Nicholas Schrock, founder of Dagster Labs, discusses raising $55M to build an open-source orchestrator for data pipelines.
Nicholas Schrock, founder of Dagster Labs, discusses raising $55M to build an open-source orchestrator for data pipelines. The discussion covers his career path, experiences at Facebook, and the vision behind Dagster Labs in the context of enterprise and AI data platforms.
Get out to California and get around all the A players that you can find. Get over yourself and get around the people who you're going to learn from and feed off. [music] All righty. Hello everyone and welcome to the deal maker show. So today we have a really amazing founder. You know we're going to be talking about building scaling. uh 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 brace yourself for a very inspiring conversation so without further ado let's welcome our guest today Nick Shrock welcome to the show >> thanks for having me 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 Oh, I think I
have a pretty conventional um upbringing in a lot of ways. I grew up in a city called Edina, which is kind of a you know, middle upper middle class suburb in um in in Minnesota. And uh you know, I had a very my my [clears throat] parents I come from a medical family. My father's a doctor, a brilliant guy. Um and they were very academics. My parents were very academics focused. So we always had uh a lot of high expectations on that front and a lot of vigorous conversations and they were well read. So kind of had a very enriched childhood on that front. Um you know I like I I kind of had like an 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 uh or uh you know, started a business empire at 16. Um you know, I had I had a fairly well
balanced childhood. Um you know, I worked hard. I you know, did well in school and I uh was uh very into percussion. Um, so, uh, you know, drum line and then I got into Mima, which is kind of a a xylophone thing. You play with four mallets. Um, and, um, so >> yeah. And what about what about history? You know, it sounds like when you were heading off to to college, you know, history was a what you were thinking, but eventually, you know, that transition to computer science, which is quite the shift. >> 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. I once wrote a biography of myself when I was in fifth grade and um the uh you it was like an exercise. you write like a um a future timeline of yourself and
like I I I was going to be president of the United States but the way I was going to get there is I moved to Florida and I became governor uh 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 do lots of side projects at home. Like I kind of have a different like you know I'm I'm far more um abstract. Oh that that balance is changing with AI because AI can capture so much incidental complexity that I'm much more liable to do like home automation, that sort of stuff. 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 you know approach history and politics with. So when you came out of uh college you decided to go to Microsoft but it was a not a long stint before you know you decided to pack up the bags and go to Europe. So what was the um what was [clears throat] that experience like of working at a at a you know 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. >> Yeah. So I end up going to L school of economics. Um I it's interesting I have very warm feelings towards Microsoft actually I was in the developer division um which produced the NET framework and C and like that the engineers there were brilliant. You know, I attribute a lot I was actually talking to 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 Hilesberg who was the designer of C and now of TypeScript. 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 I 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, uh, 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. And um yeah, 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 5 years? And then like I'm like 5 years ahead. I'm like some like
mid-level manager or something like I was just like I'm too young, 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 9/11 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. 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. Then I felt like LLC 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 don't I'm kind of you know I meet a lot of young people and it's interesting a lot of interview rubrics um when you're doing behavioral interviews kind of guide you to you know
like what are your career goals for the next five years and I always like like I didn't really have any like I I meaning like I didn't have an exact plan. I'm I'm kind of a person and maybe it's naive but uh I'm a big believer in kind of exposing yourself to a lot of stuff and like and trying to go at opportunities because 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, right? Like you like you go to some fancy private high school, then you go to Stanford, then you do the internship at Google, then you get the full-time thing at Meta, and then you like do a startup or something. 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 broad. I you know 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. >> Well I mean obviously that that really opened up the opportunity of coming back uh and getting into the world of startups. Now the first 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 uh along the way before you actually you know went to Facebook I guess. How was that first stint with startups, you know, for you? >> 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, you know, and it's kind of ironic. I I I just talked a big game about uh you know getting a varied experience and all this stuff, but then I ended up
going back to Ann Arbor of all places to work for uh a healthcare 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 LSC I was like you know what I I think I am a software engineer. [laughter] um and that that is what I want to do and I was also I I like the mission of the company. It was um kind of working on healthcare data interoperability which I think is like a very important problem. So that was pretty motivating to me and then um worked very closely with some dear friends on that. So that was, you know, fun way to spend a couple years in my 20s. And then went to Chicago actually to start a business with um uh with a college colleague, a brilliant guy, and uh he pitched me on building software for um you know, hedge funds and proprietary trading shops because he had uh been working at
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