The Ledger
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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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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 …”
Founders should not delegate sales until reaching $5M to $10M ARR
“A lot of founders think, oh, I hired my, a salesperson, now I don't need to do sales. Because a lot of technical founders, they don't really enjoy sales, right? So like, I need a salesperson to like, Take this off my plate. I want to focus more on the product …”
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?”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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 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.”
Early-stage startups must buy major enterprise logos with dedicated technical deployment
“Getting those big logos is so important early days. Like you need to buy them. And you need to put resources in to make them successful.”
Very few software companies can scale relying solely on startup customers
“I think there's very few businesses that can just scale based on startups and digital natives. They go up, down, all over the place, right?”
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.”
Startups should start with a horizontal sales motion before industry verticalization
“I mean, I think you have to start horizontal because you're, again, learning what's your applicability to the different verticals.”
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.”
Early-stage sales hires need domain knowledge over deal-size experience
“Early days, it's the domain knowledge.”
Databricks has individual customer accounts generating $100M in annual contract value
“Like we have a hundred million dollar accounts.”
Databricks recently closed a single customer contract worth $190M
“Yeah, we just did one for a hundred and ninety million actually.”
High sales payouts are an early startup's best recruiting tool
“Early days, you got to make sure that salespeople are crushing their numbers and making money, because that's going to be your best recruiting engine.”
AI is already better at outbound sales than human representatives
“I don't know if completely replace it, but certainly I think outbound stuff, the AI is actually better at it than humans, in my opinion, because it'll also learn what works faster, right?”
Ron Gabrisco predicts Databricks will reach $10 billion in revenue soon
“I think we'll be ten billion in a few years.”
Databricks immediately disqualified non-cloud prospects during its early GTM scaling
“One of our qualifying questions is, are you in the cloud? If you're not in the cloud, then you're not ready for Databricks.”
AWS waited until $100B in revenue to fully verticalize its sales org
“AWS just moved to verticals right across the whole organization and they're a hundred billion.”
Databricks has approximately 20 sales reps earning over $1M annually
“Now we probably have 20 guys make a million bucks in in the sales team.”
Databricks currently has 5,000 total sales employees and 1,400 quota-carrying reps
“We have 1400 reps now. We have 5000 people in sales.”
Enterprise partner leaders should have direct sales experience
“Just getting the person that's always been in partnerships, sometimes it's a little bit dicey. I'd rather find somebody that's done some sales and done some partnerships.”
Expanding internationally requires transplanting high-performing HQ talent
“One of the big lessons I learned is you want to transplant some of your talent. So I literally, like when we opened EMEA, Took four or five of my, you know, best young hungry sellers and said, okay, you're going to go to Amea for a year. It's going to be great…”
Enterprise sales reps should complete five to ten meetings weekly
“You know, we sit at the bar at like five a week is kind of the minimum, so, you know, five to 10, he's probably right, and that's six to eight, that's not a bad metric, but again, you do want to make sure you prepare.”
At least 25% of enterprise prospect meetings should turn into opportunities
“So, at least 25% of those should turn into some kind of opportunity.”
Enterprise sales reps should spend 10 hours preparing for a one-hour meeting
“You practice 10 X more at least than you play. So if you have a one hour meeting, you should be preparing for it 10 hours.”
Scaling from $10M to $100M ARR is the hardest growth stage
“That 10 to a hundred million is pretty tough scale, because now you got a little bit of product market fit, but now you really have to get into like that enterprise motion, start getting referenceable customers, get them to speak about you.”
Databricks will fund $200M in partner projects this year
“You know, we'll fund two hundred million in projects to partners this year, but I would spend even more on partners and distribution.”
Startups should hit $100M ARR before starting a President's Club
“I would say you got to be a hundred million plus to do it.”
Databricks generated less than $1M in revenue when Ron Gabrisco joined
“Yeah, well less than a million.”
Early Databricks dedicated every Wednesday exclusively to sales prospecting
“Every Wednesday, all we did was prospecting.”
Databricks' early average contract values were $18K to $20K
“18 to 20 grand. I mean, when I came. Yeah, when I came in, we're, it was tiny. But the first, you know, say month I was there, we probably did a million bucks”
Databricks had hundreds of thousands of free Spark users when Gabrisco joined
“When I joined, we had hundreds of thousands of spark free users.”
Microsoft remains Databricks' largest commercial partner
“Ali and I did the deal with Microsoft, right? Which became kind of pretty historical, I think in legend. And it's still, you know, Microsoft's our, you know, biggest partner. It's a amazing partner for us.”
Databricks expanded into EMEA at $100M ARR and APJ at $250M ARR
“We probably started to do that to EMEA, maybe a hundred million plus, a hundred to two hundred and fifty million. And then we were an APJ, probably, you know, about two hundred fifty million plus.”