About this newsletter
How to Data covers topics related to data, analytics, startups, company-building, and technology generally. It draws from my background as a data startup founder, operator, investor, and advisor. My goal is to share helpful and practical insights for data practitioners.
Check out some of my previous writing
The last-mile problem in analytics - There are many steps in the analytic value chain, and the last part of turning a business insight into a business outcome is hardest but most important one.
The data-driven organization’s hierarchy of needs - Just like in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, when it comes to data capabilities you need to nail the basics before you can move on to more advanced things.
How to look for data roles and recruit data talent - Data titles are ambiguous and there is a spectrum of data skills and needs in modern organizations. Understand and recruit the talent you actually need.
About me
My name is George Xing and I’ve been deeply involved in data for most of my career – as an operator, founder, and angel investor.
As the first analytics hire at Lyft, I built and led the analytics team at Lyft from 2014-2020 and was responsible for driving company-wide decision-making through a period of over 100x growth.
In 2021, I started Supergrain to build a headless BI platform to help data teams create a source of truth for their metrics. Over the next 3 years, we built a warehouse-native marketing automation platform and Supaglue, an open source product integrations platform.
In March 2024, we were acquired by Stripe, where I’m currently a product manager building user-facing data products.
I’m a small angel investor and advisor to data and B2B SaaS companies.
Please reach out if you’d like to chat about data! You can find me on Twitter @g_xing or on LinkedIn.
