Dbt Labs

“I think everybody knows at this point that if I'm giving you a discount on, you know, the last day of the quarter, it's you're probably gonna be able to get that same discount on the first day of the next quarter.”

“Both of the companies were actually like beating their revenue targets.”

“I believe that they'll actually be close to 600. I don't have the exact number.”

“My fondest desire was not to go and build another technology company. It was actually to like real companies, real, real customers use the new cloud-based analytics tech that like had already been built. And so I didn't actually start a technology company. I s…”

“We grew consistently at 10% month over month for about six years running.”

“I think this is a thing that many people who build consulting companies, the thing that they get wrong is that they accept whatever work comes their way. I said no to anything that wasn't in those lanes. And that meant that we, not only did we get better at do…”

“No one had taken seriously the T part of it, the transformation part of it.”

“Data tech prior to 2016, always thought of data analysts as kind of low level, non-technical people. You can see that in Excel or Tableau or other products that like existed before that. Yeah, you can do powerful things with these products, but they're not fun…”

“When you build command line tools, you can get a lot of value out of them. You don't have to build a user interface. You don't have to build login. So you can get a lot of value out of a small amount of effort.”

“Over time, we eventually hired two more software engineers as we continued to scale, but it was like incredibly clear that that was not going to work. Cause what we were doing was we were taking all the money from the consulting business and like shoveling it …”

“If you are sitting on top of an exponential, then you don't need to be heroic. In the process, like what you need to do is continue doing the things that support that exponential curve. Do the next, build the next feature, make the next customer happy.”

“We churned about a third of our team over the next year.”

“In the 2017 through 19 period, it was like a massive concern for every open source founder that AWS was just going to take your thing and put you out of business.”

“When you grow in this like much more organic way, while it does allow you to discover things that are really special, it means that you live with all of your legacy organizational debt and tech debt for a long time.”

“The initial leadership team that I had grown the business with scaled for a long way, but over the past 18 months, I've replaced every single person that reports to me with like the folks that can scale to the Next level.”

“I think that parts of our community got irritated at us because they could see that a lot of our innovation was going to service this new group of users that we'd never prioritized before.”

“Our first, let's call it Ten million in ARR was like very PLG oriented.”

“When you sell to software engineering, sometimes you can go PLG for a lot deeper in the journey and, you know, Stripe and Twilio and others have done that very successfully. But data for a variety of reasons that are probably too boring to get into ends up nee…”

“I, at one point in time, I paid two percent of our monthly revenue to a coach because like, that's how important I consider that.”

“We had an acquisition offer for more money than I would have ever been able to use in like three generations of my family.”

“And so that means that companies like us and companies like Fivetran that are big parts of that, you know, we're not going anywhere.”

“My big conclusion is I sent an email to our product marketing, our head of product marketing. I was like, Hey, can we just say the analytics stack? Like this is a set of technologies that works together to do analytics. And it kind of tries to get away from th…”

“My read is that people like us, people like Fivetran, while we are critical to their success as platforms, because we drive a ton of consumption. They don't actually really care about the dollars that we make as businesses. Cause they're so tiny relative to th…”

“When you talk to the folks at the hyperscalers, they will say, we are, we're like making sure that our solution is like covers all these different areas, but it's mostly not. Because we want to compete in these areas. It's mostly because people come to us with…”

“We've already got internal prototypes working of generate me a model that does this or generate me tests for this model or you know, write documentation for, so we've got all of this stuff that is going to be making its way through at some point.”

“And so this year will probably be the year where we start playing around in that space.”

“We waited, waited a long time to raise any venture funding at all. We had a thousand companies using the product before we raised a single cent.”

“If you look today the only people who are consistent presence on our executive team from a year ago are me and our CFO and everybody else around the table is, is new.”

“Our business as a result has not really had a hiccup. But if you only existed on Twitter or LinkedIn you would think that you know, our customers desired us on mass and we're every single one of them was livid and canceled, but that just like didn't happen.”

“Two years ago, We could walk into a quarter with one X pipeline coverage and you would just, the deals would just show up and that's not how the world works today.”

“Like this was the year where Snowflake went From a four billion dollar company to a twelve billion dollar company.”

“Tristan said, we're gonna 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, like, super excited to get that message, like, this is my chance, and unfor…”

“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, irrational amount nearly, like, 20% of my liquid net worth into DBT because I was so convinced that…”

“There are a few areas that we do want to hold our ground and that's in our transformation standard as well as our semantic standard because we believe those two are better served together for the user's sake.”

“20,000 companies using dbt every single week, and that attracts partners to want to build for dbt.”

“We think about dbt open source. It's really the guts of the data transformation. It's where you describe your business logic. And then on the cloud side, we build proprietary software that supercharges the development life cycle and the productionization of db…”

“When we talk about what is the value of dbtlabs to our customers, they often talk about how it's either 20 to 35% as valuable as what they spend on their cloud data warehouse. But what we charge our customers is a very small fraction of that 20 to 35%, and tha…”

“And when we lose a deal, we most often lose it to dbt open source.”

“We have 8000 companies using our scheduler. We have to manage ten million runs per month.”

“Making the decision to strategically take a long time in certain cases allows you to create strengths that are uncopyable in, in the market.”

“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.”

“Dbt core is, is open source. It's used by, I don't know, over 14,000 companies today.”

“We owned a hundred percent of the cap table at this point, myself and my two co-founders and our employees.”

“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 …”

“The goal that I always set for these meetings is that we don't leave the room without somebody saying something that feels uncomfortable.”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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.”

“It turns out that we raised four rounds of funding all during COVID and the valuations during that period started off attractive and only got more attractive.”

“We share public salary bands on every job posting, but we don't share an individual's salary.”

“Our goal is to provide opportunities for secondary on an annual basis.”

“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.”

“As we move forward, we're not looking to, like, own cataloging or own whatever, these different categories. We're looking to be the infrastructure that powers this ecosystem, because it turns out that you don't actually want to connect to, like, four different…”