 Hello and welcome to Dataversity Talks, a podcast where we discuss with industry leaders and experts how they have built their careers around data. I'm your host, Shannon Kemp, and today we're talking to Dataversity founder and CEO, Tony Shaw, about his career. Hello and welcome, my name is Shannon Kemp and I'm the Chief Digital Manager at Dataversity and this is my career in data at Dataversity Talks podcast dedicated to learning from those who have careers in data management to understand how they got there and to be talking with people who help make those careers a little bit easier. To keep up to date in the latest in data management education, you can go to dataversity.net forward slash subscribe. And today we are joined by Dataversity's own founder and CEO, Tony Shaw. And normally this is where a podcast host would read a short bio of the guest, but in this podcast, your bio is actually what we're here to talk about. Tony, hello and welcome. Hi, Shannon. Thanks for having me. How are you today? Thanks for joining us. Very excited to have you on this podcast and helping us to kick this off. Yeah, glad to be here. So tell me, I mean, I of course know what you do and what your job title is, but tell everybody out there, what's your recent current job title and what are your responsibilities? I'm the founder of Dataversity and my current job title is CEO. So I do normal CEO stuff in that role, kind of oversee what everybody else is doing and figure out what the company is a whole, what sort of business we should be involved in, provide governance over all the various functions and just kind of try to keep my hand on the tiller so that we're heading in the right direction. I love it. Well, that's not your only job, right? You hold several different roles. Well, day to day. So there's all the usual meetings to do the things that I just mentioned. Primarily I'd say I'm a content person. I think where I add the most value is in figuring out what our content should be directed at, what audiences it needs to serve, how we go about serving the information and education needs of our audience. And when I say content, I mean both in terms of the subject matter, what the topics are as well as the formats in which we deliver that. That's probably half my role. So when we develop a new conference, for example, when we're developing any new event, I'm very involved in defining what that event is gonna cover, what sort of speakers we're looking at. I'm very involved in reviewing and selecting the presentations and deciding what balance of topics needs to be included in that event in order for it to best address our audience's needs. Tell me a little bit about DataVersity, why you founded it and what DataVersity is. Honestly, I didn't get there immediately. I grew up in Australia for anybody who's wondering what my accent is. It's not entirely North American, but I've lived more than half my life in North America at this point. But I grew up in Australia and I joined a company down there that was involved in the development of business conferences. And it was an international company that had an office in New York at the time, but I started out as a conference developer, conference producer with that organization. It was called IIR for the Institute for International Research. And it became a hugely successful organization. It sold eventually for over a billion US dollars after many years. I was long gone at that point, but many folks may have heard of it. Anyway, it turned out I was very good at figuring out what people wanted to learn. And do that through a fairly simple process of calling people up. Back before there was email capability. We would read the newspaper, read articles. We would find out who the experts were in a particular field. We would call them up and say, we're thinking that this could be a topic that is interesting for people to attend a conference on. The very first conference I did was designed for corporate secretaries, which in Australia is kind of a chief legal and administrative function, often also a financial role. So I talked to a number of corporate secretaries about what they needed to know in order to do their job better. And the weight of that input would then go into developing a conference agenda. I would call up and talk to CPAs and lawyers and regulators and the people who were responsible for advising corporate secretaries and develop a conference that way. And so it just turned out and the next one I did was for human resource professionals then I did one for real estate developers and construction companies. You would in this job kind of go from one industry to another and figure out what information needs do people have and develop a conference, design a conference specifically for them. And it turned out I was just very good at figuring out what those needs were. Essentially my method, if you like, was to imagine myself in that role at a big organization or whatever was appropriate. If it was a small organization, just what's it like to have this role at that organization? What sort of questions would I be asking myself? And then that became my way of designing an educational event. And I would talk to the speakers and say, these are the questions that people want answered. Can we invite you to do a presentation that addresses these? So from there, when I moved to the US, the US is obviously a much larger and more specialized market. People don't spread themselves across multiple industries in quite the same way that we did back then. So I eventually got drawn more and more into the technology space and some of the conferences I developed back in the late 80s were around superconductivity, neural networks. Yes, neural networks actually began way back in the 80s. They're not just a function of the past decade. We did things like over-the-counter financial options which eventually became responsible for the global financial collapse. So probably shouldn't own up to that one. But yeah, it was kind of an open field at the time because there wasn't a lot of competition in the conference space 30 years ago. And so we went after whatever new markets we felt we could run a successful conference in. Where I started to get involved in data management was I joined a company called Technology Transfer Institute. They were based in Santa Monica. The owner of that company was a gentleman by the name of Leonard Kleinrock who was the person who sent the very first computer to computer internet message or computer to computer message before it became the internet. Len was a professor at UCLA, his lab in 1969 had developed computer networking to the point where machine to machine communication was possible. And so he had a very successful training business. Some of the people who I used to work with there probably the most famous at the time was James Martin, a prolific author and speaker but Ed Codd and Chris Date used to do seminars for TTI before they started Codd and Date. Tom DeMarco was a popular speaker. It was a place where I got to rub shoulders with a lot of very influential technology innovators and Len's philosophy really as an educator was to have the best possible people doing the training. He felt that the person you most wanted to learn about something from was the person who actually created it. So that was just really interesting place to be. I was there about 10 years and became the CEO eventually. And that was just at the end of the 90s. And for whatever market reasons I kind of forget now but the seminar business was fading away. And so I had decided to go do a dot com and it's gonna be in the identity management space. And there might be some folks listening to this who are amused that the name of the company I chose was bigid.com and I had that URL. It turns out there's now a very successful company called bigid.com who obviously picked up that name after I had long abandoned it but and they are in the data governance space. So we work with them now. It's kind of a crazy coincidence. But anyway, if you looked into the lineage of that particular URL, I held it first. But my startup dot com days were very short lived. Turned out I was just not the right person to be running an organization developing a technical product. You know, my background generally is in marketing and business type roles. And so I started a company called Wilshire Conferences which was the predecessor of DataVersity. And Wilshire ran an event called the metadata conference. That's where we hooked up with Daima International originally. And so that was where I became more involved with data management and progressively moved towards the creation of DataVersity. Really, the genesis of DataVersity was that at Wilshire Conferences we were, I think we just had two events at the time but it's just not very descriptive. It describes that we do conferences but it didn't describe that we were educating people, that we were involved in data. So, and one of my staff at the time came up with the name of DataVersity which just was immediately popular with everybody on staff. And we decided to go that way. And then shortly thereafter, I met you and you turned DataVersity into more of what it is today with our significant digital presence. You obviously built the publishing side of the business. I remained fairly committed to the event side of our business which until COVID was still the primary driver of the business, but since COVID then the digital programming has obviously been far more significant. So that's the much longer than you asked for introduction but I guess one thing I would like to say there is, I don't consider myself a data management practitioner. My expertise is more around training, publishing and providing the right information to a data management audience. So quite honestly, I could not do the job that our audience does. I do a different job, I think do it pretty well and people like what we do but I'm not an expert in data management. My expertise is really more in providing information and training and education to people. So I love it. And there's certainly some aspects that I didn't know before, which is great. You know, and but it's true though, I mean, is even though we are not data architects or data modelers ourselves necessarily, I find sometimes and maybe you do too, the irony of what we do is always, you know, working to manage our own data and the data that we need to manage the business. Yeah, it's so valuable. For whatever reason, and I'm not quite sure why I think partly it's this approach that I have of putting myself in the position of the person who I'm trying to provide a service for and imagining what it must be like to be in that role. So for whatever reason, I found that I've been pretty good over the years at making connections between things. You know, I'll hear somebody talking about the application of technology to one area and I'll say, hey, well, that's interesting but wouldn't this be a great solution for this problem instead? The best example of that I can think is back when we used to be involved with semantic technology and the semantic web. All the folks at the time who were in that space were trying to come up with the next Facebook or the next Google, you know, they were focused on social networks and search. And I remember having conversations with people saying, yeah, but, you know, if you wanna actually sell products into big organizations, focus on practical issues like master data management or metadata management because the technology that underlies these things that they were working on was really appropriate for solving the problems that MDM and metadata management were trying to get it. And, you know, it turns out eventually many companies didn't do that. You know, graph technology turned into numerous solutions that are targeting data integration and metadata repositories. And, you know, I give myself credit for that, at least as being able to kind of connect the dots. Sometimes more easily maybe than somebody who's really, you know, cut their head buried in a problem. What is it? Is it the architect or the engineer who knows a little bit about lots of different things? I know less than an architect or an engineer, but I know a tiny bit about a lot of different things. And sometimes that puts me in a good position to make connections. With a robust catalog of courses offered on demand and industry leading live online sessions throughout the year, the Dataversity Training Center is your launch pad for career success. Browse the complete catalog at training.datavocity.net and use code DVTOX for 20% off your purchase. Well, let's back up a little bit. So, you know, you said you started getting into the conference business when you were still in Sydney. You know, I mean, back up even further, you know, is that what you wanted to be when you grew up? I mean, what was the dream? No, I wanted to be an architect. As a kid, I wanted to be an architect. I really wanted to design buildings. I thought that seemed really cool. My very first job out of high school was with a big Australian construction company called Lend Lease that, and I worked for the building materials area. So I sold lumber, building materials, all sorts of things, which I really enjoyed. That was what brought me to North America actually for the first time. I went to the Northwest, spent some time in Vancouver, Washington State, Oregon, visiting lumber mills and joinery stores and like joiner shops, people who did find woodwork, that sort of stuff. So, much as I love that, you know, it turned out not to be where my school really lay. I was a bit more intellectual than I was handy with tools. So, I ended up in a more academic kind of a pursuit. But, yeah, honestly, I thought I was gonna, I did a business degree. I thought I was gonna end up working for Rank Xerox, selling photocopiers or something. I don't know, I just, I should mention, I started out doing a marketing degree, had ambitions of being, you know, in consumer marketing or something, but I failed my consumer behavior course twice, which was a psychology course. And so I was excluded from the marketing school and had to go back a couple of years later and to do an accounting degree instead, which as it turns out was not of any detriment to my career. In fact, I think having an accounting degree has been incredibly valuable for me since then. I've never worked in accounting, but to this day I use that knowledge in different contexts. And it just helps me to understand business so much better than I would have if I didn't have it. But, you know, in my early 20s, I just kind of stumbled from one job to another a bit until something stuck. So I wish I could say I had an ambition that I jumped into and, you know, got qualified for. But most of the people who end up in the conference business, at least, and a lot who end up in the publishing business do so through a fairly circuitous route. And mine was definitely circuitous. Still doing some work for TTI today, don't you? Well, yes, so what happened was around about 2000, the year 2000, TTI had sold off our biggest event and Len Kleinrock had this opportunity to take over a strategic technology advisory service. It was called Vanguard. No relationship to the financial, to the investment firm. It was a division of consulting company, division of computer science and corporation, actually. But it was a small service that they offered for elite clients as a business development exercise. So anyway, the thing that was really attractive about this was that the board of advisors for Vanguard was just this elite group of technologists. You had Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of MIT. You had Alan Kay, the father of the GUI and sort of Apple's chief software architecture architect. Yet Gordon Bell, who was the father of the VAX. John Perry Barlow, a little bit of an oddball in that group, but a very prominent commentator and writer about the emerging digital space, the emerging cyberspace. John was such a character. He used to be a lyricist for the Grateful Dead. Had so many great stories. There was Bob Lucky who was the chief research guy at Bell Labs, executive director of Bell Labs. So anyway, Len really wanted to get involved in this and to take it over because CSC was resigning it and I was CEO of TTI at the time. And we inherited it. It was a very difficult business to run at first. We didn't really know how to do that, but eventually came to grips with it. And I kind of stumbled into the role of running the meetings. I mean, there was nobody else to do it. And running the meetings was a combination of just keeping us on time and on topic and hurting all the cats because you can imagine the board members there were, they weren't really going to take direction from someone like me, which turned out to be an incorrect assumption. And actually the most valuable business lesson I ever learned came from exactly that situation, but I can return to that in a minute. Anyway, then shortly after that, I went off to do my dot com, but Len asked me to stay in the role that I had. And I just, there were various owners and managers of that business over the course of the next many years. But they kept asking me to continue this particular role of managing the meetings. And it became such a significant part of my own education over the years. I think in every business, but especially when you're responsible for providing people with education, you need input. I mean, being productive at your job, it's one thing, but without the intellectual input to keep things going, to keep your perspective fresh, then it's very easy to get stale. And this particular opportunity lost it for, well, it's still going. I'm actually running one of their meetings here in LA in June, but of course with COVID, everything's kind of shut down. So I haven't really done much for the past couple of years. But yeah, my role there is to keep us on time, keep us on topic. And I think probably one of the reasons I've stuck around is that I have continuity. I understand the culture of that particular business. And it's not a big time commitment for me, but what has been fabulous about it from the standpoint of diversity is it's given me access to such a lot of interesting people who I've been able to bring into the diversity fold. A guy like Doug Lennett, for example, the CEO of Psyche, probably the single largest, most consistent project on artificial intelligence in the history of technology. And Doug had spoken at many of our events. He always, aside from just being a good speaker and very amusing, he just has such a lot of value to add in terms of helping people understand complicated topics. And all of the board members will like that. That's why they have the role that they did. But yeah, anyway, the thing that I was gonna mention that I just touched on was actually Doug who took me aside at the very first of these TTI meetings because he could see that, I was really being deferential, deferential DEF to the board members and the people in the audience who are mostly C-level technology people. And he could see that I was being, looking for them to direct what happened next instead of in my role as manager of the business and manager of the meeting instead of me taking charge and running the meeting, which he said, I can see that you don't feel comfortable sort of bossing these people around, which I acknowledged. He said, just disavow that notion at all. Your role on this day is to run this meeting, keep it on time. And they want you to tell them what to do, where to be next, where we're ending this conversation now we're going on to the next thing. And it took me a while to internalize that, but it really in retrospect was the most valuable piece of professional advice they ever got because it became so applicable in other situations later. It's like, that was my role. That's what was expected of me. If I didn't take that responsibility and execute it, then it wasn't gonna get done because nobody else was gonna, nobody else had the position to do the things that needed to be done. So it's been tremendously helpful. I've passed that advice on to numerous folks, for example, who worked for the same organization. It's very intimidating. I mean, we had Nobel Prize winners. We had CEOs of huge organizations. Bill Gates and Larry Allison spoke at those meetings, for example. And there's a difference that's given to those folks because of their position, but in the context of that meeting, everybody needed boundaries and guidance and they respect you no matter who you are if you take ownership of that, the responsibility that you have and you do it the best that you can. So yeah, anyway, I've always thanked Doug for that. Cause once you do get the confidence to deal with, senior or prominent people like that, I think it just becomes so much more natural and your relationship, you just have a much better relationship with them. Yeah, certainly. I mean, that's amazing advice, certainly applicable to just about anybody in any situation. I've certainly seen you apply that in our conferences. And I love the advice that you use to stay up to date, keep everything fresh, keep innovating. I think that's so important for anybody in any job, any role, to not get stuck and stale. Yeah, I think that's one of the things that I really learned from working with that board was how to stop and think. It's so tempting at times to shut off new ideas because everybody's heard these stories about who was at the founder of digital equipment who said that, or IBM, I forget which one now, said, there's only gonna be five computers that are ever needed. And the number of stories that these folks had about missed opportunities, cause many of them had been there sort of from the very beginning. The number of stories about missed opportunities just from not understanding or not being open to understand. I give you the perfect example in my own life at the moment is there's all this talk about the metaverse, this kind of digital version of reality that is theoretically coming. And we know that Facebook is positioning itself for this and I don't know if this thing is gonna happen. I'm like, I don't really want it to as, you know, as somebody who doesn't really participate in online worlds or anything like that. I'm like rolling my eyes hoping it doesn't come before I retire or expire or cause I just don't really have any interest in it personally. But if I allow myself to take that attitude and shut myself off to it, I could be missing a huge opportunity either for our business or maybe for my stock portfolio or for my nieces and nephews who are coming up who wanna know where technology is going. I mean, maybe it'll work, maybe it won't, but I don't think I should be making a premature judgment about it right now and just saying that I don't like it therefore I don't want it to exist. It's clearly something that I don't understand at this point and I need to learn a lot more about. At least if I'm gonna end up with an opinion about the metaverse, at least let it be an educated opinion or an informed opinion. So in fact, not to be promoting ourselves right now but I've invited somebody to talk about metaverse at our next online conference. So I'm hoping that I learned quite a lot from that particular talk. That's some fantastic multitasking. Something interesting for our audience and you. I love it. Ready to mingle with your fellow data governance practitioners? Join us in Washington DC this December for the Data Governance and Information Quality Conference. Five days packed full of new knowledge, new friends and new strategies are yours when you register at dgiq2022east.dativersity.net. Take advantage of our super early bird pricing when you register before October 7th. But we do wanna talk about data diversity a little bit. I mean, where do you see data diversity right now? What is data diversity? Why are people coming here? What's, what do we need? Yeah, so as you would well know, we redirected our original conference company more than 10 years ago now to become data diversity and we introduced publishing, we introduced online training, we introduced our lot of free webinar content and the truth is that a lot of that activity was designed to help us develop an audience for the things that we hoped we could develop the business around, which at the time was mostly the in-person events. So I think though that what we've seen since COVID is that companies and individuals now don't differentiate between in-person learning and online learning to the extent they used to. I think our in-person programming needs to address a much different set of needs now than just learning. There's obviously an experiential aspect to meeting with other people and being in a physical place that we need to take perhaps more, I don't wanna say more seriously, but to take it more into account in the future is how can we enhance learning by being around other people as opposed to simply taking in a flow of information? I think where that's reflected in our programming, COVID has been a huge learning experience for all of us at the first in-person program that we ran last December. We had two different sessions about mindfulness and what it means to be in the moment and to be thinking in terms of the whole person as opposed to just solving this one data management problem. And I think you'll see that reflected in more of our content in the future is putting our jobs in a larger context, a business context, a human context, dare I say societal context. I don't wanna get too grandiose about this, but I think people probably are not gonna be meeting face to face as often as they used to. And therefore we need to take greater advantage of those in-person encounters to try to address a bit more than we have attempted to in the past. And so mostly what I'm referring to there, are these things like the person and understanding the big picture around what we do as opposed to just being very focused on the narrow aspects of a particular job function. Yeah, something you've hit on a couple of times now is really just how you got into the business and what you found good and bringing up the mindfulness. I think it all kind of ties well together is understanding how people learn and all these changes that have happened over the last couple of years and understanding that mindfulness has become a very important thing in society and how people manage their day-to-day jobs, whether in data management or in something else. I like that that's really important to how we do business. Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting, I was probably as guilty as anybody of sort of saying, when people come to conference, they wanna learn as much as they can and clearly they wanna network with other people and enjoy that, but I fell into the trap of thinking that the main purpose was just this narrow professional interest and I think since I recognize that COVID has changed this about me, then I assume it has changed it about a lot of other people too, that we're just looking for something else now and I can't define what that is for other people necessarily, but I just understand now that we need to be broader, need to be thinking a bit more broadly about what it means to attend a week-long professional conference and everybody kind of recognizes that the best learning comes from sitting next to the right person at lunch or at dinner or the places that you enjoy the most are usually around those encounters outside the meeting room. So we're working hard at trying to figure out the best ways to give people those, more of those opportunities. Even online, yeah. Yeah, it's, I mean, it turns out it's harder than you imagine to transfer that thing to online, but it is possible. So we're working on that part as well. You know, I mean, you try to create opportunities rather than enforcing it. You know, you can't just squish people together. There seems to be this kind of serendipitous aspect of people connecting that I can't claim to understand, but that's probably something to add it out. And it's, I think probably one of my favorite things you introduced me to is when we've gone as a company to other people's conferences or even, you know, inware and social settings at our own conferences, you kind of have a rule that we need to all fan out and not sit at the same table. So we have the opportunity for those networking and encounters and those moments where you meet somebody who just inspires you to do something new and change and bring that back into the fold. Yeah, there's a couple of philosophies that I've always tried to bring to our in-person events. One is the importance of peer-to-peer learning, meaning, you know, having case studies from people who talk practically about what they do, the successes and failures, that, you know, if I was a data architect, I'd wanna learn from another data architect as much or if not more than I would from somebody who had, you know, written a lot of articles or, you know, because another data architect understands what I'm dealing with every single day. Like when I go to another conference, I wanna hear from other people who are trying to market their educational products or come up with new ideas about how to make meetings more interesting. I'm certainly not diminishing the expertise of consultants. I think that the great advantage of consultants is that they get to see experience across, you know, dozens, if not hundreds of different customer organizations. But if I want somebody to really understand my problem, then I wanna talk to somebody who has the same problem as me. I think that's why so many people talk about coming to an event like Enterprise Data World or TGIQ and say, you know, they get such a, that their batteries are so recharged by the experience because, you know, they get to talk to people who have exactly the same challenges that they do. And maybe they've come up with solutions to that and that can be helpful. Or maybe they're just, you know, asking the same questions that could be helpful as well. But yeah, that peer-to-peer aspect, I think, is just so important to having the right sort of, having a really positive learning environment. So that's why that tends to be the thing that directs us the most. In developing the content for our events, I'm always looking for those case studies, those will take priority over, you know, the folks who are maybe more expert, but ultimately, you know, program design is a matter of balance more than almost any other issue. But yeah, anyway, I feel like I didn't answer the question that you asked about the future diversity. Well, I just, I really just asked about what is the diversity today and what are we doing? So we haven't gotten into the future yet. Well, I could, yeah, I mean, I can answer that to some extent, you know, clearly, diversity today is, as an organization, much more focused on digital delivery than we were pre-COVID. That's been by necessity. Thankfully, we were actually in the business of digital delivery pre-COVID. So we didn't have to actually develop that capability and we were able, you know, we had kind of a running start, but for many years, it was not the thing that was driving the bigger portion of the business. And now it is. I mean, that'll balance out a bit as we come back to some in-person events. But, you know, I hate to talk in terms of positive outcomes from COVID because, you know, there really aren't many, but I think COVID has convinced a lot of organizations that they can still be productive without being face-to-face 100% of the time. And from the standpoint of the services that we provide, you know, training can be productive. It's certainly more cost-effective in many contexts when delivered digitally. And so we will continue to push forward with the development of more digitally-based training opportunities. So I think we will continue to expand our offerings in the emerging areas of data management. Things, I mean, it seems like there's no slowing down the momentum for better data governance. And that's clearly a sweet spot for us. But, you know, I would see us getting more involved with topics of artificial intelligence and advanced analytics. I think that's clearly where a lot of business people want to be focused for the future and where a lot of innovation is happening. So, you know, I think generally too, particularly in our role, you know, our name, the diversity implies education. And I can see us heading more in the direction of providing tools for a broader data literacy of not just the big organizations that form part of our that form most of our customer base at the moment, but perhaps for society more generally, you know, we're not yet at the point of a diversity TikTok, but who knows, if we could capture entertaining data education in the space of 30 seconds or 60 seconds, then maybe we'll launch a diversity TikTok account. But I mean, I think we've seen many examples of where it could be incredibly, it could be transformative if more people understood about, if more people were more literate about data. And I'd love for us to play a useful part in that if it's possible. I love it. So in terms of, I mean, obviously we're still, it's a company focusing in data management. So do you see those data management jobs, like those involved in data governance, those involved in data science, data scientists, data engineers, data architects, do you see those jobs continuing growing over the next few years? Do you see, is this a thing to get into? Yeah, it doesn't seem to me that there's anything that will slow that trend down. We've seen an increasing audience around all the topics that we provide. So my senses of that will continue. Whereas our focus up to this point has generally been on a North American centric, English speaking community, you know, as well as I do, that when we run a conference, we see people from every corner of the world. And so I think a big part of our growth in future may well come from an international audience. But yeah, I think we're really at that a very kind of immature level of acceptance or one of the surveys we did recently of our own community of data governance professionals. You know, the survey data from that demonstrated that there were I think less than 10% of the audience felt that they were at a level of reasonable maturity. They were almost all at the level of we're thinking about it. We have a plan, but we haven't started or they were at the level of we've started, but it's still very early days. So, you know, I think if you just deal with the folks who are already engaged with us, you'll see that everybody's just getting started for the most part. Almost everybody is just getting started. So yeah, I think there's a long way to go. Any advice you give for people getting into data management? Well, again, I'll stress that I'm not a data manager myself. However, as somebody who's not a data manager who has become involved very extensively with data management professionals, I think the thing that has enabled me to understand what our community has to deal with is that I have a pretty good business sense for how data can be useful. And I think if everybody had the opportunity before they got into any professional specialization be it data management or financial management or anything that has more of a specialization, I would say try to get a sense for the broader business because that's what drives the need for whatever those specialist skills are. And, you know, I'm probably just putting some different words around things that I see data scientists writing about or engineers writing about. I mean, people who do startups, for example, you know, some startups come from technical specialists, but for the most part not, they come from business people who have better business ideas. So I think if you have data management skills or if you have an interest in what data management involves, you know, try to get some exposure to the business problems directly from a business standpoint and you will serve yourself and your employer better in the long term. You know, just understanding what it's like, my early jobs were in sales and marketing. Just understanding what it's like to be on the phone with a customer or to be standing on the other side of the counter in a retail operation. Practical business issues like those where data management can be vital for solving a problem, but without that perspective, then you, you know, it's really hard to appreciate what those opportunities are. So that would be my broad advice. You know, maybe easier said than done, but yeah, I speak as a, you know, as someone with a bit of an entrepreneurial bent. So I like to find business solutions. I'm sort of drawn to that aspect of the data management lifecycle, I guess, as opposed to, you know, the detailed technological solutions, but yeah. Yeah. I love it. Well, anything additional you want to add? You know, certainly this is the time to plug anything that you would like to plug. I don't know. I feel like I've just talked about myself for an hour. Yeah, look, all of us at Data Diversity are really excited about getting back to face-to-face meeting. The recent, the fact that we were not ultimately able to do that with Enterprise Data World this year was a huge disappointment. And, you know, we understand why. I mean, people are still reluctant to get back, particularly, we made that decision during the Omicron Surge and I think it was the right one. But, you know, the experience we had last December when we were able to get back together, even with a smaller audience, it was just, it was kind of a combination of relief inspiration, you know, it felt so good to be face-to-face learning and talking about stuff with people just a few feet away from you. Look, I hope obviously that there's no more setbacks. We are very careful when we go on site. We will continue to be very careful. You know, we actually hire a company to do financial, pardon me, not financial modeling, to do risk modeling prior to each of our events this year, based on the location of the event, the configuration of the meeting space, the type of attendees who are, we work with a company called Epistemics, who does risk modeling of that meeting delivery to tell us that the risks of meeting face, the risks of contracting COVID during a face-to-face meeting at this point, I'd say are extremely low because A, the precautions, B, that the audience is very safety-conscious. So, you know, I think the risks inherent in attending a business conference at this point are actually among the best that you might get in any other context. We're very excited about getting back to meeting. We're also, though, very excited about all the other things that we're doing. So whichever way you think we're going to do, whichever way you folks choose to engage with us, we'll continue to do our best to exceed expectations and deliver the value that people are looking for. So... I love it. And to find out more, you can always go to dataverseed.net for everything, find out what we're doing. Yeah. Right. I do wanna maybe sign off with something which is just a thank you to everybody who's been so supportive in the past couple of years. You know, when we first faced the cancellation of the 2020 EDW program, if everybody at that point had said, give us some money back, you know, we would have been out of business within a few weeks. We didn't, you know, in our business, we've taken registration fees and sponsorship fees and we pay people, we pay deposits, we line up vendors and, you know, this was about a week before the conference, I think, when this happened and there's just no way that we could have paid every refund request if that had been the case. We also faced some hefty venue cancellation fees which thankfully eventually were removed, but, you know, the outlook was really quite difficult for a while there and thankfully, our customers were extraordinarily understanding and allowed us to sort of keep the money that they'd given us with a promise to deliver in the future. In many cases, we offered folks digital products and services in lieu or in others. We said, we'll carry your credit forward for as long as necessary for you to be able to use it in future. And that understanding has enabled us to survive as a business to this point. Now things changed in the meantime and, you know, the digital deliveries worked out for us and so I do wanna thank everybody who is considerate of our situation at the time and willing to trust us that was the difference, frankly. So we will remember that and just do our absolute utmost to, you know, be as good as we can in future years because we owe a lot of folks for their trust, so. It's true, one of my favorite parts of this job is we work with an amazing community, so. Yeah, yeah. Thank you for listening to Dataversity Talks brought to you by Dataversity. Subscribe to our newsletter for podcast updates and information about our free educational articles, blogs and webinars at dataversity.net, forward slash subscribe.