Tristan Handy | Source | CEO and Co-founder at dbt Labs

We really want to be a semantic layer for data. We want to be able to push the knowledge that DBT has into the hands of people who want to build reports, dashboards and data products. The age-old problem in data is you come to a meeting and two people have two reports from two different systems and they both show different numbers for revenue. It's just such a boring thing to talk about, but it's still a problem that few have managed to solve. Everyone who's tried to make progress on this problem has done it in under the auspices of a commercial software product that they've then tried to get everyone to use, and it doesn't work like that. So what you need is an open layer that all of these tools can interact with to get their data definitions of revenue and of all the different business metrics that you need. Check back with me in two years, it may well be a windmill to be charging at, but I really think that we have an opportunity to do something that the whole industry has failed to do for a very long time.