Josh Epstein, CMO at AtScale talks about autonomous data engineering & how it enables businesses to deliver consistent performance without needing query optimization
1. Tell us about your role in AtScale?
I am Chief Marketing Officer – responsible for brand and buzz, demand generation, and product marketing. I am the lead storyteller of the AtScale story.
2. Can you tell us about your journey into this market?
After graduating with a math and computer science degree, I began my career as a business analyst working in finance and sales operations. From this position I grew into a data-driven marketer, applying my skills to roles including forecasting, market research, pricing, and demand generation. As I transitioned to a marketing leader, I worked with companies across the B2B technology spectrum, including data storage, cloud infrastructure, mobile app development, and cybersecurity. When the opportunity to return to my roots in the analytics and data science industry at AtScale, I jumped.
3. How do you think technology has advanced or affected the marketing industry on the whole?
I had just started running demand generation when B2B marketing made a major shift online – with the creation of companies like Eloqua, Hubspot, and Marketo, marketers embraced blogging, inbound marketing, and marketing automation. We are now in the midst of another shift with the rise of Account Based Marketing (ABM) technology and strategy. The ability to personalize online experience and customize messaging to individuals is a step change.
4. How has data-driven approach and integration of AI empowered marketers?
Data and AI are now fundamental to how marketers manage their advertising dollars (search engine marketing, display ads).Further, tools to help manage the overall marketing mix (where to spend, where to focus) are becoming common.
5. Can you explain how your ‘Self-Service Business Intelligence’ works?
Self-service BI is about ensuring that all data consumers: 1) know where to go to get the data they need; 2) have the tool(s) they need to get the data; and 3) have enough guidance or “guardrails” to ensure the data and metrics they are working with are consistent with what other consumers are seeing (i.e. a single source of truth).
6. How does your Autonomous Data Engineering product help marketers and businesses in aggregation?
AtScale’s Autonomous Data Engineering capability eliminates the need for business users (whether marketers, sales ops, or finance) to get consistent performance in their analysis without needing to worry about cloud architecture or query optimization.
7. While researching we came across a news article about your partnership with DataRobot, how do you think this partnership will benefit your customers?
We are seeing a convergence of enterprise BI and AI and see our partnership with DataRobot simplifying the data prep and feature engineering process data scientists deal with every day. Data scientists and business analysts consume a common set of governance data and metrics driving consistency and efficiency across the organization.
8. What advice would you like to give to the technology Start Ups of today especially the startups that are getting born amidst the pandemic?
Embrace agility – listen to customers, race to a minimum viable product, and iterate ferociously to deliver value.The pandemic has focused enterprise technology spending, but there is still budget for new technologies with transparent value propositions.
9. What work-related hack do you follow to enjoy maximum productivity?
I pre-book the first few hours in 4 out of my 5 mornings to do my creative work (writing, powerpointing, whiteboarding) when I am fresh and save my meetings for afternoons.
10. How do you prepare for an AI-Centric world?
11. What are the major developments you are planning, in the recent time?
One of the key opportunities we are focusing on is letting customers take better advantage of the 3rd party data sets available on data exchanges (e.g. Amazon Data Exchange). We see AtScale as the perfect tool to blend 3rd party data into their analyses. We want to make this extremely easy.
12. What movie inspires you the most?
I love zombie movies. All kinds. The unifying lesson from all is to never panic and rest when you can.
13. We have heard that you have a very joyful work culture, so can you share with us some of the fun pictures of your workplace?
14. Can you give us a glance of the applications you use on your phone?
Beyond the standard email and social media apps, I use:
● Buffer to manage my personal social accounts
● Whatsapp to chat with friends
● MapMyRun to record workouts
● Whistle to keep track of my 2 dogs
● DoorDash to get takeout for family
● RocketBook to scan my handwritten notes and whiteboard
● Candycrush to play while I eat lunch (I am on level 742)
For more such updates and perspectives around Digital Innovation, IoT, Data Infrastructure, AI & Cybsercurity, go to AI-Techpark.com.
Josh Epstein
CMO at AtScale
Josh Epstein is a serial CMO, helping technology organizations build brands and high performance go-to-market operations. In 2021 he joined AtScale, which enables smarter decision-making by accelerating the flow of data-driven insights. The company’s semantic layer platform simplifies, accelerates, and extends business intelligence and data science capabilities for enterprise customers across all industries.
