Julia Schottenstein: recommendation

Transcript context

…This might be a good time to just chat about dbt and the success the company has had. So many startups have tried to become a standard default layer of what's now called the modern data stack. And I don't know any startup doesn't use dbt or planning to use dbt. It's just a incredibly rare success story somewhere to snowflake where it's just like it's the default for building large data startups and most startups these days work with a lot of data. So my question is just like what do you think dbt did most right to win in this and continue to win? So I think dbt did a lot of things right, but I'll point out too that really stick out to me. And the first is just power and simplicity and the second is a commitment to being open. And I'll touch on what I mean by those two things. So when dbt was first getting started, you would hear a lot from companies, I don't understand, what's so special about dbt? We have a SQL templating tool at our company, we built one in-house. Like this is really straightforward and simple and it's true like dbt is really simple, but that is the power of it. So our founders, Tristan, Drew and Connor, they had a belief that the people who do data analysis work, that really work closely with their business stakeholders should also be the ones to contribute to creating clean data assets in production because that data prep work is a necessary prerequisite for any analysis that you do. So dbt was really this belief that if you know SQL, we want to invite you to do these workflows that were traditionally held by data engineers but you had to earn that. So dbt has this nice framework where it's harder to mess up, keeps data quality really high, but it is pretty simple to get started and learn and learn. And that was really the unlock in the industry. We were definitely solving a pain point at the right time. And then the second thing is this commitment to being open. So dbt is open source and that's the main guts of dbt where you write your business logic and it helps in a number of ways. Specifically it helps with flywheel, keep the flywheel running and also with network effects. And I'll explain what that looks like. So dbt is really easy to get started with at your company with reduced friction. We're building a product that people, so they talk about it, they want to share it both at their organization and with other companies. Other companies get started with dbt again with reduced friction. We now get to see this really diverse set of use cases for dbt across company sizes, across industries and it allows us to build a truly horizontal company. As our company grows, we get to invest back into our community and our product and the flywheel begins to spin faster. And then meanwhile we have a really large user base. So we have 20,000 companies using dbt every single week and that attracts partners to want to build for dbt and so they share best practices, build workflows, and now if you're a company and you've standardized on dbt, you've really unlocked an integrated modern data ecosystem that wasn't available for you before. So that has a flywheel and also benefits everyone that decides to be on the standard. So it's those two really important trends that made dbt so powerful today. So what I'm hearing there is essentially the product was right for what people needed to solve. There's also a product led component, open source, free self-serve piece that people adopted, used and started working and then scaled and started paying for it. And then there's an alignment of the vision of where this was going and how it fit with how people wanted this to work for them. Is there anything else? Because a lot of startups do that and that all sounds really smart and good, but a lot of startups try to do those things and no one cares. Maybe their product isn't necessarily what people are looking for, maybe they don't get the right distribution. I don't know. Is there anything else that you think they did really well that helped them kickstart this to even be a thing? Is it timing that was really great? Is it specific influencers early on?…

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