Ep. 223 - PAW 2019 Conference Series - Allison Swihart - Syndetic

Welcome to the 2019 Predictive Analytics World (PAW) Conference Series. Recorded live in Las Vegas, this series is bringing interviews straight to you from exhibitors and speakers at this year’s event. In this interview, host Jamin Brazil interviews Allison Swihart, CEO and Co-founder of Syndetic. Find Allison Online: Email: [email protected] LinkedIn Syndetic [00:02] Hi, everyone.  I’m Jamin Brazil, and you’re listening to the Happy Market Research Podcast.  We are live today at Predictive Analytics World. I am standing with Allison, the CEO of an up and coming company Syndetic.  You can find information on them at Syndetic.co. Allison, thanks for being on the Happy Market Research Podcast. [00:24]   Thanks for having me. [00:26]   Well, let’s start with what do you think?  I mean this is Day 2 or 3. [00:31]   Day 2. [00:32]   Day 2 of the event.  What do you think about the event so far? [00:34] I think it’s been wonderful.  It feels like there’s a really good energy here compared to some of the other conferences that I’ve been to recently.  The audience is slightly more technical, which is great for us. And I am getting a lot of good feedback on the talks. And I think that the decision to kind of combine the different PAWs together into one Mega PAW.    [01:01] Eight PAWs [01:01]    Were there eight?  There have to four PAWs.  What kind of animal is an eight-pawed animal?  I mean... There should be four PAWs. Anyway, yeah, I think it was a good decision because everyone who came for the marketing side versus the kind of deep machine learning side is mingling together, and you’re getting lots of great conversation.     [01:28] It is actually interesting seeing that convergence of...  One of the terms that a previous CEO I had on the podcast said is “diversified data” or “data diversification,” meaning...  You see this in executive teams. So executive teams that have diverse gender, ethnicity, whatever, they outperform non-diverse groups.  It was interesting having him creating that connection with respect to different data. And I hadn’t actually thought of it in the way that you just articulated it, but that’s actually pretty relevant also where you’ve got broad disciplines that are now being combined into a single event, which is kind of cool. [02:15]  Yeah, yeah.  And having people of different titles and at different levels in the organizations, I think, is really important for conferences.  I know there’s a lot of summits where people kind of focus on just the CIO level, but I think at this event, in particular, we’ve talked to a bunch of people who are analysts, who are doing the actual work, which is really important to bring their perspective of the individual contributor, not just the manager.  The manager might be making the decision to purchase one piece of software over another, but you need the perspective of the kind of “boots-on-the-ground” in order to, I think, make the best decision. So, I think they’ve done really well.