About DanAfter earning his CPA in New York, Dan dedicated his early career to education, helping to build eight schools across two continents. Three of those schools make up the charter school network Coney Island Prep, a 160-person, $20mm+ organization where Dan served as both CFO and COO.  He has served as CFO of many fast-growth start-ups, is a recurring guest lecturer at Harvard Graduate School of Education, and is an avid adventurer and musician.  But most importantly, he's a dedicated husband and an enamored father who, at this point, knows the lyrics to each and every Raffi song ever created.Links:Duckbillgroup.com: https://duckbillgroup.com
TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Redis, the company behind the incredibly popular open source database that is not the bind DNS server. If you’re tired of managing open source Redis on your own, or you’re using one of the vanilla cloud caching services, these folks have you covered with the go to manage Redis service for global caching and primary database capabilities; Redis Enterprise. Set up a meeting with a Redis expert during re:Invent, and you’ll not only learn how you can become a Redis hero, but also have a chance to win some fun and exciting prizes. To learn more and deploy not only a cache but a single operational data platform for one Redis experience, visit redis.com/hero. Thats r-e-d-i-s.com/hero. And my thanks to my friends at Redis for sponsoring my ridiculous non-sense.  Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Honeycomb. When production is running slow, it's hard to know where problems originate: is it your application code, users, or the underlying systems? I’ve got five bucks on DNS, personally. Why scroll through endless dashboards, while dealing with alert floods, going from tool to tool to tool that you employ, guessing at which puzzle pieces matter? Context switching and tool sprawl are slowly killing both your team and your business. You should care more about one of those than the other, which one is up to you. Drop the separate pillars and enter a world of getting one unified understanding of the one thing driving your business: production. With Honeycomb, you guess less and know more. Try it for free at Honeycomb.io/screaminginthecloud. Observability, it’s more than just hipster monitoring.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud, I’m Corey Quinn. A common myth that has sort of permeated the entire ecosystem is, when you associate a single person with a company, they’re the only person is really there. It turns out that with AWS, Jeff Barr is writing an awful lot of blog posts, but I have it on good authority that there are at least three services he didn’t personally create himself. Similarly here at The Duckbill Group, there are a lot of folks who aren’t necessarily in the public eye as much as I am because they don’t have the overriding personality flaws that I do. One of those people is my guest today. Dan Shapiro is our CFO, and I guess the closest thing you could consider to us having adult supervision. Dan, thanks for joining me.Dan: Thanks for having me, and I appreciate you considering me an adult, even though I don’t always feel that way.Corey: I always assume there’s someone else out there who knows what’s going on and how life works, and one day they’re going to bother to explain it to me because the alternative is that none of us know and we’re making it up as we go along, and I’m not sure I can wrap my head around that fear.Dan: Yeah, my job is to allow you guys to have the vision, some wild ideas, try to put data to ideas, tell you