YouSaid · the spoken record

Julia Schottenstein

lines on the record: 67
first: 2023-07-13
most recent: 2023-07-13
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“You can find me on Twitter, j underscore Schottenstein, and you can also find me in the DBT community slack, also Julia Schottenstein. Send me a note, reach me there. And I'd love to hear from you if you have data problems or we can help serve your needs better. Would love to chat.”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's called the Analytics Engineering Podcast. So, if you want to learn more about the data industry, I host it every other week with our CEO, Tristan Handy. It's a lot of fun. Check it out. Other podcasts that I really like are in-depth. It's first rounds podcasts by Brett Berson. He interviews a lot of operators about how they do their very best work. And another podcast that I really like is the Logan Bartlett Show, which touches on timely trends in tech.”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like belly, it's a consumer social app that lets you find and discover restaurants and rate them with your friends. It's been a lot of fun looking at the New York City restaurant scene.”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When's the last time you had to teach yourself something new? And how'd you do it? And so I like to test for growth mindset and a thirst for learning. And then also why DBT Labs. I think a lot of people who come to DBT Labs have very authentic reasons why they're drawn to the company. And in moments when things are tough, it's the answer to that question of why are you here that's going to make all the difference.”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so I almost watched a movie in preparation for this podcast, but I really don't watch things except in the holiday during the holidays. I like succession, but I have not seen the latest season.”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so two books that helped me learn a lot about myself range. It's a book about generalist and also quiet. It's a book about introverts. And then I like a lot of biographies. So a few of my favorites are Snowball, that Warren Buffett, Made in America, about Sam Walton, and Leonardo da Vinci.”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Day to day in my product work, but in investing, you're constantly thinking about risk and the power laws. And we touched on this before, but like most investments don't work out. You lose the dollars that you put in. But all the returns come from these rare events that make up for all the losses. You have to think about what are the uncapped upside opportunities in investing. I think in product, you still have to do the same thing. Like you can't 50% of the things I worked on went to zero, like we'd have a problem. But it encourages me to continue to make bets for the company that has the chance of bending the trajectory of our business.”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Network of operators at other companies that are like DBT Labs that are growing nicely, maybe a little bit ahead of where we are. And I ask them questions like, how did you navigate open source? How did you navigate pricing? How did you navigate acquisitions? And I take kind of the best ideas, figure out which ones I can apply and bring it back to DBT Labs. The second thing is I really think my special T or my superpower is that I'm a T-shaped generalist. And so I know a lot about a lot of things from finance to business to product. I have to go a lot deeper in product in the areas that I specialize in. That's where the tail of the tea comes in, but it's precisely because I've had a diverse background that makes me more effective when I'm trying to get things done within the organization because I have just more credible experiences that I can pull from. And then the last thing that I think maybe doesn't show up.”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I pull a lot on my experience, or some of the things I did was as an investor in my current role in product. And maybe I'll touch on what is the scale of venture capitalists might be a little bit foreign for people, but venture capitalists, they spend all their day meeting lots of different companies, context switching. They have to know like a little bit about quite a lot of different things. And they do this to refine their investment taste or find their investor judgment. They're also investing a lot in their network and connecting people, supporting people and mining people for ideas that are way smarter than they are. And so you do that all the time in venture. And I've brought a lot of those skills with me into product and it translates really well. The first is I still spend a lot of time investing in my network and I think it's an underrated way for a PM to spend their time. And I try to build an”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reminds people, let's ship, let's get it out into the user's hands, and then we'll learn and iterate, and it'll be a better experience for them.”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Old jobs table. And so we would look is this job, is it time for this job to run? Okay, yes, run this job. Okay. It's not time for this job to run next. Continue on like, is it time? Yes, run this job. And it would just loop over. And it's extremely naive and very simple, but it got the job done. And I try to remind the engineers like, we would be so lucky to have tech debt because that means people are using the product. And now we've had to rebuild our scheduler several times over because we do have meaningful scale. We have 8,000 companies using our scheduler. We have to manage 10 million runs per month. But what we didn't need at launch was a distributed scheduler with GoWorkers and RabbitMQ. We just didn't need it because we had no users. And so these two sayings that worse is better and tech debt is a champagne problem just really.”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not a big framework person, but there's kind of two sayings that I find myself repeating or either to myself or to others. And it's worse is better. And tech debt is a champagne problem. And what do I mean by that? It's really to help me combat this perfectionism because perfect doesn't exist. And you should instead go with good enough. Because when you ship, that's the moment when you get to learn a lot from your users. And you just can't anticipate it. You try very hard to understand exactly how people will use the product and get all the edges ironed out, but you can't until you ship. And I'll share an example. So my team helped support the DBT Cloud Scheduler. And the initial version of the DBT Cloud Scheduler was pretty naive. Like we were a little embarrassed by it. It was a big old for loop over a big.”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Channel regularly and can feel when we like mess up or we don't quite deliver an experience that we're proud of, like you will just see like dozens of people trying to jump on board and try to make it better.”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's hard as you grow. I think it's just a challenge because our community gets bigger. You can't service everybody's needs. But I think what we've done is everyone is very deep in our own product. I think one of the cool stats is at DBT Labs, we have over 30% of our employee headcount has contributed to our data transformation workflow. And so that's across every discipline, it's in obviously product, obviously in our data team. Our marketing team also contributes to data transformation and our engineering team will also contribute to our internal DBT analytics project. And that sense of like really understanding what the experience is like and then soliciting as much feedback as we possibly can. DBT Slack community of 50,000. All of our employees are like in that Slack.”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's really interesting too because a lot of the people who work at DDT Labs came from the community, so they feel this real ownership in making the experience an excellent one because they were so compelled to come join DBT Labs because the product changed the way that they work or changed their lives. And so that commitment to the community and product experience is really, really strong.”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Come at this from a very humble space where we feel like we have to serve our community and our users. And that really motivates us. And then another one is just work done well as its own end. And it's really focusing on the journey and not the end destination.”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The value that I shared is we are more concerned with value creation than value capture. And that really drives everything that we do. We try to put a lot of good out into the world and it pays back kind of slowly. The whole mission of DBT Labs is to help analytics engineers disseminate organizational knowledge through data. So we really believe in also being participants of sharing that information and getting more people knowledgeable about it. about all sorts of things. Transparency wins were really transparent company. We share our board decks. We have lots of communication and participation in all of our Slacks. We're writing culture. We have hard conversations in the open. So that's another big one, transparency always wins. We are humble. We don't ever feel like we're successful. We kind of.”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I wish I had a magic ball. That'd be pretty sweet. I think what is happening, though, is we're like far enough out from the peak of the markets. So the peak was really like November of 2021. And why does that matter? Two things. One, founders are coming to terms with valuations that they maybe received at the highs of the market are no longer going to hold in this market. And companies are out of cash or maybe out of option. So we'll be better assets entering the market soon. And at a certain point, the opportunities will just be too great that that will incentivize a lot of the buyers that have been on the bench to start purchasing again in the M&A market. And I don't know exactly when that will be, but I think we're pretty close. I think we're pretty close.”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's like everyone in the room's kind of looking like, oh, yeah, yeah. Okay. Strategic partnership Strategic alternative. It's like we all know these code words and we understand the situation you're in.”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I just want to be too clever here, like everyone understands, oh, I'm evaluating strategic alternatives. Means you're looking to sell your company. And it depends. Like, are you looking, do you have time? Yes, don't come out and say, hey, I'm for sale. Like, that's not going to end up in a good outcome, but depends where you are in your company journey. If you have time, then don't talk about M&A at all. Like that's the last thing that you want to speak about. Instead, you're talking about maybe collaborating or partnerships, how do we work together, knowledge sharing and M&A is a dirty word if you have like a lot of runway and you're and you're going to try to continue to pursue an independent path but if you're out of time, you're out of time.”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe a dozen. And really, there aren't more than a dozen companies that will find what you're doing to be a very good fit. Start with your buyer set and then start calling the list by looking at some of the criteria that might count people out and then go have those conversations. And if you're in a Hail Mary situation, be very transparent about it. Maybe open up the buyer list. If you still have some room, I would maybe focus on two to three partner or buyers and really play a different playbook, which is inflict pain, make it really hard for them to not notice you, but do it with a smile and be friendly while you do that.”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is a tough one. I think a lot of companies are on the sidelines for a number of reasons. And they could be on the sidelines because they just did an acquisition and they're trying to digest or integrate that company. They could be on the sidelines because they're not growing headcount as much. And M&A is often an org chart gymnastics of folding the target company's headcount into your budget and plan and maybe just don't have a lot of space. Probably more common right now is there's just a general uncertainty about the future and in highly volatile markets, people want to take care of their own and even the best M&A deals at a level of complexity that a lot of buyers are just not looking to take on right now. And so there are a number of reasons why people might sit out. But what I would do if I were in a position of wanting to sell my company is I would come up with a buyer set of”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh gosh, yeah. I don't want to be that. I love that people, I think being founders, it's an extremely lonely role sometimes and it is. Very hard to know what your next chapter will look like or what the journey will look like. And sometimes you really are out of cache and you do have to find a home. But I hope that you can continue to fight and find a way forward.”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think It is so risky investing in early stage companies that portfolios, 50% of portfolios don't investments don't return anything. And that's just part of the game. And it's a very acceptable path where, you know, hey, we gave it our best shot. It didn't work out. And moving on.”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, use your network, usually your venture capitalist has a really big network. And one of the things that I hear founders feeling the most nervous about is a duty to return the money to the investors. And maybe this is unpopular thing to say on a podcast, but like your investors understand that they're not making their money back and what they want to do instead is have you end up at a really great company like an Airbnb because that will help them down the road. So it's all about the long game, but use your investors to help you find connections at different companies that could be buying. And don't worry so much about disappointing them or being really, realistic about where you are in your company journey.”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If the company is buying a lot or they're active, they often have Corp dev teams. And so use that Corp Dev team to your advantage. It's their job to meet absolutely every company that could be potentially interested. So take that meeting, say you're not interested in an acquisition just yet, but push them to make an introduction to someone that could sponsor the deal. So usually that's someone in product or maybe a GM and use that as a starting point for maybe just a conversation, maybe something more like a partnership, but get the Corp dev team to work for you.”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you want to make sure that the buyer knows you are before the acquisition moment and hopefully that's because you've made an impact and they like what you're building. Maybe you've inflicted some pain. On them, but yeah, certainly creating those connections well ahead of an exit event is important”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, usually in these situations, people are acquiring the teams. And so having your data room together really the most important thing is this is, these are the team members that are going to come along with the acquisition is the biggest motivator for why a buyer would get excited.”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pretty regularly, and there's absolutely no shame in sending a note that says something like, hey, we're looking for an exit for our company, X, Y, and Z didn't pan out as we expected. We built a really interesting product and we want to keep the team together. We're running a process. Are you interested? Really just as simple as that”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's good advice if you're in a Hail Mary situation where you're looking for a home or you need an exit for your business, it's better to be transparent and cast a wider net. And you're right. And like previous times, founders tried to be a little bit cute or obfuscate that they were evasive of the situation that they were in because they wanted to drum up some competitive interest when there really wasn't any. But unfortunately in today's climate, too many companies are in that spot. So it's impossible to hide it.”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We talked to dozens. It was a combination of product and product marketing. Having a conversations. And people aren't very willing to share explicitly like what they will pay, but there's some tools that we use on relative value. People most think about what is the relative value of DBT in their cloud warehouse. And we also tried to employ some of the tactics that we tried to suss out. What do people view as very inexpensive? What's a price point that's very cheap or a no-brainer? What price point is maybe fair or comfortable for them and what would be kind of too expensive? And then we had all the data back to figure out where we landed.”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really, like an all hands on deck conversation. It's pricing is so cross cutting because it's a finance discussion as well. You're kind of modeling out things in spreadsheets and figuring out how that might impact the business, but you can't just solve these problems in spreadsheets. You have to go talk to customers, test the waters, understand where people's appetites are. And sussing that out is really hard. And then, of course, there's a product piece to it too, where you have to affect it and communicate it as well. So it was very cross-cutting. We learned a lot. We track our conversion rates really carefully. We track our turn rates very carefully. And I think largely we were happy with the change that we made and we felt like one of the big things that we were trying to solve for was our pricing catch up.”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's so important to learn that lesson while the company is still smaller or the stakes are lower because pricing just is always evolving. It's not a fixed thing. It gets more complex over time. And so we have to think about it quite a bit because my team builds proprietary software for DBT Cloud. And when we lose a deal, we most often lose it to DBT open source. we like it that way we're happy to lose to ourselves but we have to really think very deeply about what are people willing to pay for and what moves the needle for them and and focus on that”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's much better to have that conversation before you build the product than have it when your sales team's trying to sell something and people aren't excited about what you've built, aren't willing to pay for it. And at DBT Labs, we have this value. It's one of our core values that says we are more concerned with value creation than value capture. And we really mean this. When we talk about what is the value of DBT Labs to our customers, they often talk about how it's either 20 to 35 percent as valuable as what they spend on their cloud data warehouse. But what we charge our customers is a very small fraction of that 20 to 35 percent. And that's by design. And last year, we did our first ever pricing change in the company history. And you learn a tremendous amount when you have that event because you get to test the price elasticity of your customer.”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pricing and willingness to pay such a hard conversation and lots of startups don't do this early enough in their company journey. Likely a side effect of zero interest rates where investors were happy funding GitHub stars and usage and companies never thought about how am I going to make revenue or make money, which is important. So for us at DBC Labs, I don't claim to be perfect at it, but we're trying to get a better muscle around it. And I always think about Maudavan, who wrote this book, Pricing Innovation. I know you've had him on the show before, but he shares that you don't get to decide if you're going to have a pricing or willingness to pay a conversation. You only get to decide what.”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ecosystem to us is really important. So it's important that that remains open source. But then we want to supercharge that experience with kind of an open core model and build proprietary software that makes people much more successful at using DBT.”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We think about DBT open source. It's really the guts of the data transformation. It's where you describe your business logic. And then on the cloud side, we build proprietary software that supercharges the development lifecycle and the productionization of DBT at scale. So what we think about as leaving for our cloud offering is we deal with state, so stateful interactions and also any kind of cross team or structural collaboration. We want to reserve that for our proprietary offering. And I think it's really important to have that distinction of what do you believe should be open source or what is the source.”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We were trying to figure out how to make kind of flipping the way that we run people's DAGs from an imperative way to a declarative way. So instead of like running things left to right when data arrived in your warehouse, you think about it as reverse, like what would need to happen to make your data SLAs dematerialized in time?”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ownership of taking the project and making it successful. And so it was perhaps an overly creative or kooky way to spend the day, but it was really successful”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With a spool of rope and sticky notes, and I think my team looked at me crazy, went with two heads when I started to tie people up to create a graph. So each note of the graph was an engineer. And the rope was kind of the edges of the graph to connect them. And then we worked through the new algorithm extremely slowly, step by step. And it was a way that you couldn't leave that exercise without knowing exactly what was going on because everyone had a role to play. So I think a lot of times when you're starting something new, you get into a situation where a few people really understand it and they're running way ahead of the rest of the pack. But I needed a way for the whole team to go along for the journey. So I'm constantly trying to create these important moments or memorable moments for the team so that it's centered around our mission and they can have the”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so I'm going to prep this story by sharing that I'm a huge math nerd and one of my favorite books on logic is called Girdle Escherbach. And in this book, there's a fun scene where there's an ant farm that bands together to do the work of a computer flipping bits from zero to one to solve logic gates. And so this chapter of that book was really the inspiration for an exercise that I ran my team through. So about a year ago we were doing a big zero-to-one new project at DBT Labs and we were going to change the algorithm for how we built customers' data transformation graphs. And I needed a way for the team to really internalize all of the changes that we were going to make and I needed them to own it because otherwise they wouldn't be able to anticipate all of the edge cases and it wouldn't be quite as durable. You couldn't copy paste the algorithm. So I showed up to a”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yet, while they were building DBT and using DBT to help them do their jobs better in supporting their clients? And whenever they encountered paper cuts or friction or the workflow was taking longer than they expected, they would build that into DBT. And that really matured the experience of the product because the people who were building it, the founders were also day-to-day working with These customers or clients that had pain points.”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think timing Really important with the success of DBTU that they were there when the cloud data warehouses were really exploding and growing in an enormous way. And DBT Labs started as Fishtown Analytics, a consulting firm. So they worked really, really closely and hands-on with all of their consulting partners to get the pain point and really solve firsthand challenges that they saw. I think that combination of being at the right place at the right time and also getting to work really closely with people's day-to-day problems created a really special experience.”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your company with reduced friction. We're building a product that people like, so they talk about it. They want to share it both at their organization and with other. Other companies get started with DBT, again, with reduced friction. We now get to see this really diverse set of use cases for DBT across company sizes, across industries, and it allows us to build a truly horizontal company. As our company grows, we get to invest back into our community and our product, and the flywheel begins to spin faster. And then meanwhile, we have a really large user base. So we have 20,000 companies using DBT every single week. And that attracts partners to want to build for DBT. So they share best practices, build workflows. And now if you're a company and you've standardized on DBT, you really unlocked and integrated modern data ecosystem that wasn't available for you before. So that has a flywheel and also kind of benefits everyone that decides to be on the standard. And so those two.”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Prerequisite for any analysis that you do. And so DBT was really this belief that if you know SQL, we want to invite you to do these workflows that were traditionally held by data engineers. But you had to earn that right. And so DBT has this nice framework where it's harder to mess up, keeps data quality really high. But it is pretty simple to get started and learn. And that was really the unlock in the industry. We were definitely solving a pain point at the right time. And then the second thing is this commitment to being open. So DBT is open source. And that's the main kind of guts of DBT where you write your business logic. And it helps in a number of ways. Specifically, it helps with Flywheel, keep the flywheel running and also with network effects. And I'll explain what that looks like. So DBT is really easy to get started with.”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think DBT did a lot of things right, but I'll point out two that really stick out to me. And the first is just power and simplicity. And the second is a commitment to being open. And I'll touch on what I mean by those two things. So when DPT was first getting started, you would hear a lot from companies like, I don't understand what's so special about DBT. We have a SQL templating tool at our company. We built one in-house. Like this is really straightforward and simple. And it's true. Like DBT is really simple, but that is the power of it. And so our founders, Tristan, Drew, and Connor, they had a belief that the people who do data analysis work that really work closely with their business stakeholders should also be the ones to contribute to creating clean data assets in production because that data prep work is a nest.”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ecosystem where we can partner with lots of companies in the modern data stack. And generally speaking, when it comes to competition, we take a really long-term view. And there are a few areas that we do want to hold our ground, and that's in our transformation standard as well as our semantic standard, because we believe those two are better served together for the user's sake. But for everything else, we really feel like we can work with our ecosystem and accomplish what we want to accomplish and also help them accomplish their goals too.”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The second philosophy we have is really a grow the pie philosophy. So we want to work with our partners in our ecosystem to make the opportunity set even larger. And we see that today. Like we mostly serve reporting and BI use cases. We're seeing lots of companies start to operationalize their data now with this big wave of ML, clean, transform data assets are being used to train machine learning models so that the pie continues to grow. Let's focus on that as our target and work with people to make the opportunity set really attractive and not try to slice it up too thinly. And then the last one is we want to lean into our strengths. So we have an ambition to be a platform company and we know what we're good at, but we also want to leave space for our ecosystem to offer solutions to our users that help them out. And we really want to foster an”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we recently codified our philosophy when it comes to competition. And I'll give Nick Handel, the founder of Transform, who led this exercise at DBT Labs. But we really have like three pillars when it comes to competition. So the first is hold true to our vision. We're really excited about the path and the journey that we're going on at DBT Labs. We don't want the distraction. So occasionally you'll have competitors maybe throw shade or throw stones, but most of that is just noise. If you have a lot of conviction that you're going in the right journey, you want to just keep your eyes straight ahead and run your best race and not be too distracted by what maybe some critics are saying.”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Company as a partner to us because they wanted our community to be excited about what they were building and hopefully get lure them over to use their product. And so because they had positioned themselves as a friendly partner, when really we weren't, we were trying to compete for this similar use case when it came time to do an acquisition. We were really excited because we knew their product was good and they had already done a lot of the work to make integrating with DBT possible. that helps us post acquisition do the integration much more easily.”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source