“I literally thought to myself, I probably made the biggest mistake of my life taking this job.” That’s what Ali Ghodsi recalls about his decision step up the CEO role at Databricks, which would mean leaving a desirable post at UC Berkeley. He wasn’t sure if the company would make it, and some of Databricks’ board agreed that as an academic, he wasn’t right for the job. But they all wound up being wrong: Ali has led the company from $3 million ARR to $800 million, and the data-analytics company was valued at $38 billion after raising $2.5 billion last year.
In this episode, Ali and Joubin discuss fleeing Iran in the 1980s, immigrating to Sweden, coding as an escape, order out of chaos, learning how to value work, right place right time, Ben Horowitz, whole genome sequencing, Turing Tests, academics as CEOs, leveling up executives, what great leaders look like, the communication needed to raise, and the problem with “data-driven” cultures.
In this episode, we cover:
- What Ali remembers from before his family left Iran (01:00)
- Moving to Sweden and Ali’s first jobs (04:00)
- What if your wealth and privilege suddenly disappeared? (10:01)
- Finding time for family and oneself while working insane hours (14:04)
- Over-working, panic attacks, and PTSD (18:08)
- Researching cloud computing at UC Berkeley, and the start of Databricks (26:06)
- What Databricks does for companies with lots of data (31:22)
- The anxiety of competing against an incumbent as a 10-person team (36:03)
- The concerns of the Databricks board — and Ali himself — about him becoming the CEO (42:42)
- Learning from more experienced CEOs and other executives (48:27)
- Approving new hires and what Ali looks for when grilling job candidates (52:02)
- Deposits, withdrawals and how much time he spends on hiring (56:08)
- What it means to have a culture of “truth-seeking” (01:00:03)
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