dbt Labs Reviews

- the cofounders have never managed people or successfully shipped a SaaS product - the cofounders do not know how to accomplish their goals - the "values" of the company are a sham and not reflected in reality - you may be terminated for any reason, especially if a cofounder does not like you - the product team has little to no experience with technical products - the product team has little to no experience with engineering - the product itself is bad - the company will start extracting $$$ from it's large OSS base - the company scaled without thought on how to scale - you'll get fired for minor disagreements with anyone important - if you're fired, they might tell the remaining team false reasons why - because the product is bad and has really no reason to exist in the face of all the better SaaS product that do the same thing, the existing customers will start to churn and it'll be difficult to get new customers. I'd guess dbt Labs has peaked and it's downhill from here, join at your own risk

The biggest red flag any candidate should be aware of is the lack of a coherent product strategy. The co-founders built a great open source product, but as others have mentioned, it doesn't seem like leadership has the experience necessary to build a good paid offering. In my year and a half at dbt, I witnessed 3 product investments totally fail and the firing on an extremely experienced ex-Salesforce CPO for "strategic differences." Following the firing, after months and probably lots of money invested into dbt Python models, the project was completely abandoned and the PM fired. The Semantic Layer launch was a failure and hasn't generated any revenue. They doubled down by acquiring Transform, and now I hear there is friction between the Transform and dbt Leadership. Lastly, there was a significant investment in a "runtime" team to optimize dbt Cloud speed (This part is kind of over my head as a non-technical employee). Not even 6 months later, the entire project was scrapped and the PM and EM were fired. Before I was laid off, deal sizes weren't large enough to sustain growth targets even after the board adjusted them down by a lot. This is a horrible signal to the board, and I wouldn't be surprised if the board guts the entire leadership team soon, causing even more instability. On the GTM side, it's much of the same. Smart, hardworking folks running around like a chicken without a head due to a lack of strategy. Marketing and Sales leadership has never managed teams or strategy of this complexity and it shows. Just like in Product, teams are set up for failure and then fired when it finally comes crashing down. Constant reorgs, overinvestment in areas that don't drive growth (don't get me started on Snowflake Summit), and underinvestment in growth areas.