How Databricks Became One of the World's Most Valuable AI Companies

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Welcome back to The Rundown, interview edition. Today, I am talking to Arsalan Tavakoli, one of the co-founders of Databricks. Now, this is a little bit different from our usual guest because Databricks is a private company, meaning you can't buy their stock, but it's one of the most valuable private companies in the world, last valued at $134 billion.
And Databricks is quietly powering the AI behind something like 70% of the Fortune 500 companies out there. So in today's conversation with Arsalan, we get into what Databricks actually does, their new AI agent called Genie One, the absolutely insane AI builds that some companies are racking up and how Databricks is helping to solve that, and his thoughts on what roles the model companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google will play in the future of AI. And of course, we also talk about IPO plans. This was a really fun one. I think you guys are gonna love it. So let's get into it. All right, guys, today we are talking to Arsalan, Tavakoli, the co-founder and senior vice president of field engineering at Databricks. Arsalan, welcome to The Rundown.

**Arsalan Tavakoli** (1:06)
Thanks for having me, appreciate it.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:08)
I'm super excited for today's conversation. We mostly cover publicly traded companies on this podcast. So I imagine a lot of our audience might not be familiar with Databricks. So for the people that aren't familiar, can you give us a brief recap on what Databricks does? And imagine that I'm like a 62 year old uncle at Thanksgiving and I'm in a slight food coma. So if you can explain to me what Databricks does, I'd really appreciate it.

**Arsalan Tavakoli** (1:34)
In a slight food coma. Everybody's been there, right before. So look, at a high level, you know, Databricks is a data and AI company. So what does that actually mean?
A lot of the things that you are really excited about in the world that's happening of applications. For example, Adidas is trying to think about how do they put new products out that really understand what customers want, what they care about, how do they get it out?
Or you're talking about 7-Eleven wants to know, what are the main products that you actually want in there? How do I stock the latest things in my stores? Or EasyJet is trying to figure out, what are the right routes to fly to get you to where do you want to go into Europe? What that takes is a bunch of frankly unsexy, boring things to happen. There's like, how do I go grab all of that data? How do I pull it in? How do I figure out some intelligence and insights from it? And then how do I build an application that you as an end user do? That's really hard. People stick in the quagmire. Databricks is the leading platform that allows you to do all of that end to end to deliver those applications that consumers and businesses really need.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:38)
So it's doing a lot of the boring, unsexy stuff in the background that no one thinks about, but that help enterprises kind of run more efficiently and gather insight, things like that.

**Arsalan Tavakoli** (2:48)
Yeah, exactly, right? So for example, if you wanted to, you've got a podcast, you want to say, hey, about any company, I want to understand what are the best private companies that are doing X, Y and Z. Who's been on my podcast that has done this? Or if I'm sitting at a pharmaceutical company, I want to be able to ask a question and say, what are the products that are saving people's lives? Like how are our sales reps doing that?
How do you give that capability? How do you make that happen? Which is what people want, especially in the AI era. Databricks does everything from soup to nuts about bringing you the data, allowing you to build those AI applications, of course, making it cost efficient and secure to do so. I think that's the holy grail that everybody's figuring out. How do we move faster? And that in Databricks is allowing tons and tons of customers, over 20,000 globally, to do that.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:32)
That's incredible. I mean, and you guys have been around for a long time. With 2013, founded in 2013, and I was doing some background on you. Before that, you were a McKinsey consultant. So you're actually the perfect person to ask this question.
Are consultants cooked? Because with more and more enterprises just integrating AI into their systems and having access to all their data, what's going to happen to consultants? I mean, as a former consultant, what do you think about this?