OTH #1: Tristan Handy, Founder, CEO at dbt Labs -- A Modest Goal Turns Into A Unicorn

Literally, we were in a hospital room with two beds, and my wife was in one, like, recovering and holding my newborn, and I was in the other bed, like, literally processing invoices in QuickBooks because, like, if I didn't, we couldn't make payroll. So, like, you do what you have to do.

Hell, yeah. Hell, yeah.

Right? Like, and then that's what it takes, right?

Like, that's the price you pay.

It's the price you pay. And you kind of don't know that that's what's going to be involved at the beginning, but then you just. You're faced with it and you're just like, well, this is. This is what I have to do today. 1 10, 100.

Hello, and welcome to episode number one of the 110 Hundred Show. My name is Eric Boggs, and I'm the creator and host of this thing. You probably already know me if you're listening to this, or maybe I'm on, like, episode number 250 or something, and you decided to come back to listen again from the very start. Either way, thank you for listening. My first guest is my friend Tristan Handy. He's the founder and CEO at DBT Labs, a data management tool for data analysts and engineers. And as you can tell, Tristan started the business the way a lot of businesses start, in a really, really hard way. In his case, cutting paychecks from a hospital room right after his wife gave birth. So it's pretty wild to know that he's gone from that to now. Hundreds of employees, over $400 million in capital raised, and he's just knocking the COVID off the ball. And the thing that I like the best about Tristan's story, he's the same guy I've known for a very long time. I hope you enjoy this project. I hope you enjoy this first episode. I think it's really good. Thanks again for listening. Tristan, my friend. How's it going?

Oh, it's going okay. It's. It's fun to use podcasts as an excuse to catch up.

So I should tell everyone that we're recording this the Friday before Christmas. Where does this day find you physically and mentally?

Oh, well, it's. It's. I'm glad you separated those. I. I'm still in my home office outside of Philadelphia, and I have a bunch of meetings to do today, but I'm struggling to keep my brain on task. I'm looking forward to a holiday break that is spent at the Chesapeake Bay and going and collecting firewood and having a fire in my fire pit. Outside? Yeah, man.

Collecting firewood. You're speaking my language, brother. So Tristan has the unique honor of being a 3 time 1 by 10 by 100 champion. We actually worked together at Argyle Social, which we don't need to talk about that. That was a. I don't know, maybe we should talk about that. RJ Metrics and now DBT Labs, where you're the founder and CEO and you've raised a kajillion dollars and you're just knocking the COVID off the ball. But you didn't start there. So it, if, if you could take us back to the earliest of early days of Fishtown Analytics.

Yeah. And I have to credit you with a lot of the, you know, giving me the courage to, to step out on my own and do the thing you were just getting started with, with. I don't know, maybe you'd started Rev Boss like a year or two ahead.

And yeah, it might not have been called Ref Boss yet.

Yeah, I, I don't know. But, but you, you were in the, this like period of oh my God, this is awesome and everyone should do it. And you infected me with that, that spirit. And I was like, well, if Eric can do it, then maybe I can do it too.

Yeah, I should say that that spirit comes and goes.

Yeah, yeah. But, but so, so really, like there's a lot of stuff happening in. You know, I consider myself first and foremost a data practitioner. I've used that skill set in a lot of different ways over the course of the last, I don't know, 20, 25 years. But yeah, that's my core skill set. And in the like 2013 through 16 time period, there's a lot of change going on. Data was moving to the cloud and companies, early adopters were trying to follow in on that journey and oftentimes they were doing that very poorly. And so I thought that I knew how to do it better. And I didn't actually want to create a technology company. I wanted to create a services business that would enable me to just like work with a bunch of customers that I thought were cool and that I liked work out of my home office, which was like very. A novel thing back in 2016, and control my time a lot more. I'm sure that you've experience this, but working at venture backed companies can tend to take over your life.

It's. It's a different vibe, I'm sure. So from what I remember about your founding story was it started as an email list, right?

Okay. That is not untrue, but I don't know that it was like quite as central as you're making it. I did. So I had a newsletter that I curated while at RJ Metrics. I ran marketing at RJ and we built it up to like 6,000 people. And as I was leaving RJ Metrics, there was nobody that was like, able to take over this, this newsletter. And so I said, well, why don't I keep writing this and you folks can have a sponsorship. And so that's, that's how we arranged it that the newsletter kept going out and they kept getting their logo out in front of a bunch of people. And it. That has grown to several tens of thousands of. Of readers now. And I continue to write it to this day.

Yeah, I was, I was going to say you still write every word of it.

I am joined by my, my awesome co contributor, Jason Ganz, who runs our Developer Experience team.

Who, who were your first clients at Fishtown Analytics?

There were two. There was one company actually that you originally introduced me to, UserVoice and. Yeah, right.

I'm interviewing Rich in a couple.

You are not. He's now onto an another company.

Yeah, Fathom like also knocking the COVID off the ball.

Is that right?

Yeah, I mean it's, it's a wonderful product. Anyway, shout out Rich. We'll talk to you soon.

And then the other one was a company called Contactually, but both of them, I knew from prior relationships, I think that a lot of times consulting companies get their like, get like meaningfully all of their business through relationships. For yes, for us it was just like the first two, which was enough to pay me a very modest salary and my co founder, Drew a very modest salary. And, and, and then we had time to kind of figure out where to get the rest and, and really I did, you know, our customer funnel was all based on, on marketing. I was, I don't honestly enjoy the earliest. I, I actually have come to enjoy the later stages of sales process, but I don't like the process where it's like, hi, will you spend 30 minutes with me so that I can tell you why I'm smart and you should spend more time with me.

Yeah, you, you're good at it. You would be good at it, but totally, totally fair that you don't. Don't enjoy it. So you and Drew got your first couple clients. How long before you realized that you. You had something?

It was really, it was really, I think client number three. I can't remember it was three or four, but it was a company called Casper. I still sleep on Only Casper mattresses to this day because I'm so appreciative for their business. It was honestly a pretty short project for us, but they were by far the biggest and most connected team that we had worked with. Casper at the time was kind of hot shit in New York tech and they had a data team of like 10 or 12 people and they had a big problem with their data stack at the time. And we took the train up from Philadelphia and over the course of a week, we rebuilt a lot of what they were doing. And we used our very nascent open source product, DBT as a, as a part of the solution. And they learned to use it and loved it and ended up referring a bunch of other New York tech communities at the time like Kickstarter and Venmo and I don't know, there's a Lightspeed Commerce. A bunch, a bunch of early, Our early users came from that.

So y'. All, I mean, those are some pretty good names for two dudes working out of spare bedrooms in, you know, the Philadelphia suburbs.

Yeah, right.

So clients one and two, personal network clients three, plus all referrals. And at some point you transition from that to raising $400 million from some of the best investors almost. So I guess like walk through that, help me understand that transition. And then I just kind of have some more kind of personal related questions to that experience.

Oh, it was so we had not thought that there was a business to be built around dbt. It was a very kind of like weird product. It was a product built to do data work, but it was, it had a completely different understanding of the Personas who did data work. And so it, it felt like maybe there were only a couple dozen of us who would actually find this interesting. So we open sourced it. And, and yeah, there was like a nice little early user community and that was cool. But we, we installed anonymous instrumentation in the, in the open source product and we could just like watch the usage go up over time. And every single month it grew by exactly 10%. Like it was kind of freakish how consistent the growth was.

Yeah.

And that was not through sales and marketing. Like we were a consulting business. We were just like working with clients every day, but in the background we get to watch this chart go up. And so over time we invested more in it. We would like kind of steal from the consulting revenues and like invest in software engineers writing open source code. And over time like that clearly didn't scale because it's like the math on that, like paying people to write open source Code, like, doesn't work forever. And so we felt like we needed to. You know, in 2019, we had a thousand companies using DBT and we had, like, four software engineers writing the code, and we were just like, this. This is kind of breaking.

Yeah.

And so we. We had to do something different.

Damn. Damn. How. How did that. And during this time, you're. Well, I guess this might be. You're having kids, right? And it's all just like this swirling, you know, success and challenges and everything else. Like, where were you, like, emotionally during that time? Was it all just high, high highs, like, we're absolutely going to kill it? Or did you feel like you were hanging on by a thread? Like, what do you remember from that time? Being the. The leader of the business?

I'll say two things. One is that it is. It is wonderful when you get to a place where you can start talking about work, life, balance to. Or, I mean, we don't use those terms, but we talk about it as work hard and go home. But it's so great when you can get there because you've had to pay for the privilege to get there. Like, I. You know, my daughter was born Valentine's Day of 2018, and I was like, literally, we were in a hospital room with two beds, and my wife was in one, like, recovering and holding my newborn, and I was in the other bed, like, literally processing invoices in QuickBooks because, like, if I didn't, we couldn't make payroll. So, like, you do what you have to do.

Hell yeah. Hell, yeah. Right.

Like, and then that's what it takes, right?

Like, that's the price you pay.

It's. It's the price you pay. And you kind of don't know that that's what's going to be involved at the beginning. But then you. You just. You're faced with it and you're just like, well, this is. This is what I have to do today. Um, and then the other thing. What was the other thing? Uh, tell me your original question again.

Uh, where were you emotionally?

Ah. So the line was very consistent up and to the right, which is cool. But that masks all of the stuff that goes on beneath the surface. That is horrifying. There were. The client conflict makes me, like, deeply. It produces all kinds of emotions. There was. There was one instance where a customer didn't pay invoices for a little while and, like, was kind of transparent with us about, like, we'll get there, we'll get there. And then they, like, shut down the business and We. We had, like, invested months and months of. I was like, look, if you knew this was coming, then why didn't you tell us earlier? Yeah, that. So that kind of stuff happens. And. But then there's also the, like, you know, there were one or two employees over the. The journey that turns out they were delivering work that was not up to my personal standards. And sometimes it takes a little while to find out about that because, like, the client doesn't really want to email the CEO and say, like, yes, your person is doing work.

That, I'm the CEO, is often the last to know. In my experience, it's like, everybody knows but you, because whatever you got.

And so that's, like, deeply upsetting because you're like, oh, I'm. I'm not living up to my commitments in this. This relationship that I care about. And so, you know, both of those are, like, deeply emotional experiences in different ways.

Yeah, yeah. And they're inescapable. And you also don't know that you were, like, signing in blood to take on an endless fire hose of those situations over the course of building your own business.

Yeah. You're the umbrella. You try to protect everybody else from all of that.

Yeah, yeah. And you can't let them see a sweat. I want to change gears. I remember we'd had a conversation. I remember where I was standing, and I was standing in my yard picking tomatoes, like, during the COVID Whatever time. And you and I were talking on the phone, and I think you'd maybe just raised. I think you just raised your second round of capital. Would I be picking tomatoes on the east coast around that timeline?

Yeah. Yeah. It was August, I think, 2020.

Yep, that's totally when it was. And you spoke about something that really stuck with me. I mean, I can't remember the exact words, but I'm going to paraphrase it. It's kind of like, I don't know, man. We just got lucky. Like, this business was going to exist. Like, the. The world was moving in this direction in terms of data and job function and whatever. And you said something. The effect of, like, I don't know, man. We just happen to be standing there, and we just got sucked into this, like, vortex, and, like, the market just pulled us into existence. And I really love hearing deeply talented and smart people like you talk about the role that luck plays in their success, in the growth of their business.

Yeah, I still totally agree with that, with that line, but I would add, like, a little bit of nuance. I think that, you know, people Often use that. Is it Teddy Roosevelt that talked about, like, being in the arena? Yeah, yeah. The. I think oftentimes the, the thing that people use that quote to, to, to talk about is like, when people are critical of people who are trying to build things, it is a, it is a defense mechanism. Is like, well, why don't you get in the arena and see how you do? And okay, fine, like, I don't. Whatever. I'm, I don't stress too much about when people are critical of me, but I think that the entrepreneurial journey is. It's so important to be in the arena because you never know what is going to happen when you get there. It's a little bit like the NFL any given Sunday, but in order to have that any given Sunday thing. True. You have to be on the field. And so oftentimes I think that we don't encourage enough people to start companies without knowing what the future holds. Like, I, I think that people should start companies because. Well, rather, I think that people should start companies with kind of a baseline. Like, here's my plan. And it's pretty modest. And it like the, the target for my plan is like, I should be able to pay my own salary. Yeah. Like, that is actually a great plan. Like to have a business that. Yeah. That no one can take away from you. Yeah. And then you, you get in the arena, you see where it goes from there. And yeah, like, certainly luck plays a role in the industry context that might allow you to become like ginormously successful, but there's also a tremendous amount of skill in navigating, figuring out when that happens and all of this other stuff. So.

Yeah, without a doubt, I made mention of this, but it's, it's holiday time. Every. You know, Harry Potter movies for us are like a Christmas. Like they're Christmas movies in our house. I don't know, maybe they're Christmas movies for everybody. But there's a. We watch one the other night. There's a quote where I guess Ron is like, we have to make a plan or whatever. And Harry's like, when have our plans ever actually worked? We show up and everything goes to shit and we figure it out. And it's like, you know what? Like, tattoo that on my arm. Because that is literally business building in the life of a, of a founder. Like big, big or small company? Because it's just like, yeah, man, it just. You get in the game, you play the game, it changes constantly. And you just gotta be good at rolling with the punches and making the moves. That you need to make.

So we now have, I can't remember, 525 employees, something like that. And one of my biggest growth periods over the last couple of years is like, understanding how critical planning is at larger stages because otherwise you have all these people wandering around underutilized and also not really clear on like, what the direction is that the company is going in. And I was, I've spent so long in the earlier stages that I didn't realize, really understand this problem. And I was always like, why don't they get it? Like, or if they don't get it, like, why don't they ask me or this kind of stuff? And, and so now the way I think about it is we actually need a very clear plan. And then my job is to disrupt the plan is to like, find out ways to, to do better than that plan.

That's a great framework for the, the founder guy that can scale up to the hundreds of employees, CEO role. Right. Because like, you, you have a founder brain. Like, you will always have a founder.

Yeah, I'm, I'm quite bad at the, like, let's make damn sure that we can execute on exactly this plan. That's. It's not how my brain works.

Yeah, yeah, let me, let me change gears a little bit. You got hundreds of employees, you're doing really well. You got global brands paying millions of dollars a year to use your, your, your software. You made a comment not that long ago about how now that you're the, you know, the big gorilla in the category, you've got all the starts throwing rocks at you. And it wasn't that long ago that you were throwing the rocks. Like, how has that transition been for you? And it does, I guess, relate to like the founder, the founder brain. And yeah, I don't know, how does it go from being the plucky upstart to being the, the guy staving off the attacks from the plucky upstarts.

We, we do have some of that. And I think that it's, it's funny, there's the upstarts that I actually think they're not adding to the conversation appreciably. And then there's the ones that I think that they are like, I, you know, there was this period where there was a, there was a competitor that we had back in like 2018 or something like that, and they, they said DBT is too hard to use. It's built for too technical of an audience. And they built a really nice GUI and, and you know, kind of replicated DBT functionality but made it, like, a little bit easier to use. And that, that created so much stress for me at the time. It was like, they're right. They're. They're right. And, you know, we responded to that pressure and built a bunch of product and made DBT easier to use. And, and so I, you know, there's the way that I experience this stuff and then there's the way that our team experiences this stuff. Like our, our team is. I think this is normal. You know, you see competition and the, the tendency is to, like, your blood pressure increases and either you have the optimist who's like, oh, we're going to crush them, or you have the pessimists who are like, oh, my God, we're gonna. We're gonna die. And I think the right answer is actually just like, we need to continue to make consistent forward progress and do what we do really well and, and be responsive enough when people introduce, like, true improvements. I think the thing that I have had to learn that has been frustrating is that you. I really used to appreciate the fact that no one gave a crap what I said publicly. And, and so, like, I really, you know, I used my newsletter to, like, constantly just like, say whatever I thought.

Yeah.

And now that we have a bigger perspective, presence in the market, I have to be a little more judicious about.

Yeah. Gotta think before you speak. Just a. Just a tiny bit.

Just a little bit.

Yeah, just a tiny bit. Lots riding on what you have to say. Well, what's next for y'?

All?

Like, what's coming up? What are your plans for 2025?

There's a lot happening in our space. You know, AI is important, and it's going to change a lot of the ways that people use our A product. Also, there's this, like, big disruptive trend that's going to be very geeky. And I don't know that we want to get, like, too deep down it. But it's called open table formats, and there's an open table format called iceberg. And it's really, like, disrupting the way that people think about databases and this, like, many billions of dollars market of like, analytical compute. So it's going to be interesting times. I. You would appreciate this. I. I often feel like I'm living in the middle of a HBS case study. Um, so maybe, maybe one day I can be involved in. In writing that.

Yeah, you could. You can write the DBT case study in the school, following their dad's footsteps and just not read the case study, but talk about it anyway.

Yeah, right. They, they can have chatgpt summarize the case study.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. That, that was totally like my brand. Like, I'm going to sit on the row, I'm going to acknowledge. Acknowledge that I haven't prepped, but I'm just going to talk because, like, that's just how I. Anyway, Tristan, thank you, man. This is really great, really fun.

Thanks for having me on.

This is just great to hear. Hear all this. My customary wrap up for this is some music recommendations. So I don't know if you got anything prepped, but. Yeah, what do you listen to these days?

So honestly, I stopped, I handed over all of my like own DJing abilities to Spotify a couple years ago. And now basically when I'm working, if I'm not in a meeting, I'm constantly listening to Lo Fi's Lo Fi Chill hop. And Spotify just like has an infinity stream of this and it's like the soundtrack of my life.

Yeah, I mean, I remember that back in the day, like that was like just what you listen to while you're working. Well, I'm glad to hear that that hasn't changed. You haven't. You certainly haven't changed either. I've known you for a long time and even with all the success that you're experiencing, it's good to know that Tristan Handy's still Tristan Handy.

Hell yeah.

Well, we can leave it there, man. Thank you.

Awesome. Good to see you.

Yep, likewise. Thanks everybody for listening to this episode of the 11000 Show. I'm your host, Eric Boggs. Thank you to our production team of Rachel Velasquez and Danny Chu, research team of Benjamin Rogerson and Heinie Blargwood. Screaming in the intro and outro provided by the Boggs children, Thomas, Catherine and Barbara. We'll see you next time.

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