SanjMo’s Welcome to 2023 Newsletter

If you are passionate, you will never work another day. — Ikigai

In 2022, SanjMo completed its first full year as an independent analyst advisory firm. Being an entrepreneur late in my career makes me feel my time is limited, and hence there is a natural urgency to make every day count. One of my goals is to solve interesting problems. This has pushed my creative thinking to new levels and to take risks.

The Year in Retrospect

The beauty of being a freelancer is that you don’t need any permission. The range of clients and initiatives proved that we are only limited by our imagination and chutzpah.

Here are some highlights:

Projects

• I engaged with over 30 clients and my most common deliverables included writing reports and conducting webinars. I wrote reports for Redis, StarRocks, Severalnines, Dremio, and MongoDB to name a few.
• I expanded into messaging and positioning analysis, created my own framework to help startups crystalize their go-to-market strategy and I expanded into competitive intelligence.
• I rediscovered my love for writing and published with Medium and the Forbes Council. This allowed me to hone my point of view on trending topics like Data Mesh and Data Observability.
• I was honored to present at several conferences — some as keynotes and some as sessions. Highlights include two data.world conferences, Collibra, AtScale, and Starburst. I hosted webinars for Linux Foundation, Striim, Okera, Ovaledge, Senzing, etc.
• I also was honored to host iconic thought-leaders in a few of my panel discussions and learn from them.

Podcasts

• In the first year of hosting the ‘It Depends’ podcast series, I recorded 26 episodes with 1,000 hours of viewership. I was joined by world-class thought leaders who shared their wealth of knowledge on my podcast.
• In addition, I was invited to my peers’ platforms such as DM Radio, SiliconAngle theCUBE, Catalog and Cocktails, The Ravit Show, Monday Morning Data Chat, and Lights on Data.

Conferences and Meetup

• It seems like I traveled all year long to attend about 20 conferences; these ranged from mega-vendors, like AWS, Google, Snowflake, Databricks, Confluent, and MongoDB, to industry events such as Gartner, MIT CDOIQ, KubeCon, in Spain and the US, and Big Data London.
• My attendance at Gartner this year was unique because for the first time I attended as a customer instead of a Gartner analyst/speaker. It was a reunion of sorts.
• I had the honor of hosting and running Okera’s Airside event and organizing their first full-day analyst and customer advisory board programs.
• One of my most ambitious initiatives was conducting two meetups in India. I worked with like-minded partners, including Google Cloud, The Ravit Show, Telmai, and Starburst. These curated events were oversubscribed and helped clarify new concepts and approaches in data analytics.

My goal is to help clients and products get discovered and to demystify concepts. What I like the most about my work is the opportunity to research deeply. I have a strong inclination to be very specific in my recommendations so that they are actionable.

Learnings

As I close this newsletter, I would like to share some of my learnings from the past year:

• Do things for which a script has not yet been written. That’s when you are your creative best. If the steps are written down, then it’s not your creation. Through it all, you have to stay (read, appear) confident and embrace impostor syndrome.
• Keep building. I attended many conferences where I learned a lot and met many interesting people. It’s important to be a sponge to new information. Then, take it a step further by synthesizing learnings into digestible components and sharing at scale.
• “Build it and they will come” doesn’t work. The quality of content created holds little value without thoughtful strategies around accessibility. We are all overloaded with online content. I have to diligently promote my material on LinkedIn, YouTube, Medium, Twitter, and Mailchimp to ensure access at scale.

What lies in store for 2023

People who know me, know that I am filled with unlimited optimism and curiosity. However, in 2023, I am blending it with a bit of skepticism as we weather the economic pressures.

Having said that, I am super excited about the new year because of the tumultuous nature of where our market is. We have inadvertently over complicated the so-called modern data stack, and it is in dire need for reinvention! I plan to help simplify and clarify technologies and share my recommendations broadly with my network.

Besides expanding my client-base and projects, my big hairy and audacious goals (BHAGs) include:

• Publish my book on Modern Data and Analytics
• Create a training class on this topic
• Organize and run global meet-ups

Knowing me, stay tuned for surprises along the way. After all, as they say, fortune favors the bald.

I’d like to close by posing a question that I have been pondering recently: “What can you do today that will make work look like play?”

Thank you for your support.

Respectfully,

Sanjeev Mohan