Databricks’ Ali Ghodsi Never Wanted to Be CEO. Now He’s Among the Best

Brian Halligan (0:00)

And is that Monday morning meeting really useful, or is it theater? Can you just have a Google Doc and get it done that way?

Ali Ghodsi (0:07)

We're talking about humans.

Why should I like you or trust you if I never get to meet you? I don't know if you're married, why do you have to meet your wife at all, and your kids? Can't you just have a Google Doc? We just write down the stuff you want, and if there's something you want to teach your kids, put it in the goddamn Google Doc. Maybe you don't even need to respond to the Google Doc, Claude can.

Brian Halligan (0:45)

Hey everybody, today we have Ali Ghodsi on the podcast. He's the founder and CEO of Databricks. I've wanted to have him on for a while now.

I had Ben Horowitz from A16Zion a few months ago, and I asked him, who is the best CEO out there? And without thinking much about it, he said Ali. And after interviewing him, I kind of agree, he's really sharp. A younger me would have loved to have worked for him and learned from him. Hope you like it. I'll be back at the end with my takeaways from the interview.

Ali, welcome to Long Strange Trip.

Ali Ghodsi (1:21)

Thanks so much, excited to be here.

Brian Halligan (1:23)

You had an interesting road to the CEO chair at your company.

From what I understand, the company was founded, there were seven co-founders at Databricks. And a few years in, it wasn't exactly ripping, the board decided it wanted to make a CEO change. Can you kind of take us into the room when those conversations were happening? And I assume they interviewed you. Like what happened?

Ali Ghodsi (1:47)

Yeah, I don't know. I think I knew I was hearing from the grape wine that they were like interviewing other CEOs and I would hear how they interviewed that guy and interviewed this guy.

So as far as I knew, I was like they're not going to even pick me. I know that the identity of at least two people. So it was, I mean, 2015 was kind of a turbulent year for Databricks because we were having great success with our open source project Apache Spark.

We were just not having commercial success. Revenue was, Gab revenue came in at like one and a half million that year. So the vibe wasn't great. And so I kind of, and I'm like a glass half empty guy. So I was like, you know, I'm probably going to leave and we're all probably going to leave. So I like, yeah. So I actually applied for, you know, a faculty job at Berkeley and, oh, and I was going to take that actually kind of towards the end. And I was like kind of facing the dilemma, which one should I should become CEO, which is I never wanted to be CEO. Or should I go back to my dream of being a professor, which is what I always wanted to do.

Brian Halligan (2:46)

Fascinating. Did they interview you?

Ali Ghodsi (2:52)

No, not like, hey, this is a CEO interview. Like, what's your strategy? No, not really. Maybe they had some one-on-ones with me that I knew that, okay, are they kind of like filling me out or something? But all this was very hush-hush. Actually, I was not allowed to know that there's like a process going on.

Brian Halligan (3:05)

The interesting thing about them picking you is my sense of the problem the board had with the company is it had very little commercial success. You would have thought they would have hired someone with a lot of commercial background. You had negative amounts of that. What do you think was going on with that?

Ali Ghodsi (3:23)

I think it's A16Z and Ben. This is the period also. I mean, they're still that way, but they were like religious about like founders only. And you know, because they had themselves been through it. Remember, Ben famously was asked at some point, hey, when are you going to bring a real CEO into your company? And he felt like shit. He wrote about it in his book, right?

So I think he didn't want to do that to, you know, us founders. So I think he really believed like, let's pick someone that is a founder. He later then said, hey, this was anyway just a trial. We didn't even give you a CEO salary. So we were like really testing you out. So I think from his point of view, probably, I don't know, you should ask him. It's probably like, hey, we'll try it out for six months, 12 months. If we're going to do a search, well, you know, we'll put another guy in place in six months or so. And what do I know? Maybe the search that we're doing didn't turn out very great. Maybe they hadn't seen any very good candidates.