The Exchanges

Q totally get that. Yeah, I think that's right in the individual level. Um, can I ask, I think, you know, in leadership, there's, there's painful moments often, um, and they're often the most, Useful from an education standpoint. When you think back to the DVT journey, what's been the most painful lesson that you're also quite pleased to have been through from a learning perspective? And what did you learn?

A It's, it flows nicely. Um, I think it was about operationalizing transparency. Um, so 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, Hey, guess what? We got, you know, five million bucks, whatever. Um, because as you know, um, there are a million things that can go wrong with a deal before the money is wired. Um, and, and you don't want to have egg on your face. If, if something does fall apart, um, that the challenge With that approach is that it doesn't give employees, um, information that they might use to, for example, decide things like when to exercise their options. Um, and that has real tax implications or, you know, all kinds of implications for, for employees. And 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. Um, our employees were not super jazzed about that. Um, in, uh, at our series B they, they wish that we had been more transparent with them.

AI assessment note: “I think it was about operationalizing transparency.”

Q I totally get you in terms of that bottoms up community-led growth that you have. Can I ask you, you know, when we think about, you know, you as a leader, um, you mentioned the growth of the business. I'm always fascinated by the term high performance, and so I just wanted to hear your thoughts. When you think about high performance today in leadership, what do you think of?

A I think, I don't use that formulation for leaders or for individuals. I, you know, certainly I would, I would kind of understand how to Call a business high performance or not. Um, and so maybe for me, a high performance leader is one that like results in a high performance business. The, um, I think that we found that the best leaders communicate very clearly. They bring, uh, their entire organizations along for the ride, whether it's the good parts or the bad parts. Um, they like transparency is a core value of ours and, but, but, but transparency, um, It's not exactly clear how to operationalize transparency. And so when we hire leaders from the outside, um, 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. Um, you know, we, we recently, we were talking about efficiency a second ago. Um, we recently went through this whole exercise in, um, Optimizing our cost to book inside of our, primarily inside of our revenue organization. And this was, you know, in many organizations, this would be like finance dictates certain changes have to happen. The CRO decides how to do it and pushes it out to the teams. And that's just like, not at all how that happened at, at our company. Um, it was collaborative between Sales and finance. And then our sales leader, N…

AI assessment note: “a high performance leader is one that like results in a high performance business.”

Q to forget, and when you get to my age, memory is not a strength. Um, you, you said there about kind of, you know, building slowly, but building defensibility and moats within that, and actually sometimes you have to go slow to go far. What did you do in terms of building defensibility and moats that was a deliberate decision not to go fast, but to build the right way?

A Two biggest things are, are we, we took a long time to monetize our software. Um, dbt core, um, is, is open source. It's used by, I don't know, over 14,000 companies today. Um, and we, for a very long time, didn't have a commercial product on top of it. Um, and, and so the way that we supported it was we Sold consulting services to implement it, which is a hard business. I mean, taking like running a consulting business and then taking the dollars from that and reinvesting them into like building the, the open source software is, is, you know, challenging. Uh, but it, it allowed us to create this, this user experience that, um, you know, was, was Unreplicated throughout the industry. And it very, you know, today, even today, you know, maybe, maybe we have some, some competitors that, that, uh, have popped up here and here and there, but, but really dbt is as close as you can get to a standard in the modern data stack. And, um, it's just like very widely deployed. And if somebody wants to do data transformation, what dbt does, they, They use dbt. And I, I really think it's because we spent such a long time, you know, refining this use case and, and being users ourselves. Um, and then the other obvious one is just community. We, we took a long time to build the community and we, we did it from a place of being members of that community. Like we were practitioners ourselves. And s…

AI assessment note: “Two biggest things are, are we, we took a long time to monetize our software.”

Q What do they entail? Sorry, I, I don't do performance reviews for my, my teams, and I probably should. Um, what, what do they entail? How do you structure them? What do they look like?

A Historically, it's been an hour, once a quarter, and we actually have, it's a little unusual. We have three people in the room. We have, uh, you, the, 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. Um, 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. Because, you know, the, the way that I like to say it is that, you know, if you've ever been in a long-term relationship, you know that that relationship does not stay healthy just by itself. Like, there, there need to be these, uh, hard conversations every once in a while. Like, hey, you've really been pissing me off by doing X, Y, Z. Um, And if you don't have those conversations, then slowly people build up animosities, you know, relationships deteriorate without them. And so these hour long sessions once a quarter are these reset opportunities to say like, okay, let's just get your shit out there and let's talk about it.

AI assessment note: “Historically, it's been an hour, once a quarter, and we actually have... three people”

Q mean, I have a couple of things I have to unpack there. First, I actually had Anthony on the show before. Fantastic dude. I loved him. The first thing that you mentioned, though, was luck. I always think, like, how important is the role of luck versus skill? And I go back and forth on this. When you think about that, how important do you think luck versus skill is?

A I think that you need some amount of luck to kind of be in the game. Whatever it is, like, You need, you need some like minimum bar of luck. And then above that, it's, it's probably skill. But I can tell you for a fact that, um, you know, I, I, Anthony and I both come from this little town called Hereford, 30 minutes north of Baltimore. Um, we, we talk about it as like, we're from the forest. Um, there's, there's nobody that works at a startup there. No, nobody has any concept of, you know, what the technology ecosystem looks like. And so there was just not a path, uh, For me, uh, to, to, to go in this direction. You know, you, you've already spoken to him, so you kind of know his story. Uh, but, but, so if I hadn't had that little moment of, of luck there, um, I, I honestly don't know what I would be doing in my life right now, but it certainly wouldn't be this.

AI assessment note: “you need some like minimum bar of luck. And then above that, it's, it's probably skill.”

Q to forget, and when you get to my age, memory is not a strength. Um, you, you said there about kind of, you know, building slowly, but building defensibility and moats within that, and actually sometimes you have to go slow to go far. What did you do in terms of building defensibility and moats that was a deliberate decision not to go fast, but to build the right way?

A Two biggest things are, are we, we took a long time to monetize our software. Um, dbt core, um, is, is open source. It's used by, I don't know, over 14,000 companies today. Um, and we, for a very long time, didn't have a commercial product on top of it. Um, and, and so the way that we supported it was we Sold consulting services to implement it, which is a hard business. I mean, taking like running a consulting business and then taking the dollars from that and reinvesting them into like building the, the open source software is, is, you know, challenging. Uh, but it, it allowed us to create this, this user experience that, um, you know, was, was Unreplicated throughout the industry. And it very, you know, today, even today, you know, maybe, maybe we have some, some competitors that, that, uh, have popped up here and here and there, but, but really dbt is as close as you can get to a standard in the modern data stack. And, um, it's just like very widely deployed. And if somebody wants to do data transformation, what dbt does, they, They use dbt. And I, I really think it's because we spent such a long time, you know, refining this use case and, and being users ourselves. Um, and then the other obvious one is just community. We, we took a long time to build the community and we, we did it from a place of being members of that community. Like we were practitioners ourselves. And s…

AI assessment note: “we took a long time to monetize our software.”

Q It's nice to break up the day with, you know, real conversation. My question to you is on the, like, facilitation of distributed. I have Matt Mullenweg on the show from WordPress who spoke about the budgets that they give to all employees to go work in a coffee shop, to go find a local space. What budgets and how do you structure them to allow for these distributed workspaces?

A Everybody gets, I think it's 250 dollars a month for, um, an out of home stipend. So whether that's, um, Um, we, we work with a vendor called liquid space. And so if there's liquid spaces in your area, it makes it very easy to, to sign up for them. Um, but you can also just expense, uh, you know, drop in space or, or wherever. Um, and the 250 dollars is, is probably not enough to get outside your home every single day, but it's hopefully enough to, um, make it so you don't go crazy. Um, and, and, but so then, so that's step one. And then step two is Oh, of course we, we all, we also have a budget for people to like set up their home offices. Um, but step one is like blanket everyone with a work out of home budget. And then step two is, uh, in places where we have high concentration of employees. Open up satellites, satellite offices. We're calling this our many satellites strategy. Um, and then the people who live in, I, we haven't finalized the like driving distance or anything, but, but for people who live in commutable distance of these satellites, then you lose your two of 250 dollars and you are assumed that you're going to go into this satellite as your out of home experience.

AI assessment note: “Everybody gets, I think it's 250 dollars a month for, um, an out of home stipend.”

Q What did you need when you think about transition from community and community adoption to enterprise adoption? I think a lot of people think SSO, but what is required to make the transition from community grassroots to enterprise heavy full rollout across Fortune 500? Cause it's so much more complex.

A I'm, I'm laughing because, um, we're, we're still, we're still in the process of Of doing that and I'm getting PTSD from even, even thinking about that. Um, no, uh, certainly the, I don't remember if it was the first thing or the second thing that we built our SSO integrations. Uh, we, we built role-based access control. We've built audit logging. Uh, we've had to answer a lot of kind of questions about the, the security profile of the application. Uh, you know, if, If you have an extremely mature, uh, multi-tenant environment, then, um, you can answer all the security questionnaires in a, 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 will allow you to answer the security questions that way. So, so I think that there's this kind of, and you know, I've, I've talked to now so many enterprise software founders who have kind of like made it through this messy period of like, Hacking together the, the like check boxes that you need to sell into the enterprise. Um, but, but fortunately, if you keep, if you do the, the like unscalable thing first, but you slowly have a motion to like make, make it do the scalable version of it, then you'll slowly work your way through. And I think that, you know, you can see that in Databricks and Confluent and Snowflake and like, they've all kind of Hit this esc…

AI assessment note: “we built role-based access control. We've built audit logging.”

Q to sell? I think the minute that you have, I'm not saying. 20, thirty million. I'm saying five million, which is still a lot of money. I'm not belittling it, but you're not, you can own a house. You can pay the bills. You can have a family comfortably. And I think that unlock is just such a different level of ambition that it enables. Do you agree with me?

A Um, I, I do, my, um, My wife and I both work very hard. Um, the fact that I've had the opportunity to do a little bit of secondary has meant for, for me that we can, we also have two little kids. We have a two year old and a four year old, and, um, it, it has meant for, for us that we, uh, can renovate our home to actually have bedrooms for our kids. It's meant that we can, uh, have childcare support that we need to actually like be able to, to do our jobs and, and focus on them. Um, There's, there's a lot of, and, and, and it, it's a tremendous luxury just from a stress reduction perspective. Like there's like things that, um, things that are just less stressful than they used to be. And not that, uh, I know that there's an incredible thing for you.

AI assessment note: “I do... the opportunity to do a little bit of secondary has meant”

Q What do they entail? Sorry, I, I don't do performance reviews for my, my teams, and I probably should. Um, what, what do they entail? How do you structure them? What do they look like?

A Historically, it's been an hour, once a quarter, and we actually have, it's a little unusual. We have three people in the room. We have, uh, you, the, 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. Um, 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. Because, you know, the, the way that I like to say it is that, you know, if you've ever been in a long-term relationship, you know that that relationship does not stay healthy just by itself. Like, there, there need to be these, uh, hard conversations every once in a while. Like, hey, you've really been pissing me off by doing X, Y, Z. Um, And if you don't have those conversations, then slowly people build up animosities, you know, relationships deteriorate without them. And so these hour long sessions once a quarter are these reset opportunities to say like, okay, let's just get your shit out there and let's talk about it.

AI assessment note: “Historically, it's been an hour, once a quarter, and we actually have”

Q mean, I have a couple of things I have to unpack there. First, I actually had Anthony on the show before. Fantastic dude. I loved him. The first thing that you mentioned, though, was luck. I always think, like, how important is the role of luck versus skill? And I go back and forth on this. When you think about that, how important do you think luck versus skill is?

A I think that you need some amount of luck to kind of be in the game. Whatever it is, like, You need, you need some like minimum bar of luck. And then above that, it's, it's probably skill. But I can tell you for a fact that, um, you know, I, I, Anthony and I both come from this little town called Hereford, 30 minutes north of Baltimore. Um, we, we talk about it as like, we're from the forest. Um, there's, there's nobody that works at a startup there. No, nobody has any concept of, you know, what the technology ecosystem looks like. And so there was just not a path, uh, For me, uh, to, to, to go in this direction. You know, you, you've already spoken to him, so you kind of know his story. Uh, but, but, so if I hadn't had that little moment of, of luck there, um, I, I honestly don't know what I would be doing in my life right now, but it certainly wouldn't be this.

AI assessment note: “You need, you need some like minimum bar of luck. And then above that, it's, it's probably skill.”

Q Do you think startups idealize the MVP, move fast, break things, test, test, test, get something out every week? How would you advise founders who are often told that?

A Um, I really believe in that. So we, we do I still try to get us to, and, and certainly in the early days we released, uh, we released software that was not always perfect. And, and that I think is, is fine because if we in the early days had these like, you know, very extensive release processes and et cetera, like, uh, we would not have had the iteration speed and cycles that we needed to get to a good place. Um, the, the, I'm not suggesting that you move slowly from an execution standpoint. I'm suggesting that you move slowly from a monetization standpoint, um, and, and like growing the business. So, so there's the, what we, what we found out is that the minute that you have a million dollars in software ARR, you're on a clock. Like that people can take kind of 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. Um, 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. Um, and, uh, so, so you should take a really long time to get on that treadmill. Cause you can't really get off once you do.

AI assessment note: “I really believe in that... I'm suggesting that you move slowly from a monetization standpoint”

Q What did you need when you think about transition from community and community adoption to enterprise adoption? I think a lot of people think SSO, but what is required to make the transition from community grassroots to enterprise heavy full rollout across Fortune 500? Cause it's so much more complex.

A I'm, I'm laughing because, um, we're, we're still, we're still in the process of Of doing that and I'm getting PTSD from even, even thinking about that. Um, no, uh, certainly the, I don't remember if it was the first thing or the second thing that we built our SSO integrations. Uh, we, we built role-based access control. We've built audit logging. Uh, we've had to answer a lot of kind of questions about the, the security profile of the application. Uh, you know, if, If you have an extremely mature, uh, multi-tenant environment, then, um, you can answer all the security questionnaires in a, 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 will allow you to answer the security questions that way. So, so I think that there's this kind of, and you know, I've, I've talked to now so many enterprise software founders who have kind of like made it through this messy period of like, Hacking together the, the like check boxes that you need to sell into the enterprise. Um, but, but fortunately, if you keep, if you do the, the like unscalable thing first, but you slowly have a motion to like make, make it do the scalable version of it, then you'll slowly work your way through. And I think that, you know, you can see that in Databricks and Confluent and Snowflake and like, they've all kind of Hit this esc…

AI assessment note: “we built our SSO integrations. Uh, we, we built role-based access control. We've built audit logging.”

Q I get it. Can I ask, why did you decide to turn on monetization when you did? Cause those are the two questions. When do you raise and when do you monetize? Why, why did you decide the time you did to turn on monetization given what we said about kind of the benefits of not?

A I am a big fan of, uh, a company called a reboot and, uh, an individual named Jerry Colonna. I read his book a while ago and he talks about something called the pathless path. I think it's a, it's like a Buddhist concept that, that, Uh, you, you can't really know what the road in front of you looks like, and so instead, you have to adopt some principles whereby you, you figure out how to navigate that road when it, you know, get, when you get closer to it. Um, so I, I honestly, I don't have a strategic answer to that question. I have a principles-based answer, and the principles-based answer is, uh, that we navigate as much Of our strategies we can by asking what the community needs from us at any given point in time. And so what happened in 2019 is that we went from a kind of the dbt community went from a place where kind of the cool kid early adopters hung out to a place where the 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. And you don't have anything for us to buy. Uh, like we, we want to pay you money. Please help us figure out how to pay you money. And it was this moment where, and, and, you know, we, We owned a hundred percent of the cap table at this point, myself and my two co-fou…

AI assessment note: “we are actually not allowed to use open source software without a commercial relationship”

Q I get it. Can I ask, why did you decide to turn on monetization when you did? Cause those are the two questions. When do you raise and when do you monetize? Why, why did you decide the time you did to turn on monetization given what we said about kind of the benefits of not?

A I am a big fan of, uh, a company called a reboot and, uh, an individual named Jerry Colonna. I read his book a while ago and he talks about something called the pathless path. I think it's a, it's like a Buddhist concept that, that, Uh, you, you can't really know what the road in front of you looks like, and so instead, you have to adopt some principles whereby you, you figure out how to navigate that road when it, you know, get, when you get closer to it. Um, so I, I honestly, I don't have a strategic answer to that question. I have a principles-based answer, and the principles-based answer is, uh, that we navigate as much Of our strategies we can by asking what the community needs from us at any given point in time. And so what happened in 2019 is that we went from a kind of the dbt community went from a place where kind of the cool kid early adopters hung out to a place where the 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. And you don't have anything for us to buy. Uh, like we, we want to pay you money. Please help us figure out how to pay you money. And it was this moment where, and, and, you know, we, We owned a hundred percent of the cap table at this point, myself and my two co-fou…

AI assessment note: “we are actually not allowed to use open source software without a commercial relationship”

Q I totally get you in terms of that bottoms up community-led growth that you have. Can I ask you, you know, when we think about, you know, you as a leader, um, you mentioned the growth of the business. I'm always fascinated by the term high performance, and so I just wanted to hear your thoughts. When you think about high performance today in leadership, what do you think of?

A I think, I don't use that formulation for leaders or for individuals. I, you know, certainly I would, I would kind of understand how to Call a business high performance or not. Um, and so maybe for me, a high performance leader is one that like results in a high performance business. The, um, I think that we found that the best leaders communicate very clearly. They bring, uh, their entire organizations along for the ride, whether it's the good parts or the bad parts. Um, they like transparency is a core value of ours and, but, but, but transparency, um, It's not exactly clear how to operationalize transparency. And so when we hire leaders from the outside, um, 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. Um, you know, we, we recently, we were talking about efficiency a second ago. Um, we recently went through this whole exercise in, um, Optimizing our cost to book inside of our, primarily inside of our revenue organization. And this was, you know, in many organizations, this would be like finance dictates certain changes have to happen. The CRO decides how to do it and pushes it out to the teams. And that's just like, not at all how that happened at, at our company. Um, it was collaborative between Sales and finance. And then our sales leader, N…

AI assessment note: “I think that we found that the best leaders communicate very clearly.”

Q Tell me, uh, Frank Slootman, the trip to his house with the Sequoia CEOs. What did you learn and how was that experience?

A I think that a lot of the content you could get if you just like read his book. Um, but what was interesting is that, you know, Frank has become one of these kind of iconic figures. You know, he, He's kind of larger than life, and, you know, some people love him, and some people, you know, maybe don't love him as much, uh, but, but he's, he's certainly larger than life, and, uh, this was an opportunity for me to, to just kind of see him as just another person. He's just like, kind of, he has a really nice house, and he likes, uh, to, he likes to be outdoors, and, uh, you know, uh, he's, it's a, Beautiful view from where he is, but, but at the end of the day, he's just like a guy. And I know that sounds weird, but sometimes, uh, when the, the, um, moment that I'm in feels very unreal, uh, it, it's nice to, to understand that like all of us that are trying to figure out these journeys are, are just people doing our best.

AI assessment note: “this was an opportunity for me to, to just kind of see him as just another person”

Q Do you think startups idealize the MVP, move fast, break things, test, test, test, get something out every week? How would you advise founders who are often told that?

A Um, I really believe in that. So we, we do I still try to get us to, and, and certainly in the early days we released, uh, we released software that was not always perfect. And, and that I think is, is fine because if we in the early days had these like, you know, very extensive release processes and et cetera, like, uh, we would not have had the iteration speed and cycles that we needed to get to a good place. Um, the, the, I'm not suggesting that you move slowly from an execution standpoint. I'm suggesting that you move slowly from a monetization standpoint, um, and, and like growing the business. So, so there's the, what we, what we found out is that the minute that you have a million dollars in software ARR, you're on a clock. Like that people can take kind of 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. Um, 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. Um, and, uh, so, so you should take a really long time to get on that treadmill. Cause you can't really get off once you do.

AI assessment note: “I really believe in that.”

Q hopefully, is you're not in person a lot of the time. And I wanted to talk about this and remote in particular. And you said before, working remotely is terrible, but distributed companies are amazing. And I kind of did a double take on this. I was like, where's Tristan going with this one? Um, So what did you mean by working remotely is terrible, but distributed companies are amazing?

A We, we have a, an HQ location in Philadelphia because the original team is from Philadelphia. We are now, uh, most of us are, are in the States. I think it's like. 75 or 80% are in the States, but we're located in, I don't know, something like 40 states. Um, and, uh, we have maybe 10 or 15% of us are in EMEA Europe and, uh, five or 10% are in Uh, Australia, New Zealand. And, um, so we are very much a distributed company. Um, the other word that I like to use, uh, is asynchronous. So I think of us as an, a distributed asynchronous company, and those things describe how work is done. You know, it, work gets done by people who are far apart and often on different time zones. Um, but that doesn't mean that we need to be remote. We are, um, we are in the process of opening up an office in San Francisco. Our biggest concentration of, of talent is now in San Francisco. I think it's like, 15% of, of the employee population. Um, and it's, 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, job postings that, you know, people apply from there. Um, and so there's no specific It's not like we have engineering in San Francisco or support in San Francisco, nothing like that. It's just that there are team members there. And so, um, one of my favorite lines on this was from, uh, Sid at GitLab. Um, he sai…

AI assessment note: “working remotely doesn't mean working from home”

Q hopefully, is you're not in person a lot of the time. And I wanted to talk about this and remote in particular. And you said before, working remotely is terrible, but distributed companies are amazing. And I kind of did a double take on this. I was like, where's Tristan going with this one? Um, So what did you mean by working remotely is terrible, but distributed companies are amazing?

A We, we have a, an HQ location in Philadelphia because the original team is from Philadelphia. We are now, uh, most of us are, are in the States. I think it's like. 75 or 80% are in the States, but we're located in, I don't know, something like 40 states. Um, and, uh, we have maybe 10 or 15% of us are in EMEA Europe and, uh, five or 10% are in Uh, Australia, New Zealand. And, um, so we are very much a distributed company. Um, the other word that I like to use, uh, is asynchronous. So I think of us as an, a distributed asynchronous company, and those things describe how work is done. You know, it, work gets done by people who are far apart and often on different time zones. Um, but that doesn't mean that we need to be remote. We are, um, we are in the process of opening up an office in San Francisco. Our biggest concentration of, of talent is now in San Francisco. I think it's like, 15% of, of the employee population. Um, and it's, 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, job postings that, you know, people apply from there. Um, and so there's no specific It's not like we have engineering in San Francisco or support in San Francisco, nothing like that. It's just that there are team members there. And so, um, one of my favorite lines on this was from, uh, Sid at GitLab. Um, he sai…

AI assessment note: “working remotely doesn't mean working from home”

Q talent detection. So I wanted to double down on this. How do you spot talent so much better than anyone else? You know, we look at, like, non-obvious sources, you know, Um, I spoke to obviously, you know, uh, Ines on your marketing team, and she said about never having done marketing, your co-founder being a marketing intern before. How do you spot talent so much better without historical data?

A Uh, um, this is such an interesting question. Is that what I've, uh, processed out loud before? So let me, let me see what I can do. Um, uh, do you know that feeling that you get when you have a conversation with somebody and It's like locked in. It's like the, the two of you are very tightly communicating and have a shared understanding of the world. Um, that is the, the feeling that I get when I get really excited about somebody. So, um, the, you know, you, we could talk about Drew, my co-founder, we could talk about Janessa, but, but I think that the, the like most interesting example of this is, is Erin, who was our very first employee.

AI assessment note: “feeling that you get when you have a conversation with somebody and It's like locked in”

Q talent detection. So I wanted to double down on this. How do you spot talent so much better than anyone else? You know, we look at, like, non-obvious sources, you know, Um, I spoke to obviously, you know, uh, Ines on your marketing team, and she said about never having done marketing, your co-founder being a marketing intern before. How do you spot talent so much better without historical data?

A Uh, um, this is such an interesting question. Is that what I've, uh, processed out loud before? So let me, let me see what I can do. Um, uh, do you know that feeling that you get when you have a conversation with somebody and It's like locked in. It's like the, the two of you are very tightly communicating and have a shared understanding of the world. Um, that is the, the feeling that I get when I get really excited about somebody. So, um, the, you know, you, we could talk about Drew, my co-founder, we could talk about Janessa, but, but I think that the, the like most interesting example of this is, is Erin, who was our very first employee.

AI assessment note: “feeling that you get when you have a conversation with somebody and It's like locked in”

Q Yeah, it works really well. Uh, especially for like repeatable processes, sales processes, anything like that. Uh, final one for you, my friend, five years time, 20, 27. What does DBT look like then? And where are we then?

A I think that the innovation that's happening in data today is still, okay, I know every founder in the world references Jeff Bezos' day one letter. Um, I think that data is unbelievably early. Um, and the, um, 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 a, there's really a lot left to do. Um, so I, I think that in five years there will be more people participating in You know, creating data, analyzing data, um, there will be more quality around the data that is produced and consumed, um, more consistency, more, like, it, it will feel less messy.

AI assessment note: “in five years there will be more people participating in You know, creating data”