ThinkData Podcast

There are a handful of genuinely useful operational observations - particularly around restructuring teams away from human collaboration toward AI-agent ownership - but they are surrounded by large stretches of generic inspiration and platitude. The ratio of novel-to-obvious is poor for 28 minutes.

“we made a very conscious shift of actually shifting away from human centered teams to AI centered teams. Again at Kelo, typically one engineer owns a feature or kind of product on their own, and we tried to minimize the amount of collaboration with other humans.”

“you can't just peanut butter AI onto an org and get the benefits”

The multi-model diversification-as-infrastructure-risk argument and the AI-centered team structure are the only genuinely fresh angles; everything else - 'someone using AI better than you may steal your job,' the Microsoft Office adoption analogy, 'start somewhere' - is widely recycled B2B AI commentary.

“if the lab changes the price or it goes down, the model goes down on a day. Does my 10,000 person team say, okay, no, we're not working today, everybody take the day off. You can't do that.”

“I don't think unless your job is extremely automatable and manual, will AI put you out of a job. But I think someone using AI better than you may potentially steal your job.”

Scott is a legitimate practitioner - sold Brooklyn Data, co-founded a real open-source tool with millions of downloads, and has a credible co-founder in a GitLab founder - but the conversation stays surface-level and never draws out the hard-won operational depth his background could justify.

“I was founder of Brooklyn Data, which was a data and analytics consultancy kind of early in the modern data stack.”

“Sid's background is, you know, founder of, of GitLab.”

A few concrete data points appear - millions of downloads, 13 months since launch, 11-month sabbatical, the summer 2025 growth inflection - but there are no customer names, revenue figures, retention metrics, or detailed case studies; most claims about AI adoption and team structure remain asserted rather than evidenced.

“we launched 13 months ago and 13 months ago Kelo did not exist. Nobody knew us. And it's actually we have millions of downloads”

“I made it, uh, exactly 11 months.”

The host consistently accepts claims without challenge, pivots with affirmations like 'Yeah, that's fair' and 'Yeah, 100%,' and closes with a textbook 'What's next?' question; there is no meaningful pushback, no probing for evidence behind bold claims, and no productive disagreement across the entire episode.

“And final question for you. What, what's next?”

“Yeah, that's fair.”