The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 20 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Tristan Handy: Most startup and executive roles, including CEO, are not hard
“Honestly, I don't think that a lot of our jobs, including my job are like that hard.”
Tristan Handy: Hitting $1M ARR puts startups on an inescapable growth clock
“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 f…”
Tristan Handy: dbt Labs has lost only around a dozen employees total
“We have an unbelievably high retention rate. Both voluntary and involuntary. So, so we, 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, maybe some, somewhere around …”
Tristan Handy: Remote work from home is lonely and dehumanizing
“Like just because it's lonely and dehumanizing and because we're built to interact with other Humans. And for many of us, especially for you know, early career folks who are, you know, I mean, I lived in an apartment with four roommates right out of college. L…”
dbt Labs to revoke $250 stipend for staff near satellite offices
“And then step two is in places where we have high concentration of employees. Open up satellites, satellite offices. We're calling this our many satellites strategy. And then the people who live in, I, we haven't finalized the like driving distance or anything…”
Tristan Handy: CEOs should aim to make as few decisions as possible
“I explicitly, I have a doc that says, like, working with me, and what, how do I see my job? And in it says, I try to make as few decisions as possible.”
Tristan Handy: Management consulting skills are mostly useless at early startups
“And then the hard thing, honestly, for a consultant was to figure out like 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. Like I wasn't the pe…”
Tristan Handy: Evaluating candidates on scale experience is the wrong hiring strategy
“I think it's like fundamentally, the talent search algorithm is fundamentally like not that hard. People just get focused on the wrong stuff. Like, have you led a customer success team at scale before? Like, that's the wrong question.”
Tristan Handy: Strategically taking time creates uncopyable startup strengths
“Making the decision to strategically take a long time in certain cases allows you to create strengths that are uncopyable in, in the market.”
Tristan Handy: Luck gets you in the game, but skill drives success
“I think that you need some amount of luck to kind of be in the game. Whatever it is, like, You need some like minimum bar of luck. And then above that, it's probably skill.”
Tristan Handy: dbt Core open-source software is used by over 14,000 companies
“Dbt core is, is open source. It's used by, I don't know, over 14,000 companies today.”
Tristan Handy: Quarterly performance reviews must include uncomfortable feedback
“The goal that I always set for these meetings is that we don't leave the room without somebody saying something that feels uncomfortable.”
Tristan Handy: Bootstrapping dbt Labs for five years would miss the market
“Our space moves incredibly quickly. And so if we took five years to reinvest the revenue the entire space would have changed by the time we got there.”
dbt Labs posts public salary bands on all job listings
“We share public salary bands on every job posting, but we don't share an individual's salary.”
dbt Labs plans to offer annual secondary liquidity to employees
“Our goal is to provide opportunities for secondary on an annual basis.”
Tristan Handy: Inconsistent adoption and calendar meetings destroy asynchronous work models
“The problem with async and the re the time when it's really hard to adopt well is when it's adopted inconsistently. Cause 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 sudd…”
Tristan Handy: dbt Labs was bootstrapped and revenue-generating for three years
“And 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.”
Tristan Handy: dbt Labs founders and employees owned 100% of cap table
“We owned a hundred percent of the cap table at this point, myself and my two co-founders and our employees.”
dbt Labs provides a $250 monthly out-of-home stipend for employees
“Everybody gets, I think it's 250 dollars 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 you…”