Ultimately, you will be a multi-product company. We don't go around today and thinking, Google is an amazing company because they have this search algorithm called PageRank. That's why they are great. No, nobody thinks of that that way, right? If you're going to be successful, you're going to transcend this one project that you're starting now.
Welcome back to B2B SEO. Over the next few months, some of the episodes of the podcast will feature the very best discussions from FC Build, our recent enterprise conference that included interviews with 50 CEOs and executives. On this episode, I chat with Databricks co-founder and CEO Ali Goatsi for a second time.
欢迎回到B2B SEO。在接下来的几个月里,我们的一些播客会采用FC Build(我们最近的企业会议)的最佳讨论,其中包括50位首席执行官和高管的采访。在这一集中,我将再次与Databricks联合创始人兼CEO Ali Goatsi进行对话。
Last time around, Ali focused on the early days of Databricks and talked about the 0-10 journey. If you haven't listened to that episode, it's one of my favorites and I would highly recommend it. In this episode, Ali talks about how to scale and build a $28 billion software powerhouse. We talk about many of the challenges of scaling, including refreshing leadership teams, expanding the product footprint, and personally growing as CEO. Ali also talks about his future plans and why it's still day one at Databricks.
I want to welcome Ali Goatsi, co-founder and CEO of Databricks, where I'm a seed investor to the FC Build Conference. Ali is a PhD from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology from Sweden, who joined UC Berkeley in 2009 as a visiting scholar and worked closely with Scott Shrenker, Jan Stoika, Matej Zaharia, at the Amplab. He then co-founded Databricks with Jan and Matej in 2013, leading engineering and product management, and became the CEO in 2016.
While Ali probably can't comment on valuation, I routinely get offers to buy my shares at north of 10 billion. And it's widely rumored that the company is going to go public sometime soon. Ali, thank you for joining us today. Thank you for having me.
Ali, perhaps you can start by sharing the founding story of Spark and Databricks. Yeah, happy to. We were researchers at UC Berkeley, and it's a public university has not that much funding, but the interesting thing is that Silicon Valley forward tech companies, the Facebook, Google's of the world, they're interested in the talent at these universities. So they spent quite a bit of amount of money at UC Berkeley, you know, in research and most of it just to get closer to the smart talent.
That enabled us to basically get a glimpse into what they were doing under NDA, of course. And we got to see what they were doing, and they were doing things very, very differently. Okay, so they were using massive, massive amounts of data, and they were using that data in a very strategic way to disrupt the industry that they were sort of competing with.
You know, whether it was Facebook and the media industry, or Airbnb and the hotel industry, or Uber and the cab medallions, they were actually enabling their organization to use data across the organization, you know, hundreds of people, thousands of people using this data, and then they were coming up with various ways to optimize using machine learning AI, and they were getting ahead of the competition that way.
So, you know, we wanted to do the same thing, and we were Berkeley hippies. So we said, we'll open source what these guys are doing. They're not potentially, you know, they're more proprietary stuff. We'll open source it, we'll give it to the world for free, and you know, all the enterprises on the planet can then do the same thing, instead of just these huge Silicon Valley for tech companies, and that is that, and then we'll move on, and we'll publish research papers, and we'll be happier as to our lives. But it turned out a little differently for research.
Yeah, I mean, what basically happened is that Ben Horowitz showed up in 2013, and kind of said, you guys are idiots, you know, if you really want to, you're onto something, you've got something good going here, but if you want to change the world, you can't expect other people to do it for you. You got to take that. You're not doing it yourself. Yeah, you got to do it yourself. If you guys don't do it, nobody else is going to do it. So this is yours to lose. So that kind of got us thinking that, you know, maybe we should, because, you know, confidentially, I haven't shared this before, but we went and knocked on a bunch of companies' doors, companies like Cloud Air and so on and we said, we have this awesome technology.
Why don't you take it, you know? And they said, well, but you created it, who's going to be governing it? I'm saying, look, we're academics. We don't want to make any money. You take it, you run with it. And you know, nah, we don't want that. This is academic, you know, Mambo jumbo. We don't really think that there is anything here. It's not enterprise-ready. Nah, we're not interested.
So, you know, we were given the runaround for, you know, probably four years across Silicon Valley. We would go on 101, we would, we were poor, so we would rent a car. We'd go down on 101, we'd visit Facebook and all these places. I'd please take this technology and they didn't want. What did it at the time? Yeah.
Well, you know, things for Cloud Data have turned out a little differently compared to DataPrix. So, you know, it's amazing how big a deal Hadoop was at the time and, you know, and what's happened since. But shifting here from the founding story of DataPrix to company, perhaps, you know, maybe we talk a little bit about your story, which is so unique as well. You know, academia growing up in Sweden to UC Berkeley, to being a VP of engineering, and now eventually to CEO.
Yeah. So, look, I actually think, the way I think about these companies, it's, they go in stages, right? In the first stage of DataPrix, when I was the head of product, and I'll get to it in a second, you're really just focused on making sure that you have product market fit. Yep. And that's more important than anything else.
So, in some sense, the first part of my career prepared me for that, right? What you do as a researcher in computer systems, is you spend a lot of time trying to come up with technology that really works and people adopt and use. In some sense, it's sort of at school, where you learn how to get product market fit. Yeah. You know, these systems are schools.
So, that's what I did the first part of my life. You know, I grew up in Sweden. We actually built a bunch of open source technology back there. But then I got the chance to just come visit UC Berkeley one year. And the rest is history. Yeah, I got permission from my girlfriend at that time, and I said, look, one year, and it's okay, one year, you have to be back. So, I spent one year here, and it was so amazing. We started messes, spark, you know, attack on all these projects that were having a lot of impact.
So, you know, I said, hey, can I stay another year? And then, can I stay another year? Can I stay another year? And I think after. That was 11 years ago. Yeah, exactly. And after three years, I think she dumped me. But, yeah. So, then in 2013, we got this opportunity.
But when we started Databricks, the first phase was the phase of really understanding the enterprise customer. And understanding that, you know, what we had built at UC Berkeley was not really a fit for enterprises. So, it actually needs to be quite a bit adapted. So, that's what we did the first three years.
Then, when I became CEO 2016, that's when you actually, once you have the product market fit, you know, you know, this product is something the market wants and needs. Now, you have to really spin up the go-to market side. And this is oftentimes where they bring in a professional CEO from outside, which has also its downsides. That's when I transitioned. And, you know, I was lucky that I had seen two startups earlier and I had done an MBA earlier in my career. So, I had a little bit of preparation, but that's when we focused on the go-to market side.
And today, I would say we're past that go-to market phase two. Now, Databricks is sort of in the scale, multi-product, optimizing, you know, the whole sort of organization. When you have thousands of employees, operational efficiency, and operational rigor is more important than anything else. So, that's the phase we're in now.
That's a great articulation. I think these three phases of finding product market fit, figuring out a scalable, repeatable go-to market, and then at some point, you're, you know, you're scaling the organization around that go-to market.
You know, one of the questions that founders asked me again and again, I probably get this question once a day and there's no right answer, but I'm curious to get your perspective is, what is product market fit? How do you know you have it? Yeah.
Look, I think product market fit. There are lots of books you can read on how to get product market fit. And so on. I think most of them are bullshit. You know, this is my mask, you, you, you live in it. The hard way, the early days were easy.
I will just say this, and I don't have a, you know, people won't like this answer, but it's, there's science and then there's art. How do scale go-to market machine? There's a science behind it. And the people have done it. If you read the right books and you hire the right people, you can do it. Operating efficiency is the same thing. Product market fit is not science. It's an art.
So, if I say, how do I create symphony nine? Like, tell me what I, what do I need to do? Or I want to do a painting that's as beautiful as Mona Lisa. What do I need to do? Do I need to like, you know, practice my, you know, muscles in the arm? Or like, do I need to like listen to certain music to get in a certain mood? And, you know, it's, it's hard because it's humans on the other side that have to really love what you're creating. So, I would just say fast iteration cycle and trying it out and testing it is, is the key thing.
We had an advantage. We had an unfair advantage at Databricks, which was when you're at UC Berkeley in a lab, and you're working on many of these projects, and you're funded to, you know, the research, research. Right? So, you have many, many years to try it out. And there were probably hundreds of projects that were created in those years that I was at UC Berkeley. Most of them didn't have product market fit. The ones that had are the ones that, of course, we spun out and did make sense. So, in some sense, it's, you know, it's, we get to cheat a little bit at these research labs. But I don't think there's like a formula you need to follow.
And I think your spot on, I think the, the trick to product market fit is you sort of sense it and you feel it when you have it. When one of my CEOs, Moad Aaron, has used the expression, which is, you know, which is the very high bar, is when the average salesperson can sell the product to the average customer. But that's a very high bar. But I think when you start to feel like demand is coming and you're not having to push to get every customer to develop the product, there's a certain point when that inflection point happens and you kind of know you have it.
Yeah. I want to talk a little bit about the GoToMarket. You talked about how the number one challenge for technical founders is figuring out the GoToMarket. Yeah. And you talked a lot about how it's more of a science. Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about your journey in figuring out the GoToMarket for Databricks?
Yeah, let me take a step back and just start by saying, usually the movie goes as follows. And it's actually kind of a sad movie. It's technical startup founder. Yeah. We're technically deep. Build this awesome thing. It has product market fit, able to get some revenue out of it, but not enough, the board, you know, and see, and then they bring in, then they say, look, we need to make a change. We need to change the CEO.
And then they think, okay, what's broken? What are we trying to fix? Well, certainly these guys have the tech covered, right? Go to Marked, but, you know, it's the revenue is not there. So let's parachute in a professional CEO. And then the board then naturally says, well, who would be really good at growing revenue? Well, someone, some CEO, professional CEO, who's prior in their life either to done sales or marketing, because that's what we want to grow. Yep. So that's the person that they hire. So that's usually what happens. And in my opinion, that's kind of, it's why that grows the revenue in the next two, three years, but it'll actually usually be the death of the company.
Because those people don't actually understand products, and they don't understand markets, how products work. So the company kind of loses its sense of direction. Unless you can keep the co-founders deeply engaged and working really well with the new CEO, and they can continue. Which is very hard. Yeah, it's hard, right? It's hard. That's a marriage, you know, that, you know, really needs to work out well from both sides. And, you know, they really need to trust each other and be mature, and that's hard.
In the rare cases where the tech guy, like me, gets a chance to actually do the go-to-market side, I think there's a few things you need to think about. It's not just, hey, there's a go-to-market thing, you just deploy it. You just need to get the pros, you do go-to-market, and then you're done. It's actually not that simple, because it depends on who, with market you're selling to, how they will buy, and who that persona is, and how do you get that budget from them? What's required to do that? That's different for different products.
Actually, one of the mistakes we made at Databricks early days was that we thought, you know, we'll let them swipe a credit card, and then come do AI on our platform. And actually, that didn't happen. Turn on enterprises don't like doing that. Exactly. And even if they do, it doesn't matter, because here's the thing. Databricks builds AI, you know, for enterprises. And this AI is extremely strategic for them, okay? So strategic that they're happy to pay $5 million of dollars, okay?
How do you get in any company on the planet, a million dollars approved to spend on anything? That's a big decision. Is that some engineer that's sitting there, you know, coding who swipes a credit card and just puts a million dollars on it? So enterprises, in our case, where the AI speeds are higher, the average selling price is higher, and you need to have budget for this decision, and you need to get high up in the organization.
That's a particular go-to-market, you know, the enterprise sales motion that's needed for that, that's the bus all you need to build. And you don't get to just pick that. So like, when you receive, you don't just get to say, oh, you know, I want my SP to be $5 million, and I don't want to have any sales people, and so on and so forth. You have to, for the product you have, and the market that you want to address with it, you have to find the right go-to-market strategy for that.
For Databricks, it ended up being enterprise sales. But if you take something like Altrix or Tableau, or many other products, it's different. It's as many users as possible. Each license cost maybe $1,000, $2,000. And once you have enough of those people in the organization, you can maybe consolidate it. Same thing with Slack. That's a different go-to-market motion.
So you need a leader on the sales side that you need to hire that can understand, you know, this first, it's almost like product market fit, but it's for the go-to-market side. Yep. Who is strapping of the go-to-market side? So I think there are three phases on the go-to-market side.
The first phase is to figure out, you know, the- What is the price point? Who's the buyer? What's the persona? What their decision-making process is? Yeah. So that's phase one. That's phase one. And the person who does that is very creative sales go-to-market leader.
And it's basically the zero to 10 million story, you know. This is the person that will take you to the zero to 10. They're highly creative. They're actually really smart. And they're experimenting with you as a co-founder on how to do that. So that's phase number one.
Phase number two, once you know that, okay, this thing sells. Now we just need to hire people. There's the growing, the growing. The growers, they're really good about how to put the, you know, when it sells ops, when it's this ratio of, you know, sales engineers and this and that. And they'll configure it for scale. Yep.
And then the third phase is the, you know, optimizers or the maximizers. This is the exacting the value. Yeah, at that point, it's, you know, how do you drive efficiency out of it? Because it's a very costly affair. Go-to-market can be extremely costly. You can, you know, you can burn down your whole bank account, literally, and many, many founders have.
So how do you actually optimize that? Is it going to be essentially one of the most important things you do to get the profitability? So that's a different leader. So when you're a technical co-founder, you need to find that pairing of a go-to-market leader that can take you to zero. Yeah, zero to 10. Now, it might be one, you know, you find the, you know, genius that can do the whole thing for you, but it's usually not the case.
Now, I think, I think you make a really good point. I mean, a lot of technical CEOs get paired up with the scale go-to-market leader way too early. And I think as you rightly pointed out, you want someone who actually is creative enough to try half a dozen different approaches, who can try a bottom-up, middle-out, I mean, there's all these different go-to-market approaches. And you don't actually know which one will work.
And so I think having that flexibility in the first, you know, hundred customers or so is really critical. It's almost like figuring out product markets fit the same thing again, but mostly for the go-to-market motion. So get in there and you should be sound to the customers yourself as a technical profaner all the time with your go-to-market leader. Until you guys figured out the messaging, the persona, who you're targeting, how you get that budget, the pitch, all of that. Absolutely.
We'll be right back. Hi, I'm a part of the NERKRIN. I'm co-founder of Horizon I. Hope you don't mind if I interrupt this episode to tell you a little bit about my company. Horizon is a machine learning observability platform. With the adoption of AIML at an all-time high, it's more important than ever to understand how this technology is affecting your business. When models are deployed in production, we lose all sight of how they're actually performing. Even the engineers who built them couldn't tell you why they're buggy or not doing what they're supposed to do.
我们马上回来。嗨,我是 NERKRIN 的一员,也是 Horizon I 的联合创始人。希望你不介意我在这集节目中打扰一下,让你了解一下我们的公司。Horizon 是一个机器学习可观察性平台。随着 AI 和 ML 的普及程度达到历史最高点,了解这种技术对你的企业的影响比以往任何时候都更为重要。当模型部署到生产环境中时,我们就无法看到它们的实际表现。即使是建造它们的工程师也无法告诉你为什么它们有问题或者为什么它们不能按照预期运行。
Horizon is here to help by providing real-time analytics and observability. The Horizon platform helps your team determine when, why, and how your models are performing. We empower engineers to fix models with explainable analysis and catch upstream engineering issues. So if your team is fed up with the hours spent troubleshooting and debugging your models, you don't have to keep just hoping for the best. You can arise.
Ali, I'm going to move around a little bit. There's been a bunch of audience questions around the business model, especially for open-source projects. In United Rixx, in fact, a rare example of a company that started off with Spark, one open-source project, you built a very successful business model while continuing to support Spark as a project. And now you have several other open-source projects that are part of the fold and the family. Can you talk a little bit about your business model and how that's evolved?
Yeah. So first of all, I think there's two different classes of open-source business models. One is what I call the Red Hat open-source model. Yep. Is I have some free software. I give that to you. And you need my support and services around it to be successful. So it's generally a services business model. Yep. That business model works if you're so lucky, like Red Hat, that there is really no major competition.
As we saw, we could do many other technologies, oftentimes because it's free, you'll find three, four, five vendors that come in and say, hey, we'll offer that as well. Difficult to monetize your support and services. There will be people that can do support and services better and cheaper than you. And over time, this expertise that you have for the tech that you created becomes commoditized. And the value can usually get to decline over time.
Exactly. The other business model that I think people don't think about enough, but it's like obvious and it's in front of their face. It's the 100 pound gorilla is the SaaS open source model. And just to be provocative, I'll say that one of the best companies in the planet is Amazon Rep Services. In terms of money, not business model.
That's a business model in which you take open source software and say, hey, you can rent it from me. And you pay me rent for using the service. It's much stickier than the on-prem open source model where they could switch services provider, who does support for them. They could switch from, say, a cloud error to a hotmerks very easily and keep the software. That's the key thing. They could keep the software.
In the cloud, when you rent the service from AWS or Databricks or anyone else, you can't keep the software if you want to switch vendors. So that business model is much, much better. Why? It's stickier. And it's harder to switch to other things. And it turns out over time, this subscription model grows the revenue much more sustainable. I totally make sense.
I think I can interrupt for a second, because the audience has been engaging in this and asking the next level or detail. The challenge with that open source model, with the SaaS model, is that you are now often competing with the cloud service providers themselves. Yeah. How do you answer the elephants?
Yeah. Just because some people are confused, there are vendors that are doing open source and they started with this red hat model. OK? And the truth is, they're not very good at running a SaaS service in the cloud. So once their customer base told them that, look, we need to be in the cloud, they said, OK, we'll offer. I mean, I created the software. I'll run it in the cloud.
The problem is, when they start running in the cloud, they realize, wow, it's really, really hard to run a SaaS service. Yep. That point, the cloud vendors are running super fast and taking their software and offering it up. And actually, they're offering a better service than the open source creators. So my advice is this, if you start a company on open source now, you need to be 100% in the cloud.
And you need to be 100% SaaS. Don't touch on-prem. Get really good at managing SaaS software in the cloud. If you do that, then I think you can absolutely compete and beat the cloud vendors. Databricks is an example of that. Because it's actually really hard to operate and run software in the cloud. And who do you think is the best in the world to operate that software? The creators.
Databricks has a competitive advantage when it comes to operating things like MLflow, things like Delta, things like Spark, the technologies we created, no one can run them as well at scale, reliably, and cheaply than us. The cloud vendors cannot do that. We literally are creating the technology for that.
Had we started on-prem though, that would not have been true. Because on-prem, we would have gotten really good at this support and services thing. And then five, six years later, we would have tried to just, you know, maybe we should just offer something in the cloud. That turns out it's very hard. So I think that's what's really going on.
So I say you can compete with them. These guys have their hands full, running VMs, data centers, storage, and a lot of other things. They're not going to be world class at operating your open-source software that you invented if you focus on it. But you have to focus on it, and it's not easy.
So I think clearly the message, I think, hopefully the audience is hearing from you, is don't have one foot each in two boats. You know, you've got to commit 100% to being on the cloud first. You've got to commit to being a SaaS service provider from day one. And it's often very different from the ethos of an open-source project community.
Because those projects are really around improving the project, adding features, adding functionality, adding integrations. And now you have to build a whole new engineering culture around running a cloud service. Yep. Presumably, you end up building a lot of proprietary software in that process. You have to.
Here's a dirty secret that nobody thinks about. Every, to my knowledge, every open-source project is an on-prem product. You go download it from GitHub. There's a version number. You download it. You can install it. That's shrink-wrap software. That's not a SaaS service.
SaaS service, like if you use Databricks today, you don't even get to see the version. It gets upgraded all the time under the scene and so on. So in some sense, it's two different technologies. One is a SaaS service. The other one is shrink-wrap gets released x times a year software.
So yeah, by definition, if you have an open-source project, and you also have a SaaS service, the SaaS service is actually a different thing. And a lot of the secret sauce can be there and how to manage and operate and run it. And that, it doesn't even make sense open-sourcing that. There is no open-sourced.
I don't think there is an open-source version of MongoDB or pick your favorite open-source project. I don't think there exists a SaaS version of it in open-source. Got it. And so those are two engineering teams that you have to build and two sort of engineering-shipping motions inside the company that you have to support over time.
Yeah, but put your weight behind the SaaS one because that one is revolutionary different. It's fundamentally at its core very different from how you do R&D on-prem. At its core, it's fundamentally different in sort of five different ways. So it's impossible to just figure that out later.
Look, is there any other advice before we move on, change topics? Is there any other advice you have for founders who are building companies that are on open-sourced projects? Anything else, you know, in terms, because you've done now this with a couple of different open-sourced projects. You know, ultimately you can't be one trick pony. So ultimately you will be a multi-product company.
We don't go around today and thinking, Google is an amazing company because they have this search algorithm called PageRank. That's why they are great. No, nobody thinks of that that way, right? If you're going to be successful, you're going to transcend this one project that you're starting now. Keep that in mind. And don't pire yourself too closely just to one tech. This is something we did at Databricks early days. When we started Databricks, we said, hey, our original invention was spark at that time. These days, it's a small portion of what we do. But back then, we were saying, should we name the company something with Spark?
And as founders, we said no, because we will transcend Spark, we will have a whole portfolio of products eventually. And Spark will be just one of them. And now, in hindsight, it was really important because today, the most important open source project we have, I would say, is Delta. So that's a cautionary tale. There are companies out there, for instance, Docker to company and Docker to software is the same thing. It's same name. And you can stream them. It blocks them for a long time.
Yeah, so this is just psychological advice to my fellow co-founders. Eventually, you have to divorce yourself from that open source project you created if your company is going to be successful. I think that's great advice. And it's one that you have to make that decision very early on. So thanks for sharing that.
So one of the questions coming from the audience from Greg is, in the $0 to $10 million phase, as you're building out, you're figuring out you're going to market. Do you recommend that you have just one go to market leader, or should you have a separate leader for sales and a separate one for marketing?
Most VCs will give you advice that you first hire the product marketing leader, because they come up with the marketing material, because the sales guy doesn't know what to say otherwise. And then you hire the sales guy. I actually disagree with him. And I think you should do it in reverse order. Titles don't really matter. But I think you need a partnering crime that essentially is going to be your GTM co-founder of yours. And that person might join several years later once you have product marketing with. And whoever that is, together with that person, you're going to figure it out with him or her. Maybe that person has a marketing title, but most likely they have a sales title.
Because really what you're doing in that phase is you go into the customer, and you're basically giving them a value prop and putting a price tag on it. Yep. OK? And you're going to see if it sticks. And so you experiment with different stakeholders, with different types of companies. And you're doing this while you're changing the value prop, you're changing the product a little bit to see maybe it's a different product I should. So you need a thought part of that. I think that's the sales person.
Once you have that figured out that I think I know what it is. It's roughly this value prop, but probably the way I explain it is way too complicated. And it's typically this persona. And this is roughly what the product looks like. That's when I think you bring in a marketing leader.
And I would say there's basically two different types of marketing leaders for that stage of the company. There is the messaging people, and then there's the managing people. The managing people can drive the man. And then there's the messaging people. They love the story, the narrative. They can tell you a nice story. My opinion is you hired that person, the storyteller, that then takes your super complicated, technically correct message and makes it really available to a wide audience so that it resonates with a big audience. And most importantly, that you can actually teach it to a sales guy in Texas who doesn't care about your company. He's going to work there one or two years to make some money and leave.
You want that guy who has, he's not going to kill himself. He wants him to be able to quickly pick up that message and run with it. That's the second hire is that marketing leader. The third hire I think should be the finance leader. Because if you don't hire finance leader, the go-to-market leaders will, as I mentioned earlier, empty of bank account. And the wheels start to fall off. So you don't want to, as a CEO, spend all your time all day long, micro-managing where they're spending the money. And why are you paying 350 KOT to the sales guy?
And so on, you don't want to. That's you shouldn't be doing that. Have a professional CFO whose job is to make sure that you still have money in the bank account. I think that sequence makes a lot of sense. So it's hire a salesperson or sales leader that is creating, that has a business development bone in their body, that can help you figure out the go-to-market.
Then bring on board a marketing person to scale that approach. And I think you rightly pointed out that, you know, there's so many different skills in marketing. You have to pick one to hire for first, one spike. And the spike is around storytelling. And then they can build the mansion around them. And once these people start spending some money, some serious money, you need the finance person to come in and sort of corral them a little bit. Yeah, and here's why the marketing one, just to make that point, how many startups do you guys know where you go to their web page?
And you're like, I don't know exactly what they do. What do they do? And you talk to the founder, and they say, oh, it's very simple. We take Docker and we have a KBM layer. We modify the Linux kernel, in which we can actually do the virtual operations really, really fast. What do you exactly do? So that's why those companies are in dire need of product marketing storyteller. Completely agree. You know, we have these panels sometimes.
And we had, I remember the last panel, we had eight CEOs who all described our companies. We're all in one space, and security is an example in this case. And it sounded like all the eight companies did the same thing. And they actually did eight different things. But the storytelling is, because if you abstract it to two higher levels, it's meaningless. And it was too detailed, no one understands. Yeah, and finding that right abstraction, I think, is challenging.
Yeah, absolutely. On the go to market side, you know, another thread that's been coming through in the questions from the audience has been around pricing. You know, you talked early on about how customers are willing to pay you millions of dollars, and you said you've got to just try a lot of things. You've got to throw things at the one and see what sticks. Any other observations and pricing beyond that?
Yeah, we should do a whole separate podcast just and pricing. So I think it's an extremely important topic. When people say product market fit, I see that as part of product is pricing. It's one of the four piece of market product, actually.
In general. So I think you need to take it super seriously. I have actually run a product pricing meeting since we started Databricks every week, still to the state, seven years in. And we still run it every week. Every week, it's called PGTM pricing, go to market meeting, and it's every week an hour and a half since the start. I'm not saying you have to do that. And otherwise, you're not going to get pricing. We're here for a different trick. So for every CEO, at least you run it for a couple of years and see what happens.
It's a very important topic, especially as your company is a little bit bigger. You don't need to be thousands of employees. If you're even if you're just 50 people or 100 people, it's actually a tricky thing to change. Because the sales guy will say, well, you just ruin my revenue. And the marketing guy needs to know how to actually market that price. The product guy needs to build it into the product. So there's so many stakeholders involved. Finance.
So you actually, the only one who can really pull that together and make sure that you get the right pricing structure initially in the early days is the CEO in my opinion. Sales of the account do it unilateral. Finance can do it unilaterally. Product guys don't have enough influence to just push that out. What I would say is you should have WTP discussions, withling less to pay discussions with your customers.
You should ask them what they're willing to pay. You should price on a metric that's attached to the value that the customer is getting. So attached to whatever is the thing that really ultimately defines the value, ideally it's something that grows or has multiple drivers behind it, users, data, our spend, whatever it is, impressions, so that your revenue can grow faster than say the number of users are just using it.
If you can attach to such a growth driver, and you're going to have people that are going to come say, hey, we can't price it on that value metric, because if we do that, it prohibits growth. Don't listen to them, because if you pick the right pricing metric, if you're really pricing on value, of course, people will optimize that particular metric.
Your customers will try to lower that. And yes, it prevents that very thing. If you think users is the main thing you should price on, of course, if you price on that, you won't get as many users, because whoever user has to pay. But it's still the right metric. So I would say, you know, there are a lot of firms out there that can help you with doing the willingness to pay conversation. So I also think you should use them. I've used many of them over the years.
Sounds like you've put a lot of energy behind pricing. I think it's extremely important. I think, if you look at technology space in the last 40, 50 years, many of the way companies disappeared or appeared or won or products won, just came down to pricing. Like how office bundled its software versus Lotus 1, 2, 3, or word perfect, or how big companies buy the second player in the market that's not so good and offer it as a free skew as part of their enterprise agreement. It's all bundle pricing strategies.
So I would definitely spend a lot of energy and time on pricing. One last question on this go to market phase, and then we'll move on. Someone from the audience asked, the carto from the audience is asking the question that, you know, if you're a solo technical founder, you were relatively lucky. I think there were several of you. But if you're a solo technical founder and you're building something relatively hard, some deep tech just like you were, how do you balance between product development and go to market, especially the earliest stages?
You raise a couple of million dollars in the seed. You don't have eight or 10 million dollars in the bank. It's like it's a hard balance every day. Yeah, it's difficult. I mean, for me, I think focus on product market fit, which is make sure that the thing you're building has value. I think it's just too hard to build the perfect company according to a playbook step by step. So if you try to, in seed, a, build the right product, for the right time, make sure that the willingness to pay is really high.
And that, you know, it's just too many things to optimize at the same time. So I think stage number one, just make sure that this product actually has unique value that's at least 10x more than anything else that's out there for them. Are you a vitamin or are you a painkiller? You know, I forget to take my vitamins every day. That's how important they are. You know, but when I have a headache, I need my painkiller, okay? So are you a painkiller and are you a 10x painkiller? That's better than anything out there. Focus on figuring that out.
Once you have that painkiller, you can figure out, that's when you can start focusing on the go-to-market side. There's lots of examples. Companies like Facebook, Google, Snapchat, WhatsApp, who, you know, I don't think really had figured out their go-to-market strategy. They just had a vital. It's an amazing consumer demand. And investors invested them and said, they'll figure it out and they did.
You know, I want to shift gears back to sort of, you know, where GitHub exists today. It's a very different company from some of the early days that we've talked about and where a lot of the founders who are listening to this are.
You mentioned a few minutes ago that while you started with Spark, Delta has become the most important opensource project in your ecosystem. Can you talk about your journey from being a paink product to a platform for data scientists? And now today, you're a platform serving the needs of multiple user persona, including business analytics users.
Yeah, absolutely. So it's similar to our story. We wanted to, when we worked Berkeley, product market fit stage, we just wanted to build something way better, 10x better at least. And actually, we came up with something that was roughly 100 times faster than a doop. But once you have that and you start the go-to-market muscle and you start listening to these enterprises, our vision was we wanted to enable these enterprises to do the kind of AI and data science that is super strategic and disruptive to their markets like Uber had or Airbnb had or Facebook had or Google had.
And we start working closer with them. It turns out that Spark itself is not enough. It's pretty complicated. And you need actually several pieces of the puzzle. My advice then is at that point, and it's very naturally to see many, many companies doing this, you start looking at what's the critical user journey or what's the jobs to be done? You can Google those two phrases. Yeah. What's the jobs to be done or this critical user journey that a user has to go through to be successful with the job they want to achieve?
Most companies are just a small part of that, right? Is there a way you can consolidate that? You can expand that so you can own and to end more of that. If you can, that kind of vertical integration, you can give benefits that no one else can. Because at the scenes between those product jumps that everyone has to do, there's a lot of friction, a lot of costs, different buyers.
So if you could do multiple of those, you can have a much superior experience as a user goes through that critical user journey to do the job that they need to get done. Whatever it is, I need to come up with a predictive model to reduce fraud on my site. What do I need to do step by step? So Databricks today, now what it has is, Spark is a way where you get all your data into a data lake. Yep. That's just the foundation of accessing all the data that's virtualized in this data mesh everywhere.
Once you have that data, Delta is the technology that actually puts quality, reliability, and performance on it, so that data is usable by anyone in the organization. Now you have governance on your data, it's secure. Then we have on top of that something called MLflow, which enables you to do end-to-end machine learning and data science on that data.
And now we've also built something that we just announced a month ago, which is SQL Analytics, which enables you to do the data warehousing workloads, BI and other SQL-based workloads. That now covers the end-to-end journey that typically an organization has to go through to be successful with their data. But for your company, wherever you are, that journey is a different one, it's not a long-term adventure, but think it through in terms of what's the end-to-end journey that they have to go through to be successful.
How many steps are there? Are there ones where you would have a competitive advantage if you could do two of them in one platform? Could you do it better? Because I don't need to switch between two products with different formats and different ways of connecting them and integrating them, and is there a way you can do that better? That could be huge competitive advantage for you. And Enterprise will want to buy that, because Enterprise today are sort of inundated with complicated software stacks with four data warehouses and five copies of this and eight copies of that. And it's very hard to govern and manage all of that. So they are always open to, if you could consolidate, a few of them. A little bit patient.
Yeah. I think it's a good segue, in fact, to another question that's been coming in on the machine learning tooling space. What you're doing is sort of much broader in many ways. But the machine learning tooling space in recent years has become very complicated with lots of startups. There's startups for building models, startup for testing models, startup for hosting models, producing, putting them into production.
And at the same time, every major tech vendor, including the three cloud service providers, also has its own ML tooling platform. So do you have any specific advice for founders starting companies in this category? Yeah.
I think MultiCloud is the future. Even the cloud vendor, some of them are now releasing. I think Google released the BigQuery Omni, which is BigQuery should work on other, and so on. And you'll see that from the other cloud vendors too. So that's an advantage you have on your site, which is MultiCloud will be a thing. And a particular cloud service that only works on that cloud is going to actually eventually become a huge disadvantage for that cloud vendor. It isn't today, but eventually it will become.
So that's a good silver lining. Second, I think the higher up the stack you move, the less competition you will see from the cloud vendors. The reason is this. The cloud vendors are starting with storage, compute, and networking. And they have to nail that. They can't lose that war.
But that's only three or four things. Core ingredients. On top of that, you cannot rebuild many more things. And on top of that, even more, right? So the tree structure just explodes above it. You move two, three levels up.
Now there's like literally thousands of apps, or tens of thousands of apps. The cloud vendors won't be able to do all of that. So it's moving up the abstraction. Yeah, so every hop you move up in this sort of software stack, it's going to be harder for them to dominate all of that. So that would be my advice.
This is not categorical, but I'm a little bit worried for people that are straight up in the core storage or network in the very like, that you should probably assume that the cloud vendors will nail. Because there's three of them that have infinite funding. And that's literally the only thing they're supposed to do. It's not like you really do have infinite funding, especially with the stock market is going these days. Exactly.
I want to wrap up maybe with one last question for you. As you take a step back on what has been a remarkable journey over the last decade, what's perhaps the one insight or the single biggest lesson you have when you look back? If you were giving the 10 year younger version of Ali advice, what would you tell Ali to 10 years younger?
I would tell him a few things. One is cliche, but the other one I think people might like hearing. The first one I would say is that focus on people that you can trust and finding leaders that you can trust. It's very hard. It's these kind of marriages, finding the people that you can work together really, really closely and figure this stuff out. There aren't enough of them. And even if you figured out the three or four people that you work well with now in two years or three years, when you reach the next stage of your company, who's going to be the next person to do that there?
So spend much more time on that, much earlier and building trust with those. The second thing I would say that I would focus on much more these days than I did in the past 10 years is I would be more uncompromising in the sense that there's a lot of shortcuts you can take to get revenue. Don't do them. The boards will push you. You want to hit those revenue numbers, but just don't do it. If you're building for a vision of the cloud, just do that. For instance, at Databricks, we built a cloud platform. But then I approved one exceptional deal, which was on prem. Just one.
There was only one of them. And it just took so much energy from me and the people involved and supporting it. Don't take shortcuts like that. It wasn't worth it. The important thing I would say is just if I look back at the person 10 years ago, is trust yourself much more. There's a lot of herd behavior. Everybody runs in that direction. But nobody's like, OK, but who's leading us in that direction? I don't know. We're all running this way. Let's go. Think from first principles and stick by it and believe in yourself.
And if you think big enough, you might be able to actually pull it off. So I have confidence. That's probably the three things I would tell myself.
如果你有足够大的想象力,你可能真的能做到。因此我很有信心。这可能是我告诉自己的三件事。
That's it for this episode. You can find past episodes and subscribe to future ones on iTunes, Stitcher, and SoundCloud. BWB SEO is brought to you by Foundation Capital, an early stage venture capital firm with 27 IPOs, including Netflix, Lending Club, TubeMobile, and Sundra. I'm Art Shogard, a general partner at Foundation Capital. I'm passionate about helping BWB entrepreneurs who are trying to solve hard problems. So this podcast speaks to you. If you are interested in growing from a technical founder into a business leader, drop me a line. Thanks and see you next time.