Sarah (00:09)
Welcome back to UnDUBBED where we dive into unscripted, uncensored, and undeniably data stories. I'm Sarah.
Fiona (00:16)
I'm Fi and today's episode is a bit different. We're flipping the tables completely.
Sarah (00:23)
You might remember Matthew Miller from an earlier episode here on UnDUBBED from Childhood Tales to Tableau Boardroom Wins. Matthew is the Vice President of Product Management at Salesforce where he leads the strategic customer impact and innovation team within Tableau.
Fiona (00:41)
You've also, Matthew, been the mastermind behind Devs on Stage at Tableau Conference.
That incredible session where developers showcase bleeding edge features live. Matthew's been turning nervous engineers into confident presenters for years.
Sarah (00:59)
Well, Matthew's back this time, but he's the one asking the questions. We're handing over the hosting reins and putting ourselves in the hot seat.
Fiona (01:09)
the podcast is yours. What do you want to know?
Matthew Miller (01:13)
⁓ wow. This is exciting. I've never gotten the chance to host a podcast I don't know if I can handle it. It's tough. I've never sat in the seat. Here we go. So I'm supposed to ask you questions and understand, draw out interesting insights. That's what they say. Let's start with your background. So one of the things that we stumbled on when I was here last is a really cool thing we have in common.
is the entrepreneurial households we grew up in. So if you need to maybe tell me a little bit about that, what was that like? What kind of entrepreneurship was it? Maybe how that influenced you today.
Sarah (01:51)
So mine is probably not the entrepreneurial household you were thinking. My parents actually bought a nightclub when I was nine weeks old.
Yeah, so I was brought up in the back of a nightclub. In New Zealand, in a small town, so kind of grew up with knowing a lot of New Zealand music and comedy acts.
Matthew Miller (02:12)
So they owned and ran a business, that's entrepreneurship. What did you learn from watching them run that business and how does that influence you today?
Sarah (02:20)
Yeah, so there was a lot of hard work put into it, a lot of hours put in, and I guess as well being in the nightclub industry, it was a lot of work during times where everyone else was partying.
Matthew Miller (02:42)
Maybe not that dissimilar to the life of a consultant or analyst sometimes.
Sarah (02:46)
Sometimes, yeah.
Matthew Miller (02:49)
Were your parents anything like mine? I know my dad and mom are the kind of people who like to share aphorisms, bits of wisdom. My dad would say, always agree on the price before you begin work. Did you have any of those things that your parents would teach you, any principles they'd often say about business?
Fiona (02:50)
didn't, I didn't, sorry.
my parents didn't have so much on the entrepreneurial side. They had more things like, don't take drugs, don't get tattoos, and don't ride on motorcycles.
Matthew Miller (03:15)
Great advice.
Good advice for life and business, I suppose.
Fiona (03:23)
Sure, it's quite interesting. I don't think that my parents felt that I was going to go into starting my own business, although they were very supportive of my academic studies and, made it really clear how important an education was. that was how I got validation from my parents is when I did really well at school.
it became a thing for me to chase, being really good at something, which I think has put good grounding in place for work ethics, albeit that for the first 25 years of my career, I was working for someone else.
Matthew Miller (04:00)
Fi what was the first time you had an entrepreneurial inkling? Was it as a kid, like a high schooler, college? Or was it when you started this business?
Fiona (04:07)
⁓ interesting.
I would have been really young because in my parents' business, they got me supposedly cleaning every week, my dad's office. And I didn't clean every week, but I did get a bit of pocket money. I did turn up at the office and go and play. I used to play on the computer. So I would have been, it would be really, really young in the 80s, a computer. So that's quite big at that time. And I was playing cards.
like a form of Solitaire yeah,
Matthew Miller (04:42)
That Solitaire game?
wow. Yeah. Well, let's leave all the kids behind in the dust then. All the Gen Zers will not understand us. Do you remember what the operating system was and the machine you used back then?
Fiona (04:55)
No, I wasn't that geeky.
No, and look, I've got no idea how I learned to do it because you would have to enter prompts to get to a certain place. So there was no mouse with a menu. It was very much, you know, you have to enter one, then five, then whatever else to get somewhere and use a keyboard.
Matthew Miller (05:17)
Wow, that's amazing.
Sarah, for you, same question. It was the first time you had an entrepreneurial inkling.
Sarah (05:25)
I actually think mine was a lot later in life and it kind of stemmed from Fi and I having some conversations around the time that her role was made redundant and she said, let's go into business together. And I was like, okay.
Fiona (05:44)
that's funny because like I think whilst I tell the story about not cleaning but still getting paid I don't know if that's entrepreneurial just smart when I went to high school I was I was at a boarding school so I was away from my parents at the time and I used to do a number of things to make money so that I could then buy whatever I wanted so for instance when we were
13 the age of 13 we were only allowed to go into the village every five weeks, and so what that meant was I would stock up on chocolate bars and they sell chocolate bars from from my room and then make money on it or I or I ran another thing where I Decided that I wanted to do to tint my eyelashes
Matthew Miller (06:26)
That's brilliant.
Fiona (06:34)
And so I set up a business tinting eyelashes, bought the pack of eyelash tint for about 20 bucks from the chemist and then charged every person $10 as they were coming through. And I made, you know, a good few hundred dollars that weekend.
Sarah (06:50)
sure if
I trust you tinting my eyelashes now or even back then.
Fiona (06:53)
Why?
Why? What makes you say that? Look, I think there might have been a few blurry eyes afterwards, bit red. Maybe the dye went in the eyes, but you know, everyone survived. No one was blinded.
Sarah (06:59)
Any disaster stories?
Matthew Miller (07:12)
some early experiments in customer success. How did you approach the chocolate bars? How do you think about marketing and markup? Like did you just pick an arbitrary price that you thought the market would bear? Did you have a spreadsheet? How did you go about your business for selling chocolate bars?
Fiona (07:15)
Yeah.
It was like drugs there mate. So it was like cashies behind the door. Because no one could get access to sugar, it was, quite a strict environment where we were fed so that we wouldn't put on weight, you know, it's that kind of school. Yeah, yeah. Like there was a lot of obsession with being skinny back in the 90s.
Matthew Miller (07:34)
⁓
Wow.
Fiona (07:52)
then they had a thing called Young Enterprise, at school. in the last two years of school, you could do some kind of enterprise. And in my final year of high school, I actually was the CEO of that business. This is not something that I've shared with my business partner. And we had to come up with products to market.
and ⁓ then sell and then obviously find a way to do that. So at our school we used to have big sports days like swimming days and things where a lot of the parents would come in and they're all cashed up farmers and so we decided to sell of all things tea And we would use
one of the girls mother's sewing machines that you could press a button and it would create a logo. So we created our own logos and then wrapped them all up, put a bit of raffia, because it looked really like that was the time where raffia was really popular.
Matthew Miller (08:50)
I have to ask, how did you settle on tea towels? Because there must have been some heuristic or just unspoken understanding that there was this missing market. How'd you settle on tea towels?
Fiona (09:04)
Yeah, I don't know that I'm so good at thinking about what the missing market is, but we just like throwing ideas out there
we had to find a supplier, we had to find something that would be a price point that we knew that parents would spend money on and we wanted to make a decent amount of margin on it. so tea towels seemed like a great idea.
Matthew Miller (09:29)
So I've observed that in a lot of entrepreneurial partnerships, there's one person who's the big ideas visionary and one who's more the operational steady. Is it safe to say I could guess which of you is which or how does that play out practically in the business now?
Sarah (09:46)
That's an interesting question, because I think we switch roles sometimes And I think it really leans into what we are naturally passionate about. So when we'll kind of go down a rabbit hole in different directions and support each other that way is how I feel.
Matthew Miller (10:07)
Do you use any kind of internal titles or have you like gotten formal about swim lanes for who's responsible for this or that? Or do you just take it on a case by case basis?
Sarah (10:18)
So right now we're in that case by case basis, but I'm feeling that soon we're going to have to start picking swim lanes.
Matthew Miller (10:27)
What's so you function like co-CEOs. What's each of your superpowers as a business person so far? What have you discovered about yourself as your superpower in as entrepreneurs? And Sarah, I want to ask you first.
Sarah (10:41)
Yeah, that's a really good question. I feel like I'm still trying to find my superpower here. In the last year that we've been operating, there's obviously been a lot of intensive learning and it's very different to being in the comfort of a large organization where you have a legal department, accounting department and your sales department and...
So we've really been, you know, finding our way
Matthew Miller (11:15)
I totally see that. I went from entrepreneurship to the big business. Yeah, observed both sides. Fi, what's your superpower?
Fiona (11:25)
It's a really good question and ⁓ one of the things that I always prided myself on being in a large corporate was achieving these seemingly unthinkable solutions to problems that the business was having. And for some reason, when I came into running my own business, I forgot that mindset.
And maybe it was because I was busy learning so much, like Sarah's saying, there's so many other things that you need to do in order to run a business that it made me forget I have a natural ability to go and find amazing solutions to problems or to ask for things and convince people that it's a great idea, that they should get on board and we should do it.
I feel like recently I've rediscovered that talent in myself to just not accept no and to keep turning left until I find a way to bring someone to yes. So a good example of that is we have an opportunity to go and do a cloud migration. So from Tableau server into cloud and
We've been talking with you and I've seen online that Biztory over in Europe have an amazing product where they actually automate the move from Tableau server into Tableau cloud, which removes a lot of headaches. Can you imagine manually doing permissions and groups? And you know, it's fine to move the content, but there's so many other things that you need to be considering in this process.
And so I approached Biztory and said, hey, we'd really like to use your product for this move. And the first answer was, "No" the really exciting thing is we managed to get them around to yes and partner with them. And that's super exciting for me
I think my superpower is finding amazing solutions to problems and also convincing people to say yes.
Matthew Miller (13:40)
Yeah, I a bit of finding a solution even when there's a no, whether that no is a no to using a cloud migration tool or the no, can't have chocolate. You're going to find a way to turn that into a successful, profitable opportunity. And now I want to ask you the same superpower question, but about each other. Fi, what is Sarah's superpower? And I'm speaking as an entrepreneur. What is your superpower you've observed about her as a business partner?
Fiona (13:47)
you
that's a really good question.
Right, it comes straight to me. So Sarah has a natural ability to connect to people. And so when she's out and talking about things and telling everyone about our story, like she's on fire and people really connect and they really want to either help us out or get involved or be a client. that's Sarah's superpower.
Matthew Miller (14:30)
I love that. Sarah, what's Fi Superpower?
Sarah (14:33)
Yeah, think Fi is very determined. So we saw the response about Biztory that I'm not taking no for an answer, but that really shines through in everything that we do and particularly her attention to detail in it. Like there is not much that goes past Fi. You know, I'm a terrible speller.
and Fi will pick that up. Or I will have a pixel out of place and Fi will pick that up. So her attention to detail is phenomenal.
Matthew Miller (15:08)
So you know how much I love storytelling. We spent a lot of time talking about that the last time. I got to hear your story. And if you're willing to go into character, I'd love to hear the way you tell the story of your business to a prospect.
Sarah (15:23)
So, our mission is that we help people unlock value from data. And it's super important for us to have clients that are, on that data journey, they're stuck or they're struggling. they want someone to come in and really rapidly help them fix where they're at and to propel them to the next stage.
And that's where we find the most interesting clients. It's like they've admitted that they're stuck and they want something and they're prepared to go through the necessary change management. We really like to lean into human-centered design as well. So they really want to just take what they're doing, which may be kind of a little bit, and really zhuzh it up
that's what I love about being in business with Fi is that we can really pick and choose the clients that are the ones that are, know, maybe not just wanting to sit on the fence and really go forward to that next step. And that's really key to us.
Matthew Miller (16:24)
So in your second ever podcast episode, you talked about the origin story and mentioned that you talked about being made redundant and how that was this catalyst for starting dub dub data. And you said, I'll read the quote, you want to give people the opportunity to not be entirely reliant on their corporate job. Can you expand on that motivation and how that that drives your culture?
Fiona (16:47)
Yeah, absolutely. So when we started Dub Dub we actually had a vision of running a marketplace and so bringing freelancers and consulting businesses on. So for instance, Biztory might list their TabMove product on there or consulting services, people who are in corporate jobs being able to list themselves as well. It turns out it's really hard to run a two-way marketplace. And that's because you've got
two people that you're selling to. You're selling to people to bring them on board and you've got to get them to sign some pretty hefty terms and conditions. And then on the flip side of that, you've got to get clients on board who are willing to run by it. pretty quickly we realized that was going to take up too much time if we were going to try and bring business in our own door at the same time, because the marketplace was never going to be a solution for us to make.
a lot of money out of. It was going to be something that we just really believed in, bringing the community together. So we've flipped it a little bit. And the Biztory model is a good example of that, where we've identified the best way to do something, and it's not something that we've created. And we've said, actually, we want to be able to use that for our clients as well. So now what we do is we identify these opportunities. ⁓ We've got an opportunity at the moment.
that's looking at data governance for a really large international. And we've pulled in a really reputable person who's been doing this for many years from the US. And she will be helping us as our chief governance officer on the project as well. So what we do is we look for the best of the best in the world and look at how we can bring them together. And we also do that with solopreneurs and bring them into our jobs as well. So we're not really looking to grow.
massively huge with our team, we're actually looking to make people individually successful in their own right.
Matthew Miller (18:48)
I really hear that leveraging each of your strengths, the connections and storytelling and the building the trust, evaluating talent. I heard you talk about Sarah and then the not taking no for an answer, putting together solutions and yet detail oriented. You talked about Fi I could see how that leverages your strengths. So was that a conscious pivot then?
Sarah (19:09)
So it was a conscious decision and we spoke about it and not just building both sides of the business, but also tax implications were kind of just going, whoa, it was becoming cost prohibitive in a way for us to go forward with that. ⁓ So have we put it on the back burner? Yes, but I feel like we're also doing it just not as big a scale.
So additional to the solopreneurs, we also look at partnering with other consultancies and we've done this a few times as well. So looking at people that are sitting on their bench at the moment, for example, and leveraging that and again, leaning into our network and doing that.
Matthew Miller (19:52)
So a client might reach out to you because you are effectively a gateway to a private marketplace of vetted providers. Is that right?
Fiona (20:00)
Yeah, 100%. And at the end of the day, if they're involving us, you know, we are the throat to choke. So we are the ones that are responsible. we're making sure that they're top quality and that the client is going to get the thing that they need. But what it means is that we don't have to be specialists in every single area. We can be specialists in the things that we do really well. And then we can identify the top talent to bring together to solve.
clients' problems.
Matthew Miller (20:28)
What are the kind of clients that you're looking for? What makes an ideal client for you?
Sarah (20:35)
So for me, it's ones that really want to propel themselves. They're looking for change and they're prepared to go through the proper change management cycle as well. And they want to do things differently.
Fiona (20:49)
I like a client that wants to get up to the eyeballs in data, has a specific problem that they're trying to solve and trusts us to not try and sell them something that's going to be extortionately expensive but is really going to elegantly solve their problem and they'll come along on the journey with us to do it.
So we've got a potential client at the moment who's looking at Tableau Next. And that's a really exciting area to be in. I know that you know the product in and out. There's a lot of opportunity that will be coming on the platform. I'm really excited to see what's happening in the semantic model and how I think things are going to change.
for professionals who work in data visualization as well. I don't think that there's going to be a mass ⁓ exit of these professionals, but there's certainly going to be some new skills that need to be learned. And I'm really excited about that. And I'm excited that clients are prepared to give it a crack.
Matthew Miller (21:56)
you've both been working in the industry quite a while. You've seen a lot of the trends that have come through, things that were touted as the big change, like blockchain is going to be everything. And then, know, things like big data that had some impact, but not everything's big data. ⁓ Hashtag medium data, my favorite tableau meme, What are you seeing as the changes that are coming now like in the role of the analyst? If you're a community member listening to this.
you're thinking about your career, maybe you're earlier in your career, what should we be thinking about the skills you should double down on and the things that you should go learn that you don't know yet?
Sarah (22:29)
I think it's a really exciting time for analysts there's a lot that's happening and all of the mundane stuff, I feel has kind of been taken away and there's ways to automate that or leverage AI to help you do that stuff without having to focus on it.
What I'm really excited about is looking at things like MCP. So for those that don't know, that's the Model Context Protocol. And I know Tableau has that as well with Claude and Shameless Plug. We'll put a link to a podcast that we've done on that in the show notes.
Fiona (23:05)
I definitely see the analyst role evolving or the developer role evolving.
And quite significantly too. it's going to be a lot of transformation that's actually required to get the data into the right shape. But what's completely new is the semantic layer. And whilst there...
has been for a long time, you know, things in governance where you can define, you know, this field means that. What's quite different and what I'm seeing in Tableau, at least with the semantic layer is you have to be really clear on your definitions of what calculated fields or even fields that you've ingested actually mean and how they should be used. It's really going to be really important to hide fields that don't.
or shouldn't be used anywhere in queries by end users. It's really important to provide business preferences and in a way that it can be ingested and processed by the models to then fire off queries and their natural language queries to then process through these descriptions, through the business preferences.
and then go into the data which you've created as the analyst, how it's all joined and easily there to then be able to come back with an answer to the query. And that means that as an analyst, I need to be able to anticipate what it is that my consumers of information are going to be interested in, what they shouldn't be bringing together.
and to be able to train the models in a way that makes it really super effective. Now that's a lot of anticipation. That's a lot of getting familiar right up to your eyeballs and the data and a lot less on design. And what really excites me about this is there's nothing worse than seeing a dashboard that's been jammed with so much stuff that it's confusing, confronting, overwhelming to end users. Now I'm going to be able to be
really picky about what I show them and what is there. The things that really are the dashboard that we talk about in your car, like the important things to be running. And then all of the supporting factors that may be required are all still accessible through a really easy natural language query. And that's super exciting to me.
Sarah (25:43)
i'd just like to add for analysts listening to this podcast today, the really important thing in my mind to start focusing on is that soft skills, human side we're moving away from having to have the nitty gritty technical aspect. But if we can talk tech to business and business to tech.
that's where you're really going to win. And some of those things that Fi spoke about, like stripping those dashboards back to really getting a clear understanding of what's going to drive the business forward, that's where the analysts are really going to stand out.
Matthew Miller (26:21)
I love that spoke with an analyst group a couple of weeks ago, and one of them said, like, semantics is how we make sure that when somebody asks about conversion rate, if they're in finance, we give them euro and a dollar. But if they're in marketing, we give them lead conversion. Because if they say conversion rate, conversion rate's not completely different answers if we don't have semantics. And I really like that analogy. What's some of the grunt work or menial tasks, the manual stuff that you think is the highest value?
for AI to replace? Like what's the low hanging fruit that AI can do that's grunt work today for analysts?
Sarah (26:59)
So if I get really specific into Tableau, I've had to spend a lot of time doing a lot of date calculations. So all those calculated fields, and I think it's great to be able to plug that into AI and say, I need this particular calculation, but I need it daily, monthly, quarterly, annually. I need it fiscal year. I need a calendar year, all this kind of stuff. And if for those that know the Lindsay Poulter method of
building basically a notepad in a format that you can then put as a calculated field into Tableau and drag it across. You can have all these calculations built in minutes rather than days.
Matthew Miller (27:44)
Okay, so I want to take a complete pivot in the conversation. We're going a completely different direction.
Now both are from New Zealand, right? Okay. And you've lived abroad, but now you don't both live in New Zealand anymore, right?
Fiona (27:54)
Yes.
Sarah (28:00)
I'm in New now.
Fiona (28:00)
just
Matthew Miller (28:02)
And Fi, you're in Sydney, right? OK.
In
politically correct terms, how are the cultures different between the two countries?
Fiona (28:07)
Yes.
coming from New Zealand when I went into the office is that in New Zealand we can be pretty blunt. Or maybe I'm just pretty blunt. I don't know.
In an office in New Zealand, it's okay, or the culture that I've been in, it was okay calling out problems. Like, oh, there's a problem with this. Oh, right, let's go and fix it. But what's really interesting is the gap between Australia and the US, who I've worked with quite frequently.
In the US, it's really poor culture to be raising problems or to be talking about things that are going on because people feel, I think the culture is you can lose your job pretty quickly over there. We have a few more employment protections over here. So I think that we're a ⁓ Kiwi or an Aussie might want to go and fix problems that people in the US don't want to look like they are the problem.
And so in New Zealand and Australia, it's kind of widely known that it's not personal. It's just a problem.
Matthew Miller (29:16)
I love that. I'd ⁓ love to hear your view on that, Sarah.
Sarah (29:20)
Yeah, so just kind of digging into that bluntness, I've been told I'm blunt as well. So maybe as a Kiwi thing, I've lived in both the UK and Singapore. And that's probably the biggest times I've been told I'm really blunt. And I think just to add to the to the cultural differences as well. In Singapore, when I was at Standard Chartered Bank, the history of that bank is it was ⁓ owned by India and China. So as a result, there are a lot of Indian and Chinese people working.
in the bank and something that I had to learn pretty early on around culture was just the way that things were done quite differently. And it is a lot about saving face. So there is a problem, but we're probably going to talk around it because we don't want to highlight who is the problem because we want to save face on the way through. So quite a lot of cultural differences there that I had to kind of fall in line with, which is challenging sometimes.
Fiona (30:18)
So Sarah's just having some technical difficulties and had to drop off for a moment. We're trying to get her back on board. But if you want to continue and fire up some questions and then we can come back to the great question that you were asking about what we've learned.
Matthew Miller (30:36)
I love that. And so this is, we get to have the one-on-one. Here we go. Rapid fire. So let's go back to the entrepreneurial roots. What are the lessons that you learned then that you're applying now? Either like things you'd say, I definitely want to do what I saw done, or I definitely don't want to do that.
Fiona (30:38)
We do.
Right, so I had a bit of a bumpy ride through my childhood with entrepreneurship. like at times, my dad, he was at the top of his game. we would travel regularly. ⁓
nothing was really a problem. And then the 87 stock market crash hit and the business tanked at the same time. So everything went into like this huge kind of ⁓ downward slide in terms of the economy.
when that happened, our lifestyle changed pretty quickly. And you know, there was second mortgages on houses and everything. My dad being quite entrepreneurial went out and he decided
He wanted to bring cable TV to New Zealand. And so he set up a business to bring cable TV to New Zealand and was actually did it got investors in the place, but he got screwed over. And meanwhile, he was still, probably leveraging I would say the earth moving business to do that. That didn't go down so well with his brother. And in the end,
Matthew Miller (31:38)
Yeah.
Fiona (32:00)
with a lot of other things that happened, which were personal things on the side, he actually had to give his business up and somehow his brother acquired that business for free. it was a huge like loss for our family. Everything kind of went down the toilet so we'd gone from being like quite wealthy when I was very young into...
Yeah, not so not really having much at all. And in fact, my, my dad and mum ended up splitting up the house got sold under mortgagee sale, like there were so many things that came together. Then when I was in my career, everyone would say, you should start up a business, because maybe they saw that I had this sort of entrepreneurial spirit. But I was really scared to go and do it. And so Sarah and I had conversations before we started dub dub around
some of these fears that I had around starting a business and not having a regular income coming in and it just being maybe a bad hobby. And yeah, it's been really good to share that with somebody who in her own right had her own experiences with her family as well. But having that trust between us and being able to share those fears and also work past them.
Matthew Miller (33:19)
Wow, I can imagine that that informs your approach to financial discipline and how much leverage you want to have, et cetera. Was there a conscious moment where you had to sort of look that fear in the face and decide you're going to do it, or was it sort of a gradual process to those conversations with Sarah?
Fiona (33:40)
It was a conscious decision that I wanted to have those conversations. you know, Sarah and I had been friends for a long time before we started Dub Dub and we'd met each other through the data community.
So I think the pair of us are really aware of each other's, scenarios of what's really important to one another. And we're there to support one another. And I think earlier, Sarah mentioned that at times we switch roles.
in the business. you know, sometimes I might be wearing the entrepreneurial hat, sometimes she might be. But we also do that in terms of where we're at with our confidence in the business. And it's really wonderful to have somebody else who when your glass is feeling half empty, like it's you know, and you're really in that state of, God, how are we going to do this? That there's someone else saying, you know what, we're about to turn a corner.
Matthew Miller (34:35)
Finding a great business partner is like finding a unicorn in a haystack. And I shouted out last time we spoke about Geoffrey Smolders but he deserves a name drop again. And I'm glad you guys are getting to partner with him and his business. He was a great business partner for me. And that same when I was down he could pick me up. And when he's down, I can pick him up. That's a really, really beautiful story. ⁓ So let's talk about Dub Dub Data today and the future.
Fiona (34:45)
Yeah.
Matthew Miller (35:03)
So the team today is the two of you as full-timers and then you have subcontractors. Do you have any other full-time staff now?
Fiona (35:11)
don't have full-time staff, but we do have a marketer that comes in and helps us with all of the production of our podcasts and getting all of our marketing reels, et cetera, out. So they're really there to help us get started, get our blogs out, and making sure that we can concentrate on the other things, which is really doing data.
Matthew Miller (35:35)
So let's imagine you're plotting out your first hires, like your dream hires to build out your team. ⁓ What are the roles? Or if you like, what are the kind of people? If I just name drop some friends from the community, we need a Tori Levinson, we need an Eva Murray. Whether you want to put it in terms of archetypes that maybe listeners might know, or whether you just want to put it in terms of roles like a trainer, et cetera, what are your kind of first 10 hires?
Sarah (36:04)
Yeah, that's a really good question. if we could have anyone for training, it would definitely be Andy Kriebel We love his training. I think he's the best in the business.
Fiona (36:14)
So there's a couple of roles and I'm trying to choose. I'll choose one because I know the archetype to describe it as. I would love to have a Timothy from Biztory and bring him in as a CTO. So having someone that's really, you know, like a Craig Bloodworth was to Tom at TIL
I want a Timothy for our team who is really looking at all of the different technologies and how they're important and how they're influencing one another. I mean, I think it's really exciting to see that Tableau are partnering with Snowflake recently looking at bringing together that open semantic layer so that all of the different tools will be able to talk to one another. So I would love to have someone that's looking out, keeping an eye on the horizon and finding out what's happening.
and helping that to influence our roadmap.
Matthew Miller (37:06)
So world-class trainer, enabler, a CTO. Back to you, Sarah. What's your
Sarah (37:11)
Sales is not our strong point. We've been learning sales, but if we could bring in a director of sales, and I'm not going to name names on this one, because I'd almost like a hodgepodge of people, but yes, I would love to have a director of sales in here that could kind of take that off our plate.
Fiona (37:31)
I probably would say that may even come in at the top of our list if we reordered it, but I just couldn't think of a name to put to it.
Matthew Miller (37:42)
I love name dropping friends from the community who you go, yeah, we need someone like that. We need a COE type person. We need like a, you know, a Matt Francis, that sort of thing.
Fiona (37:52)
I really love Paul Chapman from JLL. Obviously we've worked together. He may not be as well known in the community these days because he's so busy being an executive at JLL, but his way of influencing, you know, up the top, but also down the chain as well is just something that I really love. And he's also a visionary as well. So I think that there's definitely
Matthew Miller (37:55)
Mmm.
Fiona (38:18)
a case for having people like him. ⁓ And then obviously some amazing developers as well. So we always want people who have amazing skill sets. So off the top of your head, Sarah, who you think would, sticks out for you?
Matthew Miller (38:36)
Your Tableau Dream Team.
Sarah (38:36)
If
the two people that come straight to my mind is affectionately known by us as the twinny twins.
Fiona (38:46)
Yeah.
Sarah (38:48)
So do you know who I'm talking about Matthew?
Matthew Miller (38:51)
I presume the Flerlage twins.
Sarah (38:55)
I know there's two of them, but sometimes I think the amount of content that they put out, I think there's actually like maybe six of them.
Matthew Miller (39:03)
I mean, honestly, the baldies of data have this meme going about, you know, I'm not Peter, I'm not Tore
Fiona (39:03)
and a mice.
there's like a bucket load of amazing designers and developers out there. And then there's the unsung heroes as well. So there's people that I've, I've met throughout my career who I know I could slot in any team and they would do well and they would do well because not only are they super technical, but they are super friendly.
They give you a good hard listening to, Casey, you know, that's a shout out for you. And they solve amazing problems and they just keep solving and they keep thinking about it and they keep coming back. And it doesn't even matter if they're working with you anymore, they're still solving for you. And I love that.
Matthew Miller (39:53)
So you mentioned this solopreneur model and being able to bring people in like the best of the best and use your experience and skill to vet them and then slot them into customer opportunities. For any community folks who are listening, what's the kind of profiles you might be looking for next for upcoming opportunities? Where someone ought to go, ooh, I should reach out and just get in your orbit, start to get on your radar for the next engagement.
Sarah (40:20)
Yeah, so for us, it's all about knowing people. So if we don't particularly know them as people that are pretty public, whether that be on Tableau Public or in the forums and just as really passionate and we can see that passion as well and the content that they push out, know, Fi and I are very...
big on LinkedIn, that's our social media channel of choice. So we're always looking at people that are, interested in the conversations, pushing boundaries, whether it be and you know, the new tooling like Tableau Next or around MCP leaning into AI, people that are naturally curious about
about what's happening.
Fiona (41:03)
love the idea, you you don't have to go anywhere now and create your own blog site. You can blog off LinkedIn. So you can share what you're doing on LinkedIn, not in a post, but actually in an, article. it's a really easy way to have a thousand plus people look at your content, but then also amplifying your content.
I've been working on the next hackathon to really get up to speed with what's happening in that platform, I've really felt that there's not the same community that's available yet. But I would love to see more people sharing content around that. I've seen Kirk Monroe, I've seen Adam Maiko, Annabel Rincon.
I've seen a few things from TIL, I've seen a few things from Biztory as well. so it's sharing more of that kind of content in the new space and not being afraid to kind of say, well, this is where I'm up to with it, or I'd like some support. I would like to see that grow a lot as well. So make sure you're sharing content, reach out, have a chat.
Matthew Miller (42:14)
want to shout out one of the people you mentioned earlier, Craig Bloodworth, the CTO of TIL, speaking of the Tableau Next Hackathon, his Tableau Next Hackathon brought together Agent Force, concierge, and Tableau Desktop using that authoring API that we're doing a private preview of. So that's something I want to push and pitch. you're in the data dev community and you want to try out that API, shoot me a note. We've got it in private pilot right now. It's the thing we showed in DevZone Stage.
Fiona (42:17)
Yeah.
Matthew Miller (42:43)
We check out Craig's LinkedIn profile. Really cool demo that he did for that hackathon.
the authoring API enables you to automate anything in the authoring experience of Tableau, starting in desktop later in web authoring. So what you saw demoed at DevZone Stage, we've taken to the next level. And now there's a floating pane, kind of like show me, that hovers above every place you go from data modeling, viz, dashboarding, stories, et cetera.
in the desktop authoring experience and extensions developers can build authoring extensions, kind of like viz extensions are in vizs and dashboard extensions are in dashes, authoring extensions that sit in this pane and they can do anything. So Craig took that panel and put agent force in it. So you can ask a question, get an answer from concierge, but then click a button and it builds that same viz in desktop. You can then go and explore from the same semantic model. A lot of really cool stuff there, but we could talk about that forever. Back to Dub Dub Data. So.
have you taken any funding or have you considered raising money to scale the business?
Sarah (43:44)
Yeah, so it was something that we spoke about really early on, and we consciously made a decision not to take funding because we wanted to remain in control.
Fiona (43:56)
Yeah, I mean.
Matthew Miller (43:56)
I love that.
Yeah.
Fiona (43:59)
whether or not we would make the same decision now if there was funding available, I suppose we would have to understand the intention behind it. And so if someone just came up and said, I'm going to give you a bunch of money. Okay, but why? What is it that you specifically want out of this? And where does that sit with us as well? And given the ethos, this is how we work.
Matthew Miller (44:00)
Good.
Fiona (44:30)
One of the questions before that you were going to ask, but we got cut off with the technical difficulties was what did we learn from corporates that we didn't want to bring in to our organization? Well, we have a no asshole policy.
we wanted to really make sure that the way that we were operating and sometimes, things aren't always roses and we have asked each other at times. Is that like, is that a no asshole policy? Is that part of our policy? And it's kind of brings a little bit of levity to potentially a bit of a tense situation as well. So for me,
I think it's really important if an investor wanted to come and invest in Dub Dub that we understood why and what's important to them
There's a lot of things that come with corporate that's really tough. And the more senior that you go in an organization, the more toxic that it can become and more difficult that it can become. I think it's...
One thing that the two of us wanted to really make sure that we never did was to bring that same behaviour into our organisation. So if someone wants to fund something, they have to have a really similar mindset to us.
Sarah (45:53)
And we want to be really proud of what we've built.
Matthew Miller (45:58)
I think I'd say you should be really proud of what you built. It sounds like you built something amazing that anyone would be lucky to work at. The only downside is you're no asshole policy means I'm disqualified. So I have to take off the table. So let's imagine, You get an investor who comes in.
Sarah (46:11)
I highly doubt that.
Matthew Miller (46:18)
And you go, I need to know two things. Well, three, what percentage of the company do you want? How much money are offering? And are you an asshole? And presuming that we tick the boxes of enough money and they're not taking a controlling share. So you still run the business, but they're taking a minority share. And they're to give you, let's say, five million Australian dollars. I think it's, don't know, 3.8 million USD They give you five million. A good chunk, not crazy money. Can't retire the moon, but a good chunk. Nice seed investment. Where would you spend it first?
Fiona (46:50)
my first instinct is to solve the sales problem, like to actually get that person to come in and to have a runway for them to be able to set up an environment that they're able to perform. And obviously that means that they're already established in the markets that we're in. ⁓ And then I would be hiring ⁓ the dream team essentially and
I think we've spoken about this before, but how important the first hires are in an organization and making sure that they fit with the same ethos and values, but also they're able to get shit done and, you know, and really start to make a move on it. So that's where I'd start with sales, but also setting up the dream team. already got some people in mind.
Matthew Miller (47:44)
Yeah, we've got a list already. Kriebel Craig Bloodworth, I hope you're listening. ⁓ Sarah, what's your answer to that?
Fiona (47:47)
you
Sarah (47:52)
Yeah, think as well, so get the sales sorted, very important, start hiring the dream team. And then I think it's around getting the operations tighter. as a co-founder of team of two, there's a lot of stuff that we need to do that takes away from being more strategic. So I think it would be lining up some of that space and being a bit more.
streamlined and pushing that over to the side a little bit.
Matthew Miller (48:21)
All right, so if you're listening, you're a world-class salesperson, and you love data, but you qualify for that no-asshole policy there, then you should reach out. I love that.
We've only got a few minutes more. I'll ask you maybe a few more questions in that.
that area. So let's flip things around because I know you work a lot with Tableau and some other technologies, but Tableau is the one that I know you have a lot of depth in. You're in that Tableau community. So you run a Dub Dub for a while and then all of sudden Mark Benioff calls and goes, I'd like you guys to come on and be the co-CEOs of Tableau. So now you got a three and a half billion dollar business. And the first thing he says is, I want you to completely redo the budget.
All right, so this is it. This is the blank check, carte blanche. For every $100 we spend, how would you allocate those dollars? That's a big responsibility. You can take a second to think about
Sarah (49:19)
So I remember in the early days of when I first started using the tool, which is a little over 10 years ago, I remember back when the original founders owned Tableau, they spent a lot of money in R &D. I would like to see a lot more in R &D.
Fiona (49:39)
I am probably going to get shot down by the Tableau community for saying this. And so I apologize upfront for everyone, but I don't see the future of Tableau in Tableau Classic.
I see the future of Tableau in Tableau Next. And the reason why I say that it's not a thick client, it's all in the browser. It's being built from the ground up again. They've already learned some amazing things about what's really important in Classic, but it's really about bolt-ons and adding in. So there's a lot that's gone in to making Tableau as flexible as it is.
but now they can rebuild it from the ground up in a different platform. And the opportunity there is to really focus on things that are going to make data and analytics easier in the future. So we've talked a little bit about the semantic layer already. where that gets us to is being able to have much more simplified visualizations, less visualization, but more on the fly querying.
with natural language. so where I would be pouring all of my money into, in the R &D space at least, or the majority of it, like 80 or 90 % of whatever we allocate in R &D, it needs to be in Next and getting Next up and running and actually worthy of migrating clients into.
Matthew Miller (51:12)
Wow, that's a really interesting answer. It'll be fascinating to hear how the community reacts to that. The good news is, of course, it is an all hands on deck major focus on particularly the conversational part of Tableau Next. It's a major focus for us, bringing up the accuracy level, bringing up the quality of responses, the richness of the responses, the actionability of the responses. Major focus.
Fiona (51:13)
Sorry, sorry community.
Matthew Miller (51:36)
on making that just the absolute best it can be? What's your answer?
Fiona (51:38)
Right, and I would spend,
the thing that made Tableau really special was the amazing people that worked at Tableau. And I think that there are still some really amazing people that are there.
So I would like to see some of the money actually spent on the people in the teams and showing them that there's stability and that we're not necessarily replacing everyone with agents, that we are actually...
thoroughly committed to building the products out and for it to be a long-term goal of the organization.
Matthew Miller (52:18)
So I hear all in on Next, all in on Conversational, lots of R &D. I thought you were going to say there for a second, there's nobody left at Tableau who's any good. And then I thought, well, I don't know, hold on a minute. So I'm glad you didn't go there.
I wanted to ask you some kind of nerdy data viz questions. So you've been exploring Tableau Next. We're adding a whole bunch of new viz types and support for additional viz types and extensibility and embedding and really cool stuff. What is, in your opinion, the most overused chart in data viz? And what is the unsung chart not used enough in data viz? Sarah, I'm going to ask you first.
Sarah (53:00)
So the most overused viz chart in data viz is the bar chart. And I think that's great. And that's exactly how it should be because how often do you have to explain a bar chart? It should be never if it's labeled correctly, if it's got the right attributes and everything in it. And it's very obvious to see, know, are you in comparison? Are you up or you down that kind of thing? So that's for me, the
The most overused and rightfully so.
Fiona (53:33)
So I, yeah, okay. So the thing that's most overused that shouldn't be used at all is a donut chart. And I note that it's one of the first.
Matthew Miller (53:33)
bar chart. Fi, what's your answer?
Sarah (53:34)
humble.
Matthew Miller (53:43)
Whew, some hot
takes here today. No shortage of controversial takes here today.
Fiona (53:48)
And I know that that's one of the first charts that's actually available in Next too. And Notably Absent is a way to do period on period comparisons. we can't bring in the reference lines and things like that, but hopefully it's coming soon. Yeah, it's coming soon, it's coming soon. Next, I think the thing that ⁓ should be used more often is a bar chart. Like people try and get too complicated.
Matthew Miller (54:05)
Coming very soon. Yes.
Fiona (54:18)
People try and get too complicated with their visualizations and you know what? The really exciting thing when you use Tableau Agent is that it comes back with a bar chart and that's perfect and it's sorted and you can see things really, really quickly in it. So use more bar charts.
Matthew Miller (54:34)
You know,
I come on here as a guest host and actually, you know, I'm causing strife between co-founders with these controversial ideas. Well,
Fiona (54:43)
time.
Sarah (54:44)
same, it's the same. Yeah, And for me, the most underrated is ⁓ sparkline. So I think there's so much value in the mini chart. You know, yeah. Throw it in your BANs your big as numbers.
Fiona (54:50)
yeah, that's a good one.
Yeah, for sure.
Matthew Miller (55:00)
Yes! Love that. See?
Fiona (55:04)
Yeah, no, I think I'm with Sarah. I'm going to piggyback on her answer. I think that's a really great example. Tables are used a lot, but you can get some good tables too.
Matthew Miller (55:19)
Yeah, spark lines, BANs fantastic. I love that. Thank you both for the chance to connect today and chat. It's really cool to draw out your story. Really, really inspiring. And I hope that anybody listens to this, is inspired by it to improve their culture, improve the way they work, and maybe to reach out, become part of that dream team.
Fiona (55:21)
pipeline's bands.
Yeah, awesome. Well, thank you so much, Matthew. We're to take back the reins now, but that was brilliant. You've definitely got a future in podcasting if the whole Salesforce thing doesn't work out.
Sarah (55:56)
And being on the other side of the questions is both terrifying and refreshing. So thanks for putting us through the paces, Matthew.
Fiona (56:06)
And if you enjoy and want more of Matthew's insights, definitely check out episode D17, where we originally interviewed him about storytelling and data.
Sarah (56:16)
And as always, if you love what you're hearing on UnDUBBED hit that subscribe button, leave us a rating and share with your fellow Data Fam.
Fiona (56:26)
Until next time, stay curious, keep questioning, and remember, sometimes the best stories come from flipping the script.
Sarah (56:34)
Thanks for joining us on Undubbed, where we are unscripted, uncensored, and undeniably data.
Fiona (56:41)
Bye!
