Tristan Handy Builds Dbt Labs To Make Data Analytics Easier

Tristan Handy never planned to be an entrepreneur. He was happy with his low key lifestyle. But he helped build a tool to help him with his analytics consulting practice, gave it away for free, and it changed the trajectory of his life.

That free analytics tool is dbt and its success turned him into the founder and CEO of dbt Labs, now valued at $4.2 billion and backed by Snowflake and Databricks, as well as investors like Altimeter, a16z and Sequoia.

“I had been working in data for 15 years and had the opportunity to work at an analytics company just prior to this. That ended up failing. Sometimes failure is a great teacher. And in the process, two things happened. One, I got very early access to a product called Amazon Redshift, which was the first cloud data warehouse. And it was, it was a pretty extraordinary experience. Two, I led marketing there as an exec team, and we were trying to figure out why this new wave of technologies powered around the cloud was killing our growth,” says Handy in an interview.

That company was RJMetrics, which was well-positioned in the marketplace at its start, was well-funded and had a strong list of customers. What it didn’t have at the time, according to Handy, was a product tailored made for the Cloud paradigm shift in big data analytics.

He then left that company and started a consulting company to help companies stand up an analytics practice, particularly for Series A through C startup. “In the 2016 time period, there was no cloud native way to do what is known in the Gartner Magic Quadrant as data transformation, which is, essentially, you have this data warehouse, you shove a bunch of data into it, and then try to write reports on top of it. It turns out, that is a very bad idea,” says Handy

The process created errors and inconsistencies, forcing the analyst to manually fix the problems in order to write reports on top of the data. But there was no easy way to do that.

“I ended up bringing in my Co-Founder Drew Banin on day one. And so, we built a product called dbt. That was open source and very much inspired by the original product idea for TerraForm for Redshift. And we started using it and it became the foundation of our consulting practice. And I’m not even kidding, I’m almost more proud of the consulting we did than the building of the business,” says Tandy.

Dbt, which stands for database transformation, offers a cloud-based data management platform to help companies accelerate their data development. It connects to and runs SQL against a company’s database, data warehouse, data lake, or query engine, enabling analytics team to collaborate on a single source of truth for metrics, insights, and business definitions, helping to reduce errors. It works with data platforms like Snowflake, Big Query or Databricks by using a dedicated adapter plugin for each.

In September of 2016 there were 3 companies using the free dbt tool available on Github. And for the next five and a half years, usage grew 10% month-over-month, every month. By the late 2019 time period, they started getting inbound interest from Fortune 500 companies.

“At that point in time, we were a 15 person consulting company. There were maybe 3 or 4 Fortune 500 companies using dbt. And so, when Chesapeake Energy or USAA, or I don’t know, Coke shows up and says, ‘Hey, I read about this open source product, can you help me with this? Our answer at the time was, ‘not really. We don’t have anything to sell you. We don’t have a consulting business to gain scale to meet your kind of needs.’ And so, as we got more and more interest, we eventually had to figure out what to do,” says Handy.

Instead of scaling up its consulting business, they decided to pivot to software and build out the dbt tool. Over the past four years, the company went from essentially no software business at all to growing triple digits year-over-year for the past several years.

Founded in 2016, the Philadelphia-based Dbt Labs is part of the burgeoning global business intelligence (BI) and analytics market that is valued at $33.34 billion in 2024 and is expected to reach $65.81 billion by 2030, according to Mordor Intelligence. It competes with the likes of Salesforce Tableau, MicroStrategy, Looker, Amazon QuickSight and others.

Today there over 30,000 companies using dbt every week and over 4,300 dbt Cloud customers working with companies like JetBlue, BHP, Nasdaq, Vestas and Domain to name a few.

Customer Kayleigh Lavorini, VP and Director of Product Ownership of Data Strategy, at Fifth Third Bank had this to say about dbt Labs in an interview: “As a Bank, our supply chain literally is data, and we are no stranger to the common challenges associated with efficient, controlled delivery of analytical data and assets. We chose dbt, above others, for the flexibility of its framework – which lets us adapt to the changing controls and regulations of our industry, as well as for the way it approaches solving standardized CI/CD by applying core SDLC methodologies to data pipelines.”

The company’s strong growth and blue-chip customer base has allowed it to attract $410 million in venture funding over 4 rounds. It’s latest 2022 Series D financing raised $220 million at a $4.2 billion valuation. The round was led by Altimeter, with participation from existing investors Amplify Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, and Sequoia. Strategic investors Databricks, Salesforce Ventures, and Snowflake also participated.

Of the company’s explosive growth and potential to IPO since its modest beginnings, Handy says, “I really can’t overstate how modest my ambitions were at the beginning of the company. I’d had a career up to that point for 15 years, that was like, very high burn. And I was actually, kind of burnt out and exhausted. Starting the company, my wife and I talked about what success might look like. We decided that if I were able to make $50,000 over the first year, that would be a success. My wife’s a doctor and my income at the time was kind of irrelevant. I just wanted to do some work that I loved.”

Handy’s entrepreneurial journey is atypical for most venture-backed tech company founders. He grew up in rural northern Maryland in a place he described as “ the middle of nowhere,” the son of a teacher dad and stay-at-home mom. The family had four acres with chickens and a garden.

He had no exposure to entrepreneurship and in fact says he didn’t know a single person who was “in business” growing up. He attributes his career path to being at the right place at the right time. “I was in high school in the late 90s. The PC was really taking off and I got an internship that I essentially helped a bunch of older civil engineers learn how to use Excel and AutoCAD. I was a tech geek and it just kind of took off from there,” says Handy.

Handy graduated from the University of Maryland in 2003, and later earned his MBA from University of North Carolina Kenan-Flagler Business School in 2011. After earning his undergraduate, he started work at Deloitte in 2003, followed by a stint at GE’s renewable energy program. Later he became director of operations at Squarespace, then COO of Argyle Social in Durham, North Carolina. In 2013 he joined startup RJ Metrics as VP of analytics in Philadelphia before leaving to start dbt Labs in 2016

As for the future? Certainly an IPO is a likely opportunity, but as Handy sees it, “I didn’t set out to be a globe trotting CEO. The only reason I still have this job is that I think I can help a bunch of people that I care about by doing it. And I feel my most important job is making sure that customers and community members and investors interests can all be aligned in the same direction,” says Handy