Scaling Successfully: Building a Sales Organization

Ron Gabrisko is the Chief Revenue Officer at Databricks, where he joined in 2016. Under his leadership, Databricks has scaled from $0 to $3.7BN annualized revenue. He has grown the sales team from 0 to over 1,000 globally, leading expansion into enterprise, government, and international markets. Ron previously held senior sales roles at Cloudera and IBM, bringing deep experience in data and AI infrastructure. His tenure at Databricks has been defined by hypergrowth, multi-product adoption, and world-class GTM execution.

Agenda for Today:

00:04 – The Databricks Origin Story: Ali, Ben Horowitz & 7 PhDs

00:08 – Ali vs JPMorgan: Turning Down $10M to Stay Cloud-First

00:13 – Prospecting Day: How Ron Scaled the GTM Culture

00:16 – Why Databricks’ Pricing Model Was Its Secret Weapon

00:19 – Enterprise vs SMB: The Risky Bet That Paid Off

00:23 – From $2M to $13M ARR: How Ron Built the First Sales Engine

00:29 – Can AI Replace Salespeople? Ron’s Brutally Honest Take

00:36 – How to Get Your First Million-Dollar Rep (and Keep Them)

00:42 – The Culture Secret Behind Scaling to 5,000 Sales Reps

00:45 – Why Databricks Waited Until $500M ARR to Go International

00:52 – What Makes a Great Sales Meeting? Ron’s Gold Standard

00:58 – The Snowflake Wars: Why Ron Says Databricks Is 5 Years Ahead