Starting a Data Conference: The Data Makers Fest Story | Leonid Kholkine

The transcripts are edited for clarity, sometimes with AI. If you notice any incorrect information, let us know.

Community Building in Data and AI

Alexey: Hi everyone. I will skip the usual introduction. This is an event from Data Talks Club. If you are interested in our events, there is a link in the description. Do not forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel and we have an amazing Slack community. If you have any questions today during the interview, there is a pinned link in live chat. Click on that link and ask your questions. I will just jump directly into our usual intro. Leonid, if you are ready, we can start. (0.0)

Leonid: Perfect. We can start. (31.0)

Alexey: I accidentally pressed this new copilot button and now I have the document open. This week we will talk about building communities in the data and AI space and the story behind Data Maker Fest. Our guest is Leonid. Leonid is a researcher and practitioner working at the intersection of data, AI, and real world application. He currently leads research and development at Their Data and his work covers machine learning, sports analytics and applied AI across various industries. (36.0)

Alexey: Leonid is the cofounder of Data Makers Fest which is my favorite data conference not only in Portugal but in Europe. I have not really visited conferences outside of Europe, which makes it my favorite data conference in the entire world. This conference unifies data practitioners to share the practical experience and learn from each other. I want to talk to Leonid today about his career journey, building communities, the idea behind the conference, and everything it takes to run one. (1:08)

Alexey: If you did not hear our conversation in the beginning, Leonid mentioned that he has been very busy the last three months. I suspect it is related to the conference. I am actually very grateful he found time to join me today so we can talk more about these things. We will learn what it takes to actually run a successful data conference. Welcome to the interview. (1:52)

Leonid: Thank you. Thank you so much Alex and it is really great also to be here with you and talk a little bit about the conference. I know you are a big fan and we are always happy to of course have you there. I think anyone who is actually driving communities we would love to have them because I think all of them are in the same spirit that we have at DataMakers Fest. (2:05)

Alexey: I think this is how we connected because Leonid you are one of the first people who joined Data Talks Club back in the day when we started it. Back in the day when somebody joins Slack I get a notification. I still get these notifications today. Today is just overwhelming and I cannot catch up with everything. In the early days maybe two or three people would join per day and I would message everyone and this is how we met. (2:22)

Alexey: You were one of the early members and it was still COVID time I think. (2:54)

Leonid: Yes. Still everyone is at home. (2:59)

Computer Engineering and International Leadership Roots

Alexey: Since then we have been in touch and the conference was not there yet. I witnessed the first edition, second edition, and now it is going to be the third edition. You worked a lot with meetups so I am really interested in this because I am very passionate about communities. Not only because you are one of the first members of Data Talks Club but also because I want to learn from your experience. (3:02)

Alexey: I am really happy to have you here today. I want to start with the career journey. I know already a few things about you. Can you tell us more about your career journey so far? (3:35)

Leonid: It is a bit unusual and I think this is where it also led me to this community and kind of working inside communities. I think it also taught me a lot. I did start studying telecommunications engineering in Porto. Actually the long title of the course is something like Computer Engineering and Electronics and Communication. It was a very broad course and then it branches into these small subparts. (3:48)

Leonid: I went really into computer engineering and telecommunication engineering. In parallel while I was studying I joined this organization called BEST, Board of European Students of Technology. It is an NGO and I did a lot of things there. At some point I managed groups across 32 countries in Europe because I became the vice president of that organization. I think that helped me learn a lot on managing a lot of people. (4:12)

Leonid: When you get people together you learn how you can do different things. That is what pushed me then to do a lot more of different things which is a bit outside of the normal profession. After that I still organized at University of Porto because I also wanted to bring people together across different faculties. We have medicine, sciences, engineering and all of them are very fragmented. I wanted to promote a bit of multidisciplinary community work. (4:43)

Leonid: Afterwards I moved into software development. Eventually I became Head of Engineering at TonicApp. That is basically a health tech startup also located here in Porto. This is where I got a real taste for building products that solve problems basically. There was a problem that doctors needed something in their pocket which could help them in their day to day life and we really worked really hard at that problem. (5:12)

Leonid: At some point I made a 180 degree shift in my career and I left to do a PhD in machine learning. It was applied to sports but I did also a little bit of recommending systems and this was at the University of Antwerp. Building the startup was very exciting and interesting but I also want to go deeper on the data science side. Sports and sports physiology were also a passion of mine. (5:43)

Machine Learning Research in Sports Physiology

Leonid: At the time I was training for a marathon so everything kind of connected together. Through all this time I kept on building communities. I had a lot of these side projects which helped build communities. I did manage and help grow the DSPT. That was the data science community in Portugal which we had meetups from Porto, Viseu, Braga, and Lisbon for those familiar with Portugal. (6:13)

Leonid: That is a lot of cities and there was a really big national community presence. This is also where the taste for bigger data science events started because we started organizing DSPT Day which was 400 and then 600 people together. When COVID hit and I was abroad with my partner Rui and another person, we cofounded World Data League. It was basically a data science competition focused more on urban impact. (6:35)

Alexey: That was our first collaboration. This is how we met when you were organizing this competition. The whole idea was that we would have these different rounds where you can do different competitions and you could learn. There was a community we wanted to build where people could help each others. Even if you failed on your first challenge you still had the time to catch up and learn and then develop things. (6:52)

Alexey: We really focused more on the impact that it could have especially in cities. It was so fun now I remember it. I totally forgot about this but you included the process and it was so fun. What happened to this initiative? (7:17)

Leonid: Well COVID stopped happening and people could go outside again. For how the format was there it was really that you had to spend a lot of time working on it. Since people were spending a lot of time at home they did not mind and it also connected people while they were at home. The competition was in teams of four to six and this meant that you get to spend this time with people you might not even know. (7:30)

Leonid: You were connecting and building something together for a bigger good. I think it motivated a lot of people to participate because if you remember COVID you really were seeing only one or two people and seeing a lot of people from work on Zoom. (7:56)

Alexey: That is how Data Talks Club started. It was during COVID when everyone was thinking about how we can connect. (8:13)

Leonid: Yes. But then COVID started to fade and people started to go back. We saw this when we went to organize the third edition. We were having a bit harder time to get participants because you needed a commitment of two months for this. This was not already something people were willing to do especially as they were locked inside for two years by that time. (8:19)

Alexey: It is better to travel to Portugal instead of sitting home. (8:41)

Leonid: Exactly. Rui and I cofounded this company where we want to bring this idea of community to different levels. One of them is the Data Makers Fest but the other one is also Data Lead Club which is more a smaller thing. I think it is the same problem that maybe data scientists had 10 years back when you were that one person in data and you needed a community where you could share and discuss. (8:48)

Leonid: Now companies have bigger teams but the data leaders are kind of stuck. They have their team that they need to manage but they really have some things that they cannot really discuss with them. They also have the upper management and they are kind of alone with a lot of topics I think they would rather discuss with peers. This is happening only in Portuguese and it is for data leaders in Portugal. (9:14)

Alexey: How is it called again? (9:38)

Leonid: Data Lead Club. (9:42)

Alexey: I did not hear about this well I guess because it is in Portuguese. I assume we have listeners from Portugal and maybe Brazil. I do not know how inclusive you are in terms of geographies. (9:42)

Data Lead Club and Executive Networking Retreats

Leonid: This is why it is in Portuguese because what we focus on is events which are in person. Let us say one day and a half they stay in a hotel. It is more like a retreat where they can have time to discuss the topics and slow down from the busy life that they have on their job. They really go deeper into different discussions. (10:18)

Alexey: You still do this thing? (10:22)

Leonid: Yes. We organize it twice per year and it is kind of a membership level. People need to be comfortable sharing things around other people. So we have it a bit more exclusive in that sense. Not that we want it to be exclusive but more in the sense that we want the people who are there to be comfortable with the other members. (10:26)

Leonid: They need to be comfortable with being a bit more open and sharing. They really need to align with the values. (10:41)

Alexey: Interesting initiative and it happens under the umbrella of Ripley? (10:47)

Leonid: Yes. The company was founded really to do things around this kind of community initiatives. We need some kind of legal entity for this. (10:53)

Alexey: That is very interesting. You mentioned also now you lead Research and Development at Their Data. Which is super interesting because I get to combine the PhD part and the research part together with the industry. I think that is where the sweet spot is for me in terms of work as well. (11:06)

Alexey: Last time we spoke it was end of September 2024 at the event. You were still defending your PhD back then and moving back to Portugal. It was a tough time. You lived in Antwerp for some time and then you were moving to Portugal. Now you live in Porto? (11:30)

Leonid: Now I am in Porto. (11:55)

Alexey: Since then you started a job. I am head of research and development. That is really cool. Can you tell us more about that? What do you exactly do? Your PhD was related to sports? (11:55)

Leonid: Yes. My PhD was related to sports. (12:13)

Alexey: How did your marathon go? (12:13)

Leonid: I finished it. I do not remember how long it was already a long time ago. This was before I started my PhD. If anybody feels like challenging themselves and really wants to prove that they really can stick to a goal I think it is an interesting thing to do. It takes four to six months of training. (12:19)

Alexey: Me too. I was already doing half marathons before but it is still insane. Your whole Sunday just goes on a training session sometimes as you start and run then you have to go back then you are tired. I have two kids now and it is impossible. So you do not run anymore? (12:42)

Leonid: I hope to start running again or cycling. I have been enjoying cycling a lot just a bit more dangerous in Portugal. (13:07)

Alexey: I signed up for the second marathon for me. I guess I like suffering. It is in September. (13:13)

Leonid: No I should start. After I run my first one I have been in hibernation mode. (13:25)

Alexey: It is a good idea to start. Your PhD was about sports physiology and you finished a bit of everything actually really from predicting who could win a cycling race and also did some things on physiology and computer vision. Now you are Dr. Leonid and you work as head of research and development. What do you do as a head of R&D? (13:31)

AI Observability and R&D at Their Data

Leonid: That is an interesting one because the company itself just opened this department really recently. We are just starting and this is connected I think a bit to the product we are developing which is Genos. The idea is that we see that there is a need for more enterprise level products where you can manage all your AI activity and models through one central platform. (14:03)

Leonid: That is agnostic also to different providers. (14:47)

Alexey: What kind of activity? (14:54)

Leonid: Anything you might have from workflows to chatbots and anything that you use AI for. This is going to become especially super relevant when the AI acts in the European Union become enforced. You will need to have auditability and you will need to know what each model does and where it is working. On the other hand it also allows the same experience. (15:00)

Leonid: Basically you do not have 10 different products but you have the same experience across all of your agents and everyone knows how to use the tool. Everything is centralized. This can go from trying to see how your chatbot is replying to creating issues when you find problems when the chatbot is not replying as it is supposed to. (15:17)

Leonid: Eventually our department is starting to look into how it can also self improve and suggest actions that you can take which will improve how your chatbot or how your workflows perform without that much human intervention in it. (15:44)

Alexey: It is basically a monitoring and observability platform for all GenAI stuff? (16:08)

Leonid: Basically and improvements as well. It is a bit off topic since we want to talk about the conference. Since you mentioned that and right now we have this series of events about AI engineering. I recently spoke with a data engineer and his idea was that he wants to get into AI. (16:15)

Alexey: He is working on something similar although it is not related to GenAI monitoring but more like data monitoring. He wants a system that automatically detects some issues and automatically proposes solutions for these issues. I think this is where you also want to go. Can you tell us more about this? (16:33)

Leonid: I think this is related in a sense that let us say you have a chatbot that is replying on 11,000 documents or 15,000 documents somewhere. It also has a lot of usage which is another perspective. Let us say it is 500 or 1,000 messages a day. How do you find in this huge haystack of different messages where you are not replying correctly? (17:04)

Leonid: How do you improve it and how do you identify it and put it together? I think that is going to be the largest thing that we need to address somehow. If we have all of these processes happening with AI how do you see what is actually wrong and how can you improve it? This is why I say enterprise because for smaller scale you have a lot of really great solutions out there. (17:40)

Leonid: When you have this massive amount of data and automated workflows how do you make it really automatic? How do you find problems and solve them? When do you know when to involve a human and when do you let the machine actually go on? This is the problem space we are looking at. (18:06)

Alexey: Did it help getting that job? Like are you a cofounder there or you are an employee? (18:25)

Leonid: Employee. (18:31)

Alexey: Did your activities as a conference organizer as community organizer help to get this job? (18:31)

Professional Growth through Community Organizing

I would say a little bit. You get to know a lot of people and you get to talk to a lot of people. I think people see your work and how you work. I really like to believe so that a lot of people who organize communities and work in communities especially when it is sacrificing free time really believe in it.

Leonid: You can see that is the type of personality who really wants to make things work and really wants to develop things. I think it is also a good way to show this. It comes down to this. (19:19)

Alexey: Interesting that you mentioned volunteering but then corrected yourself. There is of course this money aspect. When you put a lot of effort you want to also get something in return. On the other hand we are talking about your full time job. So it means that the conference alone does not cover that. (19:30)

Leonid: It is still in this sense volunteering. Even though if you manage to get some money it is good because if you are losing money you are also losing motivation. You do not want to just pay for the conference out of your own pocket. (19:49)

Leonid: This is the same conclusion we came with my partner Rui. I think I mentioned him several times here because we did a lot of work together and he is also one of my best friends. We also realized that volunteering has a lot of value but at some part of your life you have less and less time. You cannot use out of work hours to organize these things if you want to continue organizing them. (20:03)

Leonid: You need dedication and it is not going to be two three hours at the end of the day that will help you dedicate. You really need to have one two full days where you can really focus on things. Talk to people, reply to emails and make things moving to help the conference grow and build up. The budget for these things is huge. (20:40)

Leonid: The amount we spend on audio visuals on hotels on the venue itself is huge. If you really want to grow this then we really need this time. (21:06)

Alexey: The venue it is going to be the same venue as last time? It is like a huge venue and I cannot even think how much it cost you to rent it. (21:12)

Leonid: Actually the problem is not the venue. It is also expensive but that is just half the cost. It only comes with the stage and the chairs. You really need to rent out all the other things from sound speakers to lights to stage design to whatever. There is really a lot of costs in it and I think people sometimes might not see that. (21:25)

Alexey: I have so many questions about that but I want to go back to the days where you were just running a meetup. It was data science Portugal. Tell us the story on how did it all start? (21:49)

Alexey: The Origins of Data Science Portugal (21:49)

Leonid: Well actually again we go back to Rui because he is the one who started it. Basically he had the same problem that we were already discussing before. He started working at a company and he has a background in maths. He started working as a data analyst or data scientist. (22:11)

Leonid: He was the only one at the company and basically when they hired him they said you are going to be the only one so you are going to have to learn on the job by yourself. He started looking around who else was doing this and he started getting people together. We would need to check with him what were actually the details on how many people in the first meetups. (22:24)

Leonid: He started just pulling people around and getting people together to share experience what they are doing. I think he started in Porto or Aveiro because he was working in Aveiro. I think that just rolled from there. It was one meetup then another then that one person knew the other person kind of brought all those people. It is interesting to see that the people who were joining those meetups at the time now have quite big roles in Portuguese companies. (22:53)

Alexey: Was it around 2015? (23:26)

Leonid: I do not remember by heart at all. It was some time ago when data science was just starting to be a thing. He always tells me this story that his one metric he was monitoring is the amount of jobs in data science. At the time if you search for data science jobs in Portugal on LinkedIn you could like see the end of the pagination like it was eight pages. Now it is like infinite so you are not really seeing the end of it and you cannot get to the end. (23:32)

Alexey: During COVID times it was infinite and you could not see the end. Now you have a lot of AI jobs and engineers and whatnot. The field has diversified a lot so it is not just one umbrella job but so many different ones. At which point did you join Rui? (24:02)

Leonid: I joined TonicApp around 2019 and I started going to the events because I wanted to learn more. I did my master thesis connected to data. I did that course that everyone did at the time from Andrew Ng on machine learning. I wanted to see what opportunities are there and what kind of things I could learn. I wanted to see how I evolve in this field and what was being done and what was not being done. (24:35)

Leonid: I started joining these events. At some point on those events I also met Rui. We started talking a lot and he told me about his plan to organize larger events. Not just the meetup but really like Data Makers Fest but a bit smaller at the time. It was 400 or 500 people. (25:12)

Leonid: We did the first event and I think since then we were organizing other things together. I was helping to organize the meetups in Porto up until when I left for Antwerp for my PhD. Even still there I did a couple of things while I was there. (25:36)

Alexey: But also when you were there it was COVID times? (25:54)

Leonid: Yes. I arrived in 2019 and COVID started in 2020. So then it was easier to collaborate on online things while you were away geographically. We did the DSPT conference in online as well. The last complex DSPT conference was online and we had around thousand participants or more. (26:02)

Leonid: The cool thing was that we have sometimes struggles with the in person events getting people to the conference. When it was online it was much easier because people had more time because they were at home. Two they did not need to travel anywhere. (26:28)

Alexey: I had similar ideas. When data talks club started we had events and these first events were super successful. I did not need to do much and the first event attracted over 100 people. Eventually I thought it would be a nice idea to have a conference online conference but even with online conference all I need is Zoom and broadcast it somewhere. (26:51)

Alexey: Thinking of the schedule getting guests and dealing with cancellations is a headache. It is online so I do not need to think about equipment or renting a venue and it was so much headache. After I did one conference people really loved it but I was like I am not going to do this again. I cannot imagine what you need to go through to arrange a physical offline conference. (27:14)

Logistical Challenges of In-Person Conferences

Leonid: I thought when you rent a venue you get everything and you just need to show up. I wish that was the case. Venue is the first thing. In Porto there are not that many venues which are big enough and interesting enough for the amount of people we want to bring together. (27:57)

Leonid: So you basically you are left with Alfandega so they are going to have a bit of monopoly on this side of things. It is a really cool location as well. It is very central and pretty thanks to the river. For me as a tourist it is amazing. Even for locals I really like having events there. (28:38)

Leonid: The issue is that it is always booked well well well in advance. So we already booked dates for 2027 and paid the deposit and still we could not get the ideal dates that we want. We are really kind of playing this game of Jenga trying to see how we can fit things inside. (29:03)

Alexey: That was just a spoiler. At least we have a conference next year and we do not have to wait for a year and a half. (29:45)

Leonid: I hope not but let us see. It is not official yet so don't take my word. Getting the venue especially if it is big requires a place to have them. Many times we have to find the best slot in the calendar that works for us and has availability. Setting the dates is not as easy as it might seem because you have Easter holidays, you have carnival holidays, you have bridge days. (29:51)

Leonid: Those weeks typically are really bad because people take them off. You have summer holidays and you do not want to put it too close to holidays because you won't be able to organize things. Ticket sales depend a lot also on when it is. Even if you think that mid September people can come the problem is that you cannot sell anything during August because people are not paying attention to communication. (30:22)

Leonid: When you start putting all of these things together you start to get shorter and shorter and shorter amount of time when you can actually organize these. There is also the availability of the venue so it becomes really small. We also need to play a bit with the season because if we do this in a high season it is difficult. This is why we also kind of moved the event to May. (31:00)

Strategic Event Scheduling and Venue Selection

Leonid: Starting October until Web Summit which is around mid November just is filled with tech events in Portugal. Finding a good date there sometimes is a bit hard so that you do not overlap also with some event. That is why you decided to wait a little and organize something in May. In May prices are not stupidly high and we can also host people and there is also not so much competition as there is in the second semester. (31:24)

Alexey: I would never think about those things. The only way to find out all these little details is either speak to somebody who is organizing conference or just try to organize one yourself. We talked about venues and time of the year but also there are many other things like getting speakers and organizing the timetable. I imagine that is a total mess. (32:19)

Leonid: There is always getting all the equipment and AV systems. We have a really great person that we work with for a long time, Ricardo. Basically the venue restricts us to the company we can work with but he is our liaison with any tech company because you needed someone who could interact with them and protect your interest. He also understands the equipment that they are proposing you to have. (33:02)

Leonid: We have like a roster of three four page list of equipment and we need to know if that makes sense and what will work. Ricardo has been really great with all this stuff. (33:33)

Alexey: For me if I am a speaker I just show up and you hand me the microphone and I connect my laptop. For me the experience is smooth. But to make this experience smooth you have to go through a three four pages long list to make sure these things work together. (33:44)

Leonid: From the content side we have been evolving this process as well. We always had a call for speakers to see who wants to come to the conference and we provide some support. It is not that we pay 100% of the flights and hotel but we do provide some support and we offer the ticket and access to the networking dinner. Then we start looking into what topics we are covering and reach out to other speakers. (34:09)

Leonid: The biggest difficulty sometimes is the keynote speakers. You need a rounding topic for the full stack because you have data engineers, AI engineers, data scientists, machine learning engineers and middle management. You have some people coming from academia so you really need to find a really nice round topic. That is the most challenging one. (34:54)

Leonid: It is always a bit more difficult to strike the right profile that is not too technical but also not too broad and not too philosophical. Organizing the schedule is also a big mess. (35:31)

Leonid: This year we have something called cloud code which helped us build an internal tool to classify with embeddings the different descriptions and group things together automatically. It basically wrote itself an optimization script which optimizes the timetable and then we just had to make some adjustments on our own. It was much easier because before that I would just try to find something to do something. (36:01)

Automated Timetable Optimization with Custom Code

Alexey: Was there no solution for that? I am surprised now. With so many conferences happening worldwide and finding that there is no solution and you just implemented it yourself. (36:52)

Leonid: There could be solutions because we are flooded with different tools for conferences. There are the really big ones and expensive ones but you can have one for yourself that is specifically tailor made for your specific case. If there is one tool I could recommend it is sessionize. It is not that expensive comparing to the value it brings. (37:12)

Leonid: It helps manage a lot of the speaker things because you have everything speaker related in one place. You can communicate regarding proposals and have photos from the speakers centralized. Instead of having a form or email they can just with one click download all of the profiles and photos. It is really easy to just use it and that saves a lot of time. (37:35)

Leonid: In BSPD it was a nightmare because we had to have spreadsheets to check who already sent it and manually put the photos in a folder. Now it is automated with sessionize. (38:09)

Alexey: With Cloud Code you would not reimplement this thing you would just use sessionize. (38:26)

Leonid: I would just like what we did which is something on top. This is a suggestion I sent to them to have a way like an MCP server where we could import the schedule. That would automate everything and everything else is covered on their site. (38:26)

Alexey: How difficult is it to get people engaged in that and actually go there and fill it? You need to let people know that the conference is happening and the call for proposals is open. (38:51)

Leonid: This is where communities like Data Talks Club and others come in. They help us share this call for speakers and it helps a lot to get the message out. We also use a lot of different mailing lists and we reach out to speakers from the previous editions. We ask them if they know anyone who might be a really good speaker and if they could share the call with them. (39:10)

Leonid: We try to build a little bit of network with the speakers so that we can also try to see if we can get anyone else. (39:50)

Alexey: I imagine that you are now flooded with low quality proposals that are generated by ChatGPT and just copy pasted. (40:07)

Leonid: That is true. We had a couple of proposals where even the candidate forgot to remove the ending like here is the proposal. There is a proposal that says it is well written in English and suitable for a technical conference. It helps you structure your thoughts and write things a bit better but it needs to come from you. (40:21)

Leonid: We say in our call for speakers don't basically be lazy and don't copy paste but use AI to talk to it and try to get a good outline. It is still quite noticeable when it is AI generated. (41:01)

Curating Quality Speaker Proposals in the AI Era

Alexey: For me personally it is so helpful to really focus on what I want to do at the end and this is invaluable. I just speak to it and then at the end I can have a proposal that is good. I just ask it to remove em dashes and replace them with hyphens. I hated it when you do not have spaces around dashes between two words. (41:22)

Leonid: Yes it exaggerates on it. We talked about speakers and venue. As a conference you sell tickets but you also have sponsors. In the past I was thinking why there is a need for sponsors if you already have tickets. (42:16)

Leonid: Well I think it is several things. It is more of a win win kind of situation. By having sponsors it basically brings the costs down for the participants. There are some developer conferences that do not have so many sponsors and you can see that the tickets are basically double or triple the price. We try to find price points where we are still competitive compared to other conferences. (42:55)

Leonid: On the other hand there is also an opportunity for sponsors either through employer branding or to show off what they do. Some of them want to contribute because they really believe in the community and want to help make the event sustainable. By generating impact on the community the company itself can get stronger because they have a bigger pool from which they could recruit. We are starting to see some coming more from the perspective of sharing an interesting tool. (43:41)

Leonid: We are super super grateful to all the sponsors because otherwise we would need to double the price on the tickets. They also help sponsor student tickets. (44:58)

Sponsorship Value and Student Ticket Accessibility

Leonid: The only reason it is not for free is that there is actually some value that makes people actually show up. Having these sponsors helps us to have these tickets that can be cheaper for students. (45:47)

Alexey: What I heard from other conference organizers is if it was just for the price of the tickets they would barely break even. With sponsors the sponsorships make it a little bit more profitable than before. It is sustainable. (46:04)

Leonid: I am pretty sure we would not even break even without sponsorship. Sponsors also get tickets to distribute in the company. Even though they are investing in sponsorship they get recognition out of it. (46:33)

Alexey: For me sponsors' booths are my favorite place to hang out. This is where interesting conversations happen. If you have a sponsored talk the speaker is usually on the booth so it is very easy to find them. Some interesting discussions happen near the booth rather than in the hall. (47:02)

Leonid: Rui is really more into going to the networking and talking to different people. His goal is to try to break the record of the most amount of people he can talk to at an event. (47:49)

Alexey: You also have this networking dinner and for me this dinner alone is the reason to go to Porto for the conference. (48:14)

Leonid: This year it is going to be on a boat on the river. (48:21)

Alexey: I hope I do not have seasickness. (48:29)

Leonid: It is on the river so you are fine. Data Talks Club exists because of the sponsors and I know firsthand how difficult it is to find them. What is the process for how you look for them? (48:36)

Leonid: It is a lot of work and most of the kudos go to Rui since he has been involved in the community and has a large network. He has a good reputation and if he is going to talk about Data Makers Fest people already know the work we did. There is a good amount of his network that already believe us because we have proven ourselves over the last 10 years. (48:55)

Leonid: You really want to bring the community to a new level. On the other hand that is not always typically enough. There is a lot of work reaching out to people and email reminders. It is always a struggle because we are a small team on how you do a good enough CRM that is quick to use. (49:37)

Partnership Outreach and Network Development

Leonid: You hinted that there might be 2027 edition. If a company wants to sponsor you how do they reach out? (50:23)

Leonid: They could still have some slots even for this year if they are still thinking about it. All the contacts are on our web page but you can also write to sponsors at https://www.google.com/search?q=datemakersfest.com. Someone from the team will reply for sure. (50:45)

Alexey: I see the partner with us link. We still have some time left and there were a few questions. They are not directly related to organizing a conference but you can maybe help us answer these. Your job now is head of R&D and you work at a company doing AI observability. (51:14)

Alexey: The question was about field deployment engineers. Leonid you mentioned that you might also share your perspective on this role. (52:01)

Leonid: We have something we never called forward deployed engineers but I think that is what we did. Forward deployed engineer is a term from a company called Palantir. They started with products for the intelligence community. They said we could do something cool but none of us are spies so we really need to work with them. (52:23)

Leonid: The only way you could do it is actually going directly and working with these agencies. The idea is that instead of building features for many customers as a typical SAS company would do they went to the customer and worked closely on one or two big problems. They sit there and try to understand their systems especially if they have legacy systems. They try to make everything out of it and build and deploy based on those needs. (53:06)

Leonid: What they do basically is they take whatever product they have and fork it for that certain company. Then it is personalized. They do this several times. (54:34)

The Forward Deployed Engineer Role and Methodology

Leonid: You evolve your main branch with ideas and patterns that you start seeing that are recurrent between clients. Sometimes it is even about creating enablers which allow for the forward deployed engineers to build things faster. It is a bit like consultancy meets products. At Their Data this is something that we were already doing a bit before we just did not call it that. (54:44)

Leonid: We really need to be in the client and understand their pains because you will never get one thing that fits all especially for big corporations. We are really trying to make the product wrap around the needs of the customer and not the other way around. (56:01)

Alexey: In your case how is that role called? Is it solution engineer? (56:35)

Leonid: We do not have specific roles and people do a bit of everything. We have a big network which are mostly freelancers who work mostly for Their Data but get a lot of freedom. They get paid a higher rate because there is a bigger risk since you never know what happens. They also manage the overhead of managing their own financials. (56:42)

Leonid: We try to give the most that we can in terms of margin instead of having a fixed salary. You can also choose how many hours you want to work and when you want to work. I have a conference which I organize and I have two kids so I like picking up my kid at 4:30 from school. I get all this flexibility that I think there are not many places where I could get it. (57:18)

Alexey: I was going to ask how you manage working and organizing the conference and you just answered that. (57:49)

Leonid: Nobody really has a specific role because they can really play these different parts when they want to invest. Even though I am head of research and development I am also an account manager for a couple of clients and a project manager for some small projects. It is really flexible and depends on your areas of interest. (57:55)

Professional Development for Junior Data Scientists

Alexey: One last question before we wrap up. I am a data scientist and I live in Spain and I would like to go to Data Makers Fest. Do you think it makes sense to attend the conference being so junior? (58:35)

Leonid: I think definitely if you have the means to. I think we have talks for about every type of level. We have introductory talks and intermediate talks and advanced talks. The speakers from my experience have come to the event and they are very open to share and discuss things. (59:09)

Leonid: This is also what we are trying to do by putting fest in the name to make it a really informal event. The diversity of things can be taken away in these kinds of conferences for more junior people. Sometimes when you are working in sports data science and you attend a financial fraud talk you find that the underlying methodology can help connect things together. You can really get a new perspective just by this diversity of thinking. (59:45)

Leonid: We tried to mix having a bit more methodological talks but also a bit of more just use cases. This happened a lot during my PhD for example where I connected things from signal processing to problems in time series. It can broaden up a bit your perspective on things. I would also recommend attending conferences which are outside of Portugal because you go to an environment which probably will have a way that people think differently. (1:01:07)

Leonid: You tend to have these clusters of knowledge where a big group is good in forecasting but maybe not so good at thinking about an automotive industry kind of problem. Different clusters will have a different way of thinking about problems that we might not have. This is the biggest lesson I learned from moving to Antwerp for five years. (1:01:59)

Alexey: My colleague lives in Spain and she checked how expensive the tickets are to Porto and they are so cheap compared to Berlin. I will be doing a workshop in the conference and my workshop is junior friendly. As long as you can program then it is going to be okay for you. I assume that most content is like that. (1:02:31)

Alexey: Maybe some things would be difficult to understand but for most of the talks you should make sense of them. If you do not you can talk to the speaker. I am not going to keep you longer. It was amazing to talk to you. I am really happy you could find time to speak to us. (1:03:05)

Alexey: I am really looking forward to seeing you in Porto in one month. (1:03:31)

Leonid: In one month there is not so much time left. (1:03:37)

Alexey: I will be enjoying Porto after the holidays. It will be great to see you again as well. (1:03:44)

Leonid: Networking Advice and Local Gdansk Culture. Thank you very much for having me here. If anyone has any more questions they know how to reach me. I am a real person and I always say I do talk to people. I do network and I do like networking so if you have questions reach out to me. (1:07:32)

Alexey: Do you go to attend any meetups in Gdansk? (1:07:58)

Leonid: I have not found any yet. I am still in Poland it is just my second month I think so I still do not know the scene. I am still in Gdansk. That is the plan to stay here longer. If somebody is from Gdansk and wants to hang out definitely reach me out. (1:08:00)

Leonid: Anyone from Poland reach me out as I do not know anything so you will be of help for me as well. Pierogi are my favorite. (1:08:21)

Alexey: Dumplings are amazing. Thanks Leonid. Thanks everyone. It was really nice chatting with you. (1:08:26)

Leonid: Thank you very much. My pleasure. (1:08:32)