The Ledger
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Former Snowflake CRO calls Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi a dick and liar
“I, you know, I strongly dislike the CEO of Databricks, but I think Mike, cause he's a dick and he's a liar, but you know, I look, I think at the end of the day, if I, if I'm honest about it, I think the two companies as a combined entity, that would be a amazi…”
Ron Gabrisco predicts Databricks will become a trillion-dollar company
“I think Databricks is a once in a lifetime type company. It will be a trillion dollar company. Somebody in that data and AI space will become a trillion dollar company, and we're the innovation leaders. I think we can do it, right?”
Databricks has migrated eight of Snowflake's top 10 customers
“We've done 250. Snowflake, the Databricks migrations, eight of their top 10.”
Lemkin: Databricks and OpenAI IPOs will be nail in coffin for SaaS
“I think it will be the nail in the coffin for almost every public software company. And what I mean is when Stripe and data, like, okay, there's OpenAI, there's Anthropic, we can put them in a different category, right? They clearly are on many levels. When Op…”
Peets: Databricks is not worth 2.5x Snowflake's $55B market cap
“Snowflake today is worth what? Fifty five billion. So is somebody going to make the argument to me that Databricks is worth two and a half times snowflake? You are, nobody's making that argument to me.”
Lemkin: SpaceX, Canva, Databricks, and Anthropic will IPO in 2026
“I think we see four IPOs backloaded next year. SpaceX goes out first. Canva comes out of nowhere second. Databricks does it in the back half of the year because it's just time. Anthropic does it at the end of the year. OpenAI probably should have gone first, b…”
Degnan: Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi's noisy strategy works
“Ali at Databricks, he shouts pretty loud and he's done a good job, and I don't necessarily agree about how he goes about doing things, but It's worked for Databricks.”
Snowflake could have killed Databricks by building a notebook and Spark connector
“I would just would have hired more salespeople and focused on new logo acquisition and pounded on product to give me a notebook and a spark connector, and we would have kicked the shit out of Databricks and they would be dead.”
Databricks rejected a $10M on-premise deal from JPMorgan to stay cloud-only
“They're like, we'll give you ten million bucks to put this, and at the time, we're less than a million, like our whole first-year target's like ten million, to put it on-prem. And Ali was like, no way, we're not doing anything on-prem.”
Databricks is growing at three times the rate of Snowflake
“And if you look at it too, right, we're three times their growth rate.”
Ron Gabrisco claims Snowflake is five-plus years behind Databricks
“Five plus years, in my opinion. You know, we bet on the future early days. We bet on AI. We bet on the lake house. We bet on open source. They're just dipping their toe into that.”
Ramaswamy: Databricks Buys Revenue and Has Double Snowflake's Sales Headcount
“It's very clear that they're buying a bunch of business. That they don't have to worry about things like you know free cash flow. They have doubled the number of sales people that we have.”
Ramaswamy: Databricks Shifts Narratives Between AI and SQL to Mislead
“Even if you look at, you know the competitor that we talked about for a few months, it was all about like amazing. AI is going through the roof. I haven't heard much from them about AI recently. All of a sudden, amazing. It's equal going through the roof. It f…”
O'Driscoll: Databricks fetches a higher private multiple than public Snowflake
“Databricks can get capital at a higher revenue multiple because they're higher growth rate than Snowflake can and on hassle-free terms.”
Masad: Enterprises are skipping SaaS tools to build directly on data warehouses
“People are skipping the SaaS tools entirely and like building on top of their data warehouse.”
Stebbings: Anthropic made $6B in February, exceeding Databricks' lifetime revenue
“28 day month of February, where they did six billion in revenue, which was more than Databricks has done in their entire lifetime.”
Lemkin: Will Never Invest in Technical Startups Lacking Technical CEOs
“I'm super skeptical of technical companies where the CEO isn't One of the greatest technical visionaries in the industry. I'm just, I'll never do that investment again. I'll never do an investment again where, where, where it's not like Databricks are better a…”
O'Driscoll: Late-stage VC has bifurcated into sub-$400M and mega-private tiers
“There really are two different late stage businesses now. It used to be late stage was, I remember Meritech would say, beyond 10 Million is late stage, and you'd think 10 to a hundred million was quote late stage. Now, late stage is 10 to four hundred million,…”
a16z's best fund ever saw Databricks return 7x and Coinbase 5x
“Our best performing fund in the history of the firm is actually a one billion dollar fund. So it's a large fund, right? In that fund, Databricks has returned seven X the fund so far. Coinbase has returned already DPI five X of the fund.”
Lemkin: Databricks Would Be the Second Best Public Software Company
“I think the simple answer is it would be the second best public company if it were public today.”
Randle: Writing mega-growth checks prevents firms from staying focused on Series A
“When you're writing billion dollar checks, that is your main product. Like it's, that's, what's going to make you all the money. And so if you put three billion dollars in open AI and it's going to turn into twelve billion dollars, it just subconsciously, whet…”
Databricks has double Snowflake's headcount but generates less revenue
“Look at Databricks. Their sales team is, they're less revenue than Snowflake. Their sales team is twice the size of Snowflake. Their engineering team is twice the size of the engineering team.”
Databricks outbid Snowflake for startup acquisitions by two to three times
“They buy companies that Snowflake Has had term sheets on for three times or two times the amount of money that Snowflake is offering to buy the companies for, because there's no consequence.”
Degnan: Snowflake and Databricks are complementary, not direct competitors
“They're a pretty dominant, in terms of the data estate, Snowflake and Databricks own the data estate together. And they're complementary for the most part, not, not really competitive.”
Stebbings: Andreessen Horowitz will generate $40B+ back from Databricks
“They're about to get the payday of paydays in Ventureland with a minimum of forty billion back from Databricks.”
Taneja: Private markets function like public markets for elite startups
“I think for the very best companies, private markets behave like public markets. There's a secondary market, you can liquidate, so your shareholders can take liquidity, employees can take liquidity, you have access to credit, you can do M&A, your stocks value,…”
Lemkin: Upcoming tech IPOs could trigger a double bubble
“We might get the next wave of IPOs that are even better very quickly, and the amount of froth that that could create in the ecosystem, the amount of just returns to LPs could create a bubble on top of a bubble, because times might just get much better in the n…”
O'Driscoll: Tech IPO wave will eliminate private market scarcity premiums
“If all those companies were to go public, as you say, if the canvas of this world, if the database wanted to go out, it's not clear to me that they'd get that three X pop. Instead, you might want to have is, okay, they'd probably trade at the very high, quite …”
Databricks waited until $500M ARR to verticalize its sales team
“I didn't go vertical at Databricks until we were probably five hundred million plus, right?”
Consumption pricing beats seat-based pricing by removing caps on growth
“Having a consumption based model is super smart. I see this mistake a lot. Like people will be like, oh, I'm going to price on users. There's a cap on users. You know, if the economy goes down, then there's maybe less users. But if you can price based on, you …”
SaaS companies under $100M ARR should prioritize direct sales over channels
“If you're less than 50 or a hundred million, like you need to build a strong direct sales channel, and then you can build the partner channel. But at five hundred million now, we should be scaling, moving stuff through channels, right?”
Databricks will expand sales headcount despite AI efficiency gains
“As long as humans are buying software, I think you need humans to sell software. So we definitely use AI to become more efficient, but we're going to hire quite a few folks because we're going to go big, so.”
O'Driscoll: Four or more venture exits will top $65B in 5-7 years
“If there's not four exits, Above sixty five billion in the next five or seven years, then the people who bought Stripe, SpaceX, Databricks, OpenAI and Antropic are screwed. So I don't think they're screwed. So I think there's going to be, this trend is going t…”
Ramaswamy: Snowflake is Ahead of Databricks in Generative AI
“They were first to market. That was their sweet spot, and they've been good at it for a for a while. We were very much in in catch up mode. But AI is a much younger field. Didn't really exist, let's call it pre-ChatGPT. There, I feel incredibly confident that …”
Lemkin: Databricks is outpacing Snowflake at $2.5B revenue
“It seemed like Snowflake was going to be the next great platform, but it is Databricks. I know it's not completely fungible product, but it's growing even faster at 2.5 billion, right? It's just mortal. Databricks, I think proves Snowflake was mortal.”
Stebbings: Stripe and Databricks Will Not Go Public in 2024
“I don't think Stripe or Databricks will go out in 24.”
Databricks replaced 'data-driven' with 'truth-seeking' as a core value
“Databricks used to have this value called data-driven. Where we wanted everybody to be data driven, but it has a dark side because you can weaponize data, right? You can argue any point of view with any set of data if you're clever enough with numbers, right? …”
Meyer: Databricks engineering and sales each blamed the other for ruining the company
“When I came into Databricks it was bimodal, right? Engineers thought sales ran the company. And we're destroying it. And sales thought engineering ran the company and we're destroying it.”
Stripe and SpaceX Will Not Go Public in 2024
“I don't expect Stripe or SpaceX to go out next year, and Databricks alone won't be enough to crack open the IPO windows.”
Stebbings: Tech IPO market will not re-open until H2 2025
“But I think it's going to be longer. Like, you know, it, you'll see it in the update coming out this weekend, but it's like, you know, data breaks, stripe, it's not going to be enough to actually crack open the IPO markets like we think it will be, I don't thi…”
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: Startups should hire a sales leader before hiring marketing
“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…”
Lemkin: Over 90% of Neon Databases Are Built by AI Agents
“At Databricks neon, which is their super base competitor, over 90% of the databases are built by agents, not by humans.”
Clements: Only top 10 private tech companies can avoid IPOs
“With that said, I think that applies to like the 10 best private companies in the world. Like Databricks can do those things. Stripe can do those things. There's a lot of companies that just do need to get public.”
Swisher: Coatue was the only private investor in both Snowflake and Databricks
“I think we were the only private investor that was Invested in Snowflake and Databricks when they were both private.”
Zeev: Venture liquidity could surge in 2026-2027 driven by mega-IPOs
“By the way, that might change in twenty-twenty-six, in big way, in a big way, because there are a host of a host of huge, unprecedented size IPOs in the works now. You know, companies like SpaceX, and Stripe, and Databricks, and, you know, and others. So there…”
O'Driscoll: Databricks generates $4.5B-$5B at 40%+ growth and is cash-flow positive
“I'm going to pick on, in my view, one of the best companies out there, Databricks. It's doing four and a half, five billion dollars, right? It's valued at, it's got a growth rate of 40% plus. It's cashflow positive.”