Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business

**Ali Ghodsi** (0:00)
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.

**Erik Torenberg** (0:20)
Could have been.

**Ali Ghodsi** (0:20)
So do you want to live with that? Or do you want to just have the money? I'll support whatever you want to do. I really couldn't care less.

**Erik Torenberg** (0:27)
In 2016, when Databricks was on the brink, the board wanted a new CEO. Co-founder Ali Ghodsi was ready to go back to academia. Instead of leaving, he took the job and turned an open-source project into a $100 billion company. On this episode of Boss Talk, I'm joined by Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi alongside Ben Horowitz and Sarah Wang. We unpacked the 2016 crisis, the Microsoft deal that changed everything, and how Databricks built intensity without burnout. We also talk about giving feedback to actually lands and why not selling might be the boldest call a founder can make. Let's get into it.
Excited to bring back Boss Talk. This was a series that you guys did a few years ago on Clubhouse. That was a big hit.

**Ben Horowitz** (1:10)
Yeah, we had fun.

**Ali Ghodsi** (1:11)
It was Ben's idea.

**Erik Torenberg** (1:12)
Yeah, excited to bring it back. So in the spirit of Boss Talk, let's talk about the first time that you became a boss in terms of running Databricks. Let's start with the moment in 2016 when things weren't as smooth as perhaps they should have been, and we were looking for a new CEO, and Ben, you recommended Ali. What did you see in Ali?

**Ben Horowitz** (1:29)
Well, that's not really what happened.

**Erik Torenberg** (1:30)
Okay, so why don't you tell the story?

**Ben Horowitz** (1:33)
So what happened was, Scott Schenker called me, who was kind of the professor in the background, kind of founder type character, very smart guy, very nice person. And he said, the guys, the other co-founders really think Jan probably shouldn't be CEO anymore, and then Ali should be CEO. And I was like, okay. And I didn't know Ali that well at that time, and I said, you want to swap out one professor for another professor? Because the one professor you have, you feel isn't running it well enough.

**Ali Ghodsi** (2:12)
One professor wants to swap out one of his professors for another professor.

**Ben Horowitz** (2:15)
It's like a professor who? And I'm like, okay, are you sure you want to look at anybody from the outside? No, no, no, no. All the founders feel like it should be Ali. And I think Martin Mikos was running around at that time, and I was like, well, maybe you should talk to him and see what an outside guy looks like. And I said, look, I'll talk to Ali. There was another factor that was going on, which was the company was in real trouble. Like it was not going well. And so the idea of bringing in an outside CEO, we wouldn't have been able to recruit the color. Like now you could recruit anybody to be CEO at Databricks. But then the choices weren't that good. So I sat down with Ali and I would say the one thing I remember about the meeting was I was surprised about how clear he was. He wasn't sure exactly what to do about everything, but he knew all the problems. And then he kind of knew who he was. And so I thought, well, we should give this a shot. So then I took that back to the board. And of course, the other people on the board who were outsiders were very skeptical. And I said we'll give them a year deal and we'll see how it goes.

**Ali Ghodsi** (3:25)
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. 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.