Tristan Handy: Why The CEO Should Make As Few Decisions As Possible | 20VC #937

Tristan, this is such a joy to do. As I said to you beforehand, uh, I was sitting with Matt in a restaurant in London, and I said, "Who must I have on the show?" Immediately, Tristan. Uh, and so I'm so excited that we made this happen, and thank you so much for joining me today.

Yeah, absolutely. Um, M- Matt, thank you for always being a cheerleader.

A fantastic cheerleader, by the way. I think I was distracted by the, the steak in front of me. But, uh-

(laughs)

... I would love to start (laughs) with a little bit on you. How did you make your way into the world of startups first? And then how did you come to found DBT most recently?

I was a lost soul, went to, uh, undergrad business school, um, went to work for Deloitte Consulting. I didn't really have any idea what I wanted to do. I spent five years there. Uh, I, you know, still lost, went to, to get my MBA, um, and then I, I had a, a lucky break. Uh, my... One of my good friends from high school and college is Anthony Casalena, and Anthony had founded Squarespace, I don't know, some five or so years before. Things were moving quickly, um, and I ended up spending a year there, um, to, to, uh, to do a bunch of things, but partially to help them raise their Series A. Um, and, uh, it was an environment that I had never seen before. I mean, ju- just the whole concept that I could wear jeans and a T-shirt to work-

(laughs)

... coming from a Deloitte background, was just... I, I, I loved it. I loved that, like, you could just sit down and do the work, and not make PowerPoint slides about doing the work. Um-

(laughs)

... and so I, I just, like, decided that I was never going back. And then, and then the hard thing, honestly, for a, a consultant was to figure out, like, how to make myself useful in this context, because, um, m- the majority of the skills that I had learned to this point in my professional career, uh, were, like, not that useful. Like, I, I wasn't the person who built the product. Um, I wasn't, uh, the person who was going to sell the product. And so I really, uh, doubled down on my data skillset, which had been something that I'd, I'd, uh, been good at for a long time. But, um, I had to figure out ways of making that useful. Um, and for me, that was, was marketing. I, like, learned how to do, uh, performance marketing. I learned how to, like, do... Y- you know, early-stage marketing is, like, highly quantitative. And so I spent my s- um, seven, my first seven years in startups, uh, doing, doing marketing in various shapes and forms.