analytics-engineering
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SDF Labs and the expensive art of finding out too late
A Seattle compiler startup asked why data developers had to send SQL to the cloud just to discover a mistake. Its answer ended up inside dbt - and changed the machinery beneath analytics engineering.
The Data Catalog Learned to Read the Room
Euno began with an unfashionable question: what if enterprise AI's biggest problem is not intelligence, but office gossip? Its answer is a living map of what a company's data means, who trusts it and where it goes.
Infinite Lambda Wants to Fix AI’s Plumbing
Before an AI agent can give a useful answer, somebody has to sort out the data. Infinite Lambda turns that unglamorous job into software, migration projects, and teams that can run the result.
Maayan Salom Keeps Asking the Awkward Question: Can You Trust the Data?
From eighth-grade Football Manager spreadsheets to autonomous data agents, Elementary’s co-founder has built a career around the moment when a number makes you say, ‘This can’t be right.’
Elementary Gave Away the Data Alarm - Then 1,500 Teams Asked for the Fire Department
Elementary won developers with a free, dbt-native smoke detector. The harder - and more valuable - job was turning that foothold into a control room for data, analytics and AI.
The Tiny SQL Tool That Taught 100,000 Data Teams to Think Like Software Engineers
dbt began as a practical fix for analysts stuck between raw warehouse tables and impatient colleagues. A decade later, its workflow sits inside more than 100,000 data teams - and a completed merger with Fivetran is turning that humble idea into a bid for the data layer beneath enterprise AI.
Hamzah Chaudhary Is Turning Business Intelligence Into a Builder’s Medium
Lightdash began as a scrappy internal tool that a customer asked to use. Hamzah Chaudhary turned that accidental signal into a broader argument: data teams should build with the discipline, freedom and leverage of software teams.
Tristan Handy
Tristan Handy is the co-founder of dbt Labs (formerly Fishtown Analytics), the company behind dbt (data build tool) - the open-source transformation layer that helped define the modern data stack and spawned the analytics engineering profession. Starting with $10,000 of his own money in 2016, he bootstrapped for four years before raising $410M and reaching a $4.2B valuation. Following a 2025 merger with Fivetran, he now serves as Co-Founder and President of the combined entity on a path to IPO. He also writes the Analytics Engineering Roundup newsletter, which has 30,000+ subscribers.