Data Minds Episode #7 — Derek Steer

In this episode, I interview Derek Steer (co-founder/CEO at Mode).

• Why Derek doesn’t call himself a “data scientist”
• The founding story of Mode Analytics. A “crucible moment” / challenge along the way
• What Mode is and who uses it
• The most common misconceptions about analytics
• What makes an analytics team great
• How analytics teams can help others use data more often in decision making
• The skills that data people need to foster to become team leaders (eg “don’t be a house”)
• How data analysts and data scientists can make their case to get investment into the tools they need
• Derek’s purpose
• The book Derek gives most often
• AND much more :)

Meet Derek Steer

Derek Steer is the CEO of Mode, a startup enabling analysts and data scientists to share and discover work. With Mode, analysts are more productive and connected, both publicly within the data community and privately within their organizations. Before co-founding Mode in 2013, Derek was an early member of Yammer’s Analytics team, where he led sales and monetization analytics. Derek has also worked in antitrust economics and on the monetization analytics team at Facebook.

• Note: I made a mistake while recording the intro to this episode. Mode did not got through Ycombinator. I wrongly assumed they went through the program as many YC companies use Mode.

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