Databricks is a company that specializes in global data, analytics, and artificial intelligence. The company was founded in 2013 by Ali Ghodsi, Matei Zaharia, Reynold Xin, Ion Stoica, Patrick Wendell, Andy Konwinski, and Arsalan Tavakoli-Shiraji who are the creators of Apache Spark.
The company was created in order to help companies and enterprises grow their business with data and AI also including generative AI as found in its early days. The company was built with an open lakehouse architecture, the company has the purpose of providing a unified foundation “for all data and governance, combined with AI models tuned to an organization’s unique characteristics.”. With the integration of the Databricks system into your company, you can benefit from the use of automation, natural language processing, and machine learning in order to discover and use the needed data for your projects.
This journey started with Ali Ghodsi who in his college years read an article that talked about a chief executive who was hired to save a struggling tech company. This incident reminded him of his parents and how the surgeries that they were performing while he was growing up, being doctors.
“I loved the fact that you could think about large corporations as patients, and you could perform surgery on them to make them super healthy and successful,” he said for the WSJ.
Fast forward, he is now the CEO of Databricks, which has become one of the fastest-growing companies in Silicon Valley. The now 11-year-old company is ready to secure $10 billion in funding from investors such as Andreessen Horowitz and Thrive Capital. Even more so, the new founding series is one of the largest in the history of venture capital.
Yet, in order to get here, Ghodsi needed to perform some “strategic surgeries” that were needed in order to create a healthy environment for the company. He became CEO of the company in 2016, 3 years after the company was founded, and started by redefining some of the practices the company was doing up to that date. One of the practices was that they started to charge for software that, back then, was given away for free.
This is one of many things he did to grow the company. Two years ago, at the urging of the investors, Ghodsi slowed down hiring and had his engineers create an AI bot that boosted productivity. The name of the robot is R2-D2 and it was created two years ago.
Nowadays, Databricks helps companies analyze large volumes of information that are collected, this tool being even more useful during the AI revolution in all fields.
Computers, tech, and science have always drawn Godhi’s attention as he started from an early age coding and a side hustle where he would fix broken computers from his classmates as he was only in fourth grade.
His plan was to study computer science, so he enrolled at a local university under the name of Mid-Sweden University. Yet, he also enrolled in a class that his roommate was taking, adding business to his major.
Fast forward to 2009, after finishing his Ph.D. in computer science, he moved to the U.S., pursuing the American dream as a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. And, after a year, while he was working at a data-analytics lab that was affiliated with the university, AMPLab, he and six other researchers created a new piece of code named Spark.
Their creation became shortly after a hit as it had the ability to analyze messy data sets faster than ever before, even more so, they also set the world record for sorting through 100 terabytes of data in 223 minutes, beating the older record by 40 minutes. And this is how Databricks slowly started.
The scientist who created the code decided it would be a good idea to create their own company, starting by asking Ben Horowitz, the co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, for $200,000 in order to start theri company. However, Horowitz helped them with a check for $11 million, which was on behalf of his venture-capital company.
Yet, at first, Ghodshi was not sure if he wanted to become a full-time tech exec, working only part-time at the company they had created, the first CCEO being Ion Stoica, his colleague from Berkley. But, this was not for a long period of time, as in 2016 Horowitz asked Ghodsi to become the CEO of Databricks, and so it happened.
During that period, Databricks was struggling to find a pool of larger customers who would pay for their software as it was still available online for free. In a customer meeting, the customer even said “Why would we ever pay $10,000?” he said. “I’m just going to get it for free.”
So, they added a feature that made the software available only to the customers that were paying. Targeting big companies such as Capital One and JPMorgan to buy their products. Another important change made by Ghodsi was that he made changes in the executive team and began sharing theri board presentation with the current employees working in the startup. This idea was inspired by a case study he read in college, where employees were more prone to work after they had the same goals as their boss.
Another milestone that helped get Databricks where it is today is the deal it closed in 2017 with Microsoft, which generated $100 million in sales.
A few years later, they also wanted to make a switch and create an opportunity for growing, expanding Dataricks into more organized data that can be stored in tables resembling sales information.
Closer to this day, in 2022, instead of laying off employees, Ghodsi came up with a plan to make the business profitable. He had his Chief Financial Officer, Dave Conte share a giant chart trucking theri progress towards their goal, making it visible to all employees. At this time his employees build AI-powered bots, including the one mentioned in the beginning, R2-D2.
This helped the company double theri sales, in the summer of 2023 acquiring MosaicML for theri AI models that can predict which promotions are suitable for each client.
Up to this day, more than 10,000 companies are using Databricks worldwide, some of the companies being Block, Comcast, Code Nest, Rivian, Shell, and almost 60% of the Fortune 500, Following one of the greatest growth journeys.
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