#359 Unlocking Data Potential: Insights from Data Pioneer

**Wei Zheng** (0:00)
Right now, there are some folks out there that are trying to reboot, like Tri-Fact, alike. There are a lot of companies out there trying to work on the next revolution of this, which is, how do we make it so that anybody without really intrinsic data knowledge can make use of the data, unlock more of that data potential in their day-to-day work.

**Dr. Darren Pulsipher** (0:21)
Welcome to Embracing Digital Transformation, where we explore how people process policy and technology drive effective change. This is Dr. Darren, Chief Enterprise Architect, Educator, Author, and most importantly, your host.
On this episode, a history lesson in AI and Data Unleashed in Silicon Valley with Wei Zheng, Pioneer of Data Management and Chief Product Officer at Conductor. Okay, Wei, welcome to the show.

**Wei Zheng** (0:55)
Thank you for having me, Darren. Thank you for having me.

**Dr. Darren Pulsipher** (0:57)
I'm so excited to be here. Yeah, I'm actually really excited in our pre-... I always talk to my guests beforehand, like a couple of weeks sometimes beforehand, and I wrote on my notes here that you're a good storyteller. So we'll find out for sure by you introducing yourself, but just so you know, on my show, I only have superheroes on the show, and only every superhero has a background story.

**Wei Zheng** (1:25)
All right.

**Dr. Darren Pulsipher** (1:25)
So Wei, what's your background story?

**Wei Zheng** (1:28)
Yeah, love to... First of all, thanks for having me on the show. I'm excited to be here, and I'll tell your listeners a little bit about me. So I was born and raised in Shanghai, China. I came to the United States when I was 14 years old, and I will tell maybe another story at some different point about how I got into computer science, but it has a lot to do with my family. It has a lot to do with what my father actually studied when he was in college. But one way or another, I ended up being here in the Bay Area.
I've been living in the San Francisco Bay Area for my entire life, basically. And I got my start by attending University of California, Berkeley, and I had to pick a major.
I didn't really know. And I was born at the time when just as I was about to enter university, it was the initial.com boom.

**Dr. Darren Pulsipher** (2:22)
Oh, the 90s.

**Wei Zheng** (2:24)
The 90s.
Yeah. And this is before Google, before Netflix, before any of these Amazon, eBay. This is before all of that. And I just remember getting mesmerized by these gigantic, shiny disk that was sent to my inbox or in my mail, not the email inbox, but the physical snail mail inbox.

**Dr. Darren Pulsipher** (2:46)
Snail mail box, yeah.

**Wei Zheng** (2:47)
It's called a company called AOL, which is American Online. And that was my first exposure to the to the Internet, I suppose, because when I went to Berkeley, we all got, you know, on the first day of school, we all got very excited about having an email address and getting up our dial-up modem. For those listeners on your show, that's a little bit younger. You probably don't know what a dial-up modem sound like from US Robotics, but it's like this, this like unmistakable sound that you're like on the Internet, right? So, I think I was lucky in the sense that, like right at the time when I went to school is the beginning of this huge Internet phenomenon, the dot-com boom. And if I had gone to school just a few years later, if I had gone to school a little bit earlier, I don't know if I would have ended up choosing the major of computer science that I chose. And that's really what led me down the path of working technology pretty much for the last three decades, two and a half decades almost at this point.
Yeah, so that's how I got my start. Now, one other story I will tell, and we'll get into what I currently do.
But one big victim of the dot-com boom at the time was a company called Webvan.

**Dr. Darren Pulsipher** (4:04)
Oh yeah, I knew Webvan very well.

**Wei Zheng** (4:07)
Yeah, and I still have their color crates in my garage. I have the yellow and the green crates, and they're actually worth hundreds of dollars on eBay right now because they're considered like an internet memorabilia almost.

**Dr. Darren Pulsipher** (4:19)
Oh yeah, absolutely.

**Wei Zheng** (4:21)
But I like the Webvan story because it's a perfect example of something that was just a little bit too ahead of its times.