Lenny's Podcast / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
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Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
19 published records
01 / recommendation
“Okay. So two books that helped me learn a lot about myself. Range, it's a book about generalist and also Quiet, it's a book about introverts. And then I like a lot of biographies. So a few of my favorites are Snowball about Warren Buffet, Made in America, about Sam Walton and Leonardo da Vinci.”
02 / recommendation
“I like Belly. It's a consumer social app that lets you find and discover restaurants and rate them with your friends.”
03 / recommendation
“He interviews a lot of operators about how they do their very best work. And another podcast that I really like is the Logan Bartlett Show, which touches on timely trends in tech.”
04 / belief
“I think one of the cool stats is at dbt Labs we have over 30% of our employee headcount has contributed to our data transformation workflow.”
05 / belief
“Maybe we could collaborate on some stuff," and that led to an acquisition. So I think that's just wanted to touch a ban on that point of just the power of, the way I thought about it is let a thousand flowers bloom, just like meet everyone.”
06 / belief
“I think founders forget that it is so risky investing in early stage companies that 50% of portfolios investments don't return anything.”
07 / commitment
“Reminds me of a clip from this last season of Ted Lasso where they have used red strings and I won't get into it, but if you've seen it you will know what I'm talking about.”
08 / belief
“I think that combination of being at the right place at the right time and also getting to work really closely with people's day-to-day problems created a really special experience.”
09 / belief
“I think being founders, it's an extremely lonely role sometimes and it is very hard to know what your next chapter will look like or what the journey will look like and sometimes you really are out of cash and you do have to find a home.”
10 / evaluation
“It's not a fixed thing, it gets more complex over time. So we have to think about it quite a bit because my team builds proprietary software for dbt cloud and when we lose a deal we most often lose it to dbt open source and we like it that way.”
11 / recommendation
“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 Bs and you don't want to shut that door down prematurely because you don't know if you can really go the distance and be an independent company.”
12 / preference
“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.”
13 / recommendation
“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. And you're right, in previous times founders tried to be a little bit cute or obfuscate that they were evasive the situation that they were in because they wanted to drum up some competitive interest when there really wasn't any.”
14 / recommendation
“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.”
15 / preference
“No, I think if I was able to invest I wouldn't be here. So I got no, the board ended up vetoing my personal investment, but it's okay because I ended up dedicating all of my personal time to building the company.”
16 / evaluation
“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.”
17 / evaluation
“We track our turn rates very carefully and I think largely we were happy with the change that we made and we felt like one of the big things that we were trying to solve for was have our pricing catch up to how people valued the tool.”
18 / commitment
“I was just so convicted that if was going to be a special company that I asked to even put my personal money in and I asked to put a very irresponsible, irrational amount, nearly like 20% of my liquid net worth into dbt because I was so convinced that this was special.”
19 / evaluation
“Because I have just more credible experiences that I can pull from. And then the last thing that I think maybe doesn't show up day to day in my product work, but in investing, you're constantly thinking about risk and the power laws, and we touched on this before, but most investments don't work out.”