Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth

M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs)

July 13, 2023

AI Summary

5 min read

Julia Schottenstein, a product leader at dbt Labs overseeing dbt Cloud, shares insights from her VC background and experience leading the Transform acquisition. She outlines principles for spotting early opportunities, navigating M&A, competing in data tools, and building dbt's open core product amid cloud data warehouse growth.

Spotting early-stage potential

Evaluate companies on four factors: people (CEO's vision and detail orientation, like dbt founder Tristan Handy's range), market (growing with chaos for new entrants, e.g., 2019 cloud warehouse explosion), product (user enthusiasm turning it into identity, chatter signaling fit), and distribution (ecosystem advantages like dbt's open source for low-friction trials). No perfect scores expected; join to shore up weaknesses. Product-market fit shows in top-of-mind sharing among users.

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What you'll learn

1 `* (00:01:37) **Julia's VC-to-PM Journey at dbt Labs**`
2 `* (00:08:52) **Evaluating Early-Stage Companies**`
3 `* (00:13:11) **M&A Strategy for Founders**`
4 `* (00:15:25) **Transform Acquisition Case Study**`
5 `* (00:18:01) **Handling Competition**`
6 `* (00:20:27) **dbt's Path to Modern Data Stack Standard**`
7 `* (00:29:20) **Open Core, Pricing, and Product Execution**`

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

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Julia Schottenstein is a product lead at dbt Labs, a data transformation company, and an active angel investor in data and infrastructure startups. She first got excited about dbt in 2019 when she was a VC at NEA and decided to make the leap from investor to operator by joining dbt Labs. She also co-hosts the dbt Labs Analytics Engineering Podcast, a show about data trends that impact analytics engineers’ work. In today’s episode, we discuss:

• Advice for founders hoping to improve their M&A outcome

• How to strategically think about competition

• How to determine your paid features and have willingness-to-pay conversations

• Why Julia lives by “worse is better” and “tech debt is a champagne problem”

• Lessons from dbt Labs

• What PMs can learn from investors

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Find the full transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/m-and-a-competition-pricing-and-investing

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Where to find Julia Schottenstein:

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/j_schottenstein

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/julia-schottenstein-25424318/