Ali Ghodsi
26 statements across 3 episodes · 6 bullish · 8 bearish · 2 people on the record · first statement Jun 14, 2023 by Ali Ghodsi · said 17 times in 6 episodes since 2024 · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Ali Ghodsi's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Mentions by year
brought up most by Packy McCormick (6), David Ulevitch (4), David George (3), Ben Horowitz (3), Martin Casado (1)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 10 mentions in 2 episodes 5 per episode
2025 6 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
2024 1 mention in 1 episode
Everything said about Ali Ghodsi, oldest first
Jun 14, 2023
Jun 14, 2023 negative
Jun 14, 2023
Jun 14, 2023
Ghodsi: New CEOs must personally handle executive searches and backdoors
“If you're new and you don't really know what a great CFO or CRO or VP of engineering looks like, you should be immersing yourself, spending all the time interviewing everyone, doing backdoors everyone. Doing dinners with people you can't get.”
Jun 14, 2023
Jun 14, 2023
Jun 14, 2023
Ghodsi: An executive hiring mistake costs two years of progress
“I say mistakes take between a year and a half to two years. Takes you six months. Jury's out. Is this, do we really need, nobody wants to Fired someone within six months of hiring someone, right? So you've taken six months, then you need to have this conversat…”
Jun 14, 2023
Sep 25, 2023 neutral
Sep 25, 2023 negative
Ghodsi: MMLU benchmark scores are inflated due to web data contamination
“MMLU is just a multi-choice question that's on the web. Ask a question. Here's, is the answer A, B, C, D, and then it says what the right answer is. And it's on the web. You can deliberately train on it and create an LLM that crushes it on that. Okay. Or you c…”
Sep 25, 2023 positive
Ghodsi: Smaller custom models can beat large LLMs on domain accuracy
“And there you're better off if you have a good data set to train, you can train a smaller model. The latency will be faster to use it later, and it will be cheaper to use it later, and yes, you can have absolutely accuracy that beats the really large model, bu…”
Sep 25, 2023 positive
Ghodsi: Enterprise CEOs now bypass CIOs to discuss AI strategy directly
“I get to talk these days to the CEOs of these big companies who previously were not interested in what I'm doing. I would be talking to the CIO, but now suddenly they want to talk like, Hey, I want this generative AI. I want to talk strategy, strategy for my c…”
Sep 25, 2023 negative
Oct 15, 2025 positive
Oct 15, 2025 negative
Oct 15, 2025 negative
Oct 15, 2025 negative
Oct 15, 2025 neutral
Oct 15, 2025
Ghodsi: Most startup BD deals fail because startups offer no commensurate value
“So like in, in these BD deals there always has to be a give and get that actually is kind of commensurate. And this is why most of these deals fall apart and they don't work. There has to be something that you as a small player can give that they don't have. U…”
Oct 15, 2025 negative
Ghodsi: Databricks passed on acquiring a successful company over weak talent
“There is one really good company that well, one really successful company that we never acquired. And I always vetoed it whenever it came up because I just think that the quality of their employee base is not great. And I didn't want it to dilute Databricks.”
Oct 15, 2025
Horowitz: Many CEOs ignore existential competitive threats out of denial
“He's paranoid enough that he knew that that could be an issue, and then he trusted himself enough to go get deep enough to decide whether to do it or not, as opposed to, you know, ignore it. Like these guys are trying to kill me. I don't want to see it. Which …”
Oct 15, 2025 positive
Ghodsi highly recommends competitor Frank Slootman's book Amp It Up
“One of my competitors, Frank Slootman wrote the book called Amp It Up. It's a great book on how you get you know, execution into a company, like getting a high performance culture read. Everybody's always trying to excel and do better and better sort of that k…”
Oct 15, 2025 bullish
Oct 15, 2025 positive
Horowitz warned Ghodsi that selling Databricks early would cause lifelong regret
“Hey, you can do whatever you want. You can sell. You're going to make a lot of money and you'll be super successful in life. But you know, if you're like me, you're going to look back the rest of your life thinking, you know, I missed that one shot. That was t…”
Oct 15, 2025
Ghodsi: Framing feedback as optional career coaching increases employee receptivity
“I think a lot of feedback can be recast. Into, you know, I'm just here to help you, but feel free to completely ignore this advice. But, you know, if you want to be really successful, if you want to get that job, or if you want to get that project next time, i…”