The modern data stack: Tim Harrison speaks to Tristan Handy
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Who is Tristan Handy and what is his background in data engineering?
Welcome to Orbit, the H G podcast series where we speak to leaders and innovators from across software and tech ecosystem to discuss the key trends that change how we all do business. My name is Tim Harrison. I'm part of the data and analytics team at HG, working with our portfolio companies on their end-to-end data journey across commercial and operational optimization and data products. We're delighted to be joined today by Tristan, CEO and founder of DBT Labs, a leading B2B SaaS company in the data transformation space, used by over 11,000 companies, including many HG portfolio companies as well. Tristan recently spoke at HG's twenty twenty three Digital Forum in London, and it's great to be catching up again a couple of weeks later.
Thanks for joining us, Tristan. Welcome.
Hey Tim, thanks for having me. Nice.
Um well to start, Tristan, I think it would be great uh to if you could tell us a little bit about yourself and DBT Labs and and the journey, um, starting with fish analytics there as well.
Yeah, uh I have been a data practitioner in some way, shape, or form for Right about 20 years now. Um, and I I won't bore you with my entire story, but I I maybe starting back in 2013, I worked at a company called RJ Metrics. And RJ Metrics was a uh a BI tool that was positioned to be very successful at the time, but was built in a uh technology architecture that predated what we now have come to know as the modern data stack. And so in I I joined that company in twenty thirteen and uh It just so happens that uh right about when I joined um Amazon released A product called Redshift, which was really the first uh a cloud native uh analytical database. You could uh swipe a credit card and and pay by usage.
Um and This this really changed the industry. Um, it was the the first time that you could see the the kind of performance that you got from Redshift without you know spending a hundred grand on an appliance that you had to store in a server room somewhere. Um, and very quickly, uh over the course of the the next couple of years, lots of small startups uh seeing this. Opportunity, uh they they emerged to kind of uh cre create a a full stack solution. Originally around Amazon Redshift and companies like um Mode and Looker and FiveTran were all born in this environment and they all saw the same opportunity. And over the subsequent years, uh, I mean uh the partially this impacted me because RJ metrics uh quickly kind of uh because of this architectural shift RJ metrics become g became less competitive as a product and uh that's its own story and you know maybe we can talk about that at some point if it's interesting.
But I got to see uh firsthand uh the the emergence of this stack of of products. Um and and I was excited about it as a as a practitioner. Um I I was like, you know, for the first time, uh, I can I can kind of not worry about uh performance in the way that I used to, you know, whether you're talking about, you know, using Excel or traditional Oracle database or MySQL, like I've I've done analytics in all these different environments and you always ran into these performance limitations that were so They're not your highest value ad as an analytics professional thinking about this kind of stuff. And so I was really excited to use this new technology. And I started an analytics consultancy in 2016 called Fish Town Analytics to uh to really just to hang out a shingle and do work in this new tech stack.
And you know, I can get to the DVT story as well, but let me stop there and like uh to tell me if I'm I'm boring you so far.
No, I think that's really interesting. And I think it it it ties so nicely into one of the first topics I really want to discuss, which is, you know, what is that modern data stack that we we all talk about now? And I often got often get asked that question by our portfolio company, CEOs, CTOs, what what is that modern data stack? And even though I've been working in in data quite a while now, it's it's actually quite a hard question to answer because it's so entangled with the history.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
Who is Tristan Handy and what is his background in data engineering?
0:00–4:51
2
How did the emergence of cloud‑native warehouses like Redshift change the data landscape?
4:51–19:42
3
What exactly is the modern data stack and why is it called “modern”?
19:42–36:15
4
Which core components (ingestion, transformation, analytics) make up today’s modern data stack?
36:15–37:30
Speakers
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