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

Brought to you by Vanta—Automate compliance. Simplify security | Superhuman—The fastest email experience ever made | AssemblyAI—Production-ready AI models to transcribe and understand speech—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—Find the full transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/m-and-a-competition-pricing-and-investing—Where to find Julia Schottenstein:• Twitter: https://twitter.com/j_schottenstein• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/julia-schottenstein-25424318/• Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/4BKMMeVXk4jJnAQSqGSJvE—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• Twitter: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Julia’s background(04:15) How Julia went from VC to working in product at dbt Labs(08:24) Four things Julia uses to evaluate a company’s potential (11:10) How to identify whether or not you have product-market fit(12:05) Distribution strategies(13:11) M&A strategies(15:54) Lessons from the Transform acquisition(18:01) Competitive values at dbt(20:25) Keys to dbt’s success(26:35) An offsite exercise Julia used to help her team internalize upcoming changes(29:32) Determining what features are included in open source(31:56) Pric