YouSaid · the spoken record

Tristan Handy

lines on the record: 46
first: 2022-10-14
most recent: 2022-10-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I know every founder in the world references Jeff Bezos Day one letter Data is unbelievably early, and a lot of the conversation in the ecosystem today is about how we've unlocked all these capabilities, but things still feel pretty chaotic for practitioners, and there's really a lot left to do. In five years, there will be more people participating in creating data, analyzing data. There will be more quality around the data that is produced and consumed, more consistency. It will feel less messy.”
2022-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The CEO Should Make As Few Decisions As Possible, The Trade-Off Between Freedom and Raising Big From VCs & Why Our Jobs Are Not As Hard As We Think and How To Assess Talent and Potential As a Result with Tristan Handy, Founder & CEO @ dbt Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it is really hard to say please cancel that meeting and send us a doc. I think it's really hard to say like I'm not going to join that meeting. It's almost like a human thing. If somebody knocks on your door and says like, here's this delightful pie. I made it just for you. You're just like, oh, thank you so much. Even if you don't like the pie, right? In the same way, if somebody says, oh, I'm inviting you to a meeting, here's the agenda. It's very challenging to say, like, that's inconsistent with how we get work done at this company.”
2022-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The CEO Should Make As Few Decisions As Possible, The Trade-Off Between Freedom and Raising Big From VCs & Why Our Jobs Are Not As Hard As We Think and How To Assess Talent and Potential As a Result with Tristan Handy, Founder & CEO @ dbt Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We write a lot and we put both cultural and technical guardrails in place to actually nudge people to work in the way that we need them to. The problem with async and the time when it's really hard to adopt well is when it's adopted inconsistently. Because if people start putting a bunch of meetings on everybody's calendars and that's how everybody expects work to get done, then all of a sudden async work is impossible because you spend all your time in meetings and nobody gets to write and think and react.”
2022-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The CEO Should Make As Few Decisions As Possible, The Trade-Off Between Freedom and Raising Big From VCs & Why Our Jobs Are Not As Hard As We Think and How To Assess Talent and Potential As a Result with Tristan Handy, Founder & CEO @ dbt Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't have a good answer to that. It's not that I never changed my mind, it's that I try not to be the person making decisions. I think a lot of people see the CEO as the person who makes a lot of decisions.”
2022-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The CEO Should Make As Few Decisions As Possible, The Trade-Off Between Freedom and Raising Big From VCs & Why Our Jobs Are Not As Hard As We Think and How To Assess Talent and Potential As a Result with Tristan Handy, Founder & CEO @ dbt Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I had a lot of post job baggage from prior companies that didn't work out the way that I and others had wanted them to work out. I think I was a little gunned and didn't have enough confidence. I think that I should have operated with a little bit more confidence when I saw things starting to work.”
2022-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The CEO Should Make As Few Decisions As Possible, The Trade-Off Between Freedom and Raising Big From VCs & Why Our Jobs Are Not As Hard As We Think and How To Assess Talent and Potential As a Result with Tristan Handy, Founder & CEO @ dbt Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The hardest thing is public speaking. I hate public speaking, and I have to do it more often than ever. I've gotten better at it, but I don't know that I'll ever enjoy it.”
2022-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The CEO Should Make As Few Decisions As Possible, The Trade-Off Between Freedom and Raising Big From VCs & Why Our Jobs Are Not As Hard As We Think and How To Assess Talent and Potential As a Result with Tristan Handy, Founder & CEO @ dbt Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that a lot of content you could get if you just read his book. But what was interesting is that Frank has become one of these kind of iconic figures. He's kind of larger than life, and this was an opportunity for me to just kind of see him as just another person. He has a really nice house and he likes to be outdoors. It's a beautiful view from where he is. But at the end of the day, he's just like a guy. And I know that sounds weird, but sometimes when the moment that I'm in feels very unreal, it's nice to understand that like all of us that are trying to figure out these journeys are just people doing our best.”
2022-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The CEO Should Make As Few Decisions As Possible, The Trade-Off Between Freedom and Raising Big From VCs & Why Our Jobs Are Not As Hard As We Think and How To Assess Talent and Potential As a Result with Tristan Handy, Founder & CEO @ dbt Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have a grass's greener problem. I want to live every life I want to experience everything that is a little inconsistent with having a startup for a decade or more. It's also inconsistent with being a parent. And so this was a really exciting way for me to like truly live and work in a different location and absorb the local culture and just try to experience something brand new. I'm looking forward to doing a lot more of them.”
2022-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The CEO Should Make As Few Decisions As Possible, The Trade-Off Between Freedom and Raising Big From VCs & Why Our Jobs Are Not As Hard As We Think and How To Assess Talent and Potential As a Result with Tristan Handy, Founder & CEO @ dbt Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Throughout COVID, being a parent during COVID is tremendously challenging. Just making it through was hard. If you were trying to navigate that, but then also saying, ah, we can't hire a nanny, we can't send our kids to camp, we can't, whatever. We talk about solving certain classes of problems, a lot of them childcare problems, solving them with money, because otherwise we would actually suffer meltdowns, I think, in my family at least.”
2022-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The CEO Should Make As Few Decisions As Possible, The Trade-Off Between Freedom and Raising Big From VCs & Why Our Jobs Are Not As Hard As We Think and How To Assess Talent and Potential As a Result with Tristan Handy, Founder & CEO @ dbt Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do, my wife and I both work very hard. The fact that I've had the opportunity to do a little bit of secondary, we also have two little kids. We have a two-year-old and a four-year-old, and it has meant for us that we can renovate our home to actually have bedrooms for our kids. It's meant that we can have childcare support that we need to actually be able to do our jobs and focus on them. And it's a tremendous luxury just from a stress reduction perspective. There's things that are just less stressful than they used to be. And not that I know it's an incredibly...”
2022-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The CEO Should Make As Few Decisions As Possible, The Trade-Off Between Freedom and Raising Big From VCs & Why Our Jobs Are Not As Hard As We Think and How To Assess Talent and Potential As a Result with Tristan Handy, Founder & CEO @ dbt Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've followed the news on that just as I'm sure you have. As a founder, I tried to imagine making some of the decisions that have been made at some of these companies and I can't understand how some of those decisions have been made. You were asked personal relationship to money. Like I talked before about my fairly modest upbringing and I'm in a very fortunate position right now where I've exceeded all of my own personal aspirations from a cash perspective. And so it's just not a thing that makes me come to work in the morning anymore.”
2022-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The CEO Should Make As Few Decisions As Possible, The Trade-Off Between Freedom and Raising Big From VCs & Why Our Jobs Are Not As Hard As We Think and How To Assess Talent and Potential As a Result with Tristan Handy, Founder & CEO @ dbt Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we have started a secondary program. Our goal is it's impossible to know whether the market will continue to support this, but we did it this year in the middle of a very challenging market. So our goal is to provide opportunities for secondary on an annual basis. We have general way that we think about how to allocate those employees of a certain tenure always get to participate at a certain level. And we try to do it in a way that all the rules are consistent between everybody at the company. So fairness in doing this stuff is unbelievably important. But I also think it is just so important for everybody that's put in like real work into this thing that we're all doing together that they don't have to kind of wait on the edge of their seat with all of their money invested in this illiquid stock. They should be able to get some returns for that before an eventual exit.”
2022-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The CEO Should Make As Few Decisions As Possible, The Trade-Off Between Freedom and Raising Big From VCs & Why Our Jobs Are Not As Hard As We Think and How To Assess Talent and Potential As a Result with Tristan Handy, Founder & CEO @ dbt Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I think that our employees have been very consistent, that they want more information rather than less. What we've done, we did it in our C and our D was that we, a month before anything came together, we said like there's interest in the market, we're probably going to raise in some reasonably near-term timeframe. We don't have any details, but we wanted to let you know that the wheels were happening and we're not going to sign any term sheets for the next 30 days so you got time. And that has been challenging to operationalize because sometimes fundraising markets move very quickly whatever. But that's a commitment to our employees that we've felt pretty strongly about because of how strongly they voiced their feedback and the series B.”
2022-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The CEO Should Make As Few Decisions As Possible, The Trade-Off Between Freedom and Raising Big From VCs & Why Our Jobs Are Not As Hard As We Think and How To Assess Talent and Potential As a Result with Tristan Handy, Founder & CEO @ dbt Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Could exercise before the 498 changed. And I was like, does anyone do this? And the answer came back like yes. GitLab taught us how to do that differently. GitLab actually says to their employees, hey, we're thinking about fundraising right now full stop. And they don't say like, here's the terms we're going to.”
2022-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The CEO Should Make As Few Decisions As Possible, The Trade-Off Between Freedom and Raising Big From VCs & Why Our Jobs Are Not As Hard As We Think and How To Assess Talent and Potential As a Result with Tristan Handy, Founder & CEO @ dbt Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It flows nicely. I think it was about operationalizing transparency. The companies that I had always worked at, the expectation was that you as an employee were going to learn about a fundraise once everything had been signed and the money was in the bank. It's like, we got $5 million, whatever. Because there are a million things that can go wrong with a deal before the money is wired and you don't want to have egg on your face if something does fall apart. The challenge with that approach is that it doesn't give employees information that they might use to, for example, decide things like when to exercise their options. That has real tax implications or all kinds of implications for employees. So when we raised our series B, we raised their seed A and B. We used kind of the historical approach that I had been familiar with, which is like, hey, guess what? We just raised money. Our employees were not jazzed about that at our Series B. They wished that we had been more transparent with them. And I believe that the sentiment was we wish that we'd known that this was coming through.”
2022-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The CEO Should Make As Few Decisions As Possible, The Trade-Off Between Freedom and Raising Big From VCs & Why Our Jobs Are Not As Hard As We Think and How To Assess Talent and Potential As a Result with Tristan Handy, Founder & CEO @ dbt Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It out to the teams. That's just not at all how that happened at our company. It was collaborative between sales and finance, and then our sales leader wrote up this seven-page long document in Notion, asked for comment from the folks on his team. Like, how should we roll this out? How do you want to do this? And it was all like in the light of day. And these changes really did have real impact on the humans on Nick's team. But this is just like the way that we communicate with each other. We share good news and we share hard truths and we ask for people to be adults. And I think that's really how you get the most out of your team.”
2022-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The CEO Should Make As Few Decisions As Possible, The Trade-Off Between Freedom and Raising Big From VCs & Why Our Jobs Are Not As Hard As We Think and How To Assess Talent and Potential As a Result with Tristan Handy, Founder & CEO @ dbt Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't use that formulation for leaders or for individuals. I certainly kind of understand how to call it business high performance or not. And so maybe for me, high performance leader is one that results in a high performance business. I think that we found that the best leaders communicate very clearly. They bring their entire organizations along for the ride, whether it's the good parts or the bad parts. Transparency is a core value of ours. It's not exactly clear how to operationalize transparency when we hire leaders from the outside. There is this period of learning what transparency means internally. And sometimes that can be awkward for folks, even who supposedly come from environments that are transparent. We recently were talking about efficiency a second ago. We recently went through this exercise in optimizing our cost to book, primarily inside of our revenue organization. This was in many organizations, this would be like finance dictates certain changes have to happen. The CRO decides how to do it and push”
2022-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The CEO Should Make As Few Decisions As Possible, The Trade-Off Between Freedom and Raising Big From VCs & Why Our Jobs Are Not As Hard As We Think and How To Assess Talent and Potential As a Result with Tristan Handy, Founder & CEO @ dbt Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's done on a margin basis as opposed to a revenue basis. So if you're a margin inefficient business, then your cost of book will look worse. Most companies, if you just look at customer acquisition costs, and you're selling $100 sneakers and the sneakers cost $50 to get from your suppliers, you're actually overstating how efficient your business is if you just look at CAC. I think a lot of enterprise software companies, because they were so focused on growth, they've often paid a lot of money for that growth. Very fortunately, because our fundamental growth comes from organic community adoption of our open source product, we've always been a pretty efficient growth business.”
2022-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The CEO Should Make As Few Decisions As Possible, The Trade-Off Between Freedom and Raising Big From VCs & Why Our Jobs Are Not As Hard As We Think and How To Assess Talent and Potential As a Result with Tristan Handy, Founder & CEO @ dbt Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's like the math works just slightly differently. I think that's probably the main one that you see growth stage enterprise software companies focusing on now because”
2022-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The CEO Should Make As Few Decisions As Possible, The Trade-Off Between Freedom and Raising Big From VCs & Why Our Jobs Are Not As Hard As We Think and How To Assess Talent and Potential As a Result with Tristan Handy, Founder & CEO @ dbt Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that there's a lot of companies, including public software companies, that are doing a lot of living into a lot of things. So we're not alone there. The good news is that we are executing incredibly well. We are growing very quickly. I think that one of the challenges that was introduced by the valuation environment is that it prized growth to such an extent that efficiency was not even a conversation. I'm trying to search my memory banks. I don't even know that I talked about an efficiency metric in any of our fundraises. Fortunately, my history in growing the business over the course of three and a half years in a bootstrap fashion, I'm like a reasonably financially conservative person because of that experience. And so we have always been a pretty efficient business. We have had to recalibrate a little bit over the past six months, but it hasn't been some like gut-wrenching change. It's been like some nudging of the steering wheel in one direction. We're very focused on a metric called Costa Book, which is not that different from customer acquisition cost, but”
2022-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The CEO Should Make As Few Decisions As Possible, The Trade-Off Between Freedom and Raising Big From VCs & Why Our Jobs Are Not As Hard As We Think and How To Assess Talent and Potential As a Result with Tristan Handy, Founder & CEO @ dbt Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the market was very conducive. So I don't know how I would have tried to balance that in a different market environment. It turns out that we raised four rounds of funding all during COVID. The valuations during that period started off attractive and only got more attractive. Fortunately for employees and founders, we're not in the situation that you described there.”
2022-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The CEO Should Make As Few Decisions As Possible, The Trade-Off Between Freedom and Raising Big From VCs & Why Our Jobs Are Not As Hard As We Think and How To Assess Talent and Potential As a Result with Tristan Handy, Founder & CEO @ dbt Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is an interesting question for me to answer. You can look up our, I don't know how many of our evaluations are public. We were public about our last one, the $4.2 billion valuation. So our fundraise, I think it was January or February.”
2022-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The CEO Should Make As Few Decisions As Possible, The Trade-Off Between Freedom and Raising Big From VCs & Why Our Jobs Are Not As Hard As We Think and How To Assess Talent and Potential As a Result with Tristan Handy, Founder & CEO @ dbt Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think that one of the things that's interesting about this is what is the environment that your company is operating in? And so if you're building something that I think has a long time horizon of relevance, then yeah, maybe you can reinvest over the course of five, ten years. I think that there are product categories like productivity software, like email marketing clients or whatever, that the need is real and it is fairly consistent over the course of a decade or more. Our space moves incredibly quickly. And so if we took five years to reinvest revenue, the entire space would have changed by the time we got there.”
2022-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The CEO Should Make As Few Decisions As Possible, The Trade-Off Between Freedom and Raising Big From VCs & Why Our Jobs Are Not As Hard As We Think and How To Assess Talent and Potential As a Result with Tristan Handy, Founder & CEO @ dbt Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I agree with you, the cost is freedom, but the upside wasn't more money, it was expanding the community, expanding the set of humans that we could actually include in the community. It was very binary. The kind of business that we were building towards, we could build a credible credit card swipe, $100 per user per month, something like that. But our customers today, that still makes up large percentage of the companies that we sell to. But there was just no path to get from there to Fortune 50 company adopting this across a thousand employees. Like it just wasn't feasible.”
2022-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The CEO Should Make As Few Decisions As Possible, The Trade-Off Between Freedom and Raising Big From VCs & Why Our Jobs Are Not As Hard As We Think and How To Assess Talent and Potential As a Result with Tristan Handy, Founder & CEO @ dbt Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So much here, the most important job of the CEO is to keep all of the different stakeholders in mind at all times and try to balance their long-term interests against one another. So if you specifically think about it from the perspective of the founders and investors, for a long time I had talked before about the vision of creating Basecamp, the internally funded thing. And you can imagine if that's the path that you go down, that success looks very different. I grew up in a very middle class background and all the money in the world to me felt like $10 million that was like all the money I could.”
2022-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The CEO Should Make As Few Decisions As Possible, The Trade-Off Between Freedom and Raising Big From VCs & Why Our Jobs Are Not As Hard As We Think and How To Assess Talent and Potential As a Result with Tristan Handy, Founder & CEO @ dbt Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so everybody gets, I think it's $250 a month for an out-of-home stipend. So whether that's we work with a vendor called Liquid Space. And so if there's liquid spaces in your area, it makes it very easy to sign up for them. But you can also just expense drop-in space or wherever. And the $250 is probably not enough to get outside your home every single day, but hopefully enough to make it so you don't go crazy. So that's step one. And then step two is, oh, of course, we also have a budget for people to set up their home offices. But step one is blanket everyone with a workout of home budget. And then step two is in places where we have high concentration of employees open up satellite offices. We're calling this our many satellites strategy. And then the people who live in commutable distance of these satellites, then you lose your $250 and you are assumed that you're going to go into this satellite as you're out of home experience.”
2022-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The CEO Should Make As Few Decisions As Possible, The Trade-Off Between Freedom and Raising Big From VCs & Why Our Jobs Are Not As Hard As We Think and How To Assess Talent and Potential As a Result with Tristan Handy, Founder & CEO @ dbt Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because it's lonely and dehumanizing because we're built to interact with other humans. And for many of us, especially for early career folks who are, I lived in an apartment with four roommates right out of college, I wouldn't have wanted to work there 40 hours a week. So it's just not totally consistent with how we are wired as humans.”
2022-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The CEO Should Make As Few Decisions As Possible, The Trade-Off Between Freedom and Raising Big From VCs & Why Our Jobs Are Not As Hard As We Think and How To Assess Talent and Potential As a Result with Tristan Handy, Founder & CEO @ dbt Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the other word that I like to use is asynchronous. So I think of us as a distributed asynchronous company. Those things describe how work is done. Work gets done by people who are far apart, often on different time zones. But that doesn't mean that we need to be remote. We are in the process of opening up an office in San Francisco. Our biggest concentration of talent is now in San Francisco. I think it's like 15% of the employee population. And it's not because we've tried to hire people in San Francisco. It just turns out there's a lot of great people there. And when you open up job post things that people apply from there, it's not like we have engineering in San Francisco or support in San Francisco, nothing like that. And so one of my favorite lines on this was from Sid at GitLab. He said, working remotely doesn't mean working from home. We've really taken that to heart. We all have different things that we get out of work. And one of those things is community. So we don't plan our office spaces around doing work together in person. We plan them around.”
2022-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The CEO Should Make As Few Decisions As Possible, The Trade-Off Between Freedom and Raising Big From VCs & Why Our Jobs Are Not As Hard As We Think and How To Assess Talent and Potential As a Result with Tristan Handy, Founder & CEO @ dbt Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is also, the feedback goes the other direction too. I feel like you're not setting me up for success because we've changed our goals twice in the past quarter and it's impossible to actually create programs along that kind of cadence and that kind of thing.”
2022-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The CEO Should Make As Few Decisions As Possible, The Trade-Off Between Freedom and Raising Big From VCs & Why Our Jobs Are Not As Hard As We Think and How To Assess Talent and Potential As a Result with Tristan Handy, Founder & CEO @ dbt Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Historically, it's been an hour, once a quarter. It's a little unusual. We have three people in the room. We have the person, their direct manager, and then typically a skip level. Although we've stepped away from that a little bit. It's like a, we call it the third person. And the goal that I always set for these meetings is that we don't leave the room without somebody saying something that feels uncomfortable. The way that I like to say it is that if you've ever been in a long-term relationship, that relationship does not stay healthy just by itself. Like, there need to be these hard conversations every once in a while. Like, hey, you've really been pissing me off by doing XYZ. And if you don't have those conversations, then slowly people build up animosities, relationships deteriorate without them. And so these hour-long sessions once a quarter are reset opportunities to say like, okay, let's just get your shit out there and let's talk about it.”
2022-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The CEO Should Make As Few Decisions As Possible, The Trade-Off Between Freedom and Raising Big From VCs & Why Our Jobs Are Not As Hard As We Think and How To Assess Talent and Potential As a Result with Tristan Handy, Founder & CEO @ dbt Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm in no way trying to say that individual performance is a non-factor. We may be overinvest in performance management, like formal performance management. We've done this since the very beginning of the company when it was three of us. We had quarterly performance reviews. So we spend a lot of time talking, writing, holding ourselves accountable to the goals that we set for each other.”
2022-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The CEO Should Make As Few Decisions As Possible, The Trade-Off Between Freedom and Raising Big From VCs & Why Our Jobs Are Not As Hard As We Think and How To Assess Talent and Potential As a Result with Tristan Handy, Founder & CEO @ dbt Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know that I come at it from that exact perspective, but also have my own challenges with the eighteen B team C team players. This kind of goes back to what I was saying before, that I don't think that most of our jobs are that hard. Oftentimes, our ability to work together, to communicate, to have a consistent approach and consistent set of values that really determines the performance of the team. Because what we really need to be solving for is the performance of the team and not the performance of individuals. That is an answer. Some of the ways that we found that folks are no longer at the company have to do less with individual performance and more with team issues.”
2022-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The CEO Should Make As Few Decisions As Possible, The Trade-Off Between Freedom and Raising Big From VCs & Why Our Jobs Are Not As Hard As We Think and How To Assess Talent and Potential As a Result with Tristan Handy, Founder & CEO @ dbt Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is a hard one for me. We now have 350 people on the team, which either is unbelievably huge or still very tiny, depending on your perspective. Certainly not everyone who has joined us on that journey is still at the company. But I would say that we have an unbelievably high retention rate, both voluntary and involuntary. So there really just aren't that many people who we've hired over the years that are no longer with the company. I mean, it's like maybe a dozen somewhere around that number.”
2022-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The CEO Should Make As Few Decisions As Possible, The Trade-Off Between Freedom and Raising Big From VCs & Why Our Jobs Are Not As Hard As We Think and How To Assess Talent and Potential As a Result with Tristan Handy, Founder & CEO @ dbt Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm laughing because we're still in the process of doing that and I'm getting PTSD from even thinking about that. I don't remember if it was the first thing or the second thing that we built our SSO integrations we built role-based access control. If you have an extremely mature multi-tenant environment, then you can answer all the security questionnaires in a certain way. And if you aren't yet there from a technology perspective, then you have to think about other deployment options that allow you to answer the security questions that way. So I think that there's this, and I've talked to now so many enterprise software founders who have made it through this messy period of hacking together the like check boxes that you need to sell into the enterprise. But if you do the unscalable thing first, but you slowly have a motion to make it do the scalable version of it, then you'll slowly work your way through. And I think that you can see that in Databricks and Confluent and Snowflake. And like they've all hit this escape velocity where they've checked all the boxes and they can do it in a scalable way.”
2022-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The CEO Should Make As Few Decisions As Possible, The Trade-Off Between Freedom and Raising Big From VCs & Why Our Jobs Are Not As Hard As We Think and How To Assess Talent and Potential As a Result with Tristan Handy, Founder & CEO @ dbt Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For us to buy, we want to pay you money. Please help us figure out how to pay you money. It was this moment where we owned 100% of the cap table at this point, myself and my two co-founders and our employees. We were hoping to do the base camp path. Let's just own this thing internally and grow it on internally generated revenue. But it was very clear that these companies needed something that we were not going to be able to deliver without meaningfully investing in the business.”
2022-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The CEO Should Make As Few Decisions As Possible, The Trade-Off Between Freedom and Raising Big From VCs & Why Our Jobs Are Not As Hard As We Think and How To Assess Talent and Potential As a Result with Tristan Handy, Founder & CEO @ dbt Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am a big fan of a company called Reboot and an individual named Jerry Colona. I read his book a while ago, and he talks about something called the pathless path. It's like a Buddhist concept that you can't really know what the road in front of you looks like. So instead, you have to adopt some principles whereby you figure out how to navigate that road when you get closer to it. So I honestly, I don't have a strategic answer to that question. I have a principles-based answer. And the principles-based answer is that we navigate as much of our strategy as we can by asking what the community needs from us at any given point in time. What happened in 2019, the DBT community went from a place where kind of the cool kid early adopters hung out to a place where Fortune 500 data people showed up. And we heard from half a dozen or so of these folks. And they said, we want to use DBT too, but we are actually not allowed to use open source software without a commercial relationship to the vendors. You don't have anything.”
2022-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The CEO Should Make As Few Decisions As Possible, The Trade-Off Between Freedom and Raising Big From VCs & Why Our Jobs Are Not As Hard As We Think and How To Assess Talent and Potential As a Result with Tristan Handy, Founder & CEO @ dbt Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is a common playbook in B2C companies, but it is much less well understood inside of B2B enterprise software. We were certainly early having investors accept our business was going to grow differently. I talked to investors throughout our three and a half years of bootstrapping, and the question was always, what metrics would you evaluate our business to determine whether or not we were ready for a Series A? And the answers were kind of all over the place and not that relevant. And when we eventually went down the road of fundraising, it was because we were getting good answers to that question. The answers were like, well, you folks are category creators and are set to own this part of the market and we understand that for open source companies, when they become standards in a certain part of the market, that that is a boulder that is going to keep rolling downhill. I'm like, okay, that's the kind of logic we use when we think about our business.”
2022-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The CEO Should Make As Few Decisions As Possible, The Trade-Off Between Freedom and Raising Big From VCs & Why Our Jobs Are Not As Hard As We Think and How To Assess Talent and Potential As a Result with Tristan Handy, Founder & CEO @ dbt Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I really believe in that, I still try to get us to, and certainly in the early days, we really saw her that was not always perfect. That is fine because if we, in the early days, had these extensive release processes and et cetera, we would not have had the iteration speed and cycles that we needed to get to a good place. I'm not suggesting that you move slowly from an execution standpoint. I'm suggesting that you move slowly from a monetization standpoint and like growing the business. What we found out is that the minute that you have a million dollars in software ARR, you're on a clock. People can take infinitely long to get to a million dollars. It doesn't really matter. That's perceived to be like wandering around in the wilderness and that's fine. But as soon as you hit a million dollars, it's like, well, next year you better have three. And the next year after that, you better have nine. So you should take a really long time to get on that treadmill because you can't really get off once you do.”
2022-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The CEO Should Make As Few Decisions As Possible, The Trade-Off Between Freedom and Raising Big From VCs & Why Our Jobs Are Not As Hard As We Think and How To Assess Talent and Potential As a Result with Tristan Handy, Founder & CEO @ dbt Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It took a long time to monetize our software. EBT Core is open source. It's used by over 14,000 companies today. We, for a very long time, didn't have a commercial product on top of it. And so the way that we supported it was we sold consulting services to implement it, which is a hard business. Running a consulting business and then taking the dollars from that and reinvesting them into building the open source software is challenging, but it allowed us to create this user experience that was unreplicated throughout the industry. And even today, maybe we have some competitors that have popped up here and there, but really DBT is as close as you can get to a standard in the modern data stack. And I really think it's because we spent such a long time refining this use case and being users ourselves.”
2022-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The CEO Should Make As Few Decisions As Possible, The Trade-Off Between Freedom and Raising Big From VCs & Why Our Jobs Are Not As Hard As We Think and How To Assess Talent and Potential As a Result with Tristan Handy, Founder & CEO @ dbt Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I say, yeah, I was going to say fuck you, get out. It did like blitz scaling with Reed's book. And I think that making the decision to strategically take a long time in certain cases allows you to create strengths that are uncopyable in the market. So our first three and a half years we were bootstrapped. We certainly could have raised money, but we didn't. We were revenue generating business. We built DBT on the side. There were so many good things that came out of that. We developed a like user experience that was beloved. We didn't feel in a rush to do that. We grew a team that had some core members that are still leading the business today that developed this like deep trust between all of us and shared headspace. There's some things that you can't actually replicate by just throwing dollars onto a fire.”
2022-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The CEO Should Make As Few Decisions As Possible, The Trade-Off Between Freedom and Raising Big From VCs & Why Our Jobs Are Not As Hard As We Think and How To Assess Talent and Potential As a Result with Tristan Handy, Founder & CEO @ dbt Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the strategic levers that I've tried to use throughout is to use time as a weapon. I think that there's this tremendous focus inside of the tech ecosystem to grow as quickly as possible. From Y combinator, like if you're not growing your user base 10% every single week, then like whatever I was.”
2022-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The CEO Should Make As Few Decisions As Possible, The Trade-Off Between Freedom and Raising Big From VCs & Why Our Jobs Are Not As Hard As We Think and How To Assess Talent and Potential As a Result with Tristan Handy, Founder & CEO @ dbt Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Customer success for us and has for five years. And Aaron has never led a large team before. She's certainly never operated at this level. This might be controversial. But honestly, I don't think that a lot of our jobs, including my job, are that hard. It's not that you need to have seen this a million different times and that you need to be the best in the world. You need to have a certain set of traits. You need to be hardworking. You need to have a clear mind and be willing.”
2022-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The CEO Should Make As Few Decisions As Possible, The Trade-Off Between Freedom and Raising Big From VCs & Why Our Jobs Are Not As Hard As We Think and How To Assess Talent and Potential As a Result with Tristan Handy, Founder & CEO @ dbt Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know that feeling when you have a conversation with somebody, it's like locked in. The two of you are very tightly communicating and have a shared understanding of the world. That is the feeling that I get when I get really excited about somebody. So I think that the most interesting example of this is Aaron, who was our very first employee. She worked with myself and Drew and Connor at our last company, RJ Metrics. I had really spent almost no time with Aaron there. We were on different teams, whatever. But I had been in exactly one meeting with Aaron, and Aaron was a junior-ish person there. She was an individual contributor, sales engineer. And there was some conversation happening in this meeting. And Aaron raised her voice and she cut through some complexity or BS that was going on in this moment. And I was just like, who's that? And from that point onwards, I was like, that's a person that I need to stay in touch with. And so she was one of my very first calls to figure out how are we going to grow this team. And Aaron now runs.”
2022-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The CEO Should Make As Few Decisions As Possible, The Trade-Off Between Freedom and Raising Big From VCs & Why Our Jobs Are Not As Hard As We Think and How To Assess Talent and Potential As a Result with Tristan Handy, Founder & CEO @ dbt Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that you need some amount of luck to be in the game. You need some minimum bar of luck. Then above that, it's probably skill. But I can tell you for a fact, Anthony and I both come from this little town called Hereford, 30 minutes north of Baltimore. We talk about it as like we're from the forest. There's nobody that works at a startup there. Nobody that has any concept of what the technology ecosystem looks like. And so there was just not a path for me to go in this direction. You've already spoken to him, so you kind of know his story. So if I hadn't had that little moment of luck there, I honestly don't know what I would be doing in my life right now, but it certainly wouldn't be this.”
2022-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The CEO Should Make As Few Decisions As Possible, The Trade-Off Between Freedom and Raising Big From VCs & Why Our Jobs Are Not As Hard As We Think and How To Assess Talent and Potential As a Result with Tristan Handy, Founder & CEO @ dbt Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Double down on my data skill set, which had been something that I had been good at for a long time, but I had to figure out ways of making that useful. And for me that was marketing. I learned how to do performance marketing. Early stage marketing is like a highly quantitative. And so I spent my first seven years in startups doing marketing in various shapes and forms.”
2022-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The CEO Should Make As Few Decisions As Possible, The Trade-Off Between Freedom and Raising Big From VCs & Why Our Jobs Are Not As Hard As We Think and How To Assess Talent and Potential As a Result with Tristan Handy, Founder & CEO @ dbt Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was a lost soul, went to undergrad, business school, went to work for Deloitte Consulting, didn't really have any idea what I wanted to do. I spent five years there, still lost, went to get my MBA. And then I had a lucky break. One of my good friends from high school and college is Anthony Casalina. And Anthony had founded Squarespace five or so years before. Things were moving quickly, and I ended up spending a year there to do a bunch of things, but partially to help them reuse their Series A. It was an environment that I had never seen before. Just the whole concept that I could wear jeans and a t-shirt to work. I loved it. I loved that you could just sit down and do the work and not make PowerPoint slides about doing the work. And so I just decided that I was never going back. And then the hard thing, honestly, for a consultant was to figure out how to make myself useful in this context because the majority of the skills that I had learned to this point in my professional career were like not that useful. I wasn't the person who built the product. I wasn't the person who was going to sell the product. So I really”
2022-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The CEO Should Make As Few Decisions As Possible, The Trade-Off Between Freedom and Raising Big From VCs & Why Our Jobs Are Not As Hard As We Think and How To Assess Talent and Potential As a Result with Tristan Handy, Founder & CEO @ dbt Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source