Ghodsi: Startups should hire a sales leader before hiring marketing
Ali Ghodsi · 20VC: Databricks CEO, Ali Ghodsi on The 3 Phases of Startup Growth, How to Evaluate Risk and Downside Scenario Planning & Who, What and When To Hire When Scaling Your Go-To-Market · Jan 14, 2021 · at 20:20
Ali Ghodsi is the co-founder and CEO of Databricks. He discusses executive hiring sequencing when transitioning a startup into the go-to-market scaling phase.
0:00 / 0:23exact quote · 23.7s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“The recommendation, actually, that we got was hire first the head of marketing, because, you know, the conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley is you need a marketing person to create the story and write the marketing material, otherwise the salesperson that you hire doesn't know what to sell. But I disagree with that. I actually think you should hire a sales leader first, and you, the founders, together with that person, should go out and meet customers and try to figure out how do we sell this product in the initial phase.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Ali Ghodsi
Ghodsi: Great enterprise sales leaders can reach $5M ARR regardless of product
“I think if you have a really, really good sales leader on the enterprise software side, they should be able to get you to zero to five million revenue or so, regardless almost, of your product.”
Ghodsi: Negotiating Marginally Higher Startup Valuations Is a Waste of Time
“Oftentimes, the valuation doesn't actually matter that much. People try to get another 10 or 20% higher valuation than what they have on the table right now, but you're only raising 10% of that valuation or something like that, so actually it's only gonna make…”
Ghodsi: Hands-on execution is an anti-pattern in late-stage startup leadership
“Rolling up your sleeves and doing it yourself is actually an anti-pattern at our face, because that means you're solving it in an ad hoc way.”
Ghodsi: High-growth companies outgrow most employees' career evolution capabilities
“High growth companies actually mostly outgrow most people's careers. The company's changing so fast that you can't in your career keep up with it. You need to change too fast to keep up with it.”
Ghodsi: AI will automate office work, unlocking a multi-trillion-dollar TAM
“Pretty much everything that humans are doing in these offices today, that's very repetitive, and it's not extremely creative, can be automated. So I think the impact of data science and AI is going to be massive, definitely in the trillions of dollars, in term…”
Ghodsi: Jack-of-all-trades talent essential early, harmful in later stages
“In the early phases, you're looking for these people that are just really smart. They can figure things out, and they can roll up their sleeves, and just pretty much do anything. They can do a decent job at pretty much anything. Those are the kind of people th…”