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Tristan Handy

Speaker

Tristan Handy

25

talks

CEO and Founder dbt Labs

Tristan Handy is the Founder and CEO of dbt Labs, a leading player in the data transformation space used by 60,000 companies including JetBlue, HubSpot, Dunelm, and SunRun. He has over two decades of experience as a data practitioner spanning large enterprises and startups. Handy’s expertise and data industry best practices reach thousands of subscribers and listeners weekly through his newsletter and podcast on analytics engineering.

Bio from: Small Data SF 2025

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Day 1 Morning Keynote | Data + AI Summit 2022

Day 1 Morning Keynote | Data + AI Summit 2022 Welcome & "Destination Lakehouse" | Ali Ghodsi Apache Spark Community Update | Reynold Xin Streaming Lakehouse | Karthik Ramasamy Delta Lake | Michael Armbrust How Adobe migrated to a unified and open data Lakehouse to deliver personalization at unprecedented scale | Dave Weinstein Data Governance and Sharing on Lakehouse |Matei Zaharia Analytics Engineering and the Great Convergence | Tristan Handy Data Warehousing | Shant Hovespian Unlocking the power of data, AI & analytics: Amgen’s journey to the Lakehouse | Kerby Johnson

Get insights on how to launch a successful lakehouse architecture in Rise of the Data Lakehouse by Bill Inmon, the father of the data warehouse. Download the ebook: https://dbricks.co/3ER9Y0K

Connect with us: Website: https://databricks.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/databricksinc Twitter: https://twitter.com/databricks LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/data... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/databricksinc/

As Head of Analytics at Clearbit, Julie serves as a data team of one in a 200+ person company (wow!). In this conversation with Tristan and Julia, Julie dives into how she's helped Clearbit implement data activation throughout the business, and realize the glorious dream of self-serve analytics. For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com.  The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.

Jordan Tigani is an expert in large-scale data processing, having spent a decade+ in the development and growth of BigQuery, and later SingleStore. Today, Jordan and his team at MotherDuck are in the early days of working on commercial applications for the open source DuckDB OLAP database. In this conversation with Tristan and Julia, Jordan dives into the origin story of BigQuery, why he thinks we should do away with the concept of working in files, and how truly performant "data apps" will require bringing data to an end user's machine (rather than requiring them to query a warehouse directly).

Matt Bornstein and Jennifer Li (and their co-author Martin Casado) of a16z have compiled arguably the most nuanced diagram of the data ecosystem ever made.  They recently refreshed their classic 2020 post, "Emerging Architectures for Modern Data Infrastructure" and in this conversation, Tristan attempts to pin down: what does all of this innovation in tooling mean for data people + the work we're capable of doing? When will the glorious future come to our laptops? For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com.  The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.

ClickHouse, the lightning-fast open source OLAP database, was initially released in 2016 as an open source project out of Yandex, the Russian search giant. In 2021, Aaron Katz helped form a group to spin it out of Yandex as an independent company, dedicated to the development + commercialization of the open source project. In this conversation with Tristan and Julia, Aaron gets into why he believes open source, independent software companies are the future. And of course, this conversation wouldn't be complete without a riff on the classic "one database to rule all workloads" thread. For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com.  The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.

Justin Borgman is the co-founder, Chairman and CEO of Starburst, and has almost a decade spent in senior executive roles building new businesses in the data warehousing and analytics space.  In this conversation with Tristan and Julia, Justin dives into the nuts and bolts of Trino, the open source distributed query engine, and explores how teams are adopting a data mesh architecture without making a mess.  For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com.  The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.

Amit Prakash is Co-founder and CTO at ThoughtSpot. He has a deep background in search, having previously led the AdSense engineering team at Google and served on the early Bing team at Microsoft. In this conversation with Tristan and Julia, Amit gets real about the promise of AI in data: which applications are being widely used today, and which are still a few years out? For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com.  The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.

Most recently leading a data engineering team at Perpay, Sarah has built and managed data platforms end to end by working closely with internal engineering, product, and operational teams. She recently left her role to pursue a wide variety of endeavors, including writing on her Substack (https://sarahsnewsletter.substack.com/). In this conversation with Tristan and Julia, Sarah dives into how configuration-as-code can automate away data work, why you might want to consider adding a data lake to your architecture, and how those looking to build a self-serve data culture can look to self-serve frozen yogurt shops for inspiration. For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com. The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.

As a PhD candidate at MIT, Kevin (and friends) published Sherlock, a data type detection engine (a surprisingly bedeviling problem) for data cleaning + data discovery. Now as co-founder and CEO of Metaplane, a data observability startup, Kevin applies these same automated data discovery methods to help data teams keep their data healthy. In this conversation with Tristan & Julia, Kevin wins the coveted award for "most crystal-clear explanations of complex technical concepts through physics analogy."   For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com.

A debate has erupted on data Twitter and data Substack - should the modern data stack remain unbundled, or should it consolidate? In this conversation, Benn Stancil (Mode), David Jayatillake (Avora) and our host Tristan Handy try to make some sense of this debate, and play with various future scenarios for the modern data stack.  For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com.  The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.

Ashley is a Principal Analytics Engineer at Hubspot, and has helped lead their implementation of dbt. Ashley makes unique connections in her writing and work. On her Substack, "syntax error at or near ❤️," Ashley might be found comparing growing companies to butterflies, or going deep on how to accommodate sensitive people in the workplace. In this conversation with Tristan & Julia, Ashley dives into the nuts and bolts of her trajectory pushing data innovation forward at Hubspot. For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com.  The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.

In this very special episode, we'll be turning the spotlight on co-host Tristan Handy, the CEO & Co-founder of dbt Labs. In this AMA with Julia, you'll get to know more about Tristan as a human, as a writer, and as the CEO of dbt Labs helping to push the analytics engineering practice forward.  For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com. 

Where does Snowflake go from here? What meta trends and technologies play into that vision? How does that impact the world of data analytics? Christian and Tristan have no shortage of opinions or ideas. This is your chance to hear some of them, live and unfiltered. Register to catch the rest of Coalesce, the Analytics Engineering Conference, at https://coalesce.getdbt.com. The Analytics Engineering Podcast is brought to you by dbt Labs.

As a product leader at companies like Heroku and Zendesk, DeVaris specialized in building infrastructure-grade products. Currently, as the CEO of Meroxa, he enables teams to build real-time data infrastructure with the same ease as we now take for granted in batch. In this romp of an episode, Tristan, Julia and DeVaris flow from his experience in tech mentorship, into the nuts and bolts of Change Data Capture (CDC), and how streaming data infrastructure can help data teams provide better end user experiences. For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com.  The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.

David is Sr. Director of Data at Lyst, and as leader of their analytics + data science teams he has followed the evolution of data roles closely over the past decade. David spends a lot of time thinking about career progression + data team structure, and in this conversation with Tristan + Julia they dive into the classic individual contributor vs manager conundrum, migrating between warehouses, and reactive vs proactive data workflows. For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com.  The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.

Julien has a unique history of building open frameworks that make data platforms interoperable. He's contributed in various ways to Apache Arrow, Apache Iceberg, Apache Parquet, and Marquez, and is currently leading OpenLineage, an open framework for data lineage collection and analysis. In this episode, Tristan & Julia dive into how open source projects grow to become standards, and why data lineage in particular is in need of an open standard. They also cover into some of the compelling use cases for this data lineage metadata, and where you might be able to deploy it in your work. For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com.  The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.

Benn is Chief Analytics Officer and a Co-founder at Mode Analytics, but you may know him from his Substack newsletter (benn.substack.com), where each Friday he dives into a semi-controversial topic (recent examples: "Is BI Dead?" and "BI is Dead").  In this episode, Benn, Tristan & Julia finally hash out some of these debates IRL: what is the modern data stack, why is the metrics layer important, and what's the point of all of this? For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com.  The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.

Seth Rosen has broken data Twitter many times, and in his early-fatherhood sleep deprivation developed a wonderful Twitter persona as the battle-tested data analyst. IRL though Seth is a serious data practitioner, and as Founder at the data consultancy HashPath has helped dozens of companies get into the modern data stack + build public-facing data apps.  Now, as the founder of TopCoat, he's empowering analysts to build + publish those same public-facing data apps. In this episode, Tristan, Julia & Seth graciously dive into spicy debates around data mesh + "dashboard factories", and explore a future where data analysts become full-stack application developers. For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com.  The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.

Brittany Bennett is Data Director at Sunrise Movement, the youth climate movement that numbers tens of thousands of members throughout every US state.  Given how quickly our industry moves, developing junior data talent is hard, but Brittany's team at Sunrise makes it look easy. And that's no accident—because Sunrise hires for mission alignment rather than technical background, they dedicate significant resources to training + mentorship. In this conversation, Tristan, Julia & Brittany dive deep into the opportunity of developing junior data practitioners. For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com. The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.

Caitlin Colgrove is Co-founder & CTO at Hex, a data workspace that allows teams to collaborate in both SQL and Python to publish interactive data apps. In this conversation, Tristan, Julia and Caitlin dive into the possibilities that real-time collaborative notebooks unlock for data teams — what if our collaboration style looked more like Google Docs than a Git workflow? For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com. The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.

Erik Bernhardsson spent six years at Spotify, where he contributed to the first version of the music recommendation system. After a stint as CTO at Better.com, he's now working on building new infrastructure tooling for data teams. In this wide-ranging conversation with Tristan & Julia, Erik dives into the nuts and bolts of Spotify's recommendation algorithm, (paradoxically) why you should rarely need to use ML, and the fundamental infrastructure challenges that drag down the productivity of data teams. For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com. The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.

In this episode, we're going to do something a little different, and turn the spotlight on co-host Julia Schottenstein. In this conversation with Tristan, you'll get to know Julia a bit—from her early childhood ambitions of becoming a "computer tycoon" (adorable!), to working in venture at NEA and now as a Product Manager at dbt Labs. They also dive into Julia's opinions on key trends shaping the future of the data industry (the phrase oligopoly makes an appearance). For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com. The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.

Brian Amadio is a Data Platform Engineer at Stitch Fix, where experimentation underpins everything they do across merchandising, planning, forecasting, operations and more.  In this conversation with Tristan, Julia, and Brian you'll get into the weeds of executing multi-armed bandit experiments and learn how you can perform experiments even with limited data.  For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com. The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.

Step with Venkat into a world where data is always fresh, queries run in 1ms, and analytics engineers build web-scale, real-time data apps. As Engineering Director at Facebook, Venkat helped build the RocksDB real-time database that powered growth to 5 billion queries per second(!)—and now with his colleagues at Rockset, he's bringing that real-time database infrastructure to the rest of us. In this conversation, Tristan, Julia and Venkat explore the fundamental technological advances that are empowering analytics engineers to enter the real-time future. For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com. The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.

Robert Chang is a product manager for the data platform at Airbnb, where he helped build and roll out Minerva, Airbnb's internal metrics store. They use Minerva to track over 12,000(!) metrics and 4,000(!) dimensions with consistency across the organization. In this conversation with Tristan and Julia, Robert dives into why they built it, what it took to get it done—and crucially, what you should do if your company doesn't have the resources to build your own internal metrics store. For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com. The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.