Dbt Labs has named Brandon Sweeney to the newly created role of president and chief operating officer as the Philadelphia data analytics firm looks to scale globally.
Sweeney will work alongside founder and CEO Tristan Handy in leading the seven-year-old company. He brings with him over 20 years of experience in growing tech companies, most recently as chief revenue officer at San Francisco software company HashiCorp. (NASDAQ: HCP), which he helped guide through an initial public offering in late 2021.
Dbt Labs is one of the Philadelphia region's startup unicorns, with a valuation of $4.2 billion after raising a $222 million Series D early last year. Backed by more than $400 million in funding, the company has weighed the possibility of going public, though the IPO market has come to a near standstill in the past year as capital markets have struggled.
In his role, Sweeney will lead the go-to-market side of the dbt Labs, including overseeing revenue, marketing and partnerships. Though an IPO could be on the horizon at some point, Sweeney said his current priority is growth.
"Building a business that can thrive under the glare of the public markets is the right foundation, right principle, to build an efficient business that generates cash, has high customer satisfaction, retains the best and brightest, and continues to scale," Sweeney said. "That should be principle, regardless of what the outcome looks like down the road."
Sweeney spent 16 years at Palo Alto, California-based cloud computing company VMWare, where he helped grow revenue from $70 million to over $11 billion. He then joined HashiCorp. when it had about $100 million in revenue and helped grow that to a run rate of over $500 million, he said, along with the IPO.
"It's helpful to have seen some of the scale and some of the likely inevitable challenges that every company has as it's looking to grow its talent, as it's looking to grow how we support customers at increasing scale around the world," Sweeney said. "I hope I can bring a lot of that perspective so that maybe we can smooth things out and have fewer speed bumps."
Sweeney was introduced to Handy and dbt Labs through venture capitalists, and said he became intrigued by the company's "incredible momentum that only continues to accelerate." He resigned from HashiCorp. in late September and began at dbt Labs a week ago. Now, he hopes to be a catalyst for that acceleration.
"We have plenty opportunity to grow in every single country around the world," Sweeney said. "What really matters is doing that in a methodical and thoughtful way and in a way that supports long-term success. I'm heading to Europe in a couple of weeks to spend time with the team and I can see a tremendous opportunity for expansion in Europe, and likewise across Asia. But the most important thing is making sure we get the foundation right before we expand, and to do that in a structured and methodical way."
While Sweeney eyes Europe, dbt Labs will open a new office in New York in the Flatiron District later this year.The company now has around 400 employees after laying off 15% of its workforce this spring. Many of the employees work remote.
Sweeney said he'd like to add talent in the Philadelphia region.
Dbt Labs has recently brought on clients including Anheuser-Busch, the British Red Cross and Thermo Fisher Scientific. It now has almost 4,000 paying customers on dbt Cloud and close to 30,000 companies using dbt's services each week. The company grew revenue by 4,034% from 2019 to 2022, enough to place No. 42 on Deloitte's Fast 500 list of fastest-growing tech companies.
Sweeney is part of a slew of new hires into dbt Labs' executive team. This year, the company has Luis Maldonado as vice president of product; Megan Pittman as vice president of people; Clarke Patterson as vice president of product marketing; and Alyssa Smrekar as vice president of brand marketing.
"New offices, new talent, people have seen some level of scale and I'm pretty excited for where we're heading," Sweeney said.
