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

“And then the company is dead. There's nothing left of it. And there's no integration between that asset that you bought and the platform that you have. So to avoid all of those, can you get people that really feel like they're your co-founders? So we spent just enormous amount of time with who we're like the company we're buying, who are the founders, how do they work? Are we culturally the same? Spend time with them. Do we get along? Do we see the world the same way? Are we going to click? Are we going to do this together? Are we going to be able to build in the next five years? So that's where we spend number one. Number two, we spend a lot of time on the product. What's the product experience? How would we integrate this? What would it look like? How much can we rewrite most of it? Can we not rewrite it? What programming? I always ask this and people are like, why that's such a dumb question? I ask, hey, what language did you write it in? Why do you want to do that? What does that matter? No, because we're going to integrate the code bases, right? It's like the build systems won't work. It's not going to even compile. So a product is something we spend a huge amount of time in talking to customers, understanding what the...”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, what we try to not do, so I'll start with a simple thing, is a lot of companies, especially at scale, they'll buy revenue. So they'll look at a company, they'll say, hey, this company is this size. We'll just buy that company. We'll put more salespeople on it, then we can accelerate the revenue, we're buying that revenue, and that's how they're doing it. We're not doing that. What we're really doing is, number one, we spend a lot of time with the team and the founders. So we're trying to see, hey, can we build together? Like you come here and you build together. That's very different from that buying revenue model. The buying revenue model oftentimes you park ways from the CEO from day one. You can see the big companies, they literally have a plan. I have some execs that come from these big companies to say, hey, our plan usually is to part ways with the CEO. You make a deal and the CEO can leave. But also the key people in those companies quickly leave, all of them, like the top management and then, you know, you keep promoting the people from below that couldn't get promoted before. And then eventually you bring in your own people to take over the company.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was around the time where Satya had taken over, and you know he was giving to everyone at Microsoft the book Growth Mindset or Mindset, which is about growth mindset. So there was this kind of aura in the air that we should try. Let's try to make things happen. Let's have a growth mindset here. Let's see, is there a way we can partner? So this would have been impossible five years earlier. So is kudos to Satyandi put us on the map and he's been a great partner ever since, you know, whenever there's been issues, they always resolve it. So, you know, we are very thankful. We wouldn't be where we are without them.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I will say, look, with all the different deal and Microsoft being Microsoft, they've been as good a partner as not only we've had a Databricks, but an entire portfolio. I mean, they've really... Lived up and delivered what they said they would do, which is I think you have to give such a huge credit because like in the whole Gates and Balmer era, they were never that good a partner to anybody. And he's really turned that around. And they've been fantastic with us.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So he just had huge problems with this. It's like, this is not a product I built. Why would we make this successful? So yeah, there's like usually there's like many times. So like if you don't have grit, those deals will die because this deal died multiple times, as Ben said. It was like completely over. Like it was completely blocked by some exec that said, absolutely not. And blocking it, it's veto. It's over. And no one wanted to overrule him. So you have to go in there and work. And the only way we did it, like they call it the nerdbird. I would take the, you know, SF Seattle flight up there. I was up there so much. I knew all the buildings, all the rooms, everything. So you just have to spend time on the ground and talk to as many people as possible and sort of influence that organization from within.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was one engineer that just said, not doing this. This is not going to go. They actually put a guy in place at Microsoft who was actually super had a great reputation. But he was a builder.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this is why most of these deals fall apart and they don't work. There has to be something that you as a small player can give that they don't have. And usually you don't have anything to give them. Usually I find all these small companies show up and they come, for instance, to Databricks now and say, oh, we'd love for you to partner with us. But what am I getting out of it? You don't report to me. I don't report to you. So the moment we've closed the deal, if it's not good for me, neither of us will just do our side of the bargain. So there has to be something in the deal dynamics, in the construct that inherently is extremely beneficial both sides. There has to be a trade that makes sense. Microsoft really wanted that product. We really wanted their distribution channel.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They were competing with AWS. They had a gap at the time, and we had a great product. They have an amazing distribution channel. So in this BD deals, there always has to be a given get that actually is kind of commensurate.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're such a small company. I'm worried you take this money and you get drunk off of it, and you're not going to do anything afterwards. And so I had to really convince him that, no, I'm extremely hungry. Like, there's no way, like, I will continue to have crazy appetites. Don't worry about it. So both sides were kind of worried about different things. But yeah, the giving get was important that you said in the beginning, which was they had a gap in the product portfolio.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was very interesting. It was a very interesting dynamic. So, you know, John Farrell had to strategize with us and told us that they have to do a big pre-commit. Because then they have skin in the game. Otherwise, they're just going to forget. They'll do like the PR, but then they'll forget about you. But then when we were trying to get that from Microsoft, I remember I was talking to Takeshi Numoto, who is one of the main brains at Microsoft, like one of the key strategists there. And his thing was, I don't want to give you a big commit.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of them, yeah. And then Ali. Said You know, when we got all the way down to the deal, he was like, if I don't get this number, Ben's going to fire me. And so can you help me out? It was very interesting.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're going to do this integration. That wipes out 12 months of our roadmap. We don't. Yeah, so whoever can sell them, we think you can sell the most, but we don't know what's your first. challenge their kind of manhood a little bit and so they come out with this big ass forecast and we're like okay great just give us a little portion of that”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, because our engineers are busy. Yeah, they're going to do this integration. That wipes out 12 months of our roadmap. We don't have anything else. You guys have many thousands of engineers. So this is, we only have one of these. Yeah, so we did.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That kind of opened enough of a door to get it going. But there were, so like one of the most important things in the deal was, which, you know, and John O'Farrell really emphasized this for both of us, was, look, you got to get them to put, they're such a big company that they're going to lose interest many times. So if you don't Have them write to such a big check that somebody in there is going to get fired if it doesn't go well. It doesn't matter if you get the deal. You're going to lose the deal. And so what we did is we're like, and the technique that we had was, okay, give us a forecast. Like we're a little company. We can't afford to do this deal. We can only afford to have one partner. So give us a forecast of what you'll do”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Were clouds. It was like a big mismatch, also. Yeah, so it was a real. So Microsoft was like super pissed at them and wanted to stick it to them. And so that was, you know, so you have Satya going, like, I think this company's interesting. And then this ground level thing going like, we want to fuck these guys. And that.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we had some luck, and then Ali. Did a couple things that are quite a few things that were very, very effective. So the luck was at the time, deal with big companies, there's always a timing element. And there was a company called Hortonworks that had a deal with Microsoft to provide some similar kind of functionality. And they were basically putting a gun to Microsoft's head saying like you pay us more money or we're going to pull our product. And they were on France.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Suddenly, all these people that were not responding to my emails from Microsoft right after Satyas, he seed them and he seed the next person, they were all like, hey, I'm clearing my calendar, would love to meet you. Do you have any time in the next two days or three days? But really kind of the original pitch of what's the give and get was Ben and Satya at A16Z. And they kind of figured it out and I was not actually even there.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think it was here actually at A16Z. And they actually just talked. And I was not actually in the loop. And then he called me up and said, Hey, I talked to Satya and I think this is, he's excited. He wants to do this. And I saved the email. So Ben introduced me to Satya. And this was, I think, three or four a.m. I was like in New York. And the email went to Satya. And then Satya added like four or five people to the email thread. And then they added four or five people. So within an hour.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe I should start by saying that we had tried to get close to Microsoft for a long while. I think Ben had told us you need to, that's an important partner because they have the biggest distribution channel. Today they have 60,000 sellers. If you can unlock that in any small way, it's going to be a game changer for you. And I had been trying and I had been CEO for a year. So I'd been trying hard to get in there. And many, many people offered me, you know, hey, so here's, I actually know Satyas, I'm going to get you introduced. And I got multiple introductions to Satya. He just like, I never responded or just CC'd his EA and it went into an EA loop.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, over systematizing, or making it symmetrical. Don't have to have one on ones with the same frequency of all your staff or like some of them, like you can meet very seldom, like everything is different. Every part of the company is different. You may need to meet with somebody every day. And then other people, you know, you can meet once a quarter for now because it's just not that serious. And you can't. Get caught up in making everything fair and symmetric, particularly like your staff, they got to be able to deal. And this is actually the biggest conversation that I had with Ali early on. If they can't do it, they can't do it”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And kind of drop everything else. Like, you know, you drop that tea and go really, really low. Like, it might be HR. I might be deep diving all the way down to HR, looking at our HR handbook, our policy, everything, like, who was this person? What happened? Why is this happening in that group? What's going on in that group? What's the culture in that group? What happened here? You might want to do that. It might be existential for your company, as we've seen. Some companies went under because of HR problems, right? Or ethical issues that were going on. So I think having a really good priority order is really important. I think some execs like they just want to have a perfect ducks in a row. I have my weekly one-on-ones. I have my weekly staff meeting. I have my weekly this, and then I do this, and then we follow the rules, and we do all of this. And then that's like just like the top part of the T.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think the best way I would say it is kind of like a T and want to be broad and then you have the leg that goes down and goes really, really deep. But you want to do that anchoring. And the key thing is to have a really good priority order. What's most important?”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's no knowledge with the people who are talking to you as CEO who are in your staff. That's not the way information moves. And so you got to be. Now he's like super fast, which enables him to go super low. But, you know, in any given time, Way to think about it as a CEO is it's not like you're spending the exact amount of attention to HR, SUR, to the key engineering project as you are to the key kind of sales competitive deals. And you have to You don't address everything evenly. You can never do that. It's just a bad idea. Now, you'll probably get to everything eventually, but you're not spending the same amount of time on every single department. The ORC chart is not the way that company works. It's just a communication architecture”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's going to be a mess because you never get the truth. Because the truth never makes it to you, like through your people. Like if I go talk to Ali's executive staff about what's going on there or organization or anybody's, first of all, they're going to spin it. Second of all, they don't actually know. And so you can't, you need to help them debug their organizations because they got a million things going on. They're also kind of going to the problem, going to the bottleneck, trying to figure out what's happening. And so like that, it's just a very unreliable source of information. All the knowledge in a company is with the individual contributors that are doing the work and the customers. Like there's no”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Listening and giving direction is very different on that. If you give direction, You can cause a lot of chaos. But if you go talk to people, you listen to understand the problem and then send it back down the chain of command. Tends to work very, very well. But look, generally, if you're a CEO and you don't fly low and fast”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But there are some tricks and rules around how you do that without breaking the whole organization. So you can't just willingly talk to anyone. But yeah, that's part of it”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly, exactly. So, yeah. So, you know, you just, it takes a lot of effort. You need to learn all your keyword shortcuts. But I think that's, you know, people feel motivated that, hey, I have direct relationship. We used to say, we used to have one of the culture principles used to be, hey, be a co-founder and we don't want to have any employees at Databricks. We just want co-founders. And the key point was like, hey, you're kind of the owner of this company. You're not just a renter. Come here and yeah, we can talk about it. And you can suggest an idea. You might have just joined and you're straight out of school. You might have a great idea for a product. Tell me about it. I'm happy to push it. So it's making people feel like they have an impact and they're inspired back to Ben's point. Then it's going to be much more exciting for them, right? Than following some bureaucracy. I don't follow the bureaucracy, basically. I go talk to anyone I like. I try to go to the person that is actually the closest to the work that's being done at any given time.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, by the way, I respond even to progress reports on all those products and I follow them in detail, every one of them. I try to respond to every product. Respond. But look, I think this is, if you're just going to fly high and give high-level inspirational speeches and then, you know, we'll trust them, we'll delegate to people, it's not going to work. So my way is, you know, you got to get into weeds. You got to understand. This is back to what I said at the very beginning. Like, how do you become great head of engineering? How do you hire a great head of marketing? The only way you can do that is by being really excellent at it. So you need to study the game and become the best. So I try to stay tuned to all of these things.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there is no feeling as good as when you're not winning and then you get it to winning. Yeah. Like, that's the best feeling. You can't replicate that once you're super successful, you never can quite get that feeling again.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We weren't winning I mean, especially, you know, the story you had in Hart Thing of a Heart Things, which is probably the best business book ever read, which I read, by the way, before starting the other books and influenced us a lot.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get the output, like particularly in Silicon Valley, because you're battling attrition, this and that, and to get things on the right track, that takes a whole different kind of level of technique and storytelling and show you how you could be winning and all that kind of stuff. That gets very, very complicated.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then people don't want to work. So I think it's like feeling like we're winning, like we're the winning team. We're winning. And wow, they're expecting more from me. And, you know, so then I think you can get, you need that motivation in people.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People who are motivated and they feel excited about work and they see the impact that they're having, they're going to work way, way harder versus if you're demoralized and you feel like it's not going well, I'm not having impact, I don't have any autonomy, then you're not going to just don't want even. You're kind of depressed sitting down working. I do think there's one thing here where leaders can really help, which is to make your team feel like they're winning and that they're doing a great job. Like you can ask more from people. But if I feel like, hey, I'm losing and everything we're doing is wrong and I'm putting in all these hours and it's stupid. Like there's like, what's the point of this?”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It just doesn't matter. You know, like you'll just have a lot of people go, I know if I work hard, it's not going to make a difference. So like, why would I do that? And like, you can't overcome that with rah-rah and, you know, lead by example or anything else like that's just fundamental to how it is. And you see in like, like in any company of any scale, even at our scale, like there are some groups who really can have impact and work extremely hard and then groups who have lesser impact will work less hard. And you just see that.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think You know, a lot of it at his scale ends up being things like organizational design. And are people feeling like they're having an impact when they're like, if people are feeling like they're having an impact and they're good, then they'll work very hard. But if you're in some kind of weird three-legged race that the CEO has constructed where everybody's got.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think that also setting the expectation, I would say, you know, one of my competitors, Frank Slutman, wrote a book called Amp It Up. It's a great book on how you get. Execution into a company, like getting a high performance culture read, everybody's always trying to excel and do better and better. Sort of that kind of culture into a company, that's a good book if you want to just study. And he's doing it at scale at bigger companies. So I think that's highly recommended reading as”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think that you want to make sure that it's sustainable. I can work insanely hard. I'm motivated. Everybody has a different threshold for how hard they can work. I don't think you want a culture where people are burning out. I think you really should avoid that. In fact, at the books, I'm very often going in and saying, hey, this team, your scores are really bad on work-life balance. Like, what are you doing about it? Or you guys should take several days off, or you should do some off-sites or do something. We actually go in and if we see that there's some groups. And other groups at Databricks, you know, their work-life balance score is like 100%. They're like, you know, slacking off, you know, so then it's kind of the opposite. But I do think that you can kind of vote for that.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But they're going to be much more honest if you ask them, like, hey, how much does she like grind the midnight oil? Is she like, and they'll tell you right away. It's like, oh my God, she works crazy. Like, you know, she's, I mean, I think she has a good balance. You know, you can suss that out very easily from backdoors, references. People will remember the people and they'll just offer it up and say, oh, that person was like nuts. They were like working 24-7. So I think that way you can get people that are hardworking. By the way, I don't want to over-emphasize. I don't think everything is just work harder. You know, you have to also work smarter.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So don't 100% true, right? So the best way to vet for this is to do backdoors. Ask people. People know if I ask someone, hey, how was Sarah? Was she great? They're always going to say, yeah, she was great.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think start with setting the tone at the top. If you're the hardest working person, everything will take care of itself from there on. If you're not working hard, it's very hard. I mean, if you have, you know, it's a double standard. I mean, Ben has a whole book about that, which is basically what you do is who you are, is the whole title of the book, right? So it's like if you are working extremely, extremely hard, the rest of the organization is also as well. Are you calling people at 9 p.m., 10 p.m.? Are you working weekends? Do they expect you? Not that you expect them and you're going to be angry and yell at them if they're not dropping everything for you. Not that. But the fact that they just know that all these working 24-70 is working seven days a week and he's working at 11 p.m. or 2 a.m. or whatever it is, I think that gets a lot of it done. The second thing I would say is you can vet for this when you hire people.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is very common, and you can see this in the industry the extreme version of it is like they get fired. And then head of HR talks to them. And they're like, do you see this coming? It was obvious, right? You knew this. No, I had no idea. He's like, wait, you didn't get any feedback on this? No. I only got thumbs up all along for like a whole year. So I'm in shock. This is super common, right?”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and then just the frequency that I think helps a lot too, where if I see you once a year at your review and I tell you what's wrong with you, you're going to be offended no matter what it is, no matter how wrong it is, no matter how correct I am, it's going to be offensive. But if every day, if I see you doing something I don't like, I go, no, don't do it that way, do it this way, then you get desensitized to it. And so I think the mistake a lot of particular engineers make is they just don't say what they think when they think it because they're afraid of hurting someone's feelings. But that's how you save their feelings because they're used to you. You're always doing that and you're doing with everybody. They see it. They're like, oh, yeah, fuck Ben's an asshole. He's like always doing this, but that's how he is. And that's how we work. And it's no problem as opposed to the hammer. And you try and put in a shit sandwich. Oh, you do this really well, but this is all fucked up. And this is good.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, are you criticizing me? Or is it like, no, no, I'm here to help you? I cannot help you, but if you beg me for help, maybe I'll help you. So which of the two modes? So if you can get people into the mode of, oh, wow, I'm like being helped. Like they're helping me and I'm going to get further ahead in my career and I'll be more successful. Please, no, no, no, please don't leave. Come back and tell me more because I'm taking notes here. So if you can flip to that, I think a lot of feedback can be recast into I'm just here to help you, but feel free to completely ignore this advice. But if you want to be really successful, if you want to get that job or if you want to get that project next time, if you did it this way, you probably would have had a higher probability of getting that, but I don't care. You do whatever you want. And then people are much more receptive. They're like, no, no, no, please. I want to know more.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can I refund that? You know, there's this book called Radical Candor, and I think people take it too far and they misunderstand it and so on. But I think the essence of that book is that if feedback, are you criticizing me? Are you saying I'm stupid? I can't do the vision because my point is not about the 5%. I was trying to make a different point, and now you're just this is a cheap shot. And now I'm like hurt. And I think, by the way, I think you're wrong. It's not five. I said six and a half.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, it was worse. It helped me with the, I'm just trying to understand basic math. You have all these numbers on the slide. And if you said that your conversion ratio is 5%, but I can't divide any of those two numbers to get 5%. And then the person freaked out. Don't freak out. Just tell me which of the two numbers do I divide to get 5% because I've divided all of them and none of them is 5%.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By the way, that's how we started Databricks was I think everybody was a PhD in computer science who was running anything. Including sales. Yeah. That's probably the number one mistake is You just go, okay, well, like I'm an engineer, so I want a sales guy who can talk to me and understand engineering. Well, that's not a really good criteria for sales. So those kinds of things he just learned faster than most other CEOs are in that position. And then he's taken a lot of stuff that like I know how to do and he's done it much better. So one thing that I'm good at is rather than telling somebody that's stupid and hurting their feelings or so forth, I'll ask him a really fucked up question. Actually, I did it in a board meeting. I said, well, could you help me with the math on this? Because I don't understand the math.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How to build a B2B machine, how to game was played, but you have to do it again, but now you're doing it in a field where you're really clueless. And also probably all your instincts are wrong and your intuition is completely wrong. So can you be clairvoyant and see the truth? Or do you want to lie to yourself? And that's where I think a lot of founders make mistakes. Like they'll do well in their own archetype when they have to step outside of their own archetype.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if you really have grit and you work hard, you're going to be able to do great things. That's about you yourself. Also, if you hire a great team, because as a leader, you alone can't do much. So, can you hire the best people out there? So that's also part of that. Do you know what Great looks like? Have you interviewed all the best people? And then can you now sell them and get the best people to come work for you? Once you start assembling a team of excellent people, then they will uplift you. This is a managerial leverage that I learned from Ben, which is from high output management by Andy Grove. But it's basically, are they so great that you're learning from them? It's like Ali was a great head of engineering, but actually he was a great head of engineering because the people that worked underneath me were doing amazing things. And I was just standing on their shoulders. So you just have to do that. And you have to instill everybody else to do that recursively so that you end up with just amazing killer team. And you got to continue doing that. Now you have to, okay, for engineering, it wasn't actually that hard because I had written a lot of software. But now you're CEO. So now you have to do that for marketing. You have to do that for sales where they were super helpful because they had done it with Loud Cloud and Ops Square.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Admit you have a problem, okay? And then, number two, be a student and learn everything you can about it, right? Go all the way down to the details and try to learn from the best and then work your butt off. You're nothing. You're zero, right? You know nothing about writing reliable software. I would say that was the same thing. I tried to learn. I try to network with the best heads of engineering, best heads of products. I try to read every book. I got as much as I could out of Ben and Mark. I read all of their blogs, all of their books, everybody else's. But then you do search, search firms are really great at getting you to meet who's the number one product manager by reputation in the market right now. Can you get 30 minutes with that person? Just sit down. They're not going to join you because your company's too crappy and too small. Can you get 30 minutes with them? Can you get a dinner with them? Can you get a breakfast with them? And then just ask them lots and lots of lots of dumb questions. And they'll tell you, they'll happily just tell you like, hey, here's how I do it. The other guys are wrong. And then they'll give you a playbook and you can go compare it. You can go to the next person and say, hey, this is the playbook I heard from. It's like, no, no, no, that's totally wrong. You don't do it that way. Here's how I do it. And then very soon you learn enough.”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we were in academia, so we were scientists. And then I led engineering and product. So you got to learn how to build a product and get product market fit. And then I became CEO afterwards. Each of these has different sort of challenges. I think that in all of them, the thing that is in common is that you really have to understand and be extremely good at the task at hand. And so number one, admit that you don't actually know everything about the job. So A, first step of anonymous alcoholics, admit you have a...”
2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source