Solomon Kahn

Founder & CEO at Delivery Layer | ex Nielsen P&L owner | ex unicorn SaaS VP of Data | Host of the Data That Drives Revenue Podcast

I'm a long-time data leader, currently leading ReportingApplications.com, a consulting company focused on building - you guessed it - Reporting Applications.

Why Reporting Applications?

Because they’re tricky to build in ways that most companies don’t realize until they are live with customers and dealing with unexpected business problems.

We believe there’s an art to building great reporting applications, but not many people have focused on this area deeply enough to become experts.

By working with us you can benefit from our many years of lessons learned.

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Prior to starting ReportingApplications.com I was the founder of Delivery Layer - a SaaS product that powered customer facing reporting applications.

Before that I was VP of Data Strategy at Helium 10 where I led all things data (Data Engineering, Data Science, Data Product Development and Analytics). I previously ran product & analytics with P&L responsibility for Nielsen Sports, the global leader in Sports Sponsorship data.
  
Early in my career I ended up with the mix of statistical, business analysis and programming skills that would turn into the ideal background for a data scientist. Since then, I've been leading data teams, building data products and running data businesses.

My philosophy is that data isn't the hero - it's the sidekick. It's only valuable if it improves the lives of your customers, or helps someone make better decisions.

Get in touch if you need to build a reporting application!

And connect and follow along for lots of content around data leadership, becoming a better data person, and (of course) Reporting Applications.

Founder & CEO

Delivery Layer is a platform that powers revenue generating data through web applications and APIs that deliver your internal data to customers and partners.  
  
We dramatically improve time to market for data products. Enterprise scale products can launch in under a quarter, and consulting project front-ends can ship in days.  

This is only possible because we focus exclusively on applications that deliver your internal data to customers (as opposed to when customers send data into your systems).
  
Our pre-built infrastructure and unique battle-tested experience allows us to move at blazing speeds.

Thriveworks

Vice President of Data Analytics

Data Hire #1, Steering data strategy at a mental health innovator, leading a talented team to
unlock insights, powering growth, and impacting patient lives.

- Bridging business-data gaps by collaborating across departments. Implemented a cloud- based business-driven analytics platform that identified key challenges and allowed for double digit increases in session volume, availability, marketing demand, and collections through more proactive identification of bottlenecks, and new areas of opportunity.
- Committed to balancing data agility with strategic cost management, ensuring the data the team delivers maximum value within budget constraints.
- Mentoring and coaching a high-performing team of 5 data analysts and engineers, propelling successful execution of a business growth-driven data strategy. Their outstanding work has garnered high marks and praise throughout the business during performance reviews and one member earned a well-deserved promotion to a lead role.
- Empowering 250+ employees through customized data literacy initiatives. Enabling seamless transitions to data-driven workflows across departments driven by business-unit focused analytics that brought transparency and accountability.
- Optimizing Data Vendor Relations: Achieving 45+% savings, in one example, on contract initiation and renewals through strategic negotiations, a data-driven approach, and industry knowledge, being mindful of the company's focus on profitability.
- Data Stack: Snowflake, Fivetran, dbt, Rudderstack, Supermetrics, Mixpanel, Heap, Looker, Confluence/JIRA, and GitHub

Head of Data & Analytics(Senior Director)

Head(Director) of Data and BI

Andela

Data Hire #1, Pioneered a world-class data team, drove insights and scaled growth for a rapidly expanding company. 

- Secured Executive Buy-In & Funding: Developed and socialized data strategy and roadmap, securing executive leadership buy-in and funding for team growth and direction. 
- Built & Scaled High-Performing Data Team: Grew a diverse, global, remote analytics team from 1 to 7, with a roadmap to expand to 17 within 12 months, strategically aligning talent with explosive company growth. 
- Established Sustainable Data Practices: Created and implemented standardized reporting and data modeling practices, ensuring scalability and portability for the future. Optimized Delivery & Efficiency: Developed and iterated on team/work management processes, driving excellence in delivery and exceeding expectations. 
- Streamlined Vendor Management: Managed all vendor relationships, including contract negotiation, budget forecasting, and cost savings initiatives including a 42% savings on vendor renewals. 
- Data Stack: BigQuery, Fivetran, dbt, Segment, Looker, Confluence/JIRA, and GitHub

Head of Data & Analytics(Director)

EVERYTHING BUT THE HOUSE (EBTH)

Data Hire #1, Built the data engine, ignited analytics culture, established the team, and empowered a data-driven future. 

- Business-aligned Data Champion: Partnered across departments to understand business needs and problems, recommended data solutions to promote data literacy and data-driven decision-making, ensuring all actions contributed to clear success metrics. 
- Cultivated an Elite Data Program: Led the development and execution of stringent data management and governance standards, along with processes to forge an enterprise-ready data team. 
- Crafted Analytical Infrastructure: Architected clean, comprehensive data models in Snowflake using dbt, integrated them seamlessly with analytics tools like Looker, and documented everything for future success. This established a robust analytical infrastructure, unlocking efficient data exploration and analysis for everyone. 
- Revolutionized Data Insights: Standardized reporting, architected impactful business analytics dashboards, and eliminated inconsistencies. This ignited company-wide adoption of centralized metrics, driving data-driven action and empowering informed decision making. 
- Data Stack: Snowflake, Stitch, dbt, Segment, Heap, Looker, Clubhouse, and GitHub

Senior Manager Data Analytics

USA Softball

I umpire all levels of ASA softball. I hold myself to a high level of professionalism and handle high stress situations well due to my role as an umpire. I had to be role model on the field and provide the rule knowledge and professionalism when dealing with coaches, players and parents. While working full time I work the weekends and some nights during the fall and late spring and summer umpiring all over the tri-state area. I have been honored with umpiring 4 ASA National Tournaments. The first was 2014, for the 12 and under Eastern Regional National Tournament, 2015, I was able to umpire the 14A National Tournament, 2016, I umpired the 12A National Tournament, and 2017, had the opportunity to umpire another 14A National Tournament and scroed high marks on my evaluations for each week long tournaments.

Umpire

I umpired all levels of ASA softball. I hold myself to a high level of professionalism and handle high stress situations well due to my role as an umpire. I had to be role model on the field and provide the rule knowledge and professionalism when dealing with coaches, players and parents. While in High School and College I drove all over Texas to umpire all levels of ASA Softball.

84.51˚

•	Spearheaded and built out the effort to create a clickstream enterprise data asset for consumption across 84.51 and Kroger. 
•	Utilized Jupyter Notebooks to do heavy data investigation into historically captured clickstream data to determine the roadmap for creating a useful data asset.
•	Recommended standard data capture and data definition practices to Kroger Digital’s product teams to clean up and standardize future clickstream data tagging.
•	Created and drove the data strategy and roadmap for the build out of the brand-new clickstream data asset.
•	Organized and drove many executive presentations and updates around the development of this mart to drive top level buy-in on the project investment.
•	Lead a team of data engineers and data scientists in the development of the clickstream data mart which included heavy data cleansing, mapping, standardization, and future preemptive testing.
•	Evangelized and trained the organization on the capabilities of the addition of this data into current analysis and data science models to better understand our customers, create better personalization and recommendation models, and recommend customer insight monetization opportunities.

Lead Data Solutions Product Owner

Senior Data Solutions Product Owner

Intelligrated

➢Engage the business to elicit requirements from all stakeholders and determine scope, current processes, and risks.
➢Worked as a technical and functional resource for the implementation of the Business Intelligence reporting tool, Orbit Analytics.
➢ Translate the business requirements into documentation that aligns with the functional and technical resource needs.
➢ Create data definition and solution recommendation mock-ups for easy to follow documentation for technical resources.
➢ Draft thorough test plans for technical unit testing, IT functional testing, and User Acceptance testing.
➢ Took on additional role as lead analyst for our custom Installbase application.
➢ Work in a Waterfall model environment, with emphasis on eliciting all business requirements at the beginning of the process so as to complete all design, implementation, testing, and delivery of items within service request scope in one sequential process.
➢ Completed ASPE Business Analyst Boot Camp to further my knowledge of new elicitation techniques, stakeholder identification, document analysis, and documentation techniques.

IT Solution Delivery Specialist

Kroger

Oversaw design, maintenance, and optimization of Kroger’s C-Store, and Supermarket Fuel SQL Server databases. Supported the Essbase and Dodeca development with the SQL Server backend, as well as developing Load Rules and Dimension Builds for Essbase Cube development.
➢	Served as Technical Lead for the migration, consolidation, and upgrade of SQL Server databases, security, SSIS packages, and SSRS Reports from SQL Server 2005 and 2008R2 to 2012.
➢	Automated SSIS packages to remove manual intervention in ETL processes, as well implemented appropriate scheduling of tasks to better suit business users.
➢	Reviewed current business procedures and suggested and implemented database/ETL changes.
➢	Developed data flow documentation to track the flow of information in and out of our servers from source to final destination. 
➢	Configure SMTP Server and email profiles in accordance with enterprise standard.
➢	Employed use of error handling email tasks that would alert my team immediately of certain events occurring on our server, and in our SQL Jobs.
➢	Drove the optimization of load processes, reporting queries, as well as Essbase Load Rules to drastically cut out hours in some processes, by rewriting the queries as well as appropriately indexing major tables. 
➢	Maintained all SSRS Reporting, corresponding security, as well as ASP front-end web page for ease of report access for C-Store and SPG groups. 
➢	Managed the Labor Reporting front-end ASP, and ASP.NET web pages, along with the backend SSIS packages and stored procedures for ETL from our Transactional databases to feed proper tables. 
➢	Began work on database design documentation to illustrate the layout of our databases and the included information.
➢	Develop and coach others to write optimized queries, and broaden the team’s knowledge of SQL functionality and introduce new tools and solutions to solve previously unsolved problems.

Database Developer/Analyst

Developed and Maintained business performance reporting for monthly stand-up meetings
Created Essbase cube documentation for business users to easily search for the cube that contained the information they needed
Educated business users on using the Essbase Add-In to adhoc business data

Retail Operations Intern

Leadership | Data Strategy & Governance | Business Analytics | Data Modeling & Architecture | Business Intelligence | Cross-Departmental Collaboration | Product Management 

Data analytics senior leader with 10+ years of experience delivering results. Spearheaded data transformation in diverse environments, including 3 large corporations and 3 hyper-growth startups. I have a proven track record of establishing and empowering teams, implementing data strategies, driving operational and cost efficiencies, and identifying new opportunities. I also bring deep technical expertise in data architecture, 
modeling, and reporting technologies and methodologies.

Passions: 
Travel - Points and Miles Game | Scuba Diving - AOW+Specialties Certified | Backcountry Backpacking | Reading

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The Battle

Solomon Kahn

Anfernee Arazoza

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