Something lost, something found

A solid footing, a dizzying town.

It’s the little things, in Las Vegas.

Yes, there are blaring thousand-foot-tall signs advertising Cirque du Soleil shows and Usher performances; yes, there is a paper mache Paris across the street from a paper mache Rome across the street from a paper mache Venice; yes, there water cannons that are choreographed the tune of the national anthem, and flamethrowers that smell like pina coladas. Yes, there is The Sphere™.

But underneath all of that, up and down the strip, hidden in the bushes and pinned at the top of the palm trees, there are also hundreds of outdoor speakers, softly playing Top 40 club hits. Just in case the rest of Las Vegas isn’t enough, it’s an almost subliminal reminder that when you’re here, you’re here to party. There’s a mood in the air in Las Vegas, and that mood is The Chainsmokers. 

Corporate conferences—which are somehow both quintessentially Las Vegas, and the furthest thing in the world from Las Vegas—also have moods. There is almost always some contagious aura that quietly defines the event. The market is booming; people are rowdy and drunk. The market is on fire; people are nervous.¹ It’s the first major event of the season, and everyone’s ready to get out of the house; it’s the last event before Thanksgiving, and everyone is ready to go home.

For its first two years, Coalesce, dbt Labs’ annual conference, was a raucous online show-and-tell. Bring your best work, your coolest project, your offbeat interest, and teach us something we never knew we never knew. 

The third Coalesce was the first in-person Coalesce, hosted in New Orleans. It felt like a homecoming, a spring party after a long winter, a real date, after a long period of only talking over text. For the last several years, the “data community”—broadly, millennial analysts and data engineers who worked in tech-adjacent industries—had existed almost exclusively online: We talked in internet chat rooms, sold each other our websites, and “met” over the occasional Zoom webinar. Though the economic ground was crumbling under our feet, the conferences in 2022 had a dual character: They were celebratory reunions, hosted at the end of the world. We all tried to ignore that second part. 

Last year, at the fourth Coalesce, the prevailing mood was anxiety. Part of that was the economic context: By late 2023, it had become clear that everyone in the conference hall could not, in fact, build a $100 million dollar business. In 2022, we introduced ourselves to one another; in 2023, we were asking for introductions to each other’s corp dev departments. 

But the bigger source of anxiety seemed to be dbt Labs itself. For years, the company had served as the de facto host of our community parties. They gave us an open-source project that we all used, and an event space—their Slack, and once a year, Coalesce—where we could all hang out. But in 2023, the bills were coming due. And at that Coalesce, you could sense that the offering plates were coming out. The stages were populated with more sponsored talks, more dbt customer stories, more pitches for dbt Labs’ paid offerings and fewer additions to its open-source projects.

None of this was a surprise. If the product is free, you are the product, the saying goes, and dbt had long been free. We all knew we’d eventually need to be sold. 

Still, there were whispers about What It All Means. Was dbt’s open source license going to change? Was the community—that nebulous thing—going to lose its soul? Was the music stopping? There was an impending sense of loss. Was this cherished place and this party that had been always been more about personal connection than profession transaction drifting away?

In some sense, yes. dbt Labs hosted the fifth vintage of Coalesce this week in Las Vegas. It felt, for the most part, like a normal corporate conference. It was reasoned; measured; everything was held at a comfortable distance. There are fewer quirky community exhibitions and inside jokes,² and more sponsored sessions, product demos, and customer testimonials. In New Orleans, there were rumors of after-parties going five figures over budget; in Las Vegas, a happy hour responsibly stopped letting people in because the host had hit their tab limit.³ In prior years, when I asked people how they felt about the conference, they told me stories about who they met and which talks they liked. This year, I was told about how many leads their booth brought in, and how they were pleasantly surprised by the ROI. 

The mood in the room—the music in the air—however, was relief. Sure, Coalesce is less of the cheery circus it once was, but that was never sustainable anyway. Sure, the dbt product itself is slowly tilting the floor⁴ towards a line of cash registers, but dbt Labs was never going to survive by selling a thin web app on top of an approachable Python package. But this version of dbt, one person told me, feels like it can last. The session that they said was most memorable was a panel of dbt execs, not for what they said, but for who they were: People with long resumes of successfully selling stuff. 

This year, that seems like what most people wanted: Not necessarily a free dbt, but an enduring, predictable one. They wanted a dbt Labs that, instead of trying to thread a commercial thread through an open-source needle, can focus on building better products, and worry less about the awkward acrobatic act of figuring out how to sell them for money while giving them away for free. Though dbt Labs can’t cut directly through that knot—the puzzle is a puzzle because you can’t just slap a price tag on something that is open-source—they can be direct about their goals: To build good, necessary software, to charge money for that software, and, on the side, if the balance sheet lets them get away with it, to throw a party. This Coalesce made comfortably clear what future Coalesces will be: Mostly a means for the first two ends; a financially-motivated event, hosted by a financially-motivated entity, supported by financially-motivated sponsors; a corporate conference, not so different than the rest of them.

But still a little different. By embracing that more stable equilibrium, the more unique parts of Coalesce start to feel less like flickering lights slowly being stamped out by some late-stage capitalist inevitability—that all fun things must be monetized—and more like the enduring bits of character that have made Coalesce the annual draw that it’s always been. We can see the dashes of color that dbt Labs’ team add to an often otherwise lifeless event calendar for their presence and not their absence. And we can stop having weighty, anxious conversations about what Coalesce is, who it’s for, and what happens next—it’s a conference, it’s for making money, and the same thing happens again next year, in the same place, in much the same way. But that’s ok, because even if the talks are sponsored, if the fun is HR-approved, and if the happy hours happen on a budget,⁵ the magic was always in the little moments—the conversation with someone who hired a former coworker, and tells you how great they’ve been; the faces to names; the gossip about an old boss’ old boss; the discovery that your new job is someone else’s last job, and that they want to tell you about it; the mystery-flavored taffies and off-brand Lego swag; and the reunions that remind you, no matter how branded the content and corporate the parties, there will always be people who are happy that you could make back for at least one more year.

Because it’s not the marquees that make the mood, but the background music. 

1. And drunk.

2. Fewer, though not none. There was at least one presentation done in costume, and a Triforce reference on a main stage. So, still not quite the Enterprise AI HR Transformational Assembly.

3. More like Coaless, amirite?

4. Before anyone emails me about it, to be clear, this is here simply to provide a visual of a tilting floor; the reference to the Titanic is entirely incidental. 

5. If we can have fun in Las Vegas—a glittering monument to abusive, extractive capitalism if there ever was one, in which every twist and turn is designed to separate you from your wallet—we can still enjoy a conference that exists to sell us software.