He Raised $55 Million To Build An Open-Source Data Orchestrator Used To Build, Manage, And Observe Complex Data Pipelines
Nick Schrock’s career defies the neat, linear playbooks often associated with Silicon Valley success. He didn’t follow a rigid five-year plan, nor did he obsess over titles or prestige early on. Instead, his journey has been shaped by systems thinking and cultural curiosity.
Nick has always felt that persistent pull toward solving foundational problems that most people overlook. His journey traces the path from growing up in suburban Minnesota to shaping Facebook’s golden-era engineering culture and later founding Dagster Labs.
Nick’s story is ultimately about building leverage at the deepest layers of software and knowing when to step aside so the company can scale beyond you. In this interview, he talks about transitioning from CEO to CTO, the implications of AI in today's world, and rethinking his fundraising strategies.
Growing Up in Minnesota: Early Signs of a Systems Thinker
Nick was born and raised in Edina, an upper-middle-class suburb outside Minneapolis in Minnesota. His childhood was academically rigorous but otherwise unremarkable by startup mythology standards.
Nick’s parents, both with medical and academic backgrounds, set high expectations for learning, debate, and intellectual curiosity. He wasn’t a prodigy or a teenage founder. Instead, Nick describes himself as gifted, but in a quieter way, curious, analytical, and keenly interested in how systems work.
That interest showed up early. In fifth grade, he wrote a fictional biography of his future self, mapping out a strategic path to the presidency through state-level politics. Even at ten years old, he was thinking in abstractions, incentives, and organizational structures.
Music also played a role. Nick spent years in percussion, including drumline, marimba, and ensemble performance. It helped him develop a sense of rhythm, discipline, and collaboration that would later echo in his engineering leadership.
From History to Computer Science: Abstractions Over Hacks
Unlike many engineers, Nick never identified as a hardcore hacker. He wasn’t obsessively building side projects late into the night. Instead, he was drawn to abstractions, frameworks, and strategy—the layers of software that shape how organizations operate.
Nick initially gravitated toward history and politics, but that same lens eventually drew him to computer science.
Microsoft: Learning Craft from the Best
Nick’s first job was working at an iconic company like Microsoft, where he joined the developer division working on .NET and C#. The experience left a lasting imprint. He credits much of his later success in developer tooling to that environment.
Anders Hejlsberg, the creator of C# and later TypeScript, became an inspiration for Nick, who remembers Anders as a brilliant engineer with a very pragmatic approach. Despite enjoying the internship and experience at Microsoft, he had an uneasy realization in his early twenties.
If Nick stayed on the default path, he could “crush it” for five years and still end up as a mid-level manager, far too young to feel settled. He wanted broader exposure to the world, to ideas, and to uncertainty. He also wanted a career in a government-related or politics-adjacent field.
Nick remembers doing behavioral interviews that could help him define his career goals for the next five years. At the time, he didn’t really have a plan about what he wanted to do next, and that was intentional.
Europe and the Value of Non-Linear Paths
At 22, Nick packed his bags and moved to Europe to study at the London School of Economics. It was less about credentials and more about perspective. As a person, he enjoys exposing himself to different opportunities.
Living abroad forced him out of the highly institutionalized Silicon Valley pipeline, which included attending an elite school and interning at a top company. This pathway would have been very similar to the typical tech careers today.
Nick deeply believes in exposing yourself to varied experiences and letting luck play a role. The detour may have delayed his career on paper, but it enriched his thinking and reinforced his belief that narrow pipelines produce narrow outcomes.
Early Startups and Hard Lessons
After LSE, Nick returned to the US and dived into startups. He recalls gravitating toward what his friends were doing. His first stint was at a healthcare interoperability company in Ann Arbor, where he worked closely with friends on a mission he found motivating.
Later, in Chicago, Nick co-founded a startup building software for hedge funds and proprietary trading firms. It was there that reality hit hard. With no funding, little credibility, and a naïve pitch, Nick found himself repeatedly rejected by sophisticated financial clients.
Although his friend had worked at Citadel, investors didn’t find that impressive or even relevant. ”Then the 2008 financial crisis hit, and the business collapsed.
Facebook: A Defining Chapter
A former Microsoft colleague tipped Nick off that Facebook was hiring, and the move changed everything. He joined Facebook as roughly engineer #180 and spent eight years there during one of the most formative periods in the company’s history. Those years defined his professional identity.
Nick cared deeply about software engineering and best practices, which were exactly what the company needed at the time. Thus, he assimilated into the culture perfectly. More importantly, he gained valuable (and humbling) exposure to good engineers and their exceptional productivity.
That exposure forced Nick to clarify his own strengths. His value wasn’t raw output; it was building frameworks, shaping culture, and designing systems that changed how teams interacted.
Nick describes Facebook’s engineering culture between 2010 and 2013 as a golden age. Talent density was extraordinary. Engineers were given autonomy, trust, and room to build. Many of the tools developed internally during that era, GraphQL among them, became industry standards.
What stood out most wasn’t speed alone, but quality and quantity at speed. Teams shipped ambitious systems without devolving into chaos, and individual engineers could organically spark projects that reshaped the company’s core stack.
Nick gives a shout-out to Mark, Chreryl, Shrep, the CTO, and the whole team for building a great, career-defining culture. He considers the Facebook experience extraordinary, not just for the financial outcomes of an IPO.
Dagster Labs: Drawn to the “Developer Experience Dumpster Fire”
After Facebook, Nick took time off but knew he wasn’t done. Initially, he explored healthcare again. He was intrigued by how conservative industries such as KLM, Walmart, and others were now willing to adopt modern developer tooling, such as GraphQL.
It wasn’t just cutting-edge tech companies with a high risk profile. Traditional organizations were also willing to have engineering groups with a different risk profile and mentality than the organization that enclosed them.
Repeated conversations revealed a frustrating truth: many organizations with ambitious visions were blocked not by regulation or strategy, but by brittle, primitive data pipelines. Core decision-making systems were built on fragile CSV files and glue code. That offended Nick at a fundamental level.
He had always attempted to work in product management and had been drawn to the stack because of shortcomings in some aspect of the underlying technology. He was compelled to resolve the problems.
Nick realized that data pipelines, often dismissed as “data cleaning,” were actually the core business logic of modern organizations, especially in an AI-driven world. Yet the tooling lagged by at least a decade.
Nick also noted that analytics systems are the basis for most human and automated decision-making in our society. And it's all built on a framework like a house of cards. He recognized the horizontal problems, a mix of technical and organizational design issues, that affect many developers.
What Dagster Is and Why It Matters
Dagster is an open-source framework for building, testing, observing, and operating data pipelines. Nick explains the concept behind Dagster in simpler terms.
When data scientists and engineers build data pipelines, they move data from a source system to a data warehouse or a target system. To do that, they must write code that needs testing. Engineers also need to be able to visualize and observe it, which is what Dagster does.
Dagster Plus, the company’s commercial offering, is an enterprise platform that hosts operationally complex components. It is a full data ops platform that covers the entire data pipeline lifecycle: writing and shipping pipelines, cloud-based development, advanced observability, and advanced analytics on top of them.
As Nick says, “It’s a place where developers can come together to have a system of record for the data platform that makes their data come alive.” Companies like Discord run their entire data platform on Dagster, combining their own compute with Dagster’s managed services.
Nick sees Dagster not just as an orchestrator, but as a control plane for the data platform, especially critical as AI disrupts every layer of the stack. Companies run their own compute in their data centers, but also leverage Dagster’s authentication and other proprietary features by paying a fee.
Stepping Down as CEO: Gaining a Co-Founder When It Mattered Most
In 2022, Nick hit a breaking point. As a solo founder, isolated during the pandemic, he was exhausted. Around the same time, he hired Pete Hunt, the former CEO and co-creator of the React framework and longtime collaborator, as Head of Engineering.
The transition happened organically. Pete brought operational strength, energy, business acumen, and leadership. Nick recognized that the company would be stronger with Pete as CEO and himself as CTO. The handoff was disciplined, values-aligned, and smooth.
For Nick, it was transformative. He gained a true partner and returned to the work he loved most: technology, vision, and systems design.
Fundraising Across Cycles: From Preemption to Pain
Dagster Labs has raised roughly $55M. Nick has lived on both sides of fundraising, and recalls that the seed round was preemptive. Thanks to his reputation for building and shipping a project that was broadly adopted, he successfully convinced investors. His messaging resonated with them.
Storytelling is everything that Nick Schrock was able to master. The key is capturing the essence of what you are doing in 15 to 20 slides. For a winning deck, take a look at the pitch deck template created by Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley legend (see it here) where the most critical slides are highlighted.
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Later, the Series B was brutal. Raised in early 2023, post-Fed tightening, pre-AI hype, it coincided with the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. Although they were getting momentum on the commercial business, it was six to 12 months too late. Pitch after pitch ended in rejection.
While painful, the process forced clarity. Nick and Pete refined the narrative, built conviction, and emerged more resilient. The experience bonded the leadership team and sharpened the company’s strategy.
The AI Era and the Long-Term Vision
Asked about his vision for Dagster, Nick accounts for the time horizon. He believes AI is simultaneously disrupting every layer of the stack and that data platforms sit at the center of that disruption. His ambition isn’t to compete directly with Snowflake or Databricks.
Instead, Nick wants Dagster to become the control plane for how companies reason about, operate, and evolve their data systems in the AI era. Longer term, he envisions something closer to an “Apple of developer tools”—opinionated and taste-driven.
Nick admires companies like Vercel and creators like Rick Rubin, who build for themselves first and trust that authenticity resonates. He himself has been working on this internal tool to improve agentic programming, and is super bullish on it.
Although he’s passionate about working in the data sphere, Nick likes to consider himself a vibes guy. He has a vision and believes in leading people rather than being led by focus groups. His long-term dream is a virtual cloud company built on frameworks that are widely adopted.
Nick envisions designing beautiful integrated experiences that feel great all the way from typing code to deploying the tools.
Advice to His Younger Self
If Nick could go back, he wouldn’t offer tactical tips or motivational slogans. He’d say this: “Get over yourself. Go where the network is. Surround yourself with the best people in the world at what you want to do. You can’t figure this out alone.”
Nick’s edge came from systems thinking and abstraction, not from chasing titles, prestige, or a rigid five-year plan. · Non-linear detours like living abroad may “delay” you on paper, but they expand your perspective and widen your opportunity surface area. · Early startup failure in Chicago taught him that credibility and timing matter, and naïve pitching gets exposed fast in sophisticated markets. · Facebook’s 2010–2013 “golden age” showed that talent density plus autonomy can produce industry-defining tools without top-down mandates. · Dagster was born of a contrarian insight: “boring” data pipelines are actually core business logic, especially as AI amplifies the cost of fragile data foundations. · The CEO-to-CTO transition worked because it was values-aligned and operationally rational, and gaining Pete Hunt became a late-stage co-founder moment when Nick needed it most. · Fundraising isn’t one game: preemptive rounds reward reputation and narrative, while down-cycle rounds force resilience, sharper positioning, and tighter conviction.
Full episode transcript Alejandro Cremades: All righty, hello everyone and welcome to the DealMaker Show. So today we have a really amazing founder. you know, we're going to talking about building, scaling, in this case, you know, transitioning from CEO to CTO. Also the implications of AI in today's world and things perhaps to think differently. If you were to to start again with everything that is going on, raising money as well. And yeah, praise yourself for a very inspiring conversation. So without further ado, let's welcome our guest today, Nick Schrock. Welcome to the show.
Alejandro Cremades: So originally born in Minnesota, and you grew up there in the suburbs in Minneapolis. So give us a walk through memory lane. How was life for you growing up?
Nick Schrock: Oh, I think I have a pretty conventional, um, upbringing a lot of ways. I grew up in a city called Dinah, which is kind of a, you know, middle, upper middle-class suburb in, um, in, in Minnesota. And, ah you know, I had a very, my, my parents, I come from medical family. My father's doctor, a brilliant guy. um And they were very academics.
Nick Schrock: My parents were very academics focused. So we always had a lot of high expectations on that front and lot of vigorous conversations and they were well-read. So kind of had a very enriched childhood on that front.
Nick Schrock: um You know, i like, I, I kind of have like a, not a particularly remarkable high school junior high experience. I mean, i was a bit precocious, but I'm not one of these like Teal fellows who were like, you know, solving world peace at the age of 13 or, or, know, started a business empire at 16.
Nick Schrock: you know, I had I had a fairly well balanced childhood. um You know, I worked hard, but you know, did well in school and, I was ah very into percussion.
Nick Schrock: um So, ah you know, drum line and then I got into marimba, which is kind of a xylophonous thing you play with formalities. And um so, yeah, you know.
Alejandro Cremades: And what about what about history? You know, it sounds like when you were heading off to to college, you know, history was saying what you were thinking. But eventually, you know, that transition to computer science, which is quite the shift.
Nick Schrock: It is quite the shift. um I like thinking about systems a lot. So when i kind of read about politics and and history, I come at it and I always have from like a very young age, um come at it from a systems perspective.
Nick Schrock: I once wrote a biography myself when I was in fifth grade.
Nick Schrock: And um the you it was like an exercise, you write like a um a future timeline of yourself. And like, I i was going to be president United States.
Nick Schrock: But the way I was going to get there is I moved to Florida and I became governor. ah And like, this is my story. And I was like 10 years old when I wrote this, you know, so I was kind of like thinking in terms of strategy and systems for a long time. And That's really like the way I, um you know, I'm in the software world. I'm very interested in the abstractions and um like systems aspects of it, um which kind of like mirrors the way I think about politics and organizational thought. Like I'm not much of a hacker, actually. Like I don't like...
Nick Schrock: do lots of side projects at home. Like i kind of have a different, like, you I'm, I'm far more, um, abstract.
Nick Schrock: Oh, that, that balance is changing with AI. Cause AI can capture so much incidental complexity that I'm much more liable to do like home automation, that sort of stuff.
Nick Schrock: Um, now, but, but yeah, no, I like, I like thinking about strategy and systems and, you know, and I, that's kind of the lens that I, um,
Alejandro Cremades: So, when you came out of college, you decided to go to Microsoft. But it was saying not a long stint before you know you decided to pack up the bags and go to Europe.
Alejandro Cremades: So what was the um what was that experience like of working at an iconic company like like Microsoft, especially being the first job and what you got out of that? and And I guess, you know like what opened up you know when going to Europe?
Nick Schrock: Yeah, so I ended up going to Lund School of Economics. um i It's interesting. i have very warm feelings towards Microsoft, actually.
Nick Schrock: i was in the developer division. um which produced the dotnet framework and c sharp and like the engineers there were brilliant you know i attribute a lot i was actually talking someone about this earlier today i attribute a lot of my success in doing dev tools at uh facebook to that experience i kind of like worship at the feet of uh anders heilsberg who was the designer of c sharp and now i've typed script i think he's just a brilliant engineer with also a very pragmatic approach that i try to do my best to emulate um so
Nick Schrock: I liked Microsoft in a lot of ways, but I, you know, I'm pretty naturally, I was kind of ambitious without a plan and i didn't really think about going what I was going to, what I was doing.
Nick Schrock: In a lot of ways, I was kind of doing a default thing of going to a company I had an internship with and had a positive experience.
Nick Schrock: And, you know, I kind of like woke up one day, I was like, listen, what happens if I absolutely like devote my life to this and absolutely like so-called crush it here? for five years.
Nick Schrock: And then like, I'm like five years ahead. I'm like some like mid-level manager or something like, good I was just like, I'm too young.
Nick Schrock: You know, I was 22. i had lots of varied interests. I wanted to like travel the world a bit. um it was also kind of, you know, I was 18 when nine 11 happened and you know, Napoleon has this line that like, you can understand a lot about a man about like what happened, what was going on in the world when he was 18.
Nick Schrock: um And so that, um you know, I thought about maybe the right path forward was kind of going into some form of government or government adjacent um or politics adjacent field. And i felt like LSE was going to be an interesting place to explore that. And I was also very interested in like living abroad, um just to vary my experience. So i i'm kind of yeah I meet a lot of young people.
Nick Schrock: And it's interesting, a lot of interview rubrics, um when you're doing behavioral interviews, kind of guide you to, know like what are your career goals for the next five years?
Nick Schrock: And I always like, like I didn't really have any. Meaning, I didn't have an exact plan.
Nick Schrock: I'm i'm kind of a person, and maybe it's naive, but I'm a big... believer in kind of exposing yourself to a lot of stuff and like, and trying to go at opportunities.
Nick Schrock: Cause I think there's a lot of luck in life and the whole, I guess I came to realize that the, you know, the whole, like the whole notion of like doing a direct pipeline from like a fancy college to a fancy internship to a fancy big company, like thing, which is like very common in the Valley now.
Nick Schrock: Right. Like, know, like, You go to some fancy private high school, then you go to Stanford, then you do the internship at Google and you get the full time thing at Meta, then you like do a startup or something.
Nick Schrock: That's like the pipeline. um You know, it's like so institutionalized and so narrow in a lot of ways that, you know, I was able to kind of go abroad.
Nick Schrock: I think it was I think it like it might have like delayed my career a little bit, but I'm happy I did it. um
Alejandro Cremades: Well, I mean, obviously you see that the that really opened up the opportunity of coming back and getting into the world of startups. Now, the first thing the first you know phase of startups for you, as they say, you either succeed or you learn. And there were a lot of lessons learned ah along the way before you actually you know went to Facebook.
Alejandro Cremades: I guess, how was that the first stint with startups you know for you?
Nick Schrock: Yeah, it was, you know, I kind of gravitated towards what some of my friends were doing. um and I kind of, I, I didn't know what I didn't know, know, and it's kind of ironic. I, I, I just talked a big game about, ah you know, getting a varied experience and all this stuff, but then I ended up going back to an Arbor of all places to work for,
Nick Schrock: ah ah a healthcare care startup that a couple of my friends were participating in And, um, the, uh, you know, I guess I kind of, I really did like, I kind of, after a year of LLC, I was like, you know, i I, think I am a software engineer.
Nick Schrock: And I was also, I liked the mission of the company. it was, um, kind of working on healthcare data interoperability, which i think is like a very important problem.
Nick Schrock: And then, um, worked very closely with some dear friends on that.
Nick Schrock: So that was, you know, fun way to spend a couple years in my twenties and then went to Chicago actually to start a business with, um, uh,
Nick Schrock: And he pitched me on building building software for um you know hedge funds and proprietary trading shops because he had been working at Citadel.
Nick Schrock: And we didn't do we didn't have any support. We didn't get any investment. And I think that's like the first time in my life where I was really kind of got my Blank handed to me, my ass handed to me on calls where like, we came in like very naive and like, we're trying to like pitch stuff to these firms. And there was like, who are you people? Like, I know this, your friend worked for Citadel, but like, you guys don't know what you're talking about.
Nick Schrock: um and, uh, and then, you know, the financial crisis happened and then it became just like a terrible idea to do what we were doing. but ended up working out pretty well because, um,
Nick Schrock: Well, actually, my my office me at Microsoft kind of heard that was on the open market and um recruited me to um or at least put me in the in the in the queue for Facebook, which was like super transformational, got me out to the valley
Alejandro Cremades: So how was that for you, too? Because, I mean, there you spend eight years, you know, which is a significant amount of time. I mean, seeing a company grow like that over those years, I'm sure it was quite, as you were saying, transformational.
Alejandro Cremades: What were some of the if you had to like name like the three biggest things that you took away from your experience from, you know working at Facebook, what would those be?
Nick Schrock: Oh my God. It's almost hard to tease apart because it's so like, it's like, you know, prior to forming Daxter labs, like Facebook is like by far like define my professional identity.
Nick Schrock: Um, and when I joined there, I was kind of like a pee in a pod. Like I just like, like I got along with everyone. i was kind of like aligned with the core culture. So not only was I, i was like early ish, I was like engineer one 80, but I was like very quickly kind of like,
Nick Schrock: What I would tell my Chicago self is: “Listen, you think you’re real hot shit. You’re not.”
Nick Schrock: “Go to where the best people in the world are at this stuff, and learn from them.”
Nick Schrock: “You can’t come up with this on your own. You’re not that guy.”
Nick Schrock: So go—get out to California and get around all the A players you can find in tech.
Nick Schrock: That’s what I would have told myself: respect the network. It’s everything.
Nick Schrock: I was kind of on my own, wandering around to some degree.
Nick Schrock: So yeah, that’s what I would have told my 27-year-old self.
Nick Schrock: Get over yourself and get around the people you’re going to learn from and feed off of.
Alejandro Cremades: Love it. Nick, for the people listening that would love to reach out and say hi, what’s the best way for them to do so?
Nick Schrock: Yeah, I think on Twitter or X—pardon me—X or LinkedIn are kind of my two networks. So “Shrocken” is my universal handle there: S-C-H-R-O-C-K-N.
Nick Schrock: And yeah, I respond to well-crafted messages that are thoughtful. So feel free to reach out.
Alejandro Cremades: Amazing. Nick, thank you so much for being on the DealMaker Show today. It has been an absolute honor to have you with us.
