dbt Labs

“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…”

“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.”

“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…”

“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 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 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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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…”

“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.”

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

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

“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 …”

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