Ghodsi: Ideal hires combine big-tech scale experience with startup grit
Ali Ghodsi · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a $100 Billion Business · Oct 15, 2025 · at 54:57
Ali Ghodsi, CEO of Databricks, describes his ideal candidate profile when acquiring companies and hiring top talent.
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“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 bureaucracy and work with it. And they're not going to just be inundated by it, but then they've gone on and done their own startup. And that's really, really hard, right? It's like extremely hard trying to do everything yourself and you don't have any help. And then, you know, you're trying to do this in this crazy market and you're trying to compete with a hundred million dollar offers when you have like nothing. So that takes a certain amount of grit and it's really humbling. So I love the people that have done both of those.”
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