Timestamps
(01:40) Julia shared the differences growing up in New York and moving to San Francisco.
(03:05) Julia discussed her overall undergraduate experience at Stanford — getting dual degrees in Computer Science and Management Science & Engineering_._
(05:40) Julia went over her time as an Investment Banker at Qatalyst Partners — notably working on Microsoft’s acquisition of LinkedIn.
(09:11) Julia talked about her career transition to venture capital — working as an associate investor at New Enterprise Associates.
(10:46) Julia emphasized the importance of getting up-to-speed and forming an investment thesis as a new investor.
(15:05) Julia discussed her Series A investment in Metabase, an open-source business intelligence software project.
(18:36) Julia unpacked her investment(s) in Sentry, an application monitoring platform that helps developers monitor apps in real-time to catch bugs early.
(20:14) Julia explained her investment in the Series B round for Anyscale, an end-to-end computing platform that makes building and managing a scaled application across clouds as easy as developing an app on a single computer.
(23:03) Julia contextualized her investments in the seed round for Datafold, a data observability platform that equips analytics engineers with the tools to address data quality issues.
(24:24) Julia shared typical hiring and go-to-market decisions that companies need to make (depending upon their growth stages and product strategies).
(27:05) Julia mentioned her Metabase application to help investors pick winning open-source startups.
(29:05) Julia rationalized her switch to becoming a product manager at dbt Labs.
(30:34) Julia peeked into the roadmap of dbt Cloud, a hosted service that helps data analysts and engineers productionize dbt deployments.
(33:34) Julia went over an under-invested area and the role of interoperability within the broader data tooling ecosystem.
(37:56) Julia reflected on the difference between being a venture investor and a product manager.
(41:05) Closing segment.
Julia’s Contact Info
dbt’s Resources
Mentioned Content
People
Tristan Handy (Founder and CEO of dbt Labs)
Ali Ghodsi (Co-Creator of Apache Spark, Co-Founder and CEO of Databricks)
Dan Levine (General Partner at Accel Partners)
Book
“Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon” (by Bill Carr and Colin Bryar)
Notes
My conversation with Julia was recorded back in May 2021. Since the podcast was recorded, a lot has happened at dbt Labs! I’d recommend:
Reading Julia’s recent blog posts on adopting CI/CD and introducing Environment Variables in dbt Cloud.
Watching the talk replays from Coalesce, dbt’s 2nd annual analytics engineering conference
Listening to Season 1 of the Analytics Engineering Podcast, where Julia co-hosts with Tristan Handy to go deep into the hopes, dreams, motivations, and failures of leading data and analytics practitioners.
About the show
Datacast features long-form, in-depth conversations with practitioners and researchers in the data community to walk through their professional journeys and unpack the lessons learned along the way. I invite guests coming from a wide range of career paths — from scientists and analysts to founders and investors — to analyze the case for using data in the real world and extract their mental models (“the WHY and the HOW”) behind their pursuits. Hopefully, these conversations can serve as valuable tools for early-stage data professionals as they navigate their own careers in the exciting data universe.
Datacast is produced and edited by James Le. Get in touch with feedback or guest suggestions by emailing khanhle.1013@gmail.com.
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Episode 78: Open-Source Investing and Data Product Management with Julia Schottenstein