Before anyone called it a "modern data stack," Chris Merrick was writing it. Literally. In 2016, while VP of Engineering at RJMetrics - a Philadelphia data startup that would punch far above its weight - Merrick wrote the first lines of code for a transformation tool his team called dbt. Today, dbt is an industry standard used by thousands of data teams worldwide, stewarded by a separate company (dbt Labs) worth hundreds of millions. Merrick never ran that company. He moved on. That's not a footnote; it's a character study.
Around the same time, he co-created Singer, an open-source standard for writing ETL scripts that became equally foundational to how data pipelines are built. Two standards in one company, before AI existed as a useful concept in enterprise software. Then Merrick watched as RJMetrics spun out its data pipeline product into a standalone company called Stitch - and he became its CTO, steering it through its 2018 acquisition by Talend for an undisclosed sum. He stayed through the acquisition, VP of Engineering at Talend, until the moment he didn't need to anymore.
That moment was 2022. He called two people he'd known since college: Colin Zima and Jamie Davidson. Colin and Jamie had spent the previous years at Looker and then Google after Google's $2.6B acquisition. Between the three of them, they had lived every frustration in business intelligence from every possible angle - the data infrastructure side, the BI platform side, the enterprise customer side. They had enough accumulated knowledge to know exactly where everything broke down. And they built Omni to fix it.