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

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And transform, they were a pure play company only in this metrics layer, semantic layer. And they had a really strong product. They had figured out some of the technical challenges and they had solved it early on. They had the benefit of having worked at Airbnb, which you know. And Airbnb in the data world is famous for having a really successful semantic layer metrics layer called Minerva. What we had at DBT Labs is really good distribution and ecosystem, but we were a little behind in bringing a product to market. And we felt that pressure from Transform because they were doing such a great job at being vocal and loud about how their semantic layer solves these really hard technical problems, but they didn't have any distribution. And so that was really tough for them. And they were putting pressure, but they were still positioning their”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I can share the transform stories for a company we just acquired. We announced it in. In February. So DBT Labs, we build transformations. That's our kind of main product. And we were venturing into a new product area that we call the semantic layer and to describe what that is like quickly, it's allowing companies to define their business metrics. And so that whenever anyone queries it, we always serve back consistent data on those business metrics.”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they prematurely will shut down a conversation or they won't talk to an incumbent or a potential future buyer because they take too competitive of a stance. But that's a mistake because M&A is all about creating plan Bs and you don't want to shut that door down prematurely because you don't know if you can really go the distance and be an independent company. So you want to have optionality”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One company, there's only ever two to three buyers that find what you're building to be extremely strategic. And the strategy that I would do in how do you get noticed is I would figure out the area that you bring a competitive advantage and I would inflict pain on that potential buyer, make it impossible for them to not notice you because that's when they're going to have their ears perk up and say, what's going on with this company? You know, we just bought this company Transform. They were doing, they were playing a really good playbook here. And really important piece here is you want to do that in a way that still”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When it comes to acquisitions, the time to start thinking about an M&A strategy is hopefully when you don't need one. And the best strategy that I could give a founder is to have a really strong offense in building their company. And when founders start their businesses, they don't usually set out to start a company to sell it to another business. They start it to be an enduring, independent, standalone company. And if you have that path, then you'll have the upper hand in absolutely every single M&A conversation because you have a viable alternative, which is do nothing, stay the course. You don't have to sell. But of course, that's not the case for most companies. Most companies don't have a viable path to being an independent company forever. And so they have to think about M&A. And so M&A is always about creating plan Bs. And the way I would think about it is for any”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, DBT had an ecosystem advantage, and they were open source, and this helped really dramatically for lots of people to have low barrier friction to just try it out and spread kind of organically. They first got started with very horizontal people could just get started without ever even talking to sales and think that was a competitive advantage. But not all companies need to be product-led. Some companies are enterprise top-down sales. And so in those situations, think about like, does the team really know how to land a complex enterprise sale? Do they have a background in that particular space? Do they have a network of connections? It can be different depending on what the company is selling. But you either want to see someone who's a company that's really strong in enterprise or really strong at the bottoms up.”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's can they not stop talking about it? And that's this like the chatter about a product, they want to share it with like their teammates or to other people at different companies. That just top of mind love and wanting to share what they've found with others is really a great sign that you're on to something. And then that spark will help do a lot of the work on how do you get to market because your evangelists are really your users of people that love what you're building.”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The next year's product, everyone who's listening hopefully either is interested in products or has a product background. So I won't say too much there. But can you talk to users or customers, potential customers? Are they building something that's really special, unique? Can you hear that spark, that enthusiasm, and figure out if this is going to be special? And then the last, I think this is more important arguably than if they have a good product, but is distribution. Do they have an advantage on how are they going to get to market? Because that's really, really hard. And think about how they think about their competitive advantage on either the ecosystem or distribution and how they're going to ultimately sell the product. You're not going to get a 10 out of 10 on all four dimensions. And so when you're joining a company, you also have the benefit of dedicating your time. And so try to think, you know, if they're weaker on one dimension, what is it that you bring to the table or what are you special?”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And for me, Tristan had this really rare ability to paint a very compelling future of the industry and how DBT was going to be a part of making that vision a reality. But he also was really, really detailed in the day-to-day work of the analytics engineering work. And it was that range and scale that made me feel like this is a founder that's very rare and compelling. The next is markets. We touched on it a little bit. What I'm looking for in markets is like, is it growing? Is there space for a new entrant to make its mark? And when it came to DBT, it was an explosive time in cloud data warehouses and it was that chaos that was really the opportunity for DBT because they created some orderliness and structure to the way that people worked with their data in the cloud data warehouse. So that was very compelling.”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the way I would look at joining an early stage company would be the same way I would evaluate investing in one. And so there are four things that I care about when I'm looking at really early stage companies. And it's people, market, product, and distribution. And I'll touch on each of those four to say a little bit more about what specifically I'm looking at. So people, this is really the CEO, the founder of the company, put simply, do you trust this person to lead?”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think if I was able to invest, I wouldn't be here. I got a no. The board ended up vetoing my personal investment, but it's okay because I ended up dedicating all of my personal time to building the company.”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So convinced that this was special. And, you know, sometimes when deals don't work out as an investor, you can create this narrative in your head. Like, oh, good. You know, I dodged a bullet or, you know, that better off without them or screw them. But for me, like that was quite the opposite with DBT. I really felt like DBT was this runaway train and it was special and I wanted to jump on board. So a few months later, I ended up calling Tristan and asked him if I could be a part of the company that built the product that I thought was so special. So that was my kind of unique path.”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So I was very, very excited. I thought if this worked, it could work in a really extraordinary way. And I spent all my time trying to get Tristan to like me so that I could invest in the company. And then in 2020, I finally got the call that I was waiting for, Tristan said, we're going to raise some money. He had a term sheet from a firm that he liked. It was a good venture fund, but he also liked me and he wanted to give me a shot. And I was super excited to get that message like, this is my chance. And unfortunately, I ended up losing that deal to Sequoia. It's a formidable partner. I was just so convicted that it was going to be a special company that I asked to even put my personal money in and I asked to put like a very irresponsible or rational amount nearly like 20% of my liquid net worth into DBT because I was”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Framework. And I got really, very, very excited about DBT because when I talked to people that were using it, the way that they described their experience on DBT was like unlike anything I had heard before. It was much more of an identity for them than just a tool that they were using to get their job done. And that really struck me. And as I kind of thought about what was happening in the market, there was a lot going on in 2019. The markets were changing quite a bit. Cloud data warehouses were starting to explode. Like this was the year where Snowflake went from a $4 billion company to a $12 billion company. And I thought to myself, if DBT worked, it could work in a really extraordinary way. And naturally tried to spend all my time getting close to Tristan, who's the CEO and founder. And I wanted to invest.”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do have an unusual background, but it doesn't surprise me that people who are interested in product are also interested in investing and vice versa. For me, I've always had three interests broadly. And that's an interest in business, an interest in technology, and an interest in markets. And I get to express those interests both in investing and in product, but just with different weights. So in product, you go a lot deeper on the tech and markets is less of a focus, but you still get to do all three. So I have an unusual background. And I used to be a professional investor at NEA. I did all of all my time investing in early stage startups that built for technical audiences. So think dev tools, infra data companies. And in 2019, I first discovered DBT, which was an open source data transformation.”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Prematurely because you don't know if you can really go the distance and be an independent company. So you want to have optionality.”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“MA is always about creating plan Bs. And the way I would think about it is for any one company, there's only ever two to three buyers that find what you're building to be extremely strategic. And the strategy that I would do in how do you get noticed is I would figure out the area that you bring a competitive advantage. And I would inflict pain on that potential buyer, make it impossible for them to not notice you because that's when they're going to have their ears perk up and say, what's going on with this company? The really important piece here is you want to do that in a way that's still friendly and open. I see a lot of founders get this wrong and they prematurely will shut down a conversation or they won't talk to an incumbent or a potential future buyer because they take too competitive of a stance. But that's a mistake because M&A is all about creating plan Bs and you don't want to shut that door down.”
2023-07-13 · Lenny's Podcast · M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source