Ali Ghodsi
CEO & Co-Founder, Databricks · Cofounder & CEO, Databricks · Executive, Databricks. On 5 shows, 7 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
Ali Ghodsi is the founder and CEO of Databricks, a unified data engineering, science, and analytics platform. He previously co-created the open-source project Apache Spark and has raised over $897 million for Databricks.
5shows
7appearances
100statements
7resolved
6supported
0contradicted
86%fully supported
101said about them ↓ Everything Ali Ghodsi said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Ghodsi: We already have AGI based on historical definitions
“I think we have AGI. I think we have artificial general intelligence. We really have it. We absolutely have it. It's like, Anyone who says we need to get to AGI, that's like, it's a, it's false premise to start with. We already have AGI.”
Ghodsi: Speech interfaces will completely eliminate physical keyboards
“Like I think keyboards are kind of basically going to disappear. Completely. We haven't actually nailed speech. I know it feels like we have, but we haven't, because you're still using your keyboard. So as long as you're using a keyboard, we haven't nailed spe…”
Ghodsi: All current LLM evaluation benchmarks are completely bullshit
“I kind of think all the benchmarks are bullshit, and so all these, so all the LLM benchmarks, here's how it works.”
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.”
Ghodsi: All proprietary software is vulnerable to disruption by open source
“In fact, I think open source has the potential to replace pretty much any software that's, Any proprietary software that exists on the planet today is, you know, in a really vulnerable state in the sense that it can be disrupted by an open source version, righ…”
Ghodsi: Any proprietary software company is ripe for open-source disruption
“Any proprietary software company out there is ripe for disruption by an open source competitor.”
Ghodsi: Great enterprise sales leaders can reach $5M ARR regardless of product
“I think if you have a really, really good sales leader on the enterprise software side, they should be able to get you to zero to five million revenue or so, regardless almost, of your product.”
Ghodsi: Large language models have become interchangeable commodities
“Yeah, look, I think the LLM is a commodity. People are not saying that, but it is a commodity. Like, and, you know, when I took econ classes, commodity was when it's interchangeable. Like, you can get gas from this gas station, or you can get gas from that gas…”
Ghodsi: Desktop AI automation stalls because frozen models lack continuous learning
“The biggest problem is that you bake a model, and that's where it's learned everything it needs to learn, and then you freeze it, and then you launch it, and then maybe you give it some context, but that's it. It's frozen. So therein lies the problem that, you…”
Ghodsi: Enterprises do not need superintelligence to capture massive AI value
“We have the AGI we need. Let us just focus on solving the actual problems inside the organizations, and I think we can already, that's enough to automate a lot of the tasks and get huge economic value out of it. We don't actually need superintelligence for tha…”
Ghodsi: Most AI economic value will accrue to applications
“But I do think most of the value will accrue to the apps. So it's kind of, and I think that's common sense. It's just, I just don't know which apps.”
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: Founders fail by hiring their own archetype for unfamiliar roles
“They'll do well in their own archetype. When they have to step outside of their own archetype, they make a mistake. They hire people that are like their own archetype in other roles where that could be lethal.”
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.”
Ghodsi: Reports of $100M AI compensation packages are largely false
“I don't think anyone's getting a hundred million dollar offers. You know, I mean, yes, there is like, One, you know, character that AI and so on, but I didn't think it's actually true.”
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: 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…”
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: Hype around the largest LLMs mirrors 2000s focus on Cisco
“So I think it's a little bit like right now like that. Who has the largest LLM? Obviously whoever can build the largest one that can train it the most obviously will own all of AI and all the future of humanity. But just like the internet, someone will show up…”
Ghodsi: AI progress would be far behind without Meta releasing Llama
“If the original Llama was never released, What would the state of the world and our view of AI be right now? We would be way further behind, right? And A, it was a big model you know, by what existed in open source and it was open sourced. And both of those th…”
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…”
The other half of the tape: Ali Ghodsi's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 90 times in 29 episodes across the shows. 11 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 18David Meyer 8Packy McCormick 6David Ulevitch 4Lucas Swisher 3David George 3Chris Degnan 3Ben Horowitz 3
Statements about Ali Ghodsi, by other people (11)
Horowitz: Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi's competitors are pseudo-technologists
“He is a real technologist, like not a, you know, pseudo technologist like his competitors.”
Degnan: Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi's noisy strategy works
“Ali at Databricks, he shouts pretty loud and he's done a good job, and I don't necessarily agree about how he goes about doing things, but It's worked for Databricks.”
Databricks rejected a $10M on-premise deal from JPMorgan to stay cloud-only
“They're like, we'll give you ten million bucks to put this, and at the time, we're less than a million, like our whole first-year target's like ten million, to put it on-prem. And Ali was like, no way, we're not doing anything on-prem.”
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: Executives who lose their team's trust must be fired
“The one thing that's always true is if the team doesn't believe in the executive anymore, it doesn't even matter. Like, they can, like, say whatever you want to me, Ali. I still have to fire you because nobody's following you.”
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.”
Ron Gabrisco says Ali Ghodsi is 100x better than other technical founders
“He's a hundred X better than any of them because he can do the technical stuff, but he's also an inspirational leader and he knows the business.”
Meyer: Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi insists on deep founder involvement in product work
“And I tried that for the first six months at Databricks. And that's not what Ali wanted to hear. He didn't want me to go off and do something and then show him how awesome it was. You know, he wanted to be deeply involved and have the founders deeply involved …”
Lemkin: Going public enables Databricks to execute tens of billions in M&A
“Maybe at some point, even if you're Revolut, if you really want to do deals for real, it's, there are limits to private stock in cash, and if Databricks goes public, and it's worth two to three times Snowflake, it can buy, it may be able to buy the parts of it…”
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 …”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 64
the a16z Podcast 17
the MAD Podcast 6
the Official SaaStr Podcast 2
BG2 Pod 1
2026 22 mentions in 9 episodes 2 per episode
- Ben & Marc: Why Everything Is About to Get 10x Bigger
- Groq’s $20BN NVIDIA Deal | Why Sam Altman Doesn’t Care About Dilution & Invisible Unemployment 2026 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Insights from Coatue's Growth Investor Lucas Swisher · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- AI Markets: Deep Dive with a16z's David George
- ClickHouse CEO: AI Margins Need to Improve | Revenue Concentration Should be a Concern
- The Five Year Desert to Product Market Fit & a $5.3BN Valuation with Shiv Rao, Founder @ Abridge · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Shopify CEO on How AI is a Scapegoat for Mass Layoffs & Trump Derangement Syndrome in Canada · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Anthropic Inference Costs Skyrocket |TikTok Deal Closes |The IPO Market:Wealthfront & EquipmentShare · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- 1 more episode that year, every mention in 2026 →
2025 44 mentions in 11 episodes 4 per episode
- 20Sales: $0-$3.7BN: The Databricks CRO's Playbook to Build the Fastest GTM Engine in SaaS History | How Databricks Beat Snowflake | How To Build a Sales Org of 5,000 and Close $190M Deals with Ron Gabrisko
- Ben Horowitz on Leadership and Culture
- 20Sales: Scaling Snowflake from $0-$3BN in ARR | Snowflake vs Databricks: My Biggest Lessons | Why Customer Success is BS and What Replaces It with Chris Chris Degnan
- Rewriting Success: What InfluxDB 3.0 Teaches About Scaling—and Scrapping—Your Core Tech
- Trino, Iceberg and the Battle for the Lakehouse | Justin Borgman, CEO, Starburst
- Predictions for 2026: Top Buy & Biggest Short | Why Salesforce Could Win & NVIDIA’s Challenges · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- 6 Months Later, How Our AI SDRs Actually Work as AI Runs GTM with SaaStr's CEO and Chief AI Officer
- From the Dot-Com Crash to the AI Era: How Builders Survive Waves of Disruption
- 3 more episodes that year, every mention in 2025 →
2024 3 mentions in 3 episodes 1 per episode
2023 13 mentions in 1 episode
2022 3 mentions in 3 episodes 1 per episode
- a16z GP Martin Casado: How I Went from Engineer to VC; Lessons from Chris Dixon | 20VC #956 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Cathie Wood: Elon & Twitter; Why Facebook is a Value Stock Now; ARK's Performance | 20VC #949 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Proven Leadership Frameworks for a High-Performing Sales Team with Databricks' VP of Sales
- every mention in 2022, scene by scene →
2021 5 mentions in 2 episodes 3 per episode
- 20VC: a16z's David George on Leading a16z's Growth Fund Today, The Biggest Misconceptions of Growth Investing, How a16z Think Through Portfolio Construction, Investment Decision-Making and Scenario Planning & How The Entrance of New Players Has Changed Th
- 20VC: Annie Duke on Reversible vs Irreversible Decisions, How To Evaluate Risk, The Theory of Sunk Cost in Venture & How to Optimise Both the Discussion and Quality of Investment Decisions
- every mention in 2021, scene by scene →
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Ali's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| a16zLEDGER | Cofounder & CEO, Databricks | 3 | 38 | 100% 2/2 | full record on the a16z Podcast → |
| 20VCLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Databricks | 1 | 21 | — | full record on 20VC → |
| MADLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Databricks | 1 | 18 | 0% 0/1 | full record on the MAD Podcast → |
| BG2LEDGER | Executive, Databricks | 1 | 13 | 100% 3/3 | full record on BG2 Pod → |
| SAASTRLEDGER | CEO & Co-Founder, Databricks | 1 | 10 | 100% 1/1 | full record on the Official SaaStr Podcast → |