When metadata becomes data

Barr Moses, David Wallace, Drew Banin, Jon Loyens, and Matt Allen

Barr was previously the VP of Customer Operations at Gainsight, a customer success company. She helped scale the company 10x in revenue and, among other functions, built the data and analytics team. She has served in the Israeli Air Force as a commander of an intelligence data analyst unit. Barr graduated from Stanford with a B.Sc. in Mathematical and Computational Science.

David’s main interests these days center around making sense of the data we collect about our data. Outside of work, he loves mountain biking, board gaming, and his two dogs.

Drew is the co-founder at Fishtown Analytics, makers of dbt. Drew works with open source maintainers, contributors, and users to build dbt and strike fear in the hearts of database optimizers.

Jon is a passionate advocate for building data-driven cultures rooted in openness and transparency. He used to be the VP of Engineering for Traveler Products at HomeAway and VP of Engineering at Bazaarvoice. As a long-time technology executive in Austin, he has lived the rise in the trend of data and analytics as a democratizing force. Jon brought A/B testing and data-driven product management to Bazaarvoice and massively expanded the data programs at HomeAway.

Matt is a senior data engineer at The Zebra in Austin, TX. He has spent the last 5 years building data pipelines and analytics systems and navigating the complexity that comes with a growing data organization.

A shared understanding of how data is defined and managed provides confidence in how it's used. Metadata makes data valuable. But it also holds enormous potential for creating value in and of itself, through workflow tuning, optimization, and a variety of other performance-based use cases. In this panel, industry experts will shed some light on the different approaches to metadata management, whether there's any truth to vendor claims, and who at any organization should really care