Meeting Title: Eden Project Renewal Strategy Discussion Date: 2026-04-22 Meeting participants: Robert Tseng, Greg Stoutenburg
WEBVTT
1 00:08:23.940 ⇒ 00:08:26.140 Greg Stoutenburg: Hey, sorry, I just walked away for a minute.
2 00:08:26.800 ⇒ 00:08:27.320 Robert Tseng: Hey, no worries.
3 00:08:28.930 ⇒ 00:08:29.580 Greg Stoutenburg: Let’s see…
4 00:08:29.580 ⇒ 00:08:35.829 Robert Tseng: Yeah, yeah, I… I’m just kind of pulling to you. Thanks for joining. I don’t think Zoran and Garrett are gonna join.
5 00:08:36.169 ⇒ 00:08:37.439 Greg Stoutenburg: Okay, yeah.
6 00:08:37.440 ⇒ 00:08:40.280 Robert Tseng: Yeah, I’m just,
7 00:08:41.429 ⇒ 00:08:52.049 Robert Tseng: Okay, so a few things, like… so I have this deck here, sure, I’m gonna walk them through that, but I mean, the main thing is really this renewal. The contract’s not up until the end of next week, but…
8 00:08:52.160 ⇒ 00:08:58.399 Robert Tseng: I think, where I’m struggling right now is…
9 00:08:59.180 ⇒ 00:09:18.049 Robert Tseng: Yeah, like, I’m communicating this, like, big vision here, and then, like, I think we’re just… I’m not able to keep up with the updates from, like, the team, so… I know this is, like, something I asked you to just kind of work with Garrett a bit more on. I think the deck… I don’t… I don’t know, did it even go… did it get faster? I don’t even know, like, I…
10 00:09:18.050 ⇒ 00:09:21.560 Robert Tseng: I… yeah, I’m not really sure if…
11 00:09:21.560 ⇒ 00:09:30.269 Robert Tseng: Yeah, the slides look a little better, but, like, I don’t know if this is a better process than we had before, frankly. So, seems like it was still a scramble to get
12 00:09:30.540 ⇒ 00:09:45.589 Robert Tseng: I mean, you and Zoron to update things, and, like, yeah, it still took, like, another 2 or 3 revisions to get to something that is, like, frankly, like, not… I mean, kind of mediocre. Like, I feel like we’ve done better… better… better updates than this one before, so… Yeah.
13 00:09:45.590 ⇒ 00:09:50.870 Greg Stoutenburg: I think it looks very nice. I think… I mean, my take on this, and I’m gonna sort of communicate… I’ll find the right…
14 00:09:50.980 ⇒ 00:09:59.459 Greg Stoutenburg: but still clear way to communicate this to him later. He needs to really understand the clients and what we’re doing for them in a way that goes beyond, like.
15 00:09:59.540 ⇒ 00:10:11.909 Greg Stoutenburg: you know, pull from Linear and update on what’s going on. Like, he needs to really understand it, and I think with that, these things can get better, because he’s got the speed to pull this thing together very quickly.
16 00:10:12.020 ⇒ 00:10:12.889 Greg Stoutenburg: But it’s like…
17 00:10:12.890 ⇒ 00:10:18.830 Robert Tseng: That’s what I’m saying, I’m like, I wouldn’t spending his time on, if this is… if it’s just, like, kind of pulling this together, like, it doesn’t take very long. Yeah.
18 00:10:18.830 ⇒ 00:10:24.320 Greg Stoutenburg: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, right. So, like, he’ll pull it together quickly, it’ll look good, but then it’ll just be, like.
19 00:10:24.470 ⇒ 00:10:27.749 Greg Stoutenburg: you know, in one case, just, like, dead wrong. Like.
20 00:10:27.750 ⇒ 00:10:28.070 Robert Tseng: Yeah.
21 00:10:28.070 ⇒ 00:10:35.540 Greg Stoutenburg: That was… and that was… that’s actually been, in my opinion, most of the reason why I got jammed on default. I don’t know how much of that you saw.
22 00:10:35.810 ⇒ 00:10:36.340 Robert Tseng: Yeah.
23 00:10:36.340 ⇒ 00:10:43.340 Greg Stoutenburg: But we showed them, Gantt. I didn’t… I didn’t review it thoroughly, because I thought, like, alright, you know, this, someone else did this. You know, our new guy.
24 00:10:43.340 ⇒ 00:10:43.660 Robert Tseng: Sure.
25 00:10:43.660 ⇒ 00:10:46.860 Greg Stoutenburg: And it was just, like, it mentioned amplitude, like, they…
26 00:10:47.270 ⇒ 00:10:48.830 Greg Stoutenburg: Amplitude months ago, and I was like.
27 00:10:48.830 ⇒ 00:10:49.470 Robert Tseng: Yeah.
28 00:10:49.810 ⇒ 00:11:02.780 Greg Stoutenburg: Anyway, so I am seeing that sort of thing, and we’ll… and we’ll, and we’ll communicate that clearly. Yeah, I do think it looks… I think it looks good, but yeah, as far as the process, no, I don’t see that the process has gotten better.
29 00:11:03.400 ⇒ 00:11:05.300 Robert Tseng: Okay.
30 00:11:05.560 ⇒ 00:11:09.710 Robert Tseng: Okay, well, I don’t want to grill the output, I’m gonna have to just roll with it, this is what we have, so…
31 00:11:09.710 ⇒ 00:11:10.380 Greg Stoutenburg: Yeah.
32 00:11:10.380 ⇒ 00:11:22.719 Robert Tseng: what I care about more is… there’s a couple things that I feel like I needed to put together. One is this architecture diagram that I keep, like, kind of hounding the team for that, like, I just went ahead and just made it myself. So, I think, like.
33 00:11:23.100 ⇒ 00:11:32.500 Robert Tseng: Yeah, I understand that, like, Adam does this thing where he just, like, kind of throws everything into the cloud. I saw the last version, which is basically what Zoran had in this deck, which is, like.
34 00:11:32.500 ⇒ 00:11:33.470 Greg Stoutenburg: The giant web.
35 00:11:33.600 ⇒ 00:11:34.300 Greg Stoutenburg: Yeah.
36 00:11:34.300 ⇒ 00:11:49.080 Robert Tseng: Yeah, like, this is… like, nobody understands what the heck this is. So, I mean, whether this is better, I don’t know, at least for me, like, I built it from, like, my first principles up, so, like, this makes a little bit more sense to me. So I’ll probably, like, just ask,
37 00:11:50.590 ⇒ 00:11:58.260 Robert Tseng: like, this… I’m gonna make another version of this. This is, like, what the current architecture is, and, like, so I could speak to where… where how things are moving through.
38 00:11:58.520 ⇒ 00:11:59.010 Greg Stoutenburg: Okay.
39 00:11:59.010 ⇒ 00:12:09.640 Robert Tseng: I put 3 options in front of them, I dropped that in Slack. So, in this renewal, like, there’s… I’m trying to, like, guard the team a bit more. There’s, like, one example where we’re keeping the current state.
40 00:12:09.640 ⇒ 00:12:23.559 Robert Tseng: Yeah, but basically, we are just moving towards just doing data governance, and I’m not doing no ad hoc analytics anymore. Like, as you can see, there’s no analysts on this team. So, you know, do you, Zoron.
41 00:12:23.560 ⇒ 00:12:29.999 Robert Tseng: kind of managing deployment of the full Martech stack, so GTM, segment, whatever, we’re not going to change any of these big pieces.
42 00:12:30.080 ⇒ 00:12:33.679 Robert Tseng: And then, like, my time will really just be, like, kind of…
43 00:12:33.970 ⇒ 00:12:41.900 Robert Tseng: help growing the engineers more on, like, making sure that we have things in the… in BigQuery.
44 00:12:42.000 ⇒ 00:12:48.109 Robert Tseng: enabled so that people can plug AI tools into it, and then, like, continuing to layer on more
45 00:12:48.110 ⇒ 00:13:04.009 Robert Tseng: governance and observability, because all we have is, like, that one channel for MetaPlay updates. So, it is, like, a narrowing of the scope, but basically trying to tell them, we will do better at risk and cost management for them. Like, there’s no revenue kind of increasing component for that. That’s basically how I am…
46 00:13:04.110 ⇒ 00:13:19.349 Robert Tseng: positioning the first offering. The second one is, like, I will pull a dedicated marketing analyst into. We’re trying to bring Abdullah in, and I want him to… I would want… and then I would have some time, I’ve budgeted some time, for me to work directly with him, and I will just…
47 00:13:19.420 ⇒ 00:13:25.350 Robert Tseng: do… do specific, kind of outcome-based analysis. And whereas, like, the rest of that kind of stays
48 00:13:25.350 ⇒ 00:13:41.880 Robert Tseng: the same. Like, the rest of the team is kind of doing the same thing. But, yeah, like, I think that’s option B. And option C is, I mean, this is kind of a moonshot kind of opt-in, but it kind of folds in. We’re already doing AI work with them. I think we’re going to lose the scope if we don’t, like, really
49 00:13:41.880 ⇒ 00:13:44.649 Robert Tseng: Show that we’re gonna be doing,
50 00:13:45.360 ⇒ 00:14:04.609 Robert Tseng: Yeah, unless we can really show the value more. So I’m, like, kind of swinging big on this and saying, like, okay, we’re actually just going to rebuild this entire stack, and we’re just gonna do everything in Snowflake, and, just kind of make this more of, like, an AI-forward, like, kind of stack where,
51 00:14:04.890 ⇒ 00:14:27.530 Robert Tseng: yeah, like, Utam, Pranav, like, I’ll involve them, like, from the beginning. And then we’ll have, like, dedicated analysts for each of these different kind of things, so we’ll staff it up kind of more similarly. I mean, this is pretty much the same price as, like, what we’re getting from Element. So, I don’t expect them to sign this, but I want them to know that, like, if we had all the budget in the world to rebuild it the way that I wanted to, like, I would take it in this direction.
52 00:14:27.530 ⇒ 00:14:30.659 Robert Tseng: So, that’s basically how I’m phrasing things to them.
53 00:14:30.910 ⇒ 00:14:49.469 Greg Stoutenburg: Okay, yeah, I like it. And I think something that is gonna come out of that discussion, and that these options frame for them really well, is that these fires that we see every day and every other day are really just because of… they’re around things like governance, they’re around things just like the disorganization of
54 00:14:49.470 ⇒ 00:15:04.700 Greg Stoutenburg: having lots of different contractors go in and start banging stuff out in, you know, their various platforms, and it does need something of an overhaul. So, I kind of like the idea of just making clear to them, like, hey, either pay us to do the overhaul, or pay us to maintain it.
55 00:15:04.700 ⇒ 00:15:11.759 Greg Stoutenburg: And… but not put out your fires that… that could have been prevented by a fuller engagement.
56 00:15:12.220 ⇒ 00:15:22.399 Robert Tseng: Yeah, because, like, where we left off last time was, look, like, if the current model, like, I mean, budget-wise is the same, but we’re kind of just treating it as, like, a bucket of hours. Like, we can’t really own any outcomes, it’s just, like.
57 00:15:22.400 ⇒ 00:15:36.499 Robert Tseng: I only have 10 hours a week of Greg’s time, whatever he can do in that time, that’s what he’s gonna do. So, he’s not gonna do any maintenance, he’s just gonna fight the fires, and that way, nothing’s gonna get better, like, and, you know, we’re just kind of, like, chugging along. So,
58 00:15:36.500 ⇒ 00:15:48.510 Greg Stoutenburg: 10 hours a week is… yeah. 10 hours a week is 2 hours a day. One hour was already wasted by hearing Mitesh and Ryan just sort of, like, tell us about the fire again. It’s like, alright, well, that was one.
59 00:15:48.510 ⇒ 00:15:49.110 Robert Tseng: Yeah.
60 00:15:49.110 ⇒ 00:15:52.570 Greg Stoutenburg: Yeah, so, yeah, yeah.
61 00:15:52.880 ⇒ 00:16:10.319 Robert Tseng: Okay, so, yeah, I think… I think you get… you get the vision that I’m… I’m gonna put in front of them. I mean, my concern then is, like, internally, can we… can we… can we actually, like, reconfigure the team to be able to… to do this better? Because I don’t know if we can. So…
62 00:16:10.320 ⇒ 00:16:20.879 Robert Tseng: Well, let’s just… Yeah, I mean, I’d be curious to hear your perspective on that, too. Like, do you actually think that this would work? Like, if we… if I eliminated, like, all of our analytics workstream, so, like, just to…
63 00:16:21.020 ⇒ 00:16:25.760 Robert Tseng: If I’ll go back to this, yeah, the projects…
64 00:16:26.720 ⇒ 00:16:35.669 Robert Tseng: I mean, most of this is already MarTech stuff, but I pretty much, like, on the maintenance, very light, like, we were just… but I’m basically not gonna have… like, wait, so, like, that… that’ll…
65 00:16:35.670 ⇒ 00:16:40.390 Greg Stoutenburg: Yeah, that’s just Jasmine or Amber whacking, objections that come in on particular.
66 00:16:40.390 ⇒ 00:16:45.279 Robert Tseng: Yeah, but we’re not gonna do any really… any… no, not really any net new reports, or whatever.
67 00:16:45.280 ⇒ 00:16:45.860 Greg Stoutenburg: Yeah.
68 00:16:45.880 ⇒ 00:17:00.410 Robert Tseng: Yeah, we’re not really gonna make the reporting any more sophisticated. We’re just… the improve… the improvement here is just that we will have better quality governance. Like, I am not… like, I’ve struggled to kind of communicate what that… what… what is, like, the…
69 00:17:01.230 ⇒ 00:17:06.910 Robert Tseng: Yeah, how is this going to be better? Like, in… in… Yeah. Yeah, so I…
70 00:17:06.910 ⇒ 00:17:11.130 Greg Stoutenburg: I mean, I can say… well, so this is the way that I put it to Ryan and Mitesh a couple times, is…
71 00:17:11.130 ⇒ 00:17:11.480 Robert Tseng: Okay.
72 00:17:11.480 ⇒ 00:17:17.230 Greg Stoutenburg: Like, hey, the golden state that I want you to arrive at with… you know, my focus has been around segment and mix panel, so I’m just speaking to those things.
73 00:17:17.230 ⇒ 00:17:41.399 Greg Stoutenburg: The goal state is self-service, where Ryan or whoever logs into Mixpanel, goes, I want to analyze, you know, the funnel from A to Z, and you click Add Event, and you guess at the name of the event, and that name will be accurate, it’ll fire when you think it’s supposed to fire, because you don’t have to worry about eliminating duplicates, you don’t have to worry about misleading naming.
74 00:17:41.400 ⇒ 00:17:44.310 Greg Stoutenburg: Like, the governance is in place. We have…
75 00:17:44.310 ⇒ 00:18:03.380 Greg Stoutenburg: we’ve aligned on what’s in there and what’s being tracked, and it’s based on user workflows that we know are valuable, and anything else has been eliminated, and so you don’t have to worry about, you know, the chaff and the garbage and the clutter. It just works. Like, that’s the goal state we want to get to, and that’s a matter of
76 00:18:03.380 ⇒ 00:18:05.680 Greg Stoutenburg: Governance and instrumentation.
77 00:18:05.700 ⇒ 00:18:08.119 Greg Stoutenburg: Work that we’re definitely capable of.
78 00:18:08.630 ⇒ 00:18:09.230 Robert Tseng: Okay.
79 00:18:09.360 ⇒ 00:18:26.950 Robert Tseng: Yeah, I think that’s fair. So, yeah, I mean, we’re… no, no random ad hoc data pulls for Jonah, like, an ops teams or whatever, like, we’re just… it’s just purely just serving marketing as… as the only client for our… for… for the data, knowing that the…
80 00:18:26.950 ⇒ 00:18:36.749 Robert Tseng: the tools that they access are Mixpanel. Somebody… I mean, they’re doing… yeah, they… they can… I mean, there’s no reporting in Segment. They’re just, like, they…
81 00:18:36.960 ⇒ 00:18:37.560 Greg Stoutenburg: Yeah.
82 00:18:37.560 ⇒ 00:18:49.439 Robert Tseng: I, like, the change… from a change management perspective, if they’re requesting changes to, like, tracking, that’s gonna go through us. We’re going to own and deploy all the GTM and segment.
83 00:18:49.490 ⇒ 00:18:58.900 Robert Tseng: And they will just be consumers of that data in Mixpanel. Is that kind of like… I kind of feel like Ryan will not, like, be fine with that. I don’t know, like, what do you… what do you think?
84 00:18:59.010 ⇒ 00:19:03.500 Greg Stoutenburg: Yeah, I mean, I think he’s gonna wanna have more… Independence.
85 00:19:03.500 ⇒ 00:19:04.180 Robert Tseng: Yeah.
86 00:19:04.180 ⇒ 00:19:05.809 Greg Stoutenburg: But that’s a, you know, well, that’s a.
87 00:19:05.810 ⇒ 00:19:17.819 Robert Tseng: Has he been the problem? Like, does he, like… I don’t… does… like, is it okay if he continues to be part of… like, oh, he is the owner, supposedly, which is probably why this whole thing, like…
88 00:19:18.030 ⇒ 00:19:19.590 Robert Tseng: Like, no,
89 00:19:19.860 ⇒ 00:19:31.930 Robert Tseng: like, he is Eden’s internal owner, but he’s not truly, like, the owner of these tools, which is why he relies on us to do the deployment. Like, I feel like we’ve been doing what he should… what he was really hired to do.
90 00:19:32.160 ⇒ 00:19:39.970 Greg Stoutenburg: Yeah, yeah, yeah, interesting. I mean, I think… I wonder if a little bit, like… I think I may have introduced him to the concept of a tracking plan?
91 00:19:40.300 ⇒ 00:19:51.770 Greg Stoutenburg: So I think, to a degree, he’s, like, he feels like he’s playing catch-up here. He’s pretty good at finding, like… he’s pretty good at finding data discrepancies and things like that, like, maybe a little too good, and yeah, I mean.
92 00:19:51.770 ⇒ 00:19:54.219 Robert Tseng: He’s basically their QA guy, he’s looking at… he’s like.
93 00:19:54.220 ⇒ 00:19:54.580 Greg Stoutenburg: Yes.
94 00:19:54.580 ⇒ 00:19:56.100 Robert Tseng: the stuff all the time, like, that’s what he should.
95 00:19:56.100 ⇒ 00:19:56.510 Greg Stoutenburg: Yes.
96 00:19:56.510 ⇒ 00:19:58.460 Robert Tseng: That’s not us. We’re not getting paid to do that, yeah.
97 00:19:58.460 ⇒ 00:20:06.630 Greg Stoutenburg: Right, right, exactly. As far as having a strategic take on what should be measured, definitely less so, and that’s where he leans on us.
98 00:20:07.000 ⇒ 00:20:17.629 Robert Tseng: Okay. Well, yeah, then I don’t want to tell them to, like, get rid of Ryan, because I feel like he would… like, I don’t want us to take on the QA responsibility. So, okay, if anything, we’re just defining clearer lanes with him. Okay.
99 00:20:17.630 ⇒ 00:20:18.320 Greg Stoutenburg: I think so.
100 00:20:18.900 ⇒ 00:20:20.799 Robert Tseng: Okay, and then,
101 00:20:21.310 ⇒ 00:20:40.950 Robert Tseng: Yeah, so I mean, I’m looking at some of this stuff, and I would even, you know, all this weekly, like, whatever, EHC, kick that out, automated projections, I mean, a lot of this stuff will just end up kicking out, like, that’s not really what Option A is. Okay, option B is, like, okay, some of these things are back on the table, it’s not gonna be Jasmine, it’s gonna be Abdullah, or something, or maybe it is Jasmine, I don’t know. I’m just gonna have a dedicated person.
102 00:20:40.950 ⇒ 00:20:45.049 Robert Tseng: Half the time, you’re literally going to be on this client, just kind of like how we have it on Eleven.
103 00:20:45.410 ⇒ 00:21:03.170 Robert Tseng: And that will allow me to partner with that person one at a time and go after one of these work streams one at a time. So, yeah, still marketing is the main focus. We’ll only do things that, like, marketing is requesting of us. We’re not… we’re still not really going to be going after any of the other stuff. So,
104 00:21:03.470 ⇒ 00:21:04.250 Robert Tseng: Yeah.
105 00:21:04.720 ⇒ 00:21:07.770 Robert Tseng: Okay, I’m just, like, talking through this out with you.
106 00:21:07.990 ⇒ 00:21:21.170 Robert Tseng: This one I still feel like is a hard sell. Like, I don’t really know if they’ll really care so much. Like, I tried to explain differences between, like, rebuild on Snowflake versus, like, kind of keeping the current thing. I don’t really… but anyway, like, I… I…
107 00:21:21.440 ⇒ 00:21:33.669 Robert Tseng: the idea was, like, if we could rebuild it from scratch and own everything end-to-end, like, this is what it would look like. So, I guess, like, I don’t really expect them to really take this option anyway. Yeah.
108 00:21:34.420 ⇒ 00:21:37.620 Robert Tseng: Yeah, I… yeah.
109 00:21:38.240 ⇒ 00:21:46.080 Greg Stoutenburg: Yeah, I don’t know, you’d have to… the AI stuff is largely foreign to me, except for what we have on the Brainforge platform, so… I don’t know. Yeah. Yeah.
110 00:21:46.210 ⇒ 00:21:50.070 Greg Stoutenburg: I don’t really know what this pitch is, but happy to be involved.
111 00:21:51.400 ⇒ 00:21:55.790 Robert Tseng: Okay. Okay, but at least option A and B may make sense to you, okay?
112 00:21:55.790 ⇒ 00:21:56.870 Greg Stoutenburg: Yes, yep.
113 00:21:57.110 ⇒ 00:22:01.769 Robert Tseng: Okay, cool. Yeah, that’s helpful. I think I can, I can work with that. Thanks.
114 00:22:01.770 ⇒ 00:22:08.089 Greg Stoutenburg: Okay, alright. And then, yeah, and then just, I guess, just, let’s see how it goes, and you can tell me what my work stream is.
115 00:22:08.700 ⇒ 00:22:09.310 Robert Tseng: Yeah.
116 00:22:10.570 ⇒ 00:22:12.290 Greg Stoutenburg: Cool. Thanks, Greg. See ya.