🐳🔥🔥 Dataframe: learnings from 2020

As 2020 draws to a close, I wanted to quickly share this year’s learnings at Dataframe with our friends, community members, and supporters. It’s been a strange year to say the least, with many surprises along the way.

• Pandemics are terrible. But technology workers are incredibly lucky in that the Covid-19 pandemic is accelerating the digitization of everything. Digital work enables remote work, which is restructuring how teams operate (across geographies and timezones). Tools and processes matter more than ever. Tools enabling an asynchronous system of record (think Salesforce for sales teams, think Zendesk for customer teams, think Dataframe for data teams) matter more than ever.
• Data engineering is having its moment in tech. Data previously was treated as a back-office asset and data teams were treated as back-office units for far too long. Purpose-specific, consumer-centric tools around data engineering and data science are starting to emerge. In particular, we’re big fans of dbt and Great Expectations (and of course, our very own open source data discovery tool, 🐳Whale and our cloud-hosted data discovery tool 🧪Dataframe).
• It’s hard to run a company. It’s harder to run a remote company operating in multiple timezones. We started Dataframe as a remote-first company, but Covid-19 really forced us to be radical in our approach in hiring and operations. Among the 10+ people we have on our team, I have not met over 70% of them in person. There are clear disadvantages to running a remote company, but the pros are starting to quickly outweigh the cons for us.
• It’s hard to fundraise. It’s even harder to fundraise during a pandemic. Luckily, the founders had a pre-vetted network of investors from our previous entrepreneurial endeavors. This was the singular reason why we were able to raise money. Counter-intuitively, your network really matters when you are running a remote company.
• Brands and personal networks matter more than ever. All of our team members, investors, and advisors came from contacts that one of the founders has had a meaningful personal relationship with (IRL) or from an established and easily diligence-able brand. Trust flows via transitive property through networks.
• Fundraising over Zoom is the new normal. Hiring over Zoom is the new normal. Zoom manners are critical. In the same way that first impressions matter face-to-face, Zoom first impressions matter. I remember every single prospective investor and every single prospective employee who yawned, ate food inappropriately, put their foot on top of the desk, or was otherwise doing things that they would not do in an in-person meeting during our Zoom calls.

And finally, I wanted to write a note of thanks to everyone who was involved in our journey this year in bringing productivity to all data teams. We’re sincerely grateful for the overwhelming support we’ve received from the data science and data engineering communities and the backing of our amazing investors. Thank you all.

-Joseph

Co-founder & CEO, 🧪Dataframe

Dataframe is the simplest Data Discovery and Documentation tool for your data warehouse.

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