AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data
Martin Casado speaks with George Fraser, cofounder and CEO of Fivetran, about the future of data infrastructure in the age of AI.
The conversation covers Fivetran’s merger with dbt, the changing role of data platforms, and why Fraser believes many companies are overestimating the threat AI poses to enterprise software. They discuss open data access, the backlash against AI agents accessing systems of record, and why businesses still need centralized data foundations even as agent-based workflows become more common.
Along the way, Fraser shares his views on data gravity, coding agents, enterprise AI adoption, and how AI is changing the way software companies build and operate products.
Resources:
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Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.
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EP 36: Fivetran CEO George Fraser and Young VCs Launching Funds
In episode 36 Logan and Zach talk with Fivetran Co-Founder and CEO George Fraser about how entrepreneurship is evolving and whether the era of iterating on product until you find your niche still exists. Plus investors leaving major firms to start their own funds, how to choose a VC firm, and figuring out the right time to sell your company.
(0:00) Intro
(0:53) Investors starting their own funds
(10:05) Tiger
(14:16) Choosing a VC firm
(22:07) Facebook’s Yahoo offer
(25:04) Welcome George Fraser
(30:02) Plaid comparison
(39:01) Salesforce data
(42:32) Finding product/market fit
(46:52) Era of iterating to success
(51:55) What’s driving stack changes?
(56:29) Mixing family and business
(1:02:17) Academia to entrepreneurship
(1:00:28) Lawrenceville Boarding School
(1:05:56) Acquisition lessons learned
(1:10:07) Closing
Mixed and edited: Justin Hrabovsky
Produced: Andrew Nadeau and Rashad Assir
Executive Producer: Josh Machiz
Music: Griff Lawson
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About the Show
A Saturday morning podcast hosted by Logan Bartlett (Partner and Managing Director at Redpoint Ventures) covering the tech news with his friends and other people with industry expertise.
Executive Producer: Rashad Assir
Producer: Leah Clapper
Mixing and editing: Justin Hrabovsky
Check out Unsupervised Learning, Redpoint's AI Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@UCUl-s_Vp-Kkk_XVyDylNwLA
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About the Show
Logan Bartlett is a Software Investor at Redpoint Ventures - a Silicon Valley-based VC with $6B AUM and investments in Snowflake, DraftKings, Twilio, and Netflix. In each episode of The Logan Bartlett Show, we sit down with the people behind today’s most important startups and extract the tactics, lessons, and frameworks they’ve learned the hard way. Conversations span hiring to GTM, product, growth, fundraising and everything in between - collectively forming the ultimate playbook to make you a better CEO, investor or board member.
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The Great Data Debate
Over a decade after the idea of “big data'' was first born, data has become the central nervous system for decision-making in organizations of all sizes. But the modern data stack is evolving and which infrastructure trends and technologies will ultimately win out remains to be decided.
In this podcast, originally recorded as part of Fivetran's Modern Data Stack conference, five leaders in data infrastructure debate that question: a16z general partner and pioneer of software defined networking Martin Casado, former CEO of Snowflake Bob Muglia; Michelle Ufford, founder and CEO of Noteable; Tristan Handy, founder of Fishtown Analytics and leader of the open source project dbt; and Fivetran founder George Fraser.
The conversation covers the future of data lakes, the new use cases for the modern data stack, data mesh and whether decentralization of teams and tools is the future, and how low we actually need to go with latency. And while the topic of debate is the modern data stack, the themes and differing perspectives strike at the heart of an even bigger: how does technology evolve in complex enterprise environments?
We're re-running this episode as part of a special report on Future.com, the Data50: the World's Top Data Startups, which covers the bellwether private companies across the most exciting categories in data, from AI/ML to observability and more.
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Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.
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The Great Data Debate
Lakes v. warehouses, analytics v. AI/ML, SQL v. everything else... As the technical capabilities of data lakes and data warehouses converge, are the separate tools and teams that run AI/ML and analytics converging as well?
In this podcast, originally recorded as part of Fivetran's Modern Data Stack conference, five leaders in data infrastructure debate that question: a16z general partner and pioneer of software defined networking Martin Casado, former CEO of Snowflake Bob Muglia; Michelle Ufford, founder and CEO of Noteable; Tristan Handy, founder of Fishtown Analytics and leader of the open source project dbt; and Fivetran founder George Fraser.
The conversation covers the future of data lakes, the new use cases for the modern data stack, data mesh and whether decentralization of teams and tools is the future, and how low we actually need to go with latency. And while the topic of debate is the modern data stack, the themes and differing perspectives strike at the heart of an even bigger: how does technology evolve in complex enterprise environments?
Stay Updated:
Find a16z on YouTube: YouTube
Find a16z on X
Find a16z on LinkedIn
Listen to the a16z Show on Spotify
Listen to the a16z Show on Apple Podcasts
Follow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg
Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Digging Into Data Replication At Fivetran
Summary
The extract and load pattern of data replication is the most commonly needed process in data engineering workflows. Because of the myriad sources and destinations that are available, it is also among the most difficult tasks that we encounter. Fivetran is a platform that does the hard work for you and replicates information from your source systems into whichever data warehouse you use. In this episode CEO and co-founder George Fraser explains how it is built, how it got started, and the challenges that creep in at the edges when dealing with so many disparate systems that need to be made to work together. This is a great conversation to listen to for a better understanding of the challenges inherent in synchronizing your data.
Announcements
Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management
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You listen to this show to learn and stay up to date with what’s happening in databases, streaming platforms, big data, and everything else you need to know about modern data management.For even more opportunities to meet, listen, and learn from your peers you don’t want to miss out on this year’s conference season. We have partnered with organizations such as O’Reilly Media, Dataversity, and Corinium Global Intelligence. Upcoming events include the O’Reilly AI Conference, the Strata Data Conference, and the combined events of the Data Architecture Summit and Graphorum. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/conferences to learn more and take advantage of our partner discounts when you register.
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Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing George Fraser about FiveTran, a hosted platform for replicating your data from source to destination
Interview
Introduction
How did you get involved in the area of data management?
Can you start by describing the problem that Fivetran solves and the story of how it got started?
Integration of multiple data sources (e.g. entity resolution)
How is Fivetran architected and how has the overall system design changed since you first began working on it?
monitoring and alerting
Automated schema normalization. How does it work for customized data sources?
Managing schema drift while avoiding data loss
Change data capture
What have you found to be the most complex or challenging data sources to work with reliably?
Workflow for users getting started with Fivetran
When is Fivetran the wrong choice for collecting and analyzing your data?
What have you found to be the most challenging aspects of working in the space of data integrations?}}
What have been the most interesting/unexpected/useful lessons that you have learned while building and growing Fivetran?
What do you have planned for the future of Fivetran?
Contact Info
LinkedIn
@frasergeorgew on Twitter
Parting Question
From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today?
Links
Fivetran
Ralph Kimball
DBT (Data Build Tool)
Podcast Interview
Looker
Podcast Interview
Cron
Kubernetes
Postgres
Podcast Episode
Oracle DB
Salesforce
Netsuite
Marketo
Jira
Asana
Cloudwatch
Stackdriver
The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA
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