Sometimes we forget the humans behind the tech in our ever busy world. DSF is fortunate enough to know some incredible tech leaders across the world and has the privilege of hearing them present at our events. That being said, our Speaker Spotlight sets the stage to get to know our speakers on a more personal level and connect them with our growing community. Read the mini interview below!

A bit about Yali:

  • I graduated from Cambridge with a BA in Natural Sciences and an MPhil in the History and Philosophy of Science. I was very interested in science, but then became interested in scientific reasoning and its history – how we developed numerical methods over time and applied them to different areas of knowledge
  • When I left university I wanted to see this work in practice in a commercial context so I worked as a consultant – first as an operations consultant (in logistics and renewable energy) and then as a strategy consultant.
  • I was always attracted to technology and startups and was lucky to be offered a job at OpenAds (since OpenX) as one of their early employees in London to manage data for them
  • At OpenAds I was lucky to get first hand experience of Hadoop which was really my introduction to “Big Data” as we called it back then
  • After OpenAds / OpenX Alex (my cofounder) and I started a boutique consultancy in London, working at the intersection of strategy, data and technology. That gave us the scope experiment building software and different businesses around our client engagements
  • Snowplow started life as a hackathon project in 2012. We built the first version in a couple of days, open sourced it. Within a week it started getting downloads and we started getting feedback from people around the world who started to use it
    It grew into the business we run today! (12 years later.) In that time we’ve raised three rounds of funding, have more than 200 enterprise customers around the world and a team of more than 100 spread across Europe, the Americas and APAC.

What is the best and worst thing about your job role? 

  • I love building things: technology, teams, companies. It is really motivating when those things are useful to others.
  • I love the opportunity to work with smart people – across our customers and partners, and our internal team
  • I also love the opportunity to learn all the time.
  • I think the hardest thing I’ve found about my job role is balancing it with family life.

What can you advise someone just starting out to be successful?

Own your own learning journey and drive your learning agenda as fast and hard as possible. There’s never been so much to learn, there’s never been more value in those learnings, and the market is brutally competitive. To make it today is much harder than to make it 25 years ago when I started out – to get ahead you’ve got to create your own opportunities. Luckily there have never been more opportunities to get ahead and learn by doing than ever before – AI is just the most recent new way to learn. (And boy is it an amazing teacher.)

How do you switch off?

Spend time with my family, read fiction, exercise.

What advice would you give your younger self?

The same advice I’d give anyone starting out – take ownership of your own learning journey and drive it as hard as possible. I only started doing this quite late in my career, when I left OpenX and started working for myself. I should have started earlier. -before I even left university.

What is next for you?

I really don’t know! One of the nice things about being an entrepreneur is you never really know what’s next. The world is changing so fast – so long as I’m learning new things and building I’m happy 😄

If you could do anything now, career-wise or personally what would you do? Why?

I’m really happy doing what I’m doing! I feel very grateful to have been given the opportunities I have, and don’t wish for anything else.

What are your top 5 predictions in tech for the next 5 years?

AI will change everything. It’ll take longer than everyone expects, but the changes will be more far reaching that everyone is imagining. I don’t think anyone really has any idea what the world will look like in 5 years time.

Thank you to all our wonderful speakers for taking part in our Speaker Spotlight!

Want to become a DSF Speaker? Apply here!