The Ledger
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Lemkin: Databricks reached $5B revenue and is accelerating at 55% growth
“But Snowflake's AI revenue is pretty small. It's a Gentix strategy is just starting, and Databricks rode this to, now they're both at five billion, and Databricks is growing and accelerating at 55% growth.”
Avoiding stock volatility is the primary advantage of staying private longer
“I think the biggest advantage is the avoidance of volatility in your stock price and sort of employee management. And so, you know, I think You know, if you can kind of steadily grow or control your stock price in the private markets, even if it's a slight dis…”
Lemkin: Anthropic and Databricks will IPO in late 2026
“I think Anthropic and Databricks have an incentive to IPO, as best I understand it. They have an incentive. As Rory said, times are great. And so I think it'll be the, unless, unless, unless the market crashes for some reason, I think they're going to do it wh…”
Degnan: Databricks grows faster than Snowflake despite lower total revenue
“They're, they are growing faster. They are behind Snowflake, but they are growing faster than Snowflake.”
Lemkin: Databricks acquired database startup Neon for billions
“I mean, Neon got bought for, by Databricks for billions,”
Benioff: Snowflake, Databricks, and Palantir Foundry each generate $3B-$4B revenue
“When you look at other data clouds, Snowflake, Databricks, Palantir Foundry, they're all in the three to four billion dollar revenue.”
Stebbings: Databricks is undervalued at a 25x revenue multiple
“It actually feels undervalued at 25 X revenue, Given the growth rate, given the fact it's found a lead, given the macro trend where it sits, it really feels like actually very reasonably priced.”
O'Driscoll: A 25x revenue multiple requires two more years of 50% growth
“If you're paying 25 X runway for anything, you know, what you're really saying is, you know, the only thing, you know, for sure is that when things level out in growth rate, they get valued like normal companies. So implicit in that is some statement about how…”
O'Driscoll: Andreessen Horowitz has invested at least $500M into Databricks
“For that guy, you probably, I'm willing to bet they have the guts of a billion dollars in that deal. Could be wrong. Half a billion at least.”
Databricks reached $13M ARR in its first year of enterprise sales
“We did, in our first year, which I think we did 12 or thirteen million ARR, we did two million dollar deals.”
Ron Gabrisco predicts Databricks will reach $10 billion in revenue soon
“I think we'll be ten billion in a few years.”
Databricks offered free technical resources to early customers spending $100K
“We developed There's a whole thing we call the strategic customer program where we'd be like, hey, if you spend a hundred grand, we'll give you free resource.”
Ben Horowitz called Databricks his highest-upside portfolio company in 2015
“So I was like looking at Mongo or Square or some of those companies and he was like, yeah, this company called Databricks, it's way earlier stage than anything you're looking at, but it's got the most upside of any company in my whole portfolio.”
Databricks has individual customer accounts generating $100M in annual contract value
“Like we have a hundred million dollar accounts.”
Ron Gabrisco hired roughly 40 salespeople in his first six months
“Second, I, you know, I hired probably 40 people the first six months, some of the best salespeople from my network, and I was literally just go set up meetings and find out what people will pay for and get the brand out there.”
Databricks avoids hiring sales candidates with a pattern of short stints
“Like if they have a bunch of one or two year stints, they're not long for Databricks.”
Databricks recently closed a single customer contract worth $190M
“Yeah, we just did one for a hundred and ninety million actually.”
Ron Gabrisco says Ali Ghodsi is 100x better than other technical founders
“He's a hundred X better than any of them because he can do the technical stuff, but he's also an inspirational leader and he knows the business.”
Lemkin: Databricks recently held an analyst summit and is IPO-ready
“Literally the fact that this last week they had an analyst summit where they went through all their metrics, their revenue, their growth rate through through an entire group of investors and analysts says to me, they will decide one data file and it will just …”
G Squared is actively buying secondary shares in Anthropic, OpenAI, and Databricks
“A lot. A lot. And I've got appetite for more. Same with OpenAI. Same with Databricks. Wiz.”
O'Driscoll: The IPO window is always open for $50B companies
“Look, the window is, was, and always has been open for Databricks and Stripe. They just don't want to go through the window, right? There's no, like, The windows open and shut for the two billion dollar market cap IPO. The window is always open for the fifty b…”
Lemkin: Databricks acquired Postgres database startup Neon for $1B
“Databricks bought its own Postgres database company Neon for a billion.”
O'Driscoll: Capital flows to venture will fall if major IPOs stay delayed
“If on the other hand, if those keep pushing out, then at some point it becomes really hard to have all this money in private illiquid assets when you have pressures on your endowment and all that. And then at that point you would see the money go down.”
Baillie Gifford maintained pro rata in Databricks' $60B round without doubling down
“Remember we did our pro rata in the sixty billion round, which is a little bit different from saying we're doubling down, right? So it's, we stood our hand, we put a small amount of extra capital into it, but we didn't double down in the 60 round.”
Bookman: Databricks and Stripe raised massive rounds primarily for employee liquidity
“They're raising, Databricks is raising most of that to deliver secondary to employees, including to deal with some tax issues, and I know that's what Stripe did, and Josh, I think, is doing most of these.”
Many join Databricks solely because it is perceived as hot
“Look at Databricks, right? Like Databricks is hiring lots of people. Some might argue too many people. I, we'll see how that plays out. But A lot of people are just going to Databricks because it's a hot company, or so they think.”
Lemkin: Mega decacorns will allow top growth funds to hit 3x net
“I think there are, there will be enough stripes and data bricks and open AIs that some growth funds can do three X net or more, and that will get the LPs to re up and that will rearm the decacorn hunters.”
Meyer: Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi insists on deep founder involvement in product work
“And I tried that for the first six months at Databricks. And that's not what Ali wanted to hear. He didn't want me to go off and do something and then show him how awesome it was. You know, he wanted to be deeply involved and have the founders deeply involved …”
Meyer: Be collective customer obsessed, never listen to feature design requests
“People like to talk about being customer obsessed. But I think of there's the customer, and then there's the collective customer. So you have to be collective customer obsessed. So you never want to overfit to a customer because then it'll be a tiny town, righ…”
Meyer: Speed of Learning Matters More Than Speed of Shipping
“Like, speed of learning is everything. But that doesn't mean shipping. That doesn't mean, you know, people talk about one-way doors, Two-way doors, type one, type two decisions, and all this stuff. Like, the key is maximizing your learning curve, and there's s…”
Meyer: Unemotional product management only works for incremental optimization
“That's great if you're doing something incremental. If you're like, let's grow revenue 10% on a product that has product market fit. Yeah, you can be, you can have no emotion then. A lot of the job is not about speccing the product and building the product. A …”
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…”
Ghodsi: Finance leaders are crucial early GTM counterbalances to sales spending
“The finance function will be a counterbalance. So find the right finance leader that works well with your sales leader to make sure that there are checks and balances. Finance leader will make sure that the bottom line also still works out, that you're not bur…”
Ghodsi rejects gut instinct, favoring cerebral processes for startup decisions
“I don't believe in gut feeling. This is just my personal sort of leadership style. When people tell me, you know, ultimately you have to have a gut check and you make that gut decision and ultimately you sleep on it and the answer comes to you and so on. I don…”
O'Driscoll: a16z DOJ board investigation will resolve by exiting Fivetran board
“But my guess is it peters out into some version of the venture firm just saying, we'll take off the board member on Fivetrans, whatever, right?”
O'Driscoll: Cost per completed task matters more than cost per token
“I'm trying to, the big picture at the start was the basic point is, you know, cost per token is really not a useful metric. It's kind of cost per completed task was the first thing. How much does it cost to get things done?”
Arora: Snowflake, Glean, and Databricks are reshaping analytics with LLM data lakes
“I think the analytic world is getting reshaped already where you can see people like Snowflake or Glean or Databricks. All these people boast enterprise data lakes where you can bring the data and run LLMs against it and get you much more synthesized analytics…”
Stebbings: Databricks raised privately at $165B, up from $134B
“Databricks come out today. No, no. We're going to do another round. We're going to do another round. One hundred and sixty five billion price up from one hundred and thirty four billion earlier this year.”
Lindquist: Databricks breached Snowflake accounts by taking small initial footholds
“You see, I saw this with Snowflake and Databricks, right? Snowflake would own everything, and then Databricks would get one small foothold somewhere, and suddenly now they're fighting over the same workloads, and someone's going to win that.”
Lindquist: Snowflake and Databricks comp reps on net revenue to defend workflows
“You look at like a Snowflake or a Databricks, that's their model, and it's because they're competing over workflows in the account.”
Swisher: Investors passed on Snowflake and Databricks early rounds over low margins
“Snowflake and Databricks. Very low margin early. A lot of people passed on those early rounds because they're, ah, in SaaS, you have to have 80% gross margin.”
O'Driscoll: Thrive executed exceptional stock-picking with Stripe, Databricks, OpenAI
“I mean, I think, we said it in one of the shows earlier on, Thrive has done an amazing stock picking job of backing Stripe, of backing Databricks, of backing OpenAI, and of backing them at scale.”
Lemkin: Going public enables Databricks to execute tens of billions in M&A
“Maybe at some point, even if you're Revolut, if you really want to do deals for real, it's, there are limits to private stock in cash, and if Databricks goes public, and it's worth two to three times Snowflake, it can buy, it may be able to buy the parts of it…”
O'Driscoll: Databricks and Snowflake Will Fight Fiercely for 10 Years
“They're going to struggle and fight against each other for the next 10 years, just like SAP and Oracle fought against each other for the last 20.”
Lemkin: Databricks crossed $4B in revenue while growing at 50%
“Databricks just said they're crossing four billion, growing 50.”