Dr. Sebastian (Basti) Klapdor joined Vista in 2019 after 12 years at McKinsey & Co, where he was a partner serving global clients on data and technology. Today, Basti is EVP & Chief Data Officer and member of the executive team at Vista, a 1.7bn ecommerce business, and parent of the famous VistaPrint. VistaPrint’s mission is to become the Marketing and Design partner for small businesses, and data and analytics is instrumental for this. Therefore, Basti’s vision is to transform Vista into one of the world’s most iconic data and analytics companies through its data talent, strategy, culture, tech stack and operating model. Core element of his vision is to treat data as product and build scalable data products in cross-functional teams on a data mesh architecture. Since 2020, Basti has grown VistaPrint’s Data and Analytics team from 80 to over 300 data professionals around the globe. Since then, the team has built ML-based, scalable data products across the value chain: from optimizing paid search spend through better keyword bidding, to reinforcement learning for dynamic pricing and next-best-action prompts in emails to NLP for understanding our ~10m annual customer interactions at scale. The investment in these and other data products paid off with $100M incremental profit realized and a continuously increasing incremental run-rate. Basti is very active in the data community with VistaPrint’s own Data blog (http://vista.io/blog), podcast features, and keynote presentations/panel discussions, incl. at 2022 MIT CDOIQ. He received the 2022 Top 100 Global Data Activators award. Basti holds a Ph.D. from Technical University of Munich.