YouSaid · the spoken record

Ali Ghodsi

lines on the record: 106
first: 2025-10-15
most recent: 2025-10-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Those were some of the things. Usually founders, usually only one of the co founders contributes long term. And so to have. You know, to have that going, and yeah, I'm still on the board, and Scott's still on the board. I mean, like, it's very unusual.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the PhD is all the contributor. Like Arsan really made the go to market work, and he really made sort of Ron work with the rest of the company that was super critical. Mate continued doing lots of innovations over the years. Patrick led all of engineering in big chunks of it and so on. And we've had other people. We've been lucky to get such folks. So hiring is critical in keeping the original talent, I think. Those were some of the things.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, like the contribution level from a large number of co-founders is unique in the industry. I mean, you've got Patrick, you have Reynold, you have Mate, you have Arsalon. I mean, like, it's crazy how much... The original team contributes.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you can keep also the original team together, that's important. Seven co founders still, many of the co founders, like, you know, you said data warehousing was a big push for us. My co-founder Reynold was really the one that kind of pushed this.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But that's a lot of the key to the company. It forces. It forces a customer focus that would be impossible to have without somebody that. Smart and crafty about getting his way. I mean, just like unbelievable.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, he does have an engineering degree from Stanford that helped a little bit. But he's a sales true and true sales guy. He's not one of these. He's a classic salesperson who grew up in sales, even though he has an engineering degree. So the comfortable thing would have been to pick someone. And we had some candidates in the mix who weren't a super technical using the product, giving us feedback, but they probably would not. And that would have been much more comfortable for us.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So some luck involved in us even finding him, but then he was phenomenal. And also, kudos to Jan, who actually led the search in 2015. So, you know, but yeah, Ron was game changing for us. But Ron was a very uncomfortable hire because he did not have a PhD. He did have a PhD.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, another, like, I mean, you know. We got I mean, like 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. Our talent team found him from some company we never heard of. A French company”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's say it was very truth seeking. But yeah, so we had nothing to lose. So we didn't know that we were going to succeed, but we had nothing to lose to make those big changes, and we made them in 2016. And it turned out those were the bottlenecks, you know, giving away your software for free, not having execs that have seen the movie before, like Ron who came in. And, you know, just the PLG motion is not going to cut it. So maybe we should just try. We weren't certain that B2B would work, but we knew that PLG is not working for sure.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We never forget Arslan going. We made the number. And I was like You made a ridiculous number, you're going to go bankrupt. You didn't make the number. You made a number that you set that was way too low.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is true. Kudos to Mark. So that year we had formed some hypothesis that. Know, we have nothing to lose. What if we just pivoted these things? What if we went all in into B2B enterprise sales? Because certainly it's up. ELG is not working at 3 million ARR, that's not going to take you anywhere. And they're just taking our open source software. So we have to have proprietary code around it. And yeah, the execs team are all PhDs. So what if we bring in someone that doesn't have a PhD and see how it goes?”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We knew that we've tried everything. And by the way, PLG is something that we had tried very hard and it didn't work. Actually, one of our biggest failures was PLG at Databricks. Everybody kept telling us PLG, PLG, PLG. And we're like, okay, product let growth. And Amazon did it and you just swiped your credit cards. We don't need salespeople. But so in 2015, I have to kind of like.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I mean, I seriously consider taking the professor job at Berkeley because I seriously thought this was going to be very, very hard to pull off. It's like, you know, I think the sentiment at Databricks was, or at least my sentiment was, look, you win some things and you lose some things in life. We created Apache Spark and we made it a worldwide sensation. Everybody's down on you. The downloads are through the roof. We have this greatest conference like, you know, thousands of people come to our conference. It's awesome. Let's go back. Let's do it again. Let's publish another paper and do those kind of things. We're just not business guys. We just don't understand business. That's okay. You know, we don't want to be a business guy. So that's kind of how I felt about it, right? But what I knew was that, hey,”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it was very close because we couldn't get funding for anyone. It's just funding frezed up and nobody wanted to invest anymore. So it was really a lifeline from ACNC.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it was so on the edge as it was that on the Series C, Jan had a handshake with the 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 NEA who led the Series B, like we co-led the Series C because nobody else would do it. It was that close to going under. And we were companies went even right, that would be it.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, even if, like, if we had to do the CEO change and all of that and I had become CEO a year earlier, it just we were too early in the market. The cloud hadn't taken off. AI was not. That was not even a phrase. AI meant robotics. People use machine learning as a phrase. And so company would have failed. We wouldn't have had enough momentum. There's not enough cloud, you know, TAM there to be had. 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 fixes in 2017. It would have been too late to the party. And probably the hyperscalers would have taken it away. You know, our competitors were taken it away and we just wouldn't have get enough momentum to be able to succeed. And that's timing of when we started. So how did we clock it so well? We had to wait for Mate to finish his PhD thesis.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One way to prove that is if Database started in 2013, if we had started in 2012, that rocky year, that difficult year 2015, would have then happened in 2014. To start the funds, we don't have the revenue. But we were a cloud AI open source company. Those things didn't take off in 2014.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's very hard to make these things work. And it also requires a lot of luck. I mean, I think one of the things people Don't realize a lot of things have to go right that should never go right. And a lot of things will go wrong, but like if you can grab your lucky moments. That's a rare thing”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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. They end up being actually the perfect employees at their works because they come in and they're really thankful. They're like, hey, what these guys have done at their works is actually really, really hard. I tried it and I'm really good. I was like one of the best at Google or somewhere. And then I did my own startup and we absolutely failed. And so hey, show some respect here. Like, you know, these guys know what they're talking about. So those are great employees, actually. So, you know, I think keep a great relationship with people who leave your company because they can boomerang back in a couple years.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not that easy. By the way, they come back after start companies, oftentimes they come back to Databricks and they're much more thankful and you understand. And actually, I didn't mention this earlier when you asked about acquisitions. My favorite acquisition, because I said it start with the people, right? And then the product. The people I love to hire people who have seen great at a big company, like, or I don't know if it's great, but have seen process, scale, big company. They've been at a Google, they've been at Amazon, they understand the processes, so they 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.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I would say that look, you know, and not all startups have the valuation of theirs, worth 100 billion. And we 10,000 employees, we actually can't afford to actually pay significant. And we do pay a significant for the right talent. But what do you do when you're smaller? Like we were smaller at some point. Well, then let's talk about how big you are going to get and what the opportunity is and what you could do together and what it would work together. But I think most people earlier in the career, they really want to learn and they want to really feel that they can have impact. So if you can really bring them in and you can sort of mentor them, you can stay close to them. And as a CEO, you have huge power. If you just spend two minutes with a kid out of school, it's immense to them. And you say, hey, I'll even mentor you. I'll help you. What do you want to do?”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I do think it's kind of crazy times. And I do think it's also exaggerated. Like, you know, I don't think anyone's getting $100 million offers. I mean, yes, there is like one, you know, character.ai and so on, but I don't think it's actually true. And it's also in the interest of CEOs, you should know, to say that, hey, people try to poach people from database for a billion dollars and they said no. It's in our interest to say that, right? Because that kind of sets the bar at a billion. And then an employee that gets not for half a, it's going to feel really insulted. Why don't I get a billion dollar offer? I heard like on the news that the other people are getting a billion.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Will I have wasted my opportunity in life? And this is like the time for AGI, and I could have been one of the guys at the superintelligence. And like, you know, how would you time that? How was it for you? How old were you? When you were 22, what did you do?”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably so, but I think that it is a crazy time with AI, and I do think I feel bad. I did actually an exit interview with someone this morning. I feel bad for the kids right now because there's like too much pressure on them. They feel like all they have to start companies. And I've never actually had anything like this because every year I talk to the interns. And I get questions about how do we build our own, you know, how do we succeed at theatabrics and so on. Last two years have just been crazy. All the kids are like, when should I become a CEO? When should I start my own company? What's a good valuation? Am I missing out? If I do like an internship here for three months, a theater breaks.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. Yeah, the joke is which company says we're P50. We pay P 50th. Like, who does that? There's no company that does that. So how does that?”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll support you either case. And actually, if you sell for this number, it's really great for me being done. We make a lot of money at A6 and Z. I'll pay the investors back many times over. So honestly, if it's for me personally, that's probably the better option. But I'm just thinking back, I was CEO of Loud Cloud Opsware. And, you know, just the cards I were given, that company wasn't the company you have. And when I look back, how often do you in life get a chance to even have a company like CloudCloud or Opsware? let alone a databricks. And it's just such a freaking big market. 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 I missed that one shot. That was the one thing. I should have taken it all the way. And now I'll never know how far I could have taken it. So do you want to live with that or do you want to just have the money? You know, I'll support whatever you want to do. I really couldn't care about us. I really couldn't care less.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They were like, so everyone was like. Stop the work. Stop working Take your hands off the keyboard. Nobody works anymore. We're done here, right? And let's count my money, how much money do I have? What would you buy for that amount of money? So they were completely not doing anything and there's just this crazy gossip going around. And then it was like they had told some of the exec and then they were calling each other every day like, hey, what else he think? Like, you know, he thinks he looked in a bad mood to do. Do you think he's going to say no? No. What did he say? Like he said this thing. He said this once. So there's just a lot of politicking going around and nobody was doing any work anymore. And I was like, you know, maybe they're right. Maybe we should just sell. And I remember having that conversation with Ben. And I think we were in a car, both of us. And, you know, he says that he dropped death bombs and he pisses people off and so on. And they don't take the feedback. But actually, he did exactly the radical candor thing with me, which is he said, hey, you can do whatever you want.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't remember actually the conversation that kind of flipped me. The acquisition offer was on the table. It was six times bigger than the valuation we had at the time. And I had done the mistake of telling my co-founders.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well The thing that you almost never get, and Ali and I had this conversation the one time we did have a real acquisition offer on the company is. You just don't get this good a market opportunity with this good an entrepreneur. That's the rarest of rare things. Like we see great entrepreneurs, but their market opportunity is limited and then we see companies that have a great market opportunity, but the entrepreneur is not big enough to fulfill that. But this was a case where we have both.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's like, you know, hey, you know. Yeah, for what it's worth when I joined the firm in 2019, the series F of Databricks was the first deal I worked on. And I think the valuation was $6 billion. Ben says to us, oh, well, it's going to be a hundred billion dollar company. And we're like, yeah, yeah, sure, Ben. Lo and behold.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We moved all the compat and we told them employees about it. It's like, hey, we're paying your PN50, you know, and we can afford it. And so that came out of that simple, you know, so these simple, you know, your trillion dollars, just add your acronym to Fang and so on. They're silly and they're kind of crazy, but they do push you and you go back and think about, hey, what is the fundamental reason from first principles that we couldn't do something like that? Why couldn't we be a trillion? What's the bottleneck from being a trillion or being part of Fang? And then you think about it and you start to zooming in on like, can we unblock that? So it has helped us and it's been a driving force, even though it's a little annoying. Hey, mom, dad, I got the A+. It's like, yeah, but we ranked. I was number two in the class. So it was someone better than you?”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If we wanted to go and get the best of the best out of Google, what does it require? And we developed a new model where we're like, okay, actually the way to think about it is your market cap divided by number of employees. That's how much money you can give away in terms of dilution. And actually, we did calculate the number at that time. And we're like, wait, we're actually richer than Google in terms of, you know, how much dilution we can afford per engineer because at that time this was like, you know, before the Twitter downsizing, so all the companies were oversized. So we did the calculation.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then there was like a pause and there was like this, and I think it's doable. And so then actually I went back and thought about it a lot. And I was like, is it doable? Am I the crazy one or are they the crazy one? Who's the crazy one here? Who's nuts here? And you know, and that kind of pushed us to think about how do we change our comp philosophy?”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I was like, and my reaction was, I laughed. I literally said, yeah, yeah. I mean, this is not serious. Like this, like, yeah, that's the bottom like, you know, it's like, no, I'm serious.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First thought was exactly Ben's crazy. But no, I think both Ben and Mark always kind of pushed us to think bigger. I remember we did the pitch at a 16Z4. I think our series D, which would have been around 2017 or so. And the question was asked, what's your biggest bottleneck? And I said, biggest bottleneck is hiring. I said, okay, well, who are you losing to? And I said, well, it's Google. You know, it's a fangs. And the response I got back was, well, you need to just add the database to Fang. It needs to be FangDB.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Want to He wanted to have a double trigger because the company, if Databell sells, and they fire me as a salesperson, what equity am I going to get? So give me double trigger so I'm protected. If we get bought and I get fired, I vest all my equity immediately.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Competitive. Yeah, 100%. Yeah. I mean, you know, there's also a reputation, right? People know they'll look back and say, okay, what happened to your previous acquisitions? Was there huge fight and everybody's quitting left and right? Or did they work out? How are you taking care of those people? What roles do they have? Do they have influential roles in your company? That's also important. You're setting a precedent. You're setting a precedent in many, many ways with acquisitions, MA, you know. The old dynamics, the price, you know, when you go through, the lawyers come back and that you're spending all those 20, 30 days doing the definitive agreement. Every little thing you agree to there is a precedent for the next deal.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the only thing I'd add, too, is this strategy is probably making you more attractive to the people you want to acquire, too. They don't want to sell if they're going to get fired right away. Yeah.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was selling it for a lot. He was making a lot of money. I was saying, you know, the electronic medical health records, how important are they if they got dropped.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Silicon Valley has a lot of lopsided companies, so you'll have a great engineering team and a bad company because it's like, you know, bad leadership, bad, go-to-market. You also can have guys who can sell anything with a ridiculously poor engineering team and they can just sell it. And, you know, you got to be very, very careful about that. Actually, our, you know, our CRO at Databricks is, you know, he came from a company that, you know, he sells anything.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I don't think those are that hard, and we try to hire these, and this is the one that I vetoed. The hard part is what do you do with the ones in the middle? That's always where you spend all of your energy trying to suss out. Like, you know, okay, they're not stellar stellar, but maybe they are, maybe they just didn't have, maybe they didn't have the go-to-market, they didn't have the funding, they didn't have the support that they needed, and so on. Maybe they could if we give them a chance. Or maybe they're just mediocre. And that's where you spend a lot of your time. But you got to spend time with them. You have to interview all the people. You have to have your people interview all the people. Can't just be, this can't be an Excel sheet exercise.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, it's like everything else. Like, it's like when we were grading students at the university, it's like, okay, the rock stars are super easy to find out. So they're like there. And then the people that are really, really bad, it's not hard. And then there are people in the middle that's in the gray zone. This was a company that was, you know, I feel like the talent is not phenomenal and you don't need to be a genius to know that. And then there's some startups you know immediately. Like, you know, okay, these guys are Olympia winners and they're like phenomenal and they're like executing like crazy and they have a track record.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 databrics. Otherwise, from every other angle, that deal always made sense. And I always vetoed it because I felt that it's just they're all going to quit or be super unhappy. Let's just not do it. Yeah.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. That's the other thing, right? Like you can buy something that's got a lot of sales where you're downgrading your whole company. Ross Pro actually wrote about in Citizen Perot. His biggest fear, which definitely came true, was he built this elite thing at EDS and then they would actually acquire IT departments and they're like he was like They're going to absorb us, not vice versa. And that does happen.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's the best software because it was written by. The engineers and built by those that were the best Including the acquisitions that we bought. They were phenomenal people that came in and they continued. And since we gelled, they continued building it. So that's why it's great. It's like, you know, so we pay a lot of attention. That's like back to the, you know, who are you getting into your company?”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it affects the brand. You know, like one of the things One of the reasons Databricks is so powerful is all their customers want to buy all their products because they're like, we know that's the best software we buy. And as soon as you start chipping away at that with these financial strategies, like you can't get it back because the reputation is every customer's experience. There's no marketing through that.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it works. And then the first year you get the bump in the revenue and you get a second year boost in revenue growth as well. The financial engineering actually works great for those companies. It's just long term. It ends up being like, you know, a bag of crap that doesn't work together.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“100%. Yeah, it's the go-to market side that you're worried about, that experience that those customers will have. They're going to come back immediately and say, hey, we were already upset about these things before the acquisition. Maybe you can fix them now. It's like, no, actually, several of those people actually quit. And now we're going to just work on integration. And that thing now got pushed out another two years. So you don't want to be in that situation. So there's a lot of companies that do that. And by the way, what they're doing works revenue-wise. They are getting the revenue. They are getting the stock swap works. Like, you know, if they're multiple of the...”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think Yeah, and This really comes. It sounds like he's talking. Like a product guy, but this is really the thing that people get wrong on the go to market because what happens is if you've got multiple product architectures, that's going to mean multiple SE forces, multiple post sales things, and your entire sales efficiency is going to go through the floor. And because, you know, they have a keen eye on that, everything they buy ends up looking like a Databricks product. You know, like, and that work is going in. They're not just selling some shit to get some money to, you know, go on a Corp dev thing. And I would say so many, like when you bring in a professional CEO, this is what they screw up. Because they don't understand that, yeah, engineering goes, yeah, yeah, we can take it on. There's another set of engineers. We don't care if they work on that, blah, blah, blah. And engineering gets less efficient too, but it wrecks the field.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What the excitement around that product looks like and how the integration would look like. The last thing we do is we'll look at the financials. What's the revenue multiple and how much can we grow it? And what's the three-year plan, five-year plan, and so on? And I feel like big companies, corporate departments do it exactly in the reverse order of this. They start with, hey, the revenue is this, but we could accelerate it. And the multiple is so low. And like, you know, in this, in my Excel sheet here, this makes perfect sense. And then second, they go to like, hey, is this a good product? And then lastly, like, hey, how do we convince these knuckleheads? I mean, we probably don't want to have them here, but we got to pay them off somehow. So I think thinking about it that way, you get more longevity out of it.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source