Julia Schottenstein: preference

Transcript context

…So you have a really interesting career path in that you went from VC into product management. Usually it's the other way around. Usually PMs become VCs and it's right to see this version of it. So I wanted to start with just a question of just how did that come to be? I do have an unusual background, but it doesn't surprise me that people who are interested in product are also interested in investing and vice versa. For me, I've always had three interests broadly and that's an interest in business, an interest in technology and an interest in markets. And I get to express those interests both in investing and in product, but just with different weights. So in product you go a lot deeper on the tech and markets is less of a focus, but you still get to do all three. So I have a unusual background and I used to be a professional investor at NEA. Spent all my time investing in early stage startups that built for technical audiences. So think dev tools, infra data companies. And in 2019 I first discovered dbt, which was an open source data transformation framework. And I got really very, very excited about dbt because when I talked to people that were using it, the way that they described their experience on dbt was like unlike anything I had heard before. It was much more of an identity for them than just a tool that they were using to get their job done. And that really struck me. And as I thought about what was happening in the market, there was a lot going on in 2019. The markets were changing quite a bit. Cloud data warehouses were starting to explode. This was the year where Snowflake went from a 4 billion company to a 12 billion company. And I thought to myself, if dbt worked, it could work in a really extraordinary way. And I naturally tried to spend all my time getting close to Tristan, who's the CEO and founder and I wanted to invest. Okay. So at this point you're a spec at NEA, you're trying to invest in dbt and okay, keep going.…

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