Databricks

“It's the same Spark that anyone else gets in the open source. All the libraries, all the improvements we put into the engine, you can just download them and run them yourselves. Or if you want you know, you can talk to a vendor that provides support. Support o…”

“Well, the element, I believe, that has brought open source from fringe hobby project out of academia to mainstream is the fact that you can actually build commercial businesses On top of open source. Right. And a lot of that, which you guys at Databricks are d…”

“I try to, if I have a new executive, I call them every day. When they're new, I call them every day.”

“And we could not do a deal that was bigger than 20 30 K. It was just impossible.”

“It wasn't until he then went at it for one year and the end of that year, suddenly half of our revenue was enterprise.”

“My first question is usually, how do you think it's going? And you know, in 50% of the cases they'll say it's not going well.”

“This PLG thing is just overrated for the kind of business we have in the kind of market we are in.”

“So we bought Mosaic. I did not unleash our sales force and go to market of 3000 people. To sell the thing that we bought because we just can't satisfy the demand. Like there's not enough GPUs.”

“One of the things that's really interesting that's happened in the sort of brains of the CEOs and the boards is that they realize Maybe I can beat my competition. Maybe this is the kryptonite that will help me kill my enemy. I have the data with generative AI.…”

“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…”

“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…”

“To train us, you know, state of the art model, you're at a hundred million dollars plus. You know, to train a, you know, a big one, to train a small one, like the Databricks model that just came out. It's like on the order of ten million dollars.”

“When we presented to our board of directors on AI in September, the way we structured is I had seven external speakers come in, right? To give different perspectives from an investor perspective. The CEO of one of the leading LLMs. We partnered with Databricks…”

“And actually in so in entrepreneurial world, like we saw this with Databricks, where like they had a very clear vision of what they were going to be. And the audience wanted it on premise and they refused to do it because it was so contrary to their vision. Bu…”

“Even in the Andreessen portfolio, I was just thinking off the top of my head, we have three companies that are at the 104 companies at the hundred billion dollar mark, right? I mean, there's Stripe, Databricks, Coinbase, OpenAI.”

“I always rate CEOs. It's like, okay, if I was running that company, would I do a better job or a worse job? And with Databricks, I do a way fucking worse job.”

“Look, you got to get them to put enough, they're such a big company that they're going to lose interest many times. So if you don't have them write you such a big check that somebody in there is going to get fired if it doesn't go well, you're, it doesn't matt…”

“If we started the company in 2014, a year later instead, so a year later than we actually did, then we would have had our difficult year in 2016. But by 2016, the cloud was starting to happen. AI was starting to happen, you know, so we would have done the fixe…”

“So, you know, I think keep a great relationship with people who leave your company cause they'll, they can boomerang back in a couple of years.”

“On the series C Jan had a handshake with the red point with red point and Redpoint just stopped returning his calls to the point where the Series C was led by us, who also led the Series A, and, ah, NEA who led the Series B, like we co-led the Series C, becaus…”

“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…”

“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.”

“The fact that the first sales guy we hired was a sales savant, like a genius, shock. I mean, like, that never happens. And he was a guy we didn't know. Like, we, like, our talent team, like, found him some, from some company we never heard of.”

“I guarantee you, you'll never have an idea this good again as long as you live.”

“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…”

“I love to hire people who have seen great at a big company, like, or I don't know if it's great, but they've seen process scale, big company. They've been at a Google, they've been at Amazon, they understand the processes so that I understand how to navigate a…”

“But the problem was that you know, as it is often with open sources that you just everyone's just downloading the open source version. Actually your biggest enemy is your open source project.”

“PLG is something that we had tried very hard and it didn't work for us. Like, and actually one of our biggest failures was PLG at Databricks.”

“We're, you know, seven co-founders still.”

“I happen to think that the return profile of that recent one in Databricks is, is very attractive. But, you know, we don't want an entire portfolio of things that we think are like pretty safe two X's, you know, where I think the question is, can we make five …”

“And then they have the big AI native companies all as customers.”