Hey, I am Sekou.

I met Power BI on July 21, 2016, at a Nashville user group meeting hosted by Will Harvey. I did not know it then, but that room changed the direction of my career. Two years later I found Tableau, and in 2018 I walked into the Tableau Conference in New Orleans and watched them rent out the entire Superdome. That was the moment I understood I had joined something much larger than a piece of software.

I came up through community, and I did not do it alone. Charlie Bryan brought Tableau into our organization. Daryle Dowell gave me permission to fail forward and the room to figure the tool out. Jim Dehner answered my beginner questions without ever making me feel like a beginner. Chantilly Jaggernauth became a mentor and then family, and started pulling me into speaking opportunities during COVID that I never would have found on my own.

Somewhere in there I went from the person asking questions at the back of the room to the person running it. I co-lead the Nashville Power BI User Group today and previously led the Nashville Tableau User Group.

Then I lost my father. I spent twelve months as his caregiver while raising a two year old in the middle of a pandemic and leading a team as a Director at Lovelytics. That year taught me more about leadership than any job ever has. Mostly it taught me that time is the one resource you cannot get more of, and where you spend it is the clearest statement of what you actually value.

Today I run Royal Blue Analytics, a data analytics and AI strategy consulting firm here in Nashville. I write, I teach, I host Ten Minute Tuesday, and I speak anywhere people will have me. The through line has not changed since 2016: take something complicated and make it make sense to somebody else.

Outside of that, it is my wife, my daughter, my church, and a genuinely unreasonable number of opinions about basketball.