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Hi, and welcome to the A16Z podcast.

Last year, the economist declared data to be the world's most valuable resource today.

Big corporations certainly have more data now at their fingertips than ever before.

So how do you actually create actionable insights and experience from your data for your

customers without getting too close for comfort?

This conversation includes CEO and co-founder of Mixed Panel, Suhail Doshi, Gil Elbas, the founder and CEO of Factual,

CEO of Foursquare, Jeff Gluck, and is moderated by A16Z partner Lauren Burson. It took place

at our summit event in November 2017. Trad traditionally, IT invested in tools to store and measure and house data, but held the keys to the castle, making it difficult for marketers and business people to actually make sense of data and information about their customers.

I think the quote I often hear is if it takes six months to answer a question, you probably stop asking questions.

There is a key evolution here towards IT tools, like some of the ones that you have,

democratizing data and bringing access to both IT individuals as well as marketers and business folks.

Can you talk a little bit about the shifting roles and responsibilities and how this is playing out and affecting you?

So on the accessibility side, what we find traditionally is that pretty much everybody has a very large data pipeline that usually consists of ingesting the information and then transforming that information, storing it somewhere, graphing it, or querying it, and then

from an executive, finally being able to get a dashboard where they can finally get that number.

You know, we don't all want to be SQL experts.

And so it's really important to find ways to give them the power to be able to do that.

However, there is a privacy component that we all do have to tackle in a company because, you know, for example, MixPennel works with a few banks. And one problem with,

of course, the banking industry, the financial services industry, is that there's just

a level of information that they cannot divulge to us. And they have to keep even housed

away from their own employees. And so therein lies this big problem with how do you make the data accessible

...