Season 3 · Episode 3
Interoperability, Governance, and Divergent Teams with Prukalpa Sankar
This episode features an interview with Prukalpa Sankar, Co-Founder of Atlan. Atlan is a venture-backed startup building a modern data workspace. Prukalpa also co-founded SocialCops, a data for good company behind landmark projects such as India’s National Data Platform. Prukalpa is a recognized industry leader, landing on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list and Fortune’s 40 Under 40.In this episode, Prukalpa and Sam discuss how diversity is a data team’s biggest strength, why governance isn’t always a bad thing, and what they hope the modern data stack will look like in 5 years.
Episode Guest

Episode Transcript
Read the full transcript here.
Guest Quote
“Diversity is our biggest strength but our biggest weakness, because it's really hard to make that team collaborate. Because most of the teams in the world are very uniform. So when every single person in the room is a subject matter expert on something, nobody else actually can have oversight on each other's work because they've never done it before. Then how do you create true trust? How do you create trust when things are breaking? If you're able to create a way for these diverse people to collaborate really effectively, to be a dream team, a dream data team where they trust each other and they can collaborate effectively, then magic can happen.” – Prukalpa Sankar
Time Stamps
[01:55]: What open source data means to Prukalpa
[05:38]: Prukalpa’s journey to data for good movement
[04:51]: How Prukalpa and her team provided gas to 80 million Indian women
[06:33]: How diversity can help a data team succeed
[15:10]: What gives Atlan its magic
[18:58]: How being open by default influenced Atlan’s architecture choices
[22:45]: The reality of the modern data stack in 5 years
[27:36]: Advice for people getting started with DataOps
Links