Meet the Hosts
Eric and John met working on a data project. Eric had just sold a company and John was leading an eCommerce turnaround as CTO and head of marketing. Over the next decade, their professional relationship grew into a friendship built on shared beliefs and pursuit of craftsmanship in their work. After hosting a successful, data-focused podcast for several years, they decided to start their own show.
Eric Dodds
I'm a Christian, husband, father and tech marketing/product leader. I'm currently on the technical marketing team at Vercel, an AI and frontend cloud platform. My previous role was Head of Product at RudderStack, a pipeline infrastructure company that streams behavioral event data. I've also founded multiple businesses, both venture-backed and bootstrapped. Several companies failed, one exited and one is still running under new ownership. Over the years I've held key go-to-market roles with a focus on marketing. I find great joy working close to and in product. I particularly enjoy tackling the XY problem, working directly with engineers and driving growth through product marketing. I've proven my ability to take functions from 0-1 (and beyond) as a player-coach, build teams and ship work as an individual contributor. I function well in ambiguity. I've mastered a variety of tactical skills across product, marketing, product marketing, data/analytics and have built efficient operations in each of those areas. In another life I would have been a software engineer, so the age of AI is a true dream as a technical tinkerer. My peers describe my superpowers as first-principles thinking, product-mindedness and writing (of all kinds). On multiple occasions these have been applied in the formation of strategies, both on a micro and macro level. "Eric has a unique ability to translate complex technical concepts into compelling narratives that move businesses forward. At RudderStack, he was the partner I consistently turned to when we needed to challenge our thinking and ensure we were building something customers would actually value. His product intuition, combined with his marketing expertise, made him an invaluable cross-functional leader who could be counted on when execution really mattered." —Sagan Shultz, Product @ Linear
John Wessel
I began my analytics career around the time the book (and then movie) Moneyball become wildly popular. Just like the book revolutionized baseball, I saw data revolutionizing traditional industries, providing me early insight into data’s transformative power. Now, I use my experience to help mid-market companies use their data to grow with confidence. I spent the first 10 years of my career building data infrastructure and analyzing data for others. I started out analyzing tens of thousands of calls to drive KPI improvements and workforce planning optimization for a Samsung contact center. I then spent time as a database administrator for a B2B SaaS app, ran a client-facing business intelligence team, and did Data, DevOps, and Infrastructure work in AWS, GCP, and Azure. Next, I spent just under 5 years as an executive managing product, marketing, and technology for an e-commerce company. We made the unique decision to unify these diverse groups so they could work together more seamlessly, and it paid off. We ran the business like a tech company. We invested in a robust data infrastructure to manage our first-party customer data and capture data for our data-hungry pricing, paid advertising, and inventory planning algorithms. I put together a world-class team of employees, contractors, and partners, all fueled by data. What results did we get? 📈 Company Revenue ⬆️ $27 to $60 million 📈 Organic Traffic ⬆️ 80,000/mo to 1,000,000/mo 📈 Gross Margin ⬆️ 12% increase Now at Agreeable Data we apply these learnings to help other companies grow with certainty.