 Right. Well, it's wonderful to be back here again at Slush. Thank you for having us. It's my honor to be here with my friend and business partner, Tristan Handy, who leads DBT Labs. DBT helps companies to transform, organize, and share their information. And the topic of our talk today is about leveraging community for product growth. But one of the powerful things is this community is actually how we got to know Tristan and how we got to know DBT and become an investor. And I'll just take a second. I'll tell a little bit of the story. We were working on an investment in another company, and we were doing the due diligence calls. And as we were doing the due diligence calls on another company... I don't think I've heard this story. Really? You're just telling... Okay, let... No, so I won't say the name of the company, but you actually know the company well. We were looking at this other company. We were doing the due diligence calls, and every due diligence call was like, hey, have you heard of this thing called DBT? It's amazing. It's transformed my life. It's made everything so much easier. It's so powerful. You know, it's taken over so much of our operations with data and our company. And my partner, Sonya and I, who were doing this due diligence, were like, whoa, we got to go figure out this DBT thing. So we pivoted away from the one that was raising at the time and started working with DBT. We were doing work on DBT Labs and then figured out how badly we wanted to invest. The company was not raising money. It was August of 2020 in the middle of the pandemic, and we flew out to your house, and we had a meeting, because he lives in Philadelphia at the time we were in California. I tried so many different ways to tell you no. Yeah. We flew out to your house, and we met on your porch socially distanced in the middle of a thunderstorm. Mosquito bites and everything. Yeah, it was good times. But anyways, but thanks for being here. So, you know, this is a conference filled with founders, prospective founders, people thinking about startups. And I think the most interesting thing, for me at least always, is to hear the story of what drove you to become a founder. And like, how did you think about making the steps to start a company in the first place? Yeah, I'm happy to tell that story. But one of the things that I think is so hard to know, even if you've been through the process, is how to catalyze an amazing community. And it makes me think about it so much as I sit in the middle of this community that has grown over the course of what, 10 plus years? How long has it been? Yeah, I think more than that. Yeah, and I bet you at the very first slush, no one could have envisioned this. And that is how I feel today, looking back on the past seven and a half years, I built a tool, myself and my co-founder Drew, built a tool that I needed to use to do my own work. I was very excited about new technologies in our space. It was the early days of the cloud data warehouse. And I had been a longtime data practitioner and I saw how powerful some of these products were and I just wanted to use them. And there was a missing piece and I knew that if I was gonna deliver client work that was great, then I needed an answer to this question. And so I built that. And then I figured that maybe a couple other people, I didn't think there would be that many people that would use this. But I thought maybe a couple other people would use it and so I created a Slack community to collaborate on, exchange best practices. And in the first six months, there were like a hundred people there, which kind of felt like what I anticipated might happen. But it just kept going up. And we heard the types of feedback that you relayed just there. People started playing with DBT and they found that it did more and more and more for them. So I think that great communities, you can, maybe there's a certain set of ingredients that all have to be shared, but there's not a playbook. There's not like an answer that always works. Yeah, no, exactly. And I think taking a step back, what a big component I think probably relates to open source. And so what drove the decision to, you said you created this thing. Like what drove the decision to make it an open source thing versus trying to start a commercial business from the beginning that just focused on selling a product? In the early days of my career, so in the early 2000s, I worked in the data world. And at the time the data world was dominated by this duopoly. Really it was like Microsoft and Oracle. And there was kind of very little cross pollination that happened there. Either you were a Microsoft shop or you were an Oracle shop and all the tooling was built and you got locked in. And the customers of, and both of these companies are very different today. So it's a kind of lessons from a prior era, but even the users and the customers of these ecosystems didn't like them. They felt locked in, they felt like they had no choices and it's just a bad world to work in. And so I as a practitioner when designing tooling, my first rule was I don't want to lock people in. I want people to use this thing and love it and continue to use more of it because they felt empowered to make choices. And I knew that if this thing was going to be widely used, it was going to be tens of thousands of human hours and would be spent inside of a company and writing this code and if you make that code proprietary, then all of that investment is locked up and can be kind of taken away from you at any given point in time. And that just didn't seem right. Yeah, I mean I remember when we were first doing the due diligence and learning about DBT when we kind of came upon it doing references on the other company, the fact that there were a lot of people we talked to who were in love with you but had never spoken to anybody at the company. And because the fact that you had chosen this open source strategy, there was no friction for them to be able to try something and for them it was like I might as well try it and they loved it. And so how have you found that being this community company has helped you as you've tried to think about, okay, there's this product out there that we provide for free and how does that shape how you sell and how you interact with them now as customers? It's, I think for any commercial open source company it is your biggest strength and your biggest weakness. So it is a tremendous strength for us in that we often start commercial conversations from a place of, we already have 400 users using the product, we already have training materials, we have, like if most companies, if you showed up and the customers had already had a 400 person install of your product, that would be unbelievably wonderful to save you so much on customer success costs. The downside of that is we're doing just fine. We don't need to buy your commercial thing. So we have to, you know, in the early days the name of the game was making sure that we could deliver on the open source value prop and that we could innovate at the speed of our partners and all of that was very challenging but in the past two or three years the name of the game for us has been making sure that we have an answer to the question, why should we pay you for the thing that maybe we could get for free? And, you know, you could talk to basically any open source founder out there and they're gonna say the exact same thing. The way that Ali at Databricks says it is that I had to hit two grand slams. I had to hit the open source grand slam and then I had to hit the proprietary grand slam. And so we're not in the process of hitting a grand slam on the proprietary side. We're like doing it in one base at a time. We're actually making it like global friendly, not grand slams on American baseball, Unififism, the World Cup. We're gonna win the two World Cups. But we're making iterative progress there and it's a journey. We've made a lot of progress there in the past 12 to 18 months. I don't know, it's been fantastic to see and to see how you guys have really gone after that and built such a great commercial business in alignment with supporting the community and the open source. And maybe share for a little bit about their earliest days. Let's dig in a little bit more on their earliest days. So you said you got it out to a few hundred people. Who were these people? How did you get them excited? Like how much time did you spend with them? Did you, when you started the Slack community, was it you just letting them be and talk about the product? Were you involved in it? So we didn't do a lot of what you would traditionally call customer development. We couldn't afford to do that. We were bootstrapped. We had to pay our own salaries. And so we were really a consulting business for three and a half years. And the way that early users got their hands on this thing was that our consulting clients would learn about DBT, they would pick it up and then they would tell their friends. And the kind of locus, the patient zero of the DBT community was a mattress company in New York called Casper. And they had a team of a dozen data analysts and this is in September of 2016. And they got so excited about DBT that they started having meetups and they introduced us to Kickstarter and Venmo and all of these New York based tech companies at the time. And we would kind of show up to our own, not our own, but like DBT community meetups. And it was just kind of an emergent phenomenon. The main thing that we would see in the very early days is that people who knew DBT were able to very quickly get jobs at like a level or two up when they took their next job. So like a Casper data analyst would get a job running a data team at Starrie and they would make 50%, 100% more. And it was this knowledge of DBT that was this unfair advantage in their careers that allowed DBT to spread so quickly. Wow. And has the community impacted how you've made product decisions both in the open source and commercial and how? Oh, geez, that's a big question. Yes, we have been huge beneficiaries of watching open source companies before us. Yes. I think it was in 2018 where there was a lot of big decisions that happened in open source land. I think that Mongo and Elastic and Redis and maybe a couple of other companies all like made big changes to the way that they were doing open source at the time. Those are the licensing. There's a lot of licensing stuff, I think. And so we had the opportunity. This was as DBT was getting it to maybe like 300 companies were using DBT and we were trying to think seriously about these kinds of questions. Because if you get really popular and then you change some of these decisions, it can drive you to the top of hacker news like not in a good way. And so we have tried to keep our open source surface area pretty well defined. There's a large set of things that our open source doesn't do that we've kind of reserved for our commercial product. And open source is specifically having to do it like the language that we're building. And that's worked pretty well for us. We don't do kind of fancy licensing stuff. We just have permissive Apache 2 open source. And then we have proprietary. Yeah. And have you had a moment, though, where you and you've gone down one path in the community and said, uh-uh, we don't like this? There's one product area that we make a very simple data catalog. We call it DBT docs. I don't think we first built this in 2018. And it was great for its time, but it was really a single page web app, and it doesn't scale. And it's kind of a dead end product direction. And really, this thing needed to be a part of our commercial product, DBT Cloud. And so just a month ago, month or two ago, we released an updated version of this that is proprietary. It's a part of DBT Cloud. And we didn't take away DBT docs, but we added significant capabilities to it, and now we charge for it. And the community has said, OK, cool. That looks really useful. So I think that when communities really react negatively is when you take away something. You reset an expectation that you had kind of committed to in the past. And if you build something new, and that new thing is proprietary, I think that that is generally perceived to be totally fair. And as a founder, I find that you specifically do a lot above and beyond to engage with the community. You have a blog. You have an active podcast. You're doing seed investments in and around the data space. DBT hosts a large user conference and an event that's open to customers and non-customers and competitors in a very interesting dynamic, like straight on competitors are there at the conference that the Sequoia Capital Investment Dollars are helping to finance. How does that engagement important in the community? And what are the gives and takes? Or what role do you feel is playing in helping the success of the company? Any successful community-oriented company gets a tremendous amount of stuff for free. Whether it's code that your community has written and either contributed to your product or contributed as plug-ins in the ecosystem, you get blog posts that are free marketing. You get documentation. You get all this stuff for free. And that well will dry up if you are not being members of the community. And you can perceive the community's sentiment around this stuff. There's a general sentiment around, are the commercial open source maintainers being good stewards? And it's very, very important to me that the answer to that question is always yes. Because I think, honestly, there have been a million companies in the past three decades that have done, helped customers solve similar problems. And they're decent businesses. It's hard to argue with them on some level. But none of them are, like, far and away successful. And I think that if we are going to live up to our own ambitions, to really change the way that our ecosystem works for practitioners, we have to be much more successful than the traditional enterprise software companies have been in our space. And I think that it is this community approach that will enable that. So community hasn't just gotten us here. Community is what needs to continue to drive this ecosystem for the next decade plus. Absolutely. Maybe we should take a few minutes because we're coming near the end to talk about the building of the business of DBT and your role as a CEO. And as you said, it's been six and a half, almost seven years since you started the company, right? Or seven and a half years since you started the company. What would you go back and tell your younger self now, having been through the last seven and a half years? What's the advice you would give to the younger Tristan when you were at the very start of this journey? Well, it was the founder of the GPUs company. Why am I not able to think of his name? Jensen was on a podcast recently and said, if I knew how hard this was going to be, I never would have done it. When I heard him say that, I was like literally in my backyard blowing leaves with a leaf blower. I was listening in my ears and I was just like, oh, that's too close to home. It's a long journey. And it is, I think that every single entrepreneur benefits from a certain amount of naivete and very much myself included about how long and how hard that journey is going to be. I think that it's important that most founders, and myself included, if you continue to be successful at a certain point in the company's trajectory, it's not because you are the best sales leader in the world or marketing leader in the world or engineering. There are people that are likely going to be better than you at all of these different things. What is going to need to be your competitive advantage is that you are the most problem-attached and you are the most long-term thinker around the table. And that means that you need to show up at work every day, energized. You need to be excited not just about what you're going to do over the next year, but what you're going to do over the next decade. And you have to solve for that in your own psychology. You have to figure out what makes me excited to come to work every single day. And then you need to figure out how to give that to your team. We call that the spark of a founder. It's irreplaceable in any company. And that spark drives so much energy, excitement, enthusiasm, and has this perspective that nobody else can ever bring. In the building of the company, what have been some of the hardest decisions you've had to make as CEO? Over the course of the past year, I have presided over a pretty significant transition in our leadership team. And that's included my two co-founders who are still with the business, but are now individual contributors. And most of our various functional execs. And that's been very hard. It's been the right thing. And I think that the transitions have been managed very smoothly. But there's this really fun part of the company when all the leaders get in a single room and you have all the context in your heads and you solve problems together. It feels like building a treehouse together as kids. And it was tremendously fun. And I wanted to extend that period for as long as I could. And maybe I extended it for just a little bit longer than I should have. But I think that I'm very excited for the next phase with this next set of leaders. I think that this is one of the most important decisions that founder CEOs need to make is when do you put different people in different seats? And how do you know what success looks like at different stages? Because necessarily, you're trying to assess somebody for a set of skills that you don't have yourself. So it's a very hard question to answer. And how do you keep the culture through that? Because I think you've done a very good job of being focused on that. I think that there are certain moments that you have that you have to step into with courage. And these, you know, Sequoia calls them crucible moments. But you have the opportunity to lean into them. And that often feels like a little bit of a gut check. Like, oh, do I have the confidence to stand by our values even in a global macroeconomic climate that is forcing all of us to go through things that we haven't gone through in 10 plus years? Or do I let the current era make me back down from some of my long-held beliefs? So I think that it is that taking those moments to really stand up for what has always been true. I think it's also really critical to write, if you have beliefs about your company culture or your company values, you have to write that stuff down. I wrote our company values literally before even starting the corporate entity. And we've made some tweaks to them over the years, but we refer back to them all the time. And it's a critical part of who we are. You know, one of the things you talked about was how your co-founders move to individual contributor roles. And in my work with different companies, that's always a very hard navigation. And I think founders worry a lot about what it will be like post that navigation. How did that go and how do you feel they're doing now? Like, how are they? Yeah, share about that, because I think that's important for people to hear that are facing that similar challenge. It's different every company. Fortunately, my two co-founders, Drew and Connor, actively wanted that for themselves. I didn't have to twist any arms. I didn't threaten. It was like, you know, each of them raised their hands and said, hey, I think it's time. And fortunately, they're both world-class individual contributors and can contribute to the company in that way. It, honestly, the hardest part of the transition has been me managing my own psychology. Because these were two people who went through all of it with me. They were at that meeting that you were talking about where we were talking about the Series B fundraise that we've navigated everything together. And now it's a lot more me. And that's not to say that we're not close or that we don't talk about stuff, but if they're not in all the rooms, then they have to kind of trust me a lot more frequently. And that's been a change in my role as a company. I feel like in the past, we kind of made decisions as a group and now I think I wear the more traditional title and responsibilities of CEO. So you mentioned before, we just got a minute left, you mentioned before that the thing you would tell yourself is how hard it is, 30 seconds, what's the piece of advice you should give to these founders, potential founders here, thinking about starting something on their own? At a certain point, once you've built something that you feel like is going to persist, you need to really prioritize your own physical and mental well-being because maybe in the first year, the first three years, maybe it's not even clear that this thing is going to continue to exist and maybe you need to work yourself like hell. But that's not sustainable and you have to identify this transition point and really start treating yourself in a way that will be able to be sustainable for essentially indefinitely. Thank you. Thanks for being here. Thank you. Quick plug, you're up for a treat and that you've got Rob from Visionaries and Nico Rosberg up next. But after that at 1.45, this Sequoia team, we meet all those interested in starting your own companies in the investor meeting space. We're looking forward to having you there. But thanks for being with us, Tristan. Thanks for having us back here again at Slush. Thank you, everybody.