Speaker

Julia Schottenstein

Julia Schottenstein

Julia Schottenstein is a product leader at dbt Labs, where she leads dbt Cloud and led the acquisition of Transform (a semantic layer startup). Before joining dbt she was an investor at NEA, where she focused on early-stage companies building for technical audiences — developer tools, data infrastructure, and analytics. She joined dbt after failing to invest in the company’s Series A (which went to Sequoia) and asking the founder, Tristan Handy, for a role instead. She co-hosts the Analytics Engineering Podcast with Handy.

Key ideas

  • M&A is always about creating Plan Bs. The strongest negotiating position is not needing to sell; build a strong independent company first, then identify the two or three genuinely strategic buyers and ‘inflict pain’ on them — with a smile — to get noticed.
  • People, market, product, distribution. Her four-dimension framework for evaluating, or joining, an early-stage company; nobody scores 10/10 on all four, so find the weak one and ask what you bring to de-risk it.
  • Have the pricing conversation before you build. You don’t get to decide if you’ll have a willingness-to-pay conversation, only what; dbt charges a small fraction of delivered value under ‘value creation over value capture’.
  • Worse is better; tech debt is a champagne problem. Ship good-enough and learn from real users; debt from shipping means people are using the product.
  • VC skills transfer to product. Investing in a network of operators slightly ahead of you, T-shaped generalism, and power-law thinking are her edges moving from venture into product.

Episodes