Tristan Handy

Tristan Handy is co-founder of dbt Labs (originally Fishtown Analytics) and now serves as president after the company's merger with Fivetran. He previously led the company as CEO while dbt became the standard analytics-engineering workflow for transforming data in the warehouse.

From consultancy tool to open standard

Handy's path ran through Deloitte, Squarespace, and RJMetrics before he started Fishtown Analytics as a consultancy. dbt began as an internal way to apply software-engineering practice to analytics SQL. The open-source project spread through data teams who wanted versioned, tested transformations, and the company grew around that community. In public talks with hosts such as Matt Turck, Handy describes analytics engineering as a real discipline: analysts who own transformation logic with the same rigor engineers bring to application code.

Scaling dbt Labs

Under Handy's leadership dbt Labs raised large late-stage rounds and expanded from the CLI into Cloud and enterprise offerings while keeping the open-source core central to adoption. The company's category claim stayed consistent: transform once in the warehouse, share definitions, and make analytics trustworthy.

Fivetran merger and the president role

After the Fivetran combination, George Fraser became CEO of the merged company and Handy moved to president and co-founder. In coverage of the deal he has framed the combination as open data infrastructure for analytics and AI workflows: ingestion plus transformation as one stack rather than two disconnected tools.