Databricks splits R&D into enterprise stability and new innovation teams
Ali Ghodsi · Fireside Chat: Ali Ghodsi (Founder & CEO, Databricks) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark) · May 24, 2021 · at 27:21
Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and CEO of Databricks, details the company's internal engineering structure for building and sustaining multiple products.
0:00 / 0:12exact quote · 12.2s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“All of engineering and product is separated into two different pieces. One that focuses on the things that enterprises need, large enterprises, encryption, security, authentication, stability, and so on. And another piece that focuses on these innovations.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Ali Ghodsi
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: Early Big Tech achieved AI breakthroughs using 1970s algorithms with massive data
“What they were doing is they were taking those algorithms from the seventies that do not work, but they were applying orders of magnitude, more data to it. So a lot of data on modern hardware, and they were getting superhuman results.”
Ghodsi: Founders cannot pick their sales channel; product-market fit dictates it
“You don't get to pick your channel. You can, you don't get to say, oh, I want my ASP to be 50 K or 60. That's not your choice. You have a product. You have a market. If it has fit, you have to find the right channel to connect those two.”
Ghodsi: Databricks open-sources products only after achieving product-market fit
“So our secret sauce is look at an enterprise problem, figure out what that is, understand it deeply by being really customer obsessed, bring the problem back, have the innovators, the PhDs that know how to solve these problems. Solve the problem. Iterate quick…”
Ghodsi: Creating open-source software gives cloud hosts a competitive advantage
“We're going to host open source software in the cloud, but the difference is we'll create open source software. That way we get competitive advantage with respect to anyone else who would want to do the same thing, right? Otherwise anyone can pick up any open …”
Ghodsi: Open-source Lakehouses will eventually render proprietary data warehouses obsolete
“So slowly what's happening is that the open source realm An ecosystem is emerging where you can do all of your analytics in this lake house paradigm, and you don't, eventually it will be the case that you will not need all these other, you know, proprietary ol…”