- Tristan Handy, CEO of $4.2 billion software company DBT Labs, says he defied a common Silicon Valley myth to grow his business. In an industry where Mark Zuckerberg’s “move fast, break things” culture is the norm, he advises startups to take time in the beginning to build a strong foundation. Otherwise, innovation can be stifled by all the noise.
Thirteen years after Mark Zuckerberg coined the phrase “move fast and break things” at Facebook, Silicon Valley is still moving as fast as ever. Just look at how founders scrambled to keep up with DeepSeek last month. But the 44-year-old CEO behind the $4.2 billion tech giant DBT Labs proves that easing in is essential to really pick things up down the line. Once a strong base is built, it’s much easier to scale quickly; DBT Labs’ annual recurring revenue went from $2 million to $100 million in the four years post-foundation building, from 2020 to 2024.
“I always tell founders that your biggest asset at the beginning stages of the journey is time. You need time to figure things out, for your users to figure things out, and for them to tell other people,” Tristan Handy, founder and chief executive of DBT Labs, tells Fortune.
“Some things about startups you actually can’t rush. They just take the time they take—and that is totally counter to the Silicon Valley mythology.”
Silicon Valley’s grind-set stifles innovation
Handy launched DBT Labs in 2016, after working at several startups including Squarespace and RJMetrics. From there, the business steadily pulled in new clients to use its data-build tool—until its success hit the speed dial in 2019.
“It was like clockwork, every month, 10% more people were using DBT, and that happened for years,” Handy says. “At a certain point, you become the standard, and everybody uses you… Things tipped in 2019. It was the first time that we had had Fortune 500 companies show up and say, ‘I love what you’re doing. I want to use it. How can I pay you?’”
Within that year, it grew from 300 customers to about 1,000. Then in 2022, DBT Labs received a $4.2 billion valuation as part of a $222 million Series D funding round, backed by Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Databricks, Snowflake, and Salesforce Ventures. Now, some of DBT’s major customers include JetBlue, BHP, Nasdaq, Vestas, and Domain.
It took a few years for the startup to solidify that footing and really take off—but Handy says that pace is critical to where it is now.
“You could not have built the company that we had built if you raised money on day zero and had a board meeting every quarter forever,” Handy says. “Because your board members would be like, ‘What’s the growth?’ We just wouldn’t have been able to do things the way that we did.”
And for an industry that’s always looking for the next billion-dollar product, operating on Silicon Valley’s grind-set could stifle bright ideas, Handy says. Hitting the pavement running with a boardroom of investors timing their stride can put founders in a headspace of distress.
“Innovation is fundamentally creative. It has to be fun. It can’t come from a place of fear,” Handy says. “The conventional wisdom around startups is that you are creating something that you want to put a dent in the universe. And I explicitly started with the opposite goal.”
Silicon Valley and the “move fast and break things” mantra
In a 2012 note to Facebook’s potential investors, CEO Zuckerberg penned the “move fast and break things” strategy as a formidable way to innovate quickly. That same year the business rapidly expanded, acquiring Instagram for $1 billion, going public in May, and reporting a 36% revenue increase with total revenues of $1.26 billion in the third quarter from the same time in 2011. It was the company’s official motto until 2014, changing after Facebook faced criticism that the adage could lend itself to collateral damage. Zuckerberg retreated to a more modest “Move fast with stable infrastructure.”
While Facebook—now Meta—has shied away from its old mantra, the same sense of urgency and upheaval has stuck. After DeepSeek rocked the AI industry with its revolutionary chatbot R1, Zuckerberg rallied four war rooms of engineers to figure out how they made such rivaling technology. And in the name of efficiency, the company has been shedding ‘low-performing’ staffers—although some axed employees disputed this reasoning.
Other tech leaders echo the importance of working at a fast pace. In an interview for Fortune’s Leadership Next podcast last year, World Wide Technology CEO Jim Kavanaugh cited nimbleness and hustling as being important in being able to compete in the industry.
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“You have to get good at taking good swaths of information, gathering what you think is enough information to make intelligent decisions, and you need to start moving,” Kavanaugh said. “Because if you wait for perfection, you’re going to be too late. And there’s a lot moving right now, specifically around digital transformation, AI, cyber, cloud, all of those things.”
Google CEO Sundar Pichai is also picking up the pace. Feeling the heat of new breakthroughs and regulatory pressures in the AI space, he urged employees in a strategy meeting late last year to step it up. Google needed to grow its AI capabilities and stay the web search front-runner as OpenAI and Perplexity entered the scene.
“I think 2025 will be critical,” Pichai said. “I think it’s really important we internalize the urgency of this moment, and need to move faster as a company. The stakes are high. These are disruptive moments. In 2025, we need to be relentlessly focused on unlocking the benefits of this technology and solve real user problems.”