Platform thinking unlocks exponential growth

So much of the way that we tackle problems and build products is this builder mindset. It's like I have a plan. I then manipulate things to match my plan and make it happen. And this is a way you can create tons of value. Part of the problem though is it can't possibly create more value than the effort that you put into it. What I look for instead are things that can be gardened, things that can grow on their own and that you can direct or maybe give a little bit of extra energy to or curate over, and is a totally different mindset for it.

Anything that is shaped like an ecosystem that has some kind of network effect, and many things have network effects, have some kind of compounding loop. Compounding loops are not rare. They are, 'Look.' It's like truffle hunting. You have to know what you're looking for and find the dynamics of a thing that if it worked would work at an accelerating rate.

So our founders, Tristan, Drew and Connor, they had a belief that the people who do data analysis work, that really work closely with their business stakeholders should also be the ones to contribute to creating clean data assets in production because that data prep work is a necessary prerequisite for any analysis that you do. So dbt was really this belief that if you know SQL, we want to invite you to do these workflows that were traditionally held by data engineers but you had to earn that.

Before you even get into technical or design execution of any platform area, really think about the principles behind the platform you're building and the stack rank of constituents.

A marketplace business never starts as a marketplace business, because what we think of as a marketplace business is something which at scale is removing the friction of the two sides finding each other. But when you start, you don't have that scale.

Maybe we shouldn't talk about the concept of a marketplace founder. Really there's founders. Every founder is a marketplace founder. It'll be a choice they make after they grow as to whether they want to build a platform.

Platforms are products, ultimately. You should be thinking about how do I create coherent offerings that make this company more productive?

It's really hard to kill a network effects business. The last telegram was sent in 2016, over 100 years after it was invented because of network effects. It had to be manually closed down.

The technical architecture determines strategy in a technology company even more than the what and who we're building for. If you build the right technical how and set yourself up to have a platform that can be adaptable, flexible, that is incredibly valuable over the long term.

You need both. So if you only do incremental, you will follow the shortest, the steepest gradient in front of you... So you need coherence about where you're going and the way you get that is by creating a North Star for yourself.

For every individual user, the utility that they derive from the product increases the more users there are on the platform... in the case of collaboration tools, it's not the more users in abstract terms. It's the more users within your team, the more users within your company.