Insight
Schottenstein: Startups should inflict competitive pain on potential buyers to get noticed
“And the strategy that I would do in, in how do you get noticed is I would figure out the area that you bring a competitive advantage, and I would inflict pain on that potential buyer. Make it impossible for them to not notice you because that's when they're go…”
Insight
Schottenstein: Distribution advantage is arguably more important than a good product
“And then the last, I think this is more important, arguably, than if they have a good product, but is distribution. Do they have an advantage on how are they going to get to market? Because that's really, really hard”
Disclosure
Schottenstein: dbt Labs will hold ground on transformation and semantic standards
“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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Schottenstein: dbt Labs charges far below its perceived 20-35% warehouse value
“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…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Schottenstein: dbt Cloud loses deals most often to dbt open source
“And when we lose a deal, we most often lose it to dbt open source.”
Insight
Schottenstein: Distressed startups seeking an exit should be openly transparent
“If you're in a Hail Mary situation where you're looking for a home or you need an exit for your business, it's better to be transparent and cast a wider net.”
Insight
Schottenstein: Startups typically have only two to three strategic buyers
“For any one company, there's only ever two to three buyers that find what you're building to be extremely strategic.”
Insight
Schottenstein: Refusing talks with incumbent acquirers is a founder mistake
“I see a lot of founders get this wrong, and they prematurely will shut down a conversation or they won't talk to an incumbent or a potential future buyer because they take too competitive of a stance. But that's a mistake because M&A is all about creating plan…”
Disclosure
Schottenstein: dbt reserves stateful interactions and team collaboration for paid Cloud
“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…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Schottenstein: Tech M&A is close to picking back up
“There'll be better assets entering the market soon. And at a certain point, the opportunities will just be too great that that will incentivize a lot of the buyers that have been on the bench to start participating again in the M&A market. And I don't know exa…”
Assertion Partly supported
Schottenstein: Snowflake grew from a $4B to $12B valuation in 2019
“Like this was the year where Snowflake went From a four billion dollar company to a twelve billion dollar company.”
Disclosure
Schottenstein: NEA lost the dbt Labs funding round to Sequoia
“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…”
Disclosure
Schottenstein tried to invest 20% of her liquid net worth into dbt
“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…”
Insight
Schottenstein: Founders with viable standalone paths have the upper hand in M&A
“And if you have that path, then you'll have the upper hand in absolutely every single M&A conversation because you have a viable alternative, which is do nothing.”
Assertion Supported
Schottenstein: 20,000 companies use dbt every single week
“20,000 companies using dbt every single week, and that attracts partners to want to build for dbt.”
Assertion Supported
Schottenstein: 50% of early-stage VC portfolio investments return zero
“50% of portfolios don't return, investments don't return anything.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Schottenstein: dbt Cloud scheduler serves 8,000 companies and 10M monthly runs
“We have 8000 companies using our scheduler.
We have to manage ten million runs per month.”
