YouSaid · the spoken record

Ron Gabrisko

lines on the record: 106
first: 2025-08-04
most recent: 2025-08-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“First year targets like 10 million to put it on prem, and Ali was like, no way, we're not doing anything on prem. He couldn't get out of the meeting fast enough, right? Because his vision and the founder's vision was all around cloud, open source, and data on AI, which in retrospect was amazing insight on where the market was going. Anyway, so we just passed on it. And JP Morgan was like, we'll never be in the cloud. And obviously now they're like one of our biggest customers. So they're massively in the cloud. We have Jamie Diamond talking at Data and AI Summit. But again, like that product market fit. I think building that playbook, if you can find the right salesperson as a startup, you know, to help you do that, you should. But again, I believe in Founder-led sales. You got to go meet with customers. You got to understand what their needs are, how to develop the product. That product feedback loop of requirements and what's valuable to customers is incredibly important.”
2025-08-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: $0-$3.7BN: The Databricks CRO's Playbook to Build the Fastest GTM Engine in SaaS History | How Databricks Beat Snowflake | How To Build a Sales Org of 5,000 and Close $190M Deals with Ron Gabrisko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of depends, right? Like, I think founder led sales is really important. No one can sell the vision and the passion of the company better than the founders. Like Ali was really good at that. I'll tell you a story like early days. Like I was, I don't know, 30, 60 days in. And I was like, hey, if we're going to have a big business here, we got to sell the financial services. And so I set up like 10 CIO meetings in Wall Street. You know, I brought Ali Mate, Arslan. We're going to go meet all these folks. And we went and met JP Morgan Chase. This is back in like early 2016. And we were meeting with like the risk management. And first of all, we show up. I get all these meetings immediately and I'm like, what's going on? And I'm like, well, I have the creators of Spark. We show up and there'd be like 100 people and they just want to take pictures with Mate. So it's hilarious. But anyway, they're like, we'll give you 10 million bucks to put this. And at the time, we're less than a million, like our whole.”
2025-08-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: $0-$3.7BN: The Databricks CRO's Playbook to Build the Fastest GTM Engine in SaaS History | How Databricks Beat Snowflake | How To Build a Sales Org of 5,000 and Close $190M Deals with Ron Gabrisko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First, we didn't really have a set playbook or revenue model, right? Like, we were creating that. That was one of the things that really was exciting to me coming into Databricks was, hey, I get to help build the playbook, build the culture, all those kind of things. And honestly, first thing I did was like, hey, let's build out a team of people that I know how to sell. And let's just go find out what customers will buy. So a lot of that first kind of stage of a company called product market fit from a million to 10 million is, you know, we had all these Spark users. They're free. But let's just go talk to them and find out what would you pay for.”
2025-08-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: $0-$3.7BN: The Databricks CRO's Playbook to Build the Fastest GTM Engine in SaaS History | How Databricks Beat Snowflake | How To Build a Sales Org of 5,000 and Close $190M Deals with Ron Gabrisko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, again, like enterprise sales is kind of a system. Like, a lot of people think it's a black box, but it's not. It's a science, especially complex organizations. When you're selling to enterprises, decisions are made not by one person usually. They're made by committees, right? So you got to kind of know how to navigate organization, who are decision makers, who are influencers, things of that nature. You know, we talked about like med pics, some of the how do you build a playbook? What kind of reps do you hire? I mean, Ali's 10x smart, right? Like all the founders are, like their brains work in a different way. So he gobbled it up. Now he's like an expert. Like we'll sit down and he knows exactly like he's amazing salesperson now.”
2025-08-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: $0-$3.7BN: The Databricks CRO's Playbook to Build the Fastest GTM Engine in SaaS History | How Databricks Beat Snowflake | How To Build a Sales Org of 5,000 and Close $190M Deals with Ron Gabrisko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, Ali's like one in a billion. You know, this is kind of my third founder, technical founder. He's 100x better than any of them because he can do the technical stuff, but he's also an inspirational leader and he knows the business. Back then, he was like when I joined the company, they were kind of transitioning to him as the CEO. He was actually the VP of engineering. And I was like, he was like recruiting me. And I'm like, that's kind of, you know. different, right? But no, the first thing when he took over as CEO, he was like, teach me sales. Like, I want to learn sales. So, you know, we would sit down and talk about org charts and med pick and how organizations make decisions.”
2025-08-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: $0-$3.7BN: The Databricks CRO's Playbook to Build the Fastest GTM Engine in SaaS History | How Databricks Beat Snowflake | How To Build a Sales Org of 5,000 and Close $190M Deals with Ron Gabrisko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I met Ben through VC networking, and at the time it was like kind of late 2015. So I was like looking at Mongo or Square or some of those companies. And he was like, hey, this company called Databricks. It's way earlier stage than anything you're looking at, but it's got the most upside of any company in my whole portfolio. There's seven PhD super smart Berkeley computer guys. And there's just a bunch of Berkeley hippies and wanted to, you know, change the world. So they gave away their software for free. And I need somebody to help them build a business. So I met the founders. They were just absolutely amazing. Ali and the whole crew.”
2025-08-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: $0-$3.7BN: The Databricks CRO's Playbook to Build the Fastest GTM Engine in SaaS History | How Databricks Beat Snowflake | How To Build a Sales Org of 5,000 and Close $190M Deals with Ron Gabrisko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source