Julia Schottenstein

A successful open-core strategy keeps the core standard open source to drive adoption while charging for state, collaboration, and enterprise-scale features.

"We think about dbt open source. It's really the guts of the data transformation... on the cloud side we build proprietary software that supercharges the development life cycle and the productionizatio..."

Transitioning between VC and Product is natural because both roles require a balance of business, technology, and market analysis.

"I do have an unusual background, but it doesn't surprise me that people who are interested in product are also interested in investing and vice versa. For me, I've always had three interests broadly a..."

Technical debt is a 'champagne problem' that indicates product usage; avoid over-engineering at launch before demand is proven.

"I try to remind the engineers, we would be so lucky to have tech debt because that means people are using the product... what we didn't need at launch was a distributed scheduler with coworkers and Ra..."

Product-market fit is signaled by organic 'chatter' and a user's proactive desire to evangelize the product to peers.

"It's can they not stop talking about it and that's the chatter about a product, they want to share it with their teammates or to other people at different companies. That just top of mind love and wan..."

Pricing should follow value creation, often capturing only a small fraction of the total value provided to ensure long-term adoption and customer success.

"We are more concerned with value creation than value capture. And we really mean this. When we talk about what is the value of dbt Labs to our customers, they often talk about how it's either 20 to 35..."

Physical, memorable exercises can help a team internalize complex technical changes and ensure collective ownership of a project.

"I showed up to a team offsite with a spool of rope and sticky notes... each note of the graph was an engineer and the rope was the edges of the graph to connect them. And then we worked through the ne..."

A culture of transparency, including sharing board decks and having difficult conversations in the open, builds trust and alignment.

"Transparency wins. We're a really transparent company. We share our board decks. We have lots of communication and participation in all of our Slacks. We're writing culture. We have hard conversations..."

High-growth communities require employees to be active participants who can 'feel' the user's pain when the product falls short.

"We have a dbt Slack community of 50,000 and all of our employees are in that Slack channel regularly and can feel when we mess up or we don't quite deliver an experience that we're proud of, you will..."

Effective competition involves ignoring external noise to focus on vision, expanding the market through partnerships, and doubling down on unique platform strengths.

"We really have three pillars when it comes to competition. So the first is hold true to our vision... The second philosophy we have is really a grow the pie philosophy... And then the last one is we w..."

Shipping 'good enough' versions is the only way to truly learn from users and validate product direction.

"Worse is better and tech debt is a champagne problem. And what do I mean by that? It's really to help me combat this perfectionism because perfect doesn't exist and you should instead go with good eno..."

Corporate development teams are gateways to internal product sponsors; use them to build relationships even if you aren't ready to sell.

"Use that corp dev team to your advantage. It's their job to meet absolutely every company that could be potentially interested. So take that meeting, say you're not interested in an acquisition just y..."