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Ep. 420 ICYMI - Why Your Structured Data Is Stuck — and How Graph Neural Networks Unlock It, with Jure Leskovec, Stanford Professor and Co-Founder of Kumo
21 October 2026

Ep. 420 ICYMI - Why Your Structured Data Is Stuck — and How Graph Neural Networks Unlock It, with Jure Leskovec, Stanford Professor and Co-Founder of Kumo

Making Data Simple

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Since this aired, Kumo has moved from GNNs to relational foundation models — the ‘secret sauce’ segment at 17:57 is where that story starts

Data’s everywhere, but so often it feels… stuck. Joining us today is Jure Leskovec, Co-Founder and Chief Scientist at Kumo and a Stanford Professor who pioneered Graph Neural Networks and fundamentally reshaped how we understand networks — from Pinterest’s recommendations to tracking the spread of disease. We unpack why structured data is lagging behind the AI revolution, how techniques like Graph Neural Networks are finally unlocking its potential, and how this all plays out in real-world applications.

    00:57 Meet Jure Leskovec 02:31 Knowing When to Move On 04:01 Academia versus Industry 07:30 Learnings from Pinterest 10:28 The Kumo Pitch 17:57 The Secret Sauce 25:51 Monetization 27:12 Only the Enterprise? 29:49 The Sandbox to Try Before Buy 31:42 The Best Use Cases 35:00 Summarizing 37:38 Predicting AI 40:15 What’s True and No One Agrees 41:19 Learning

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leskovec/
Website: https://kumo.ai/

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