Apr 20, 2021
It's clear when you listen to Ryan Bergstrom tell his story as to why he is a leader here at P3 Adaptive. His problem-solving ability is incredible, and he loves to teach and help others. That vibe sounds quite familiar, the data community has a such great reputation for altruism! Ryan's drive, tenacity, and resilience have led him on a path to success, and he's just getting warmed up! It's a great story that we hope will inspire the future data rock stars out there.
References in this episode:
The Saturday Night Live Wolverine
Skit <The very first SNL skit to air!>
The Pokemon Optimizer Blog Post
Episode Timeline:
- 2:45- Bergs's journey begins with a degree in Finance (pronunciation matters!), living in his parent's basement, and selling gym memberships...Ryan quickly realized that was NOT for him
- 23:45 - Rob's dream about Bergs, the value of the new tools, and Ryan is way better than he thought at this stuff
- 52:45 - An interesting data problem Rob's been working on
Episode Transcript:
Rob Collie (00:00:00):
Welcome friends. Today's guest is Ryan Bergstrom. Ryan's one of our
directors here at P3. So yes, that's two weeks in a row of
directors from P3. Ryan's story reminds me of an old song that I
really liked, that was all about roses growing up through cracks in
the sidewalk. Of course, our twist on it is, you can't keep the
data gene down. Ryan's career arc began with what you might call
generationally poor timing. I won't spoil the details, but you've
heard the phrase pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. Well, Ryan
definitely did that, but you see Ryan's bootstraps, they had the
word data written on them.
Rob Collie (00:00:40):
Necessity, resilience, both massive themes in Ryan's life, but also
he's a helper. Even at the beginning of his story, you'll hear that
he was already helping his colleagues, his teammates, when no one
told him he had to. And spiritually, that continues today with us
at P3. I'll even tell you in this episode about a dream that I had
that involved Ryan. It really, really, for me anyway, captures how
I feel about the guy. He's a super valuable teammate, contributor,
and leader for us at P3, and also just a great person. And I'm
really happy that I know him. Okay, you know what's next. Let's get
into it.
Announcer (00:01:20):
Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention, please?
Announcer (00:01:24):
This is the Raw Data by P3 Adaptive podcast with your host, Rob
Collie and your cohost, Thomas LaRock. Find out what the experts at
P3 Adaptive can do for your business. Just go to p3adaptive.com.
Raw Data by P3 Adaptive is data with the human element.
Rob Collie (00:01:47):
Welcome to the show. Ryan Bergstrom, how are you today?
Ryan Bergstrom (00:01:51):
I'm doing well. Pleasure to be here, Rob.
Rob Collie (00:01:54):
It sounds so sincere, right there.
Ryan Bergstrom (00:01:56):
Yeah.
Rob Collie (00:01:57):
Authenticity is our hallmark on this show. And you're already
leading off just so perfectly.
Ryan Bergstrom (00:02:03):
Well, I strive to please.
Rob Collie (00:02:05):
Tell us a little about yourself. What's your role here at P3
Adaptive?
Ryan Bergstrom (00:02:08):
I am our senior director of client services. Gosh, I feel like my
four-year anniversary is coming up here in maybe a week.
Rob Collie (00:02:17):
There's a whole sort of like entering class of people coming up on
there four-year.
Ryan Bergstrom (00:02:22):
Yeah, yeah. If this was like the X-Men, I would be like the
Cyclops, Storm, Wolverine, maybe Gambit, Beast, certainly
Archangel, but not Jubilee or any of those new folk.
Rob Collie (00:02:37):
I see, I see. Do you have a particular affinity for any of those,
that first wave?
Ryan Bergstrom (00:02:41):
Well, I mean-
Rob Collie (00:02:42):
I mean, naturally you want to be Wolverine, don't you?
Ryan Bergstrom (00:02:44):
Yeah, yeah. I mean-
Rob Collie (00:02:45):
And everybody wants to be Wolverine.
Ryan Bergstrom (00:02:47):
I'm from Minnesota. He's Canadian. They're like cousins to us.
Rob Collie (00:02:51):
Not everyone can be Wolverine. So I don't if that makes him for
like draft or something.
Ryan Bergstrom (00:02:55):
He's generally first pick, isn't he? But I mean, no one would've
picked Cyclops. No one wants to be the, "Come on guys, follow the
rules."
Rob Collie (00:03:02):
Have you ever seen the old Saturday Night Live with John Belushi
where John Belushi is speaking in some sort of like deeply Eastern
European accent? The English coach is telling him to say this, to
say sentences over and over again. Like, "I'm sorry, but we are all
out of badgers. Would you be willing to accept this Wolverine."
Ryan Bergstrom (00:03:24):
No, I haven't seen that.
Rob Collie (00:03:24):
John Belushi, of course, the way you pronounce it, Wolverine, and
every sentence that the guy has him say ends in Wolverine.
Ryan Bergstrom (00:03:33):
No, I haven't seen that.
Rob Collie (00:03:34):
That kind of punctures the Wolverine myth for me. Is that every
time I see Wolverine, I think Wolverine. All right, so senior
director of client services, what does that mean?
Ryan Bergstrom (00:03:45):
When I joined the company, I was principal consultant and I got to
see a ton of awesome use cases across a variety of our clients,
taught the Gillian trainings and just got to do it all with Power
BI, with Power Pivot, Power Query, and see the incredible range of
use cases that the tool set can be used for. And as we grew, I
became the director of client services or one of them, helping
other consultants build solutions for our clients, solve problems,
whether it's act like a dispatcher and figure out who's going to
staff what. And there's a ton of internal projects that we have
because we're a growing company. And so we have our own
infrastructure that we're continually improving and our curriculums
that we're continually adding new content to. And I'm one of the
people that drive that forward.
Rob Collie (00:04:38):
Yeah, we just had one of our other directors, Krissy on the show
and we really didn't talk much about the role of director here.
It's our management job for the consulting team. It's different
though because we're a remote company. Did you have management
experience before coming here?
Ryan Bergstrom (00:04:53):
No, I didn't. Prior to coming to P3, I worked for two different
companies. I started working with Life Time Fitness. That's where
my career kind of began. I was selling gym memberships, actually, I
was a member engagement advisor for my first job, became a
Salesforce admin, Salesforce developer, and then national sales and
marketing analyst. Then I worked for a medical device company as a
consumer insights analyst, Coloplast, doing just tons of analysts
and development work. And from there, that's when I came to P3. So
no management experience.
Rob Collie (00:05:30):
So you don't have that contrast of like, "Oh, here's what it was
like managing people in person versus managing them remotely."
Which many people in the world have encountered now for the first
time over the last year. Management's always been remote for you.
It's like, "What's the big deal."
Ryan Bergstrom (00:05:46):
Yeah, that's kind of how it's been. And you know what's
interesting, it's occurred to me now, when Life Time Fitness is
where I spent the majority of my pre P3 career. When I was working
in the national sales and marketing office, I reported to our vice
president of sales, and all of his lieutenants, so to speak, the
regional managers were national. So, even though I was going to the
office and I wasn't remote, I was certainly interfacing with
predominantly, I guess, you could say remote people because it was
a national corporation. From observing him as a leader and a
manager, he was certainly managing remotely. I've never really put
that together, but I suppose a lot of lessons that I passively
learned were from him.
Rob Collie (00:06:38):
Sponging it up. Yeah.
Ryan Bergstrom (00:06:40):
Yeah.
Rob Collie (00:06:40):
One of the best things that you can be in a career, I think, is
sort of like a curating sponge, picking up things that you saw
other people doing that worked well or things that didn't work well
and being able to replay that. So much of my development has been
that, like role-playing the successful habits that I've seen from
others that I've worked with. So I'm glad that you were able to
bring that one in.
Ryan Bergstrom (00:07:02):
Yeah, there's a Richard Bach quote from either, I don't know if
it's from Jonathan Livingston Seagull or if it was from this book
he wrote called Illusions. The story of a reluctant Messiah, but
the quotes always stuck with me and I'm going to totally butcher it
right now. So the quote hasn't obviously stuck with me that much
because I'm not going to nail it, but it was essentially, "We are
all teachers. We are all students. All great teachers are perpetual
students." Is the more or less than none of it. You cannot lead.
You cannot manage. You cannot do anything unless you're always open
to new information, just coming in from other people and adjusting
what you are.
Thomas LaRock (00:07:40):
Since we're on the topic. I was going to mention something I
learned back in my previous life. I know I've mentioned that before
that I used to coach basketball. You pick up little things from
everybody. So there's always this thing. You can never pretend to
be somebody else because you always be second best. So when you
start out coaching, you can't say, "I'm going to be like coach K or
do all these things." You can never be that coach. So what you do
is you say, "I really liked that play that coach just ran. I'm
going to take that." I like the way temple plays defense, zone
defense.
Thomas LaRock (00:08:13):
I'm going to use that. And you take all of those parts of all this
stuff that you've learned in, say your ether, all around you and
you take what you think is the one that would reflect a part of
you. And then that is what you become. So as a coach, I had little
aspects of all these different things. And somebody would say,
"Where'd you learn that?" "I learned that from John Thompson at
Georgetown." I thought that was just peculiar for coaching, but no,
that's just life in general. Just like Ryan was saying, you take
that one little thing from somebody else and you say, "I liked that
part and I'm going to use that for myself."
Rob Collie (00:08:49):
Yeah, if we want to get really nerdy and we do. The right metaphor
[crosstalk 00:08:53], my favorite metaphor anyway is the Borg from
Star Trek: Next Generation. They go and absorb civilizations and
they don't turn into that civilization. They just sort of like take
the capabilities from that civilization that they like, that'd be a
good strengthening fit for their overall collective. And they
acquire those and feature those. They're like, in some sense the
best of the best of all the things that they've eaten. To be Borg
like is a piece of a nerd career advice.
Ryan Bergstrom (00:09:24):
Be Borg like. Now, I've watched a little bit of Star Trek. I love
it when I do watch it. Are they a villain in the show?
Rob Collie (00:09:31):
Definitely a villain. And you know the other thing that this
metaphor isn't so great is that they're also kind of robotic and
unfeeling. So, you want to be bored in terms of your skills and
wisdom acquisition, but everything else you don't want to be bored
like.
Ryan Bergstrom (00:09:48):
I really like analogies and metaphors that are kind of like the
antihero of metaphors or analogies, like be bored like, because
that's the good stuff. Assimilate the good stuff. But let's forget
that they're the villains. One that always seems to happen in
society at large is, "Oh, this is the new cell phone on steroids."
And it's like, usually we frowned upon steroids. But when we're
using it in an analogy, we sure seem to like it, like oh, this is
the, I don't know the Hummer H3, the Hummer 2 on steroids." It's
always like, "Okay, so steroids are good when we're using it as a
metaphor, but it's bad when you do them or [crosstalk 00:10:26] no
one recently all the time in business, we talk about Power Pivot
and Power BI and Power Query like, "Oh, we want, our client said
once they learn Power Query, it's like the gateway drug." And I'm
like, "Okay, so drugs are good in this analogy, but in other
analogies or in real life, like generally drugs, no, not a good
thing."
Rob Collie (00:10:46):
Yeah, we just take the good part of the analogy and discard the
rest of it. This car is the regular car on steroids. Wait, wait,
wait. You mean, it's going to have like a receding hairline and its
rear tires are going to shrink over time and it's going to have a
temper
Ryan Bergstrom (00:10:58):
It's backed me in this hail damage on the car, what are we talking
about here?
Rob Collie (00:11:05):
No, no, just the good parts of steroids. That's great. Did you
really say that you haven't watched much Star Trek? Did you
[crosstalk 00:11:13]-
Ryan Bergstrom (00:11:13):
I've probably watched 20 to 30 episodes. I've seen it most in
movies.
Rob Collie (00:11:16):
Okay. All right.
Ryan Bergstrom (00:11:17):
But there's eight seasons of it or more eight. That's probably a
super turn. There's like 50 million because there's 10,000
spin-offs
Rob Collie (00:11:25):
Yeah, I just didn't want to let you get away with like, I was like
the ringleader of the board game club here at P3 like-
Ryan Bergstrom (00:11:30):
This is true.
Rob Collie (00:11:30):
... throwing down that like, "Oh, well I've heard of this Star Trek
thing. I've just...
Ryan Bergstrom (00:11:35):
No, no, I love it. I have no dislike of Star Trek. Look, I've
played this game called Artemis. It's essentially a bridge
simulator. And it's me and my geeky friends sitting around with
tablets and computers land party style. And it's essentially a Star
Trek role playing game, but it's so bare bones and minimalist that
many of my friends like to go destroy that enemy or that enemy. And
that doesn't quite cut it for me. So, I'm sitting there like,
"Captain, the cruise seems morale is down because the cafeteria is
no longer serving steak on Wednesdays, moleculas steak, permission
for the galley to upgrade their equipment." And there's nothing in
the game that has anything to do with this. And my friends just
like to go, "Uh, permission granted, blah, blah, blah." But captain
it doesn't end there. There's also an issue with the condiments. If
we do move forward, we're going to need and the, okay Ryan.
Yes.
Rob Collie (00:12:41):
Yeah, I think I want to role-play with you. Yeah, the last few
attempts at any sort of online gaming like that have really haven't
gone over well. It felt like work. I want to circle back to a
couple of things. So I heard a quote the other day that I don't
know who originally wrote this. I really liked it, which is that
information is surprise. If no surprise, no information. In order
to be surprised, you have to have some humility, don't you?
Ryan Bergstrom (00:13:14):
Oh yeah.
Rob Collie (00:13:14):
If you know it all, you can never be surprised. Information is
surprised. That was one that like, "Hey Borg like in the good way."
Like I've said, "Hmm, I'm picking that one up. That ones being an
added to the collective."
Ryan Bergstrom (00:13:28):
That's the kind of quote that you hear in the slam poetry observer
in you comes out and you say, "Hmm." You kind of snap your
fingers."Hmm, that's good."
Rob Collie (00:13:40):
Oh yeah. That's how I do it. Going back to your origin story. One
of the ongoing themes of the show and really of our lives and of
our company, there's a few points that all tie into the same theme,
but one of them is this concept of the citizen developer. Another
one is this tweener sort of the IT business hybrid. And really then
sort of the thing that's kind of humorously ties them together is
that the best results, the best versions of this are never
intentional. Did you have any idea back in school that you were
going to be a frontline celebrated data professional?
Ryan Bergstrom (00:14:17):
Oh, absolutely not. When I was in school, you're being generous by
asking me if I had any idea if I was going to be a data
professional. When I was in school, I didn't have any ideas. I was
just nothing but surprise at all the information coming my way. I
studied finance, which I was taught by my finance professor that if
you have a degree in finance, you say finance. And if you don't,
you say finance. That was one of the things I learned in
college.
Rob Collie (00:14:45):
That was worth four years.
Ryan Bergstrom (00:14:46):
That was worth four years. Barbecue, that was something I learned
in college. I wish I could have done a super senior lab with that
one. I studied accounting. Liberal arts education is interesting
because you just get your tendrils into so many things. And even
the things I didn't think I learned just come back to me. I'm like,
"Oh, I remember studying this, or I remember sitting there." It
kind of surprises you. But to your question, I think I was going to
be a frontline data professional. Oh no, definitely not. I don't
even think now you can get a data science degree or a business
intelligence degree. I don't really think they were doing that.
Back when I was in school in the early knots, pots, or whatever you
call the early 2000s.
Rob Collie (00:15:24):
Can we call them the dreadnoughts?
Ryan Bergstrom (00:15:26):
The dreadnoughts, yes.
Rob Collie (00:15:28):
Just moving on. We can cut that out, right?
Ryan Bergstrom (00:15:30):
Yeah, that was a throwaway joke.
Rob Collie (00:15:32):
That was-
Ryan Bergstrom (00:15:32):
Look, you got to set the bar low with something so that the other
ones really surprise you with the new humor information.
Rob Collie (00:15:39):
... One of the classic Mitch Hedberg sets on Letterman, he makes a
joke and no one laughs and he turns and says, "Hey, can we cut that
out? Can we edit that?" And suddenly then you're laughing at the
bad joke. You had a built-in safe. So finance-
Ryan Bergstrom (00:15:55):
Finance.
Rob Collie (00:15:56):
... finance. So you studied finance.
Ryan Bergstrom (00:15:57):
You studied it too?
Rob Collie (00:15:58):
No, no. I've studied people who studied finance. I borged that from
you. So, finance didn't prepare you for selling gym memberships.
It's an interesting turn, right?
Ryan Bergstrom (00:16:10):
Interesting turn, yeah. So, when I graduated in the summer, June of
2008, it turned out that wasn't a good time to graduate and enter
the workforce. Who did that?
Rob Collie (00:16:21):
What was going on back then? I don't even remember?
Ryan Bergstrom (00:16:24):
I don't know. I was too busy trying to get a great deal on a
mortgage. No, not really.
Thomas LaRock (00:16:29):
You chose to enter college for years before that. I mean, you
didn't have to.
Rob Collie (00:16:33):
You brought shit on yourself.
Thomas LaRock (00:16:34):
Right.
Ryan Bergstrom (00:16:35):
Yeah, no, no. I take full responsibility for that.
Rob Collie (00:16:37):
I remember at that time in the world as the financial sector was
crumbling thinking, oh my God, can you imagine coming out of
college right now? I didn't know I was talking about you. We
actually hadn't met yet.
Ryan Bergstrom (00:16:49):
Can you imagine coming out of college right now with a degree in
finance?
Rob Collie (00:16:52):
Especially in finance.
Ryan Bergstrom (00:16:54):
Well, so it didn't prepare me for selling gym memberships. I
suppose that was like one of the other things I did when I was in
school is I fell in love with health and fitness. So, being from
Minnesota that's Life Time Fitness, corporate headquarters in
Minnesota, best part of my day when I was living in my parents'
basement at the time was going to Life Time Fitness, I'll go work
for these guys. So I started selling gym memberships and I don't
know I did that for maybe a year and a half.
Ryan Bergstrom (00:17:19):
And fortunately for me, they used Salesforce and I just am good at
technology and software. I always say this when I'm teaching
trainings or talking about my story, I was fortunate to grow up on
eight bit Nintendo and 16 bit super Nintendo. Back when if you read
the manual, you learn to the tips and tricks. So, it ingrained in
me since I was a competitive five-year-old video gamer with my
friends and cousins was, if I read the manual, I will be able to
beat you, because that's where the secrets are. And reading the
manual obviously, a powerful thing because the internet made it one
of the first acronyms. RTFM, read the something manual.
Rob Collie (00:18:03):
Fun manual.
Ryan Bergstrom (00:18:04):
The fun manual. Read the fund manual, yes. So I read the manual on
Salesforce back then and when I was selling gym memberships and
just got really good at making reports and dashboards in Salesforce
to help people prospect for sales. And that parlayed my way into
the corporate headquarters. No idea when I was doing it, that all
of a sudden I was about to become like a data person at the
time.
Rob Collie (00:18:26):
But it's an interesting collision there. That always really
interesting to me. I don't think I've ever really asked you very
specifically this, your job is to convince people to sign
agreements and become members at Life Time Fitness at that that
moment in time. Was anyone telling you, "Hey, Ryan, we need you to
go into Salesforce and start running reports." How did you make
that transition?
Ryan Bergstrom (00:18:55):
I needed to make money. I was a 100% commission. And so I needed to
figure out the people that were most likely to join. So, I was just
doing all kinds of customer analysis on my own and then helping my
coworkers do it. There was just a problem and I couldn't kind of
anyone else but myself to solve it. Because I think that that's
just generally what you got to do. Don't wait for other people to
solve your problems. Be proactive in solving yourself if it's
possible. And it was fun, working with data is fun.
Rob Collie (00:19:24):
But you didn't know that until then, right? There's this moment
where you... It's like the moment in the the parking lot in the
movie, a star is born. The story takes that turn. She starts
singing and you realize it, one day you're going, "Oh, there's all
this information in Salesforce, but I wonder if I can do anything
with that?" It doesn't sound like most of your colleagues were
doing that.
Ryan Bergstrom (00:19:47):
No, I don't think so. I just happened to be that type of person
that was a good with computers and good with software and open to
learn it. There's a certain amount of people that just left
clicking is enough. They just want to use information or
information technology, computers, et cetera, as little as possible
to accomplish their task. But they don't think, "Well, how could I
use these tools to make the task different or more effective,
easier, smarter, better, et cetera." And it's like the Bill Gates
quote really, "If you have something really complicated, have your
laziest employee do it because they'll figure out the best way to
get it done." Maybe that was me. I didn't want to make a million
cold calls. I wanted to make 15 to 30 good ones.
Rob Collie (00:20:35):
Interesting. Most of the places where people encounter like BI for
the first time, it's usually a situation where there's more than
just personal leverage involved, meaning the thing that they're
looking at with the data and they start falling into Excel or
whatever, the report that they're generating at the analysis that
they're performing is information about the activities of many,
many people and probably can impact the decisions made on behalf of
a number of people as well. You started in a place where you really
only had personal leverage, the reason to run some BI like your BI
moment, isn't a place that you wouldn't typically, that I wouldn't
typically expect to be one of the, sort of the formative
environments.
Rob Collie (00:21:21):
I would not expect that frontline sales rep for a national gym
chain in their particular location would need a whole lot of BI. I
know that they'd need it. I know that data is always useful. The
magnitude of leverage involved is quite a bit lower in that
situation. And yet you still leaped that gap. I think that's
actually kind of extraordinary, even relative to most of the
stories we hear, like the first collision with data. You really had
to be, I think, pretty aggressive, even more than usual to make
that jump.
Ryan Bergstrom (00:21:56):
Look, I was living in my parents' basement and I was hungry to get
out. I needed to win for myself. And this is the beginning of my
career. I studied finance and now I'm selling gym memberships. It
wasn't what I wanted to do forever. And I didn't want to work in
finance despite getting a degree in it. I was lost really.
Rob Collie (00:22:15):
Did you hear that by the way, as he's dismissing it and pronounces
it finance?
Ryan Bergstrom (00:22:19):
I was hoping no one would catch that.
Rob Collie (00:22:20):
He's looking over his shoulder going buy-
Ryan Bergstrom (00:22:22):
I don't want to be dq'd now.
Rob Collie (00:22:24):
... buy, buy finance.
Ryan Bergstrom (00:22:25):
Yeah.
Thomas LaRock (00:22:25):
Wow.
Rob Collie (00:22:26):
Yeah, I never wanted anything to do with you.
Ryan Bergstrom (00:22:28):
I just needed to do something. And I loved the intellectual
challenge that creating these BI reports made and being able to
help my fellow member engagement advisors at Life Time Fitness, I
would make them reports in dashboard. And then we had a team and we
were trying to win as a team. So I was starting to produce BI for
that one location to help drive us forward. And I don't know, I
guess, it was just the domino effect. When the position opened up
at the corporate office that I ultimately ended up getting, it was
Carrie Jacob's, my old manager that originally forwarded to me. She
was like, "This is like what you do for us. You should do that for
the whole company." And I was like, "Oh my gosh, that would be
amazing." And it worked.
Rob Collie (00:23:14):
How neat, what a great story.
Ryan Bergstrom (00:23:16):
Oh yeah. My story is all about being helped by everyone else along
the way. And the power of relationships is one of the absolute
number one thing I learned, it's like, we are all people trying to
figure this whole thing out. And you can try to step on other
people or you can try to lift other people up. And if you do the
ladder, it's more fun and more rewarding. And frankly, one of the
most rewarding things about being at P3 Adaptive because we get to
go into all these companies and just help them elevate their game.
And the excitement that comes with it is just addictive.
Rob Collie (00:23:56):
There was another one of those examples of a metaphor that we're
taking the good parts of and not the bad parts.
Ryan Bergstrom (00:24:01):
Yeah, yeah.
Rob Collie (00:24:02):
You're just you're doing a brisk business and a Borged metaphors.
Let me tell you all while Ryan's here listening. Let me tell you
all about a dream I had one time, you know like in the 80s or 90s
adventure movies, at the beginning of the movie that sort of trying
to as quickly as possible introduce all of the characters, and
they've got this one, there's this one person who's sort of the
star of the movie. And it's usually someone like Ed Harris. And
Ed's making his way through the space station or whatever, checking
on everybody. He's like, "We're going down through the submarine
from the bow to the stern."
Rob Collie (00:24:41):
He's checking in with all the people who end up being the
characters in the movie, but he's checking on them. And they're all
happy to see him and he's there to help and he's providing support
and everything. And that's sort of the intro sequence to the movie.
I had that dream and the Ed Harris figures working his way through
the submarine. But the whole time it's Ryan, it's Bergstrom here.
It's his face. I's him. That's how my subconscious perceives Ryan
at our company. Ryan's talking about relationships and everything
and how much people supported him and everything. And I just want
Ryan to tell that story in public with God as my witness, so that
everyone knows that you live that or you pay it forward to.
Ryan Bergstrom (00:25:20):
Rob's told me this before. So, I appreciate the story. It hits me
right in the fields.
Rob Collie (00:25:25):
You're Ed Harris in the abyss, you know?
Ryan Bergstrom (00:25:28):
Yeah.
Rob Collie (00:25:29):
The glue, the one that holds it all together.
Ryan Bergstrom (00:25:32):
I try. We're just the team. Life can be a team sport if you let it.
And it's more fun that way for me, for the people that are playing
on solo mode instead of co-op. That's cool too. I'd love to be an
MPC in your game, whether I'm giving you a quest or whether I just
have that fun one line, that's cool too, but let's all win
together.
Rob Collie (00:25:55):
I thought for a moment there, we were just going to get one of
those terrible sports platitudes, like, "Well, it's team sport, run
the blaze, the coach draws up and focus one thing at a time. Make
sure we execute." Nope, didn't get the sports platitude. That was
something completely unexpected there. There was information. There
was surprise.
Ryan Bergstrom (00:26:15):
Surprise.
Thomas LaRock (00:26:15):
You were surprised.
Rob Collie (00:26:15):
Yeah, That was definitely a surprise. All right, so you discovered
the power of data in an unlikely place due to... It's almost like
pressure and heat-
Ryan Bergstrom (00:26:25):
Yes [crosstalk 00:26:26].
Rob Collie (00:26:26):
... it's an intense necessity. Yeah, what a rough time, by the way,
the COVID graduating crowd, right?
Ryan Bergstrom (00:26:34):
Oh no.
Rob Collie (00:26:35):
Is the first one to experience something quite like what you
graduated into. So maybe right now, not maybe, certainly right now,
there are people being forged in the fires of adversity and data,
like young, recent graduates who are going to be rockstars in the
near future. I look forward to meeting some of them.
Ryan Bergstrom (00:26:55):
Oh, they're out there. I mean, I talked to a few people who are in
school right now and I have a chess coach, Rob. I'm a chess player.
I have a chess coach. [crosstalk 00:27:04] I've rediscovered my
love of chess from fifth grade. And my chess coach is a freshman in
college right now, studying data science. Super cool dude. And I
find myself down him. I'm like, "Hey look, you are totally in
control to make yourself as good as you want. You don't need
permission from anyone else." We've never been in a time in human
history where it has been easier to learn anything. And no one's
gatekeeping you. You're in control of that. And these people that
are graduating right now in COVID, man, my heart just aches for
them. From a technology and information standpoint, they have it
all at their fingertips and the hungry ones will rise to the
top.
Rob Collie (00:27:52):
I agree with you that no one's actually gatekeeping, but that
doesn't mean that people aren't trying. That was kind of a big
theme of our conversation with Krissy is that the people who tend
to learn technical skills via the abstract path, a lot of them tend
to, whether intentionally or not become gatekeeper types for the
vast majority of the rest of us who learn via the practical human
impact route, which is a different route than the abstract route.
So there are headwinds, it's not as gatekeeping is telling yourself
that you can't do it because I'm not that type. I'm not one of
those people. You can sort of see the shining example person and
say, "Well, I'm not them." And so you self gatekeep. I agree with
you. I mean, this isn't a disagreement.
Ryan Bergstrom (00:28:36):
Is the woman that invented Spanx named Sara Blakely? I think
so.
Rob Collie (00:28:39):
Jamie look that up.
Ryan Bergstrom (00:28:43):
I was reading a book called Living with a SEAL that her husband
wrote, the CEO of some company that had David Goggins lived with
him, but his wife was Sarah Blakely. And one of the stories that he
tells is that when she was growing up, her dad every night at
dinner would say, "What did you fail at today?" And they would all
celebrate the failures. And I loved it. Everyone's heard that
failure is the stepping stone to success. It's like, fail, fail,
fail, succeed. If at first you don't succeed, try, try again, all
that. And that was the conversation that they had at the dinner
table.
Ryan Bergstrom (00:29:16):
I was like, "Oh my God, I love that. I hope with my kids, I can do
something productive like that." Because look at what she ended up
doing. She's started a billion dollar company. Failure after
failure, but worked her way up. With respect to learning new tech
skills, it's hard because you don't succeed constantly. But every
one of those stumbling stones, that's learning. That's what it
feels like. People can do it. They just have to be willing to not
be good at something for awhile.
Thomas LaRock (00:29:46):
So confirmed it is Sarah Blakely. And she's worth a billion
dollars.
Rob Collie (00:29:50):
That's a lot of Spanx.
Thomas LaRock (00:29:51):
I was going to say, that's how much leggings are worth.
Ryan Bergstrom (00:29:53):
That's how much solving a problem that affects a ton of people is
worth.
Rob Collie (00:29:57):
So, let's continue the progression. Here you are, you've moved
upstream to corporate-
Ryan Bergstrom (00:30:02):
Corporate, yeah.
Rob Collie (00:30:02):
And now you're in an analyst role. You're officially a data person
now. At some point along there you discover DAX. When and how does
that happen? I mean, imagine if the Salesforce acquisition of
Tableau had happened before, maybe you would have been forced fed
Tableau and we wouldn't be here.
Ryan Bergstrom (00:30:21):
Quite possibly. So, five years at Life Time Fitnesses, the national
sales and marketing analyst. I was still doing it all in Excel. I
was living VLOOKUPs, SUMIF, kind of land. I remember I would do
these elaborate summits to be lived up to all that stuff. This was
before I discovered pivot tables. And then one day I was like, "Oh
wow, I've been creating pivot tables, the long division way,
interesting." At that point in lifetime, we'd switched from
Salesforce to dynamics.
Ryan Bergstrom (00:30:53):
So I had two CRM systems I was familiar with and I got recruited to
go work for Coloplast. It's a medical device company. They had a
different CRM system, Oracle and the whole nice thing about me was
I had this like CRM experience. But of course, I didn't think it
mattered that much. I was like, "Look, it's just like how these
different tables talk to each other." And I inherited these reports
and dashboards when I was at that company that took forever to put
together and it was bang your head against the desk and you never
had time to improve them.
Ryan Bergstrom (00:31:25):
And so I was spending like a week, like seven business days to put
together something. And I was like, "Surely this is a button. Can I
just refresh this?" Like, "Surely there's got to be a better way.
There's got to be a better way." And that at Coloplast is where I
heard someone say Power Pivot and Power Query. And I was like,
"Well, that's something in Excel I don't know how to do." It sounds
promising. I mean, with a word like power, surely it'll solve all
my problems. And that's when I bought actually your book grab
because I was like, "All right, well, let's read the book." I know
one thing is true. If you read the manual, it's where all the
secrets are. So I bought some manuals.
Rob Collie (00:32:03):
This is by the way so atypical. I mean, if it's running completely
counter to the male stereotype of not reading the directions, not
asking for directions, I'll write a book, but I'm very loathe to
read one.
Ryan Bergstrom (00:32:15):
People make fun, my friends make fun of me because if I got a new,
I don't know, TV, and they're like, "Oh, let's turn this new 77
inch TV on and see how it looks." I'm like, "Hold on though, I got
to read the manual." I look [crosstalk 00:32:27] forward to it. I
love it. I'm going to find out about a button that some feature
that's like unlocks it into virtual reality or something. I don't
know. But that's where all the secrets are.
Rob Collie (00:32:37):
They're like, "But Ryan, the Super Bowl started five minutes ago."
Your like, "Yeah, it's okay, we'll miss the first quarter, but
imagine how much better quarters two, three, and four are going to
be after I've read the manual."
Ryan Bergstrom (00:32:46):
Look, the jerseys are not going to be tuned to the correct color of
royal if I don't learn how to adjust the color saturation. Yeah,
now that's the brand of geek that I am.
Rob Collie (00:32:58):
My brother is like this. When he get a new Nintendo game back in
the day, I'd be like, "All right, let's plug it in." And he says,
"Oh no, no." He'll go sit in his chair with that manual. And he
needed to read it cover to cover before he would ever even plug it
in. I admired that and was surprised by it at the same time like,
"Come on, lets..."
Ryan Bergstrom (00:33:16):
Well, that's the only way you learn how to do the secret modes.
Rob Collie (00:33:18):
You bought a manual?
Ryan Bergstrom (00:33:19):
I bought a manual. I bought your book. I started reading it,
slowly. And I was a few chapters in and I knew this much about
power pivot. And I was like, "Okay, let's take this problem that I
have in Excel where I'm doing like a summit of 300,000 contacts to
800,000 phone calls." I'm doing the summit if I'm a 20 digit alpha
numeric field. And when I would hit enter on that for a weekly
report, I would see the percentage sign in the corner of Excel
start to calculate 1%, 2%. And I got my stopwatch out at I timed it
and it was going to take 15 minutes. I had to do this every week,
15 minutes to do this. And I would go walk the stairs and it locks
your computer up. So I'd walk the stairs, I'd go get coffee. I'd do
whatever. And I was like, "Oh I'm sick of it." So when I knew
virtually nothing about PowerPoint because I was just beginning
your book, I'm like, "Let's try this." Let's try this new thing. I
did what I thought I had to do.
Ryan Bergstrom (00:34:19):
And I did it and it was done in an instant. And that was like I had
been saved. I was like, "Oh my gosh, this is the truth." I am
learning everything I can about this because I just took 15 minutes
and turned it into an instant. And that's when I was bad at it. How
deep does this rabbit hole go? I was jumping in. I was on my
honeymoon in The Bahamas, on the beach, reading a Power Pivot and
Power Query book because I didn't have time not to get better at it
because I saw how much better life was about to be. I would just
read the books. I read them all. I bought every book on the subject
matter. I would read a third of each one and get bored and go to
the next one. This is what I do when I learn I've discovered. I get
so many different sources that I could learn from.
Ryan Bergstrom (00:35:16):
And I end up going a third of the way through each one that I end
up reinforcing the beginning concepts over and over and over and
over again, before I end up making it all the way through. And I've
realized that that just helps me learn better. The thing that was
most frustrating was that I was telling everyone that I worked
with, you got to learn this stuff. This is amazing. And they kept
coming to me and saying, "Oh, that's so cool that you like reading
about this stuff." I don't learn best from books. I don't learn
best from this. And it just made me so mad. I was like, "Neither do
I. I learned best with a private tutor, doesn't everyone?" But I
learn I don't have to min-max and optimize my learning the way Tim
Ferriss would have you believe. It's okay to just learn at a
non-optimal pace and improve, so.
Rob Collie (00:36:08):
I'm going to zoom in on something that's a demonstration of
integrity. The story about kicking off Excel and watching it grind
for what you would realize would be like 15 minutes or whatever,
maybe even longer in some cases. There's a different personality
type that looks at that and goes, "Oh, hot damn." I have an excuse
to screw around for the next 15 minutes. When I worked
construction, I was sort of like the junior guy on the crew.
Whenever the crew didn't want to do a whole lot of work for the
rest of the day, they would just come up with a bunch of errands to
send me on, "Oh, go get some nails, go walk a mile and a half
through the sand to get nails and come back and then we'll do
something." And I get back. I'm like, "All right, time to do that
thing." Like, "No man, very close to the end of the day now." That
bothered you that this thing was going to take that long. I'm with
you, it would bother me too completely, right?
Ryan Bergstrom (00:36:58):
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Rob Collie (00:36:58):
I don't take it for granted because there are a lot of people that
are like, "Yeah, that's just how long it takes. And I go on and I
get my coffee or I play phone games, whatever it is. So that hole
there's got to be a better way. This guy has got to be better than
this, like that's very common, I think, amongst our people.
Ryan Bergstrom (00:37:13):
Oh yeah, I think it's the most common thing amongst our people.
Rob Collie (00:37:17):
There's got to be a better way that we should make that even into
an ad campaign. Write that down somewhere.
Ryan Bergstrom (00:37:21):
Yeah, probably.
Rob Collie (00:37:23):
Yeah, please. But at the same time, that's not true of all
humanity. I think it's the data gene folks that think this way. And
then the other 95% of the world don't think that way. This is
something that the people don't really think about. At least in the
early days we're talking to them about Excel is that Excel is very,
very inefficient at searching for and finding things. Well, of
course, at the same time, we've got the CPU's on our computers
these days, their frequency is measured in gigahertz, billions of
calculations per second. And they've got more than one core. So the
average machine that we're running these days might be capable of
10 billion calculations a second without any trouble.
Rob Collie (00:38:04):
How the hell can anything be slow at 10 billion calculations per
second. You were mentioning numbers in the hundreds of thousands
and everything. Well, it turns out that if you're at a very, very,
very inefficient search algorithm, because the storage structure of
a spreadsheet wasn't optimized for it, finding matches is
devastating. This is my challenge to the world. If you have a
spreadsheet that you are tempted to put into manual recalc mode,
where you ever see the percentage calculation progress meter in
your spreadsheet. If ever see that, I can tell you without a doubt
that you're doing something like VLOOKUP or SUMIF or array formulas
that do those sorts of things, because you're absolutely using
matching.
Rob Collie (00:38:47):
It's the matching that makes Excel slow. And the DAX engine is
lightning fast at matching. It's not even fair. So this thing that
went from 15 minutes to sub-second in calculation. It was like,
"Well, now the CPU is doing what it's supposed to do." It's one of
those really unexpected reasons to upgrade from Excel to Power BI
is you'll never have to wait on a recalc ever again. And it's just
one tiny benefit out of a dozen monsters. I guess it's not
tiny.
Ryan Bergstrom (00:39:17):
Well no, it's not, but it's the truth in terms of tip of the
iceberg of the incredible benefit that you get out of it. It's just
an entire new way of thinking about your data and getting the
answers. You get this feedback loop of, "Okay, I've solved that,
I've solved that problem." So, now not only have I regained that
time, that effort, but I'm asking a better, smarter question. So,
I'm getting to the next layer over and over and over again.
Rob Collie (00:39:46):
The company you're at before P3 was called Coloplast?
Ryan Bergstrom (00:39:49):
Yeah. They sell ostomy bags and catheters. So a really, really
great company, helping people with really devastating healthcare
needs.
Rob Collie (00:39:59):
The name. It sounds like a fat cell that contains a soft drink.
Ryan Bergstrom (00:40:04):
Yeah, yeah, it does.
Rob Collie (00:40:05):
It's like... So how many years in there when you started slinging
DAX and M?
Ryan Bergstrom (00:40:12):
Probably six months to a year.
Rob Collie (00:40:14):
Six months is really just enough time to kind of acclimate yourself
to the role.
Ryan Bergstrom (00:40:18):
Yeah, I just was constantly taking too long to get things done for
myself. And very quickly I heard about these new things and
realized this is the better way. And I didn't have time not to
learn at that point. It would cost me more time not to learn it
than it would take to learn it.
Rob Collie (00:40:38):
Do you even remember the person who first mentioned it to you?
Ryan Bergstrom (00:40:43):
I do.
Rob Collie (00:40:44):
Good.
Ryan Bergstrom (00:40:45):
It was my boss. He said, "Oh, this Polish guy that we worked with,
because we were global. We worked with people from all over the
place. His tinkering with Power Query and Power Pivot. You should
check, maybe that's the answer." He didn't know anything about
it.
Thomas LaRock (00:40:58):
But he had heard of it?
Ryan Bergstrom (00:40:59):
He'd heard of it and then he paid for me to get videos from back
when we were PowerPivotPro.
Rob Collie (00:41:05):
The 2013 videos that I shot in Excel 2010.
Ryan Bergstrom (00:41:09):
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Rob Collie (00:41:12):
Because I was too upset about them renaming measures to be
calculated fields in 2013. There was no way I was going to record
for posterity sake. A bunch of videos calling it, calculated fields
over and over again.
Ryan Bergstrom (00:41:23):
Once I started learning it, it was a snowball that couldn't gain
speed fast enough. It was just like, "Oh, let's redo this report,
let's redo this dashboard. Let's take this entire business process
and change the way we do it because we're going to eliminate all of
these headaches or we're going to gain this new insight." And I
couldn't do it fast enough to satisfy myself. And I don't mean like
I wasn't good enough. So I couldn't do it fast enough. I mean like,
"Give me more, let us do this more because everything needs to be
done this way." It will solve so many of the headaches.
Rob Collie (00:42:02):
So why'd you leave?
Ryan Bergstrom (00:42:02):
I left to come to P3.
Rob Collie (00:42:05):
I know that chronologically, but what was the enticement?
Ryan Bergstrom (00:42:08):
So, it was at that point and this happened to many of the people
that work with P3, when they want to talk about their stories.
They're getting good enough at their last job before coming to P3.
And they're starting to work in all kinds of different departments,
because whispers are going out about this person who can do this
thing. That was happening to me. And that was really my happy place
at work. I still had a ton of traditional Excel stuff, but I was
like, "Oh, Power Query, Power Pivot, Power BI. I love doing this."
And I remember I was talking to my boss at the time. I was like,
"Hey, can you send me to this foundations at Power BI training with
this company PowerPivotPro puts on? Can you send me to this?"
Ryan Bergstrom (00:42:53):
The company will give me five grand to get an MBA, but will you
give me a thousand or 1500 or how much it costs to go do this
foundation's Power BI course because like this will give me ROI for
the company? The MBA, that's going to take years to get ROI. This
is going to be immediate ROI. You're going to make your money back
in a week after I get back from this course. "Ah, probably not, but
I'll see what I can do." Well, meanwhile, there was a blog post by
you saying were hiring.
Ryan Bergstrom (00:43:20):
And I had applied and I was working through our diabolical DAX
test. So I'm trying to get approved to come to a P3 training. And
at the same time, I'm also applying to P3 and I ended up passing
that test. I had an interview with Kellan and Austin on a Friday
afternoon. And before I did that interview, I had a conversation
with my boss. I was like, "Hey, my favorite part of my job, the
part that just fills my happiness cup is doing all this work in
Power pivot, Power Query, and Power BI. You got to get more of that
in front of me, send me around the company, have me do it. That's
what I needed to do. Also, I got to get that training approved. I
got to go do that training."
Ryan Bergstrom (00:44:03):
He's like, "All right, I'll see what I can do." So, then I go home
and I have the interview with Austin and Kellan and offer the job
on the phone call. The happiest day of my professional career. I
was this pumping. It was very much like sci, like mute my
microphone. I'm like fist bumping because, it turns out I was
great. "We want to hire you." I didn't know I was that good at DAX
at the time.
Rob Collie (00:44:24):
How would you know, there's nothing to measure yourself against an
environment like that?
Ryan Bergstrom (00:44:28):
So I'm trying to get into this foundations training little did I
realize like I was way past that.
Rob Collie (00:44:32):
Yeah, you were lying to your manager about all that ROI you were
going to get. You were already past all of that.
Ryan Bergstrom (00:44:38):
Yeah, so I was wrong in hindsight, but I thought that that's what
was... So then I come back to work on Monday after I've been
offered the job, I get the offer letter over the weekend from you.
I go into my manager's office and I was like, "Hey that class that
I wanted to get approval for." He's like, "Oh, you know what I'm
not going to be able to get approval for it. Not going to be able
to do it. Sorry." I was like, "It's totally cool. I'm going to be
teaching it." And I didn't say it in a mean way with, and my
manager was like, "Oh really, what?" I was like, "Yeah, they hired
me."I'm going to be doing it.
Ryan Bergstrom (00:45:16):
And he was just like, "Oh, that's so amazing. I'm so happy for
you." And he was just an absolute, he was a great guy, great
manager, brilliant person. And that was the moment. It was like,
"No, no, no, I'm actually going to be teaching it. I apparently I
don't need to go to it because not only do I know the foundations,
I'm very advanced it turns out." And that was the beginning of me
with P3.
Rob Collie (00:45:37):
So there's actually a really surprising parallel that are between
your story and Krissy's. You both tried to get approval to take our
training and were denied and ended up here instead. So let that be
a lesson to you managers out there. Someone wants to take our
training. If you want to keep them, you say yes.
Ryan Bergstrom (00:45:58):
Pretty much, yeah. I always think back to that conversation, that
weekend, it was a turning point because I was reading the books on
the beach in The Bahamas. I was staying up late and instead of
playing video games, instead of doing whatever, I was reading the
manual on how to properly do data modeling and how to write DAX, I
was reading release notes of Power BI, because I just saw the
value. I just knew that this was not the next step. This was the
elevator.
Rob Collie (00:46:37):
If you're listening to this and you're wondering like, "Why are
there so many people that so many, that started four years ago?"
That's because that's when we started hiring full-time. We didn't
have full-time jobs at P3. We had a lot of 1099 contractors or
whatever. But when we really turned into the W-2 two full-time
version about four years ago. So there's a reason that you and
Krissy both sort of appeared at the same time.
Ryan Bergstrom (00:47:04):
I remember when I came on board, I got to meet Krissy. I got to
meet all the other consultants working for P3. I remember having
the conversations like, "Oh hey, I'm Ryan, this is what I'm going
to do, board games and barbecue and I'm kind of weird. I stay up
late at night and I constantly am trying to read and figure out the
better way to do things. It's a curse that I have." And everyone is
just like, "Oh yeah, me too. I also do that." I can't stop thinking
about the better way to solve these problems. And that has just
been one of the threads that every single one of the consultants
that work for P3 has woven into them, as well, is we're just wired
that way. There are other people that know DAX, we're the best at
it, but there are other people that are incredible at it too. But
what I think we're the best at is not just Power BI or DAX or Power
Query, it's understanding a problem and finding the solution the
fastest. That's what I think we're the best at.
Rob Collie (00:48:09):
I think we're the best consulting firm. If pure DAX is an Olympic
sport, I'm not sure anyone from our company would be the gold
medalist in the world. It just that we'd be close. We might be on
the podium, but yeah, it's the impact. It's the human impact. The
shortest path to impact. And that comes through the tweeners, the
people who move through the human and business plane as easily as
they move through the tech plane. You are, even though you didn't
expect it, didn't set out to be it weren't studying to be it.
Rob Collie (00:48:40):
You have, just like Krissy, just like everyone in our company, you
have a deep technical capability that we tend to associate with
like I went to engineering school or something. You have that in
your brain, those structures are in your brain. We just don't
expect it. I think it's so beautiful. And at the same time, a
little bit sad that there's so much latent, untapped quality
engineering talent that's sort of languishing in tweeners. That
have yet to find their valuable niche. Of course, it's part of our
business model, you know?
Ryan Bergstrom (00:49:15):
Yeah.
Rob Collie (00:49:16):
Something's truly, truly beautiful about this. As a senior director
here, how recently has it been that you've been puzzling over a
data model or a DAX or an M problem?
Ryan Bergstrom (00:49:29):
Yesterday.
Rob Collie (00:49:30):
Well, that long ago, huh?
Ryan Bergstrom (00:49:31):
I was on a sales call and she was stumped and she had sent me the
Power BI user form post that she made. And I took a peek at it
while I was on the call with her. And I was like, "Wow, this is a
really well documented problem." I was like, "You got like DAX
studio queries in here. You got profile queries in here." I was
like, "You're advanced, you know that right?" And she's like,
"Well, I don't know about that." I'm like, "No, no, no, trust me,
you are. You are an advanced user. You are very good." And I was
like, "Well, I think that this is your answer. Your team needs
training." She showed me her data model. I was like, "You really
don't need our help with project consulting." Which I'm thrilled
that I get to say that to people like, think about that. A customer
called us and rather than me being like, "Oh, you need us to
consult on your project."
Ryan Bergstrom (00:50:18):
I was like, "Oh no, you, you got this." Like, "You're solid, but
this is what you're missing." And I gave her an idea to work with
and we're following back up with training. But all of the
consultants on my team will periodically come to me with data
problems. I like to joke that maybe I have an aura of problem
solving, to put it into a video game sense because they'll be
explaining the problem and I'll be so excited to throw my input and
I'll have ideas and I'm waiting to talk, because I've listened
enough. So, now I'm done listening. Now, I'm just waiting to talk
because I want them to be able to explain the whole thing to me.
And before I can offer any sort of suggestion, they're like, "Oh I
think I solved it." Yeah, and I'm like, "No, I was going suggest
that idea too." But no, before they get to me, they saw with
themselves-
Rob Collie (00:51:08):
That's-
Ryan Bergstrom (00:51:08):
... over and over again.
Rob Collie (00:51:09):
Yeah, that happens all the time like by the time you're done
formulating a question in a way that another human being like
you've refined it to the point where you can transmit the question
in the process you uncover its fundamentals, the fundamentals of
the problem. And that allows you to unlock it. That happens so many
times. I've been on the receiving end and the transmitting end of
that dynamic, just so many times of my career. All right, yeah
that's it. And the person who's being asked the question sits there
and goes, "Well, I'm glad I could help."
Ryan Bergstrom (00:51:40):
Yeah, that's pretty much the tone I use when I say that too.
Yeah.
Rob Collie (00:51:44):
That is the only tone that you're allowed to use actually,
right?
Ryan Bergstrom (00:51:46):
Yeah, yeah. My way [crosstalk 00:51:48] is done.
Rob Collie (00:51:49):
I'm glad that we still have ways and opportunities for you to
engage with those sorts of things because you know what happens, is
you get into management and you get removed from all the things
that brought you in the first place. Do you get a sustained diet of
stuff like that or is that like I happen to ask you on a day that
you just had a nice snack the day before?
Ryan Bergstrom (00:52:07):
Yeah, a little bit of that, but it's relatively sustained. It's not
as much as when I was a principal consultant, but a couple times a
month, at least people are coming to me and showing me the things
and I'm helping them out, getting them suggestions. The difference
now is that the things that I get to work on are always way more
complex than when I was a principal consultant, because people only
come to me with the hard stuff.
Rob Collie (00:52:32):
Yeah.
Ryan Bergstrom (00:52:33):
And that's not because I'm better than them. It's just that that's
when they are stumped and they need to bounce an idea of
someone.
Rob Collie (00:52:42):
I rarely get to do modeling in DAX anymore, less frequently than
you. But with this podcast, the dashboards that we've been
developing, I've been developing primarily with some Kellan help on
the data fetching side. I've been working on this measure for a
while, that it turns out that the DAX complexity of it is only part
of it. The biggest problem with it is the real world. The real
world nature of the problem. It's like I'm trying to calculate for
a given episode how much lift it offers sort of in a durable sense.
People come in to listen to this episode, do they stick around and
become subscribers? But the thing is no one's telling us a
subscriber count. It'd be really nice to know like, "Oh look, we
went plus 20 or plus 20% or something like that in terms of
subscribers after this episode." And we go, "Okay, that's a good
episode for introducing our podcast to people." We should do things
like that more often, but no one tells us how many people are
subscribing.
Ryan Bergstrom (00:53:41):
Really?
Rob Collie (00:53:42):
No, we don't have a subscriber metric. We just have the number of
downloads of an episode.
Ryan Bergstrom (00:53:46):
How do they know what the most popular podcast in the world?
Because of downloads.
Rob Collie (00:53:50):
Apple knows if you're subscribed or not, but apple doesn't tell us
the subscriber account. They hoard that information, and the same
thing with Spotify and all of that. So all we know is how many
times a client comes to our RSSV to download the audio file. And we
know where it came from. We know that it came from Spotify,
whatever. We haven't gotten too deep into it. It might be that
there are some stats somewhere in Apple that we can get to, for
instance. We have to like divine subscribers, and it turns out it's
just a really noisy, noisy, complicated problem. The number of
listens to episodes is going up over time. So there's just sort of
a natural upward progression. So you can't just say, "Oh, it went
up. It was sort of already kind of naturally going up.
Rob Collie (00:54:37):
So you got to say, "Did it go up faster than it had been?" It's
what you've kind of got to look at. So now you're looking at sort
of the local area of the curve, right before and right after the
episode. And it just turns out that if there's a real ringer of an
episode, right before or right after that episode, it distorts the
hell out of everything. It's just like, I've really, really, really
enjoyed that problem because it is so slippery. It is so difficult
and it is so valuable if we can crack it. I think the answer is we
just fundamentally need more granular source data, which of course
is often the case, but it's been a nice week, long puzzle to screw
around with.
Ryan Bergstrom (00:55:14):
Yeah, what do you like measuring acceleration?
Rob Collie (00:55:17):
Essentially, but it turns out that if every episode's pressing the
gas pedal a little bit and taking it off, press, press, press. How
do you follow Aroon?
Ryan Bergstrom (00:55:25):
Yeah, that's what I was just thinking.
Rob Collie (00:55:26):
As a guest, right? If you come after the corporate VP of Power BI,
you're going to be judged as bad for listens.
Ryan Bergstrom (00:55:35):
Well, thanks for having a few episodes in before you go me on
there.
Rob Collie (00:55:39):
Oh, you're following Krissy. You're still screwed.
Ryan Bergstrom (00:55:40):
Oh no, yeah. I take that back. Curses to you.
Rob Collie (00:55:48):
We really screwed you over here, man. I can't wait to show you the
dashboard that shows how much you suck. And here's what we call the
inverted Bergs from peak.
Ryan Bergstrom (00:55:59):
Yeah.
Rob Collie (00:56:01):
The [crosstalk 00:56:02] Bergs from trench.
Ryan Bergstrom (00:56:03):
I'm going to get approached by saboteurs to put me on other
podcasts now.
Rob Collie (00:56:08):
It took some very sophisticated DAX to identify this, all right.
All right, so you've been here for some very, very, very rapidly
changing formative years.
Ryan Bergstrom (00:56:18):
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Rob Collie (00:56:19):
In our business. It's sort of just as almost like the mythical
extraterrestrial anthropologist looking in from the outside. What
are some of your observations about the nature of what we're doing
and what we've been figuring out and how we're different?
Ryan Bergstrom (00:56:35):
I've seen us continue to evolve really with the power platform
stack because it's grown quite a bit, really in the last four
years. You got Power Automate now you got Power apps. You got
things that aren't quite power platform stack like Azure data
factory that are coming out at new ways to do et. Al. And when I
came on, we were very focused on just Power BI and Pivot and Power
Query as our core competencies. They still are because there's
still the greatest need for what I would call the simple things.
They're not necessarily the simple things as I've learned. I was
advanced. I wasn't just a foundations person, but in corporate
America, the use cases we see all the time, they're not always
cutting edge craziness. It's just helping people do the basics
faster. But as we've evolved now, multiple times will implement
these very complex enterprise solutions that our titles are
principal consultants. But in the workplace you would have people
with principal solution architect or senior solution architect
doing these things that we're doing.
Rob Collie (00:57:48):
Plus a team of people with a title that ends in the word
developer.
Ryan Bergstrom (00:57:51):
Oh yeah. Be developer, senior developer, pretty developer, all
these things. And we're coming in and we have the end user's
perspective. A joke that you make all the time is databases are
often set to write only. No one actually looks at the data once
they go in.
Rob Collie (00:58:09):
That's right. It's stored though. It's there. Trust me.
Ryan Bergstrom (00:58:12):
We go in and we're focused pretty much exclusively on how are you
going to use this solution we implement to make your company
better, to save you time, to make you more money, to save you
money, to reduce headaches for your end users? So, we truly do have
an end-to-end user experience in mind versus we're going to solve
this data problem. We're not solving a data problem. We're solving
human problems using data. And the majority of the work is focused
on Power BI. But when we do these huge data solutions, oftentimes
that end Power BI users who we have in mind. So, we're able to do
the crazy backend solution architecture in a way that makes the
most sense for Power BI to thrive.
Rob Collie (00:59:00):
I like it.
Thomas LaRock (00:59:01):
It's not going to fit in the t-shirt <laugh>
Rob Collie (00:59:05):
All right, so as a board gamer and a disciple of DAX, did you cross
paths with some of the fun stuff over the years? Did you ever look
at the Pokemon optimizer blog post, you got anything like that?
Have you ever used any Power BI for personal or gaming purposes or
anything along those lines?
Ryan Bergstrom (00:59:22):
I used it to track a weight loss dashboard that my friend and I did
last year. Every day I was sharing screenshots of my little health
and wellness personal dashboard to show trend lines of where we
were going to end up at the end of our little 75 day challenge. I
did see the Pokemon blog. I looked at the Pokemon data model. I was
quite happy with it. I've always wanted to build some sort of daily
sports betting data model, but I don't sports bet. So it's really
to like an idea that I think sounds fun.
Rob Collie (00:59:54):
Our only two time guest on the show, Michael Salfino is now
associated with an outfit called BetPrep. You should look it
up.
Ryan Bergstrom (01:00:04):
Okay, I'm going to definitely look that up.
Rob Collie (01:00:05):
Look up BetPrep and we can bring Mike back around. Maybe not even
for the show, maybe we'll talk to him behind the scenes and get
some DAX in there for them or something, who knows. I don't know
what they're doing over there, but he was telling a story on it's
the football off season, but they did one podcast talking about the
draft and he was talking about, and some of the sports they're not
as thoroughly analyzed as football is at this point. During the
championship game of the final four, Baylor versus Gonzaga, they
allow live betting now. You can place bets at various points during
the game.
Ryan Bergstrom (01:00:41):
Oh really?
Rob Collie (01:00:42):
And Mike was telling the story about how his buddy, who he works
with on BetPrep was just killing it because Gonzaga was the
favorite. They were the one that was supposed to win. Early in the
game they're down like, I didn't watch the game, but apparently
that I down nine or 12 to nothing in the first several minutes. And
at the time out, the algorithm that's setting the odds for the live
bet is still too heavily believing in the favorite. That algorithm
was going, "Okay, Gonzaga's going to still come back and win this."
But everyone who was watching the game was like, "Oh, I don't
know." And so he just kept every time out, he would bet on Baylor
and just cleaned up. There's still some frontiers out there that
are even in the gambling world where there's still some sort of
unguarded doors, apparently. I don't know. I would've had no idea
that any of that kind of stuff was even been going on, but.
Ryan Bergstrom (01:01:35):
No, you always just assume that the sports betting world has hired
all the big brain betting thinkers to produce those algorithms. But
it's just not true.
Rob Collie (01:01:47):
Well, I mean, they have, but anything that's new might be
vulnerable. I bet that next year's algorithms are going to be a lot
better.
Ryan Bergstrom (01:01:55):
Yeah.
Rob Collie (01:01:56):
That was probably a one time exploit in a way.
Ryan Bergstrom (01:01:59):
I doubt it.
Rob Collie (01:02:00):
Yeah. Oh man, just the idea of live betting during a game. I mean,
it just seems like such a cliff to step off of. If I walked into
that, I might not ever come out. I'm going to stay away from the
idea of betting in real time. I don't bet at all, but for some
reason I think the real time betting would really hook me and I
want nothing to do with it.
Ryan Bergstrom (01:02:24):
Certainly keeps you interested in the game the whole time.
Rob Collie (01:02:27):
Well, if you have a decent fantasy football, you know-
Ryan Bergstrom (01:02:30):
Can you imagine how much money would've been lost or one during the
Patriots-Falcon Super Bowl when they were down three, four
touchdowns at halftime?
Rob Collie (01:02:40):
Yeah, yeah. This was something that also we talked about with Mike
on the show was like, "If the win probability models keep saying
that there was like a 99.8% chance that you going to lose and you
still won or vice versa, is the model actually accurate?" Are the
Falcons really that bad, because they've now lost multiple games
where they had a 99 plus percent chance of winning in a short span
of time? They just keep doing it. It's not just the Super Bowl. If
they've managed to pull it off repeatedly, does that mean that the
Falcons are just really, really that incompetent?
Thomas LaRock (01:03:12):
Yes.
Ryan Bergstrom (01:03:12):
Makes you wonder if that's a data point now in calculating the
99%?
Rob Collie (01:03:17):
Yeah.
Ryan Bergstrom (01:03:17):
Is Falcons equals true?
Rob Collie (01:03:19):
I had the idea that them having pulled that off indicates that it's
going to be harder to have a 99% win probability in the future. The
model's going to get smarter.
Ryan Bergstrom (01:03:27):
Oh, that too probably.
Rob Collie (01:03:31):
And go, "Well, I've seen crazier shit than this", says the model.
"So we're only going to give you 97 or something."
Thomas LaRock (01:03:36):
Hey man, I've enjoyed this, hope you have as well.
Ryan Bergstrom (01:03:39):
Yeah, this has been really fun.
Announcer (01:03:41):
Thanks for listening to the Raw Data by P3 Adaptive podcast. Let
the experts at P3 Adaptive help your business. Just go to
p3adaptive.com. Have a day-to-day.