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 17 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
Handy: dbt Labs replaced its entire executive leadership team over 18 months
“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.”
Handy: Data software must become sales-led unlike engineering PLG tools
“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…”
Handy: Tightly scoping consulting work enables hiring junior talent over 15-year veterans
“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…”
Handy: Pre-2016 data tech treated analysts as non-technical users
“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…”
Handy: From 2017-2019, open source founders feared AWS commoditization
“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.”
Handy: dbt community grew irritated as engineering prioritized enterprise users
“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.”
Handy: Exponential growth requires supporting the curve, not heroic founder actions
“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.”
Handy: dbt Labs grew 10% month-over-month for six years straight
“We grew consistently at 10% month over month for about six years running.”
Handy: Organic Company Growth Entails Enduring Legacy Technical and Organizational Debt
“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.”
Handy: dbt Labs lost one-third of its team after taking venture capital
“We churned about a third of our team over the next year.”
Handy: Early cloud data startups ignored the transformation stage of ETL
“No one had taken seriously the T part of it, the transformation part of it.”
Handy: Subsidizing OSS Engineers With Consulting Revenue Is Unsustainable
“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 …”
Handy: dbt Labs began as a consultancy, not a software company
“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…”
Handy: Command-line tools deliver high value with minimal engineering effort
“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.”
Handy: dbt Labs once spent 2% of monthly revenue on coaching
“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.”