About Colm O'Grada

If you want to get in touch please contact me on LinkedIn.

Who I Am

I lead data and analytics at Tines, a series B company which provides low-code automation for security teams. My work spans everything from commercial BI to product analytics, data engineering to marketing metrics.

I started my career in academia, researching what the immune system can tell us about our metabolic health. Somewhere along the way, I discovered informatics and wanted to make it a full time job.  I joined Google, where I remained for nine years, leading data teams across commercial, strategy and product spaces.

Someone had the bright idea to put Ryan and I on a stage at the same time. Oops.

What I Do

While I am kept pretty busy at my 'day job', I also work with the startup community both in an advisory and community development capacity. I have worked with startups in several countries and have won awards for my work in this area.

When I have the time I also write articles for this (and other) blogs and take the occasional photo.

San Francisco, but even foggier. Photo by me.

What I Write

You will find all the posts I have written here. A few highlights:

AI: A Team Effort
With the explosion of interest in AI across businesses of all kinds,particularly in traditional industries, the emergence of new platforms andsolutions have helped make AI more accessible. The latest versions of frameworkslike TensorFlow [https://www.tensorflow.org/] and PyTorch [https://pytorch.org/…
Steering The Culture Ship
I was in Tokyo a few years ago on business and grabbed a beer with a formercolleague of mine. He had moved to Japan from the UK a few months previously andwas settling into this new environment. I was curious to learn more about thebusiness culture differences, so I asked him what had surprised h…
Six Lessons I Learned Finishing A PhD
Wrapping up a life sciences PhD is no joke; it commits you to an all-or-nothingminimum four years with little income and tough hours in the lab. When you’redeep in the middle of a PhD program, it can be hard to appreciate thetransferable skills and experience you’re picking up almost every day. …
Permission To Land: Ensuring Analysis Has Value
At the heart of it, the purpose of analysis is to drive better actions throughinforming better decision making. In this article, I will focus on one of themost important parts of this process; making sure the output lands well and drives action. When is the right time to think about how an analy…
Ask and You Shall Receive - Dealing With Hard Facts
In a quote frequently misattributed to W. Edwards Deming, one of the fathers ofprocess improvement, ‘In God we trust. All others must bring data.’. But what ifsomeone brings data and we don’t like what the data tells us? Dealing with the results of analysis when it doesn’t tally with ourpreconc…