The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 31 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Ghodsi: Product-led growth is overrated for enterprise software
“This PLG thing is just overrated for the kind of business we have in the kind of market we are in.”
George: a16z expects a 3x to 4x return on Databricks investment
“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 …”
Horowitz: Big company partnerships fail without massive financial commitments
“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…”
Horowitz: Redpoint ghosted Databricks' Series C, forcing insiders to co-lead
“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…”
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.”
Horowitz told Ghodsi he will never have an idea this good again
“I guarantee you, you'll never have an idea this good again as long as you live.”
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…”
Ghodsi: A commercial open-source company's biggest enemy is its free project
“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.”
Ghodsi: Product-led growth was one of Databricks' biggest failures
“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.”
Ghodsi: Databricks restricted MosaicML sales because of severe GPU shortages
“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.”
Ghodsi: Enterprise CEOs want proprietary AI models to protect their data
“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.…”
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…”
Horowitz admits he would do a much worse job running Databricks
“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.”
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…”
Casado: a16z portfolio includes four $100 billion companies
“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.”
Horowitz: Databricks refused on-premise customer demands to stay cloud-only
“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…”
Andreessen: Training state-of-the-art AI models costs $100M+
“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.”
Ghodsi: Early product-led growth capped Databricks deal sizes at $30K
“And we could not do a deal that was bigger than 20 30 K. It was just impossible.”
Levine: Cloud and SaaS enabled the commercial monetization of open source
“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…”
David George: Databricks counts all major AI-native companies as customers
“And then they have the big AI native companies all as customers.”
Ghodsi: Launching Databricks one year later in 2014 would have failed
“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…”
Ghodsi: Maintain relationships with departing employees so they return as boomerangs
“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.”
Ghodsi: Ideal hires combine big-tech scale experience with startup grit
“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…”
Ghodsi: Databricks CEO calls every new executive hire daily
“I try to, if I have a new executive, I call them every day. When they're new, I call them every day.”
Ghodsi: Enterprise sales drove 50% of Databricks revenue within one year
“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.”
Zaharia: Databricks includes all engine improvements in open-source Spark
“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…”
Horowitz: Databricks' first key sales leader was hired from an obscure firm
“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.”
Ghodsi: Databricks still retains all seven original co-founders
“We're, you know, seven co-founders still.”
Ulrich: Mastercard brought seven external experts to brief its board on AI
“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…”
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…”