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

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  1. “Trying to kill me. I don't want to see it. Talk more about the journey about evolving from an academic, a technologist, to someone commercial RCOs go through. Talk about what it was like for you in the context of what others can learn from it.”

    2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Like quixotic, insane idea given where they were. He's paranoid enough that he knew that could be an issue. And then he trusted himself enough to go get deep enough to decide whether to do it or not, as opposed to, you know, ignore it. These guys are trying to kill me. I don't want to see it, which is what a lot of CEOs do. And so that kind of thing. But there's a lot of elements to that job. It's a very complicated job.”

    2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “The strategy was like make Spark the biggest open source thing. I mean, I can remember it on all the slides now. And then Databricks would have the best Spark. But Databricks never had necessarily, we didn't do a lot to make it the best spark or not differentiate it enough. And that was kind of the first thing Allie did on the product side. And then he hired Ron Gabrisco, which. Was transformational because that kind of drag the company into the world.”

    2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Yeah. Spark Conference Fund Yeah. But the problem was that as it is often with open source is that everyone's just downloading the open source version. Actually, your biggest enemy is your open source project. The main thing you have to fight in the market is, hey, why can't I just download the open source version? Amazon is offering it to Codeners are just offering it. I'm just going to use that. So this was the biggest challenge that Databricks had at the time. And we needed to do very serious, aggressive pivots internally, which were going to be very, very painful to lots of people, like to the whole ethos of the company internally. And so I kind of knew that for almost a year. So when I got the shot, that's what we started doing.”

    2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “First of all, kudos to Jan for building the company originally and Ben investing and believing in us. And then also, I kind of couldn't have done the CEO job. Ben basically babysat me the first couple of years. You know, so I did know what was kind of wrong with the company because I had been there for two, three years and I had seen from inside what we should change and what the issues were. But we had an open source project that actually became very successful thanks to those first two, three years. Apache Spark became a worldwide sensation. And we could pride ourselves on the number of downloads of the software”

    2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “I was like, maybe they're right. Maybe we should just sell. And I remember having that conversation with Ben, which is, he said, hey, you can do whatever you want. You can sell, you're going to make a lot of money, and you'll be super successful in life. But, you know, if you're like me, you're going to look back the rest of your life thinking, you know, I missed that one shot. That was the one thing. I should have taken it all the way. And now I'll never know how far I could have taken it.”

    2025-10-15 · a16z Podcast · Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source