Databricks, every mention
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tap a year for its mentions
every year anyone Ben Horowitz 22Ali Ghodsi 22Sarah Wang 14Jen Kha 7David George 6Matt Bornstein 5Peter Levine 4Packy McCormick 4Frank Chen 4Erik Torenberg 4
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Databricks comes up
Why Investors Are Rethinking Everything for the AI Era
- ▶ 42:11 Aram Verdian Um, would you have wanted to sell Stripe, Databricks, or any of those other companies three, four years ago?
Why AI Demand Is Outrunning Compute Supply
- ▶ 57:42 David George And, and by the way, they're going to compete, they're going to be competing with not only the labs to be that abstraction layer, but Databricks. 3 times in the scene
How Open Source Became AI's Backbone | Inferact with a16z
- ▶ 36:40 Elena Burger Just about Infraact and, you know, running the company, and I know that Ian Stoick of Databricks is an advisor and a co-founder of Infraact, and I'm just curious what you've learned from him, ah, in terms of taking an open source project… 2 times in the scene
AI Markets: Deep Dive with a16z's David George
Ben Horowitz and David Solomon: The Sweetest Macro Spot in 40 Years
- ▶ 33:17 Ben Horowitz We've also kind of gotten all of our data in a Databricks data lake, and so we can ask, you know, basically any question about the firm or the portfolio.
The Biggest Bottlenecks For AI: Energy & Cooling
- ▶ 0:45 David George Um, we've got some slides showing this whole trend and, you know, I guess Databricks was an appropriate way to kick off, um, you know, talking about the trend of companies staying private longer than ever.
- ▶ 40:12 David George Then we got to usage-based, and so, you know, obviously all the cloud companies, uh, run that way, um, you know, Databricks runs that way, Snowflake, et cetera.
- ▶ 51:09 unnamed speaker Some of the names that we have underwritten, you know, I think there is this broader question of gosh, like there's a lot of, of names, for example, like, um, you know, the chat, uh, opening eyes of the world and also data bricks that feel… 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 55:02 David George So to the extent that instead of using that sort of structured database on the back end, you take all of your unstructured data and dump it into a Databricks, for example, um, you know, and, and query it or access it through that.
Ben & Marc: Why Everything Is About to Get 10x Bigger
- ▶ 10:09 Packy McCormick I, I love the, the email that you sent to, to Ali at, at Databricks, Ben, where you talk about the fact that, you know, the business was underselling itself, he was underselling the business, and it was gonna be 10 times bigger than… 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 15:25 Marc Andreessen But yeah, when, when we look at Substack, it's the exact same thing that you were just talking about with Databricks, which is like, wow, this thing could be orders of magnitude, orders of magnitude multiples, um, larger, um, you know,…
The Chip That Could Unlock AGI.
- ▶ 0:16 Matt Bornstein You had a lot of success doing Nirvana, Mosaic, and Databricks.
- ▶ 1:04 Matt Bornstein Prior to that, Naveen was at Databricks as head of AI and co-founder of two successful companies, Mosaic in the, uh, cloud computing world and Nirvana, uh, doing AI chip accelerators, uh, before it was cool.
- ▶ 3:22 Matt Bornstein You know, so you've had a lot of success doing both of those things and at Databricks, um, why start a new chip company now?
Michael Truell: How Cursor Builds at the Speed of AI
- ▶ 14:30 Michael Truell We have Databricks, Snowflake, we have, uh, we're on AWS GCP and Azure,
Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a $100 Billion Business
- ▶ 0:40 Erik Torenberg So in the spirit of, of, of Boss Talk, let's talk about the, the first time that you became a boss in terms of running, uh, uh, Databricks. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 2:01 Ali Ghodsi So this was the biggest challenge that Databricks had at the time. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 3:19 Ben Horowitz And with Databricks, I do a way fucking worse job. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 8:54 Ben Horowitz By the way, that's how we started, uh, Databricks was I think everybody was a PhD in computer science who was running anything.
- ▶ 12:57 Sarah Wang So maybe on the topic of managing talent, um, you have this incredibly high intensity culture at Databricks. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 19:24 Sarah Wang Um, we actually hired an ex-Databricks employee to A-sixteen Z, so we have some inside scoop on your leadership style, and one of the things he said was, you have this, and Ben sort of touched on this too, but you have this amazing ability… 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 31:35 Ali Ghodsi Uh, usually I find all these small companies show up and they come, for instance, to Databricks now and say, oh, we'd love for you to partner with us. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 37:40 Ben Horowitz And because, you know, they have a keen eye on that, everything they buy ends up looking like a Databricks product, you know, like, and, and that work is going in. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 43:34 Sarah Wang Maybe actually just to turn, so we're talking about Databricks as an acquirer. 7 times in the scene
- ▶ 51:10 Sarah Wang Um, and we know that you can bring the best talent in the house, right, to Databricks.
- ▶ 51:59 Ali Ghodsi You know, I get questions about how do we build our own company, you know, how do we succeed at Databricks and so on. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 54:44 Ali Ghodsi By the way, they come back, like after start companies, oftentimes they come back to Databricks and they're much more thankful and they understand. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 56:22 Ali Ghodsi One, one way to prove that is if Databricks, Databricks started in, if we had started in, you know, that rocky year, that difficult year, you know, would have then happened in, right? 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 58:41 Ali Ghodsi Um, you know, it's like, you know, I think the sentiment at Databricks was, or at least my sentiment was, 2 times in the scene
Is Non-Consensus Investing Overrated?
- ▶ 41:16 Martin Casado I mean, there's Stripe, Databricks, Coinbase, OpenAI.
The Future of Software Development - Vibe Coding, Prompt Engineering & AI Assistants
- ▶ 21:45 Matt Bornstein And, um, I think as a firm, we've been super, super active and super aggressive, you know, and, uh, investing in companies like Databricks, I mentioned, Fibetran, DBT, which, which, 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 24:51 Jennifer Li If it's, you know, YubiKeys or if it's, um, again, like Databricks on Spark. 2 times in the scene
Tech Executives: AI Has Changed SaaS Forever (Don't Fall Behind)
Founders, Media, & Memes: a16z’s Strategy for the Future | a16z LP Summit 2025
- ▶ 20:16 Ben Horowitz Yeah, and, yeah, and then, and by the way, like, that's where we have higher impact, too, you know, like, and I love Databricks, but I was, like, massively impactful early, and, you know, now, like, I call Ali, and I say, good job.
- ▶ 29:14 Ben Horowitz Yes, I think succession planning is kind of like a tactic, um, and look, we've already done succession, I, so the original Infra investor in the firm was me, um, and I made some good investments, you know, like Okta and, uh, Databricks,…
Giving New Life to Unstructured Data with LLMs and Agents
- ▶ 7:13 Anant Bhardwaj And I think there is a paper by Databricks, which is compound AI system, that elements are very good, but you need a bunch of systems before and after this for that to be reliable.
Beyond Leaderboards: LMArena’s Mission to Make AI Reliable
- ▶ 50:31 Ion Stoica Like, um, you know, like Databricks with Spark and, uh, or AnyScale with Ray.
Rick Rubin: Vibe Coding is the Punk Rock of Software
- ▶ 1:13:42 Ben Horowitz Um, and actually in, uh, 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.
How AI is Powering Payments, with Greg Ulrich of Mastercard
- ▶ 23:14 Greg Ulrich We partnered with Databricks quite a bit.
Build Your Startup With AI
- ▶ 4:33 Ben Horowitz You know, at Databricks, they've got a foundation model, but they're using in a very specific way, you know, in conjunction with their kind of leading data platform.
Startup Building: Challenges & Opportunities
- ▶ 35:29 Ben Horowitz Like if you do all those things, like I like, uh, Ali's company, Databricks, they're really, really good at that.
Politics & the Future of Tech
- ▶ 47:23 Marc Andreessen Um, our, another, you know, our company, Databricks, uh, just released another, you know, another, what looks like a big leapfrog on the smaller model side.
- ▶ 1:04:53 Marc Andreessen You know, to train a, you know, a big one, to train a small one, like, like the Databricks model that just came out.
Crisis in Higher Ed & Why Universities Still Matter
- ▶ 59:20 Ben Horowitz We funded, uh, you know, Databricks out of Berkeley, which was a research done, you know, on computer science and scalable systems in their, uh, basis in their amp lab.
AI Food Fights in the Enterprise with Databricks' Ali Ghodsi
- ▶ 6:09 Ali Ghodsi First of all, you can build the big one with mosaic and with data works. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 10:09 Ali Ghodsi It's like, I can just say it like at Databricks.
- ▶ 13:04 Ali Ghodsi These applications, which many of them are obvious, like, you know, Mark talked about it in his, you know, AI will save the world, you know, the lawyer, uh, you know, the teacher, they're like, there's lots of use, everybody knows, uh,…
- ▶ 14:09 Ben Horowitz Um, and then, you know, coming from Databricks perspective, how are you, how are you all thinking about open source, both with respect to Mosaic and then with the other, you know, things like Llama?
Ben Horowitz on Executive Firing (and Hiring)
- ▶ 1:17 unnamed speaker But in today's podcast, two of those leaders, a 16 z co-founder Ben Horowitz and Databricks co-founder and CEO Ali Godsey sit down to talk about hiring 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 21:25 Ben Horowitz They better know their function better than you, but they don't know Databricks better than you. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 27:53 Ben Horowitz How about, how about the other, though, because how do you keep the kind, like, let's say you need a pretty sharp cultural change, and you guys did at Databricks early on, where you were very engineering centric, I'll just say, 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 36:06 Ben Horowitz That's how he got into the Databricks interview process, and he was like the most left field candidate, but he ended up being the best candidate.
How to Build an Open Source Business
- ▶ 13:57 Peter Levine Databricks and Spark is an example.
- ▶ 23:48 Peter Levine Open source is not just Red Hat, Elastic, Databricks, Cloudera.
Everyone is an Analyst: Opportunities in Operational Analytics
The Future of Decision-Making: 3 Startup Opportunities
a16z Podcast | The Rise of the CCO
- ▶ 0:08 unnamed speaker The episode is a conversation with A-sixteen Z's Matt Levy, partner on the executive talent team, discussing the role with CCOs all, Alison Pickens of Gainsight, Krista Anderson-Copperman from Okta, and Hatem Shafiq from Databricks.
- ▶ 15:34 Hatem Shafiq So we built a customer maturity model in AppDynamics, but I've done a version two of it in Databricks.
a16z Podcast | A New Lab Rises
- ▶ 0:15 Sonal Chokshi Jan also founded Databricks and served as its CEO for the first few years, and has played a seminal role in multiple startups that have come out of the Berkeley data analytics or badass stack.
- ▶ 2:31 Peter Levine One, of course, is Spark, which is the basis of Databricks.
- ▶ 9:44 Peter Levine And a lot of that, which you, you guys at Databricks are doing, and many other companies, GitHub is another example, these hosted offerings that leverage open source has given a very clear path to sort of marry the innovation with open…
a16z Podcast | A Conversation With the Inventor of Spark
- ▶ 0:03 Sonal Chokshi I'm Sonal, and I'm here today with Matei Zaharia, the CTO and co-founder of Databricks, which is the primary company driving and developing Spark.
- ▶ 11:28 Matei Zaharia The people at, uh, UC Berkeley and the, the people we got, uh, at Databricks to, to, to work on Spark are just a really fantastic team that's able, uh, to, to build, uh, great software very quickly.
- ▶ 18:11 Matei Zaharia So the way we're doing this at, at Databricks is, uh, is actually quite different than I think it's a, it's an,
10 Years Too Early: On a Tech Career, Business, and Investing
- ▶ 6:30 unnamed speaker In fact, I remember when Databricks started and they said, we're going to be cloud only.
AI: What's Working, What's Not
- ▶ 13:34 Frank Chen We have a company called Databricks that's rapidly becoming the default computing platform for people building their AI models. 3 times in the scene
AI, Deep Learning, and Machine Learning: A Primer
- ▶ 34:14 Frank Chen So we have companies like Databricks and Aremo and SigOpt, all of which will help you bring deep learning, deep learning techniques into your own application so that you can make your application smarter,