discovery Platform with Shinji Kim

Show Notes

• (02:00) Shinji reflected on her academic experience studying Software Engineering at the University of Waterloo in the late 2000s.
• (04:19) Shinji shared valuable lessons learned from her undergraduate co-op experience with statistical analysis at Sun Microsystems, software engineering at Barclays Capital, and growth marketing at Facebook.
• (08:52) Shinji shared lessons learned from being a Management Consultant at Deloitte.
• (14:01) Shinji revisited her decision to quit the job at Deloitte and create a social puzzle game called Shufflepix.
• (17:42) Shinji went over her time working as a Product Manager at the mobile ad exchange network YieldMo.
• (22:25) Shinji discussed the problem of stream processing at YieldMo, which sparked the creation of Concord.
• (26:17) Shinji unpacked the pain points with existing stream processing frameworks and the competitive advantage of using Concord.
• (33:19) Shinji recalled her time at Akamai — initially as a data engineer in the Platform Engineering unit and later as a product manager for the IoT Edge Connect platform.
• (37:26) Shinji explained why sharing context knowledge around data remains a largely unsolved problem.
• (42:07) Shinji unpacked the three capabilities of an ideal data discovery platform: (1) exposing up-to-date operational metadata along with the documentation, (2) tracking the provenance of data back to its source, and (3) guiding data usage.
• (46:59) Shinji unpacked the benefits of plugging BI tools into data discovery platforms and collecting metadata, which facilitates better visibility and understanding.
• (52:36) Shinji discussed the role of a data discovery platform within the modern data stack.
• (53:59) Shinji shared the hurdles that her team has to go through while finding early adopters of Select Star.
• (55:48) Shinji shared valuable hiring lessons learned at Select Star.
• (01:00:00) Shinji shared fundraising advice for founders currently seeking the right investors for their startups.
• (01:04:41) Closing segment.

Shinji’s Contact Info

• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Medium

Select Star’s Resources

• Website
• Blog
• LinkedIn | Twitter | Medium

Mentioned Content

Articles

• “The Next Evolution of Data Catalogs: Data Discovery Platforms” (Feb 2021)
• “Data Discovery for Business Intelligence” (May 2021)

People

• Martin Kleppmann (Author of Designing Data-Intensive Applications)
• Emily Riederer (Senior Analytics Manager at Capital One)
• Anya Prosvetova (Tableau DataDev Ambassador)

Book

• “Managing Oneself” (by Peter Drucker)

Notes

My conversation with Shinji was recorded back in July 2021. Since then, many things have happened at Select Star:

• General Availability launch on Product Hunt: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/selectstar
• Snowflake partnership on data governance: https://blog.selectstar.