Tristan Handy — The Work Behind the Data Work

Tristan Handy is CEO and founder of dbt Labs. dbt (data build tool) simplifies the data transformation workflow and helps organizations make better decisions.

Lukas and Tristan dive into the history of the modern data stack and the subsequent challenges that dbt was created to address; communities of identity and product-led growth; and thoughts on why SQL has survived and thrived for so long. Tristan also shares his hopes for the future of BI tools and the data stack.

Show notes (transcript and links): http://wandb.me/gd-tristan-handy

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⏳ Timestamps:

0:00 Intro

0:40 How dbt makes data transformation easier

4:52 dbt and avoiding bad data habits

14:23 Agreeing on organizational ground truths

19:04 Staying current while running a company

22:15 The origin story of dbt

26:08 Why dbt is conceptually simple but hard to execute

34:47 The dbt community and the bottom-up mindset

41:50 The future of data and operations

47:41 dbt and machine learning

49:17 Why SQL is so ubiquitous

55:20 Bridging the gap between the ML and data worlds

1:00:22 Outro

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Connect with Tristan:

📍 Twitter: https://twitter.com/jthandy

📍 The Analytics Engineering Roundup: https://roundup.getdbt.com/

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💬 Host: Lukas Biewald

📹 Producers: Cayla Sharp, Angelica Pan, Sanyam Bhutani, Lavanya Shukla

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