20Sales: $0-$3.7BN: The Databricks CRO's Playbook to Build the Fastest GTM Engine in SaaS History | How Databricks Beat Snowflake | How To Build a Sales Org of 5,000 and Close $190M Deals with Ron Gabrisko

You all listening to 20 sales with me Harry Steppings. Now, state we have an absolute unicorn from the sales world. On the show, we have Ronga Brisco, CRO Data Bricks, which he joined in 2016. And check this out, under his leadership, Data Bricks has scaled from zero to over $4 billion in Aero. He's grown the sales team from zero to over 1000 globally, leading expansion into the enterprise, government and international markets. I do not know any other CRO or sales leader that has gone from zero to $4 billion, leading the charge, incredible. And this is one of the best 20 sales shows we've ever done. But before we dive into the show today, is your finance team, a cosanter, tied up in enforcing policies, bogged down by cumbersome processes and drowning in operational busy work? Well, what if you could unlock seamless, strategic finance that actually fuels your business growth? 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Plus, with 20X the standard protections through program banks, your cash is not just working harder, it's working safer too. It's no surprise that one in three venture back startups in the US, with companies like Anthropic, Coinbase and Robinhood, I mean, my god, these companies are incredible. Trust Brex to help them grow. If you wanna join the smarter startups on the planet, head over to brex.com/startups and see what they can do for you. - You have now arrived at your destination. - Ron, I am so excited for this dude. I have heard so many great things. So thank you so much for joining me today. - Yeah, excited to be here. Thanks for having me. - I've gotta start. You just mentioned before this how Ben Horrors brought you into Databricks. - Yeah. - Take me to that story. How did Ben bring you into Databricks? - Yeah, so I met Ben through VC networking and at the time, it was like kind of late 2015. So I was like looking at Mongo or Square or some of those companies and he was like, yeah, this company called Databricks, it's way earlier stage and anything you're looking at, but it's got the most upside of any company in my whole portfolio. There's seven PhD, super smart Berkeley computer guys and there's just a bunch of Berkeley hippies and wanted to change the world so they gave away their software for free and I need somebody to help them build a business. So I met the founders. They were just absolutely amazing. I'll lead in the whole crew. So what was that like meeting Ali? Because I think I have a challenge doing this show where I meet Ali today and I'm like, amazing leader of multi billion dollar company and then I retrofit that on seed founders. I'm like, well, you're not as good as Ali and I forget the slope that Ali's been on. What was Ali like then? - First of all, Ali's like one and a billion. This is kind of my third founder, technical founder, he's 100x better than any of them 'cause he can do the technical stuff but he's also an inspirational leader and he knows the business. Back then, when I joined the company, they were kind of transitioning to him as the CEO. He was actually the VP of engineering and I was like, he was like recruiting me and I'm like, that's kind of different, right? But no, the first thing when he took over as CEO he was like, teach me sales. Like I wanna learn sales. So we would sit down and talk about org charts and med-pick and how organizations make decisions. - Can you take me to that seat? You sit down without anything to teach him sales. What did you teach him? - No, I mean, again, enterprise sales is kind of a system. Like a lot of people think it's a black box but it's not, it's a science. Especially complex organizations. When you're selling to enterprises, decisions are made not by one person usually. They're made by committees, right? So you gotta kind of know how to navigate organization and who are decision makers, who are influencers, things of that nature. We talked about like med-pick, some of the, how do you build a playbook? What kind of reps do you hire? I mean, I'll least 10x smart, right? Like all the founders are. Like their brains work in a different way. So he gobbled it up. Now he's like an expert. Like he'll sit down and he knows exactly like he's amazing salesperson though. - So I love this in terms of the engine light characteristics, the science of it. But when you joined, it was zero. Like in revenue, you know? - Yeah, well less than a million. - Okay, less than a million. Is it an art then? And how did you think about building the first playbook for Databricks? - First, like we didn't really have a set, playbook or revenue model, right? Like we were creating that. That was one of the things that really was exciting to me coming into Databricks was, hey, I get to help build the playbook, build the culture, all those kind of things. And honestly, first thing I did was like, hey, let's build out a team of people that I know know how to sell. And let's just go find out what customers will buy. So a lot of that first kind of stage of a company called Product Market Fit from a million to 10 million is, you know, we had all these Spark users, they're free. But let's just go talk to them and find out, what would you pay for? - I just want to go back, you said about the playbook there and figuring it out. Founders are told today, the founder needs to be the one to create the playbook and then you bring in the CRO head of sales to run the playbook for you. Do you disagree with that? - Kind of depends, right? Like I think founder-led sales is really important. No one can sell the vision and the passion of the company better than the founders. Like Ali was really good at that. I'll tell you a story, like early days, like I was, I don't know, 30, 60 days in. And I was like, hey, if we're going to have a big business here, we got to sell the financial services. And so I set up like 10 CIO meetings in Wall Street. You know, I brought Ali, Mate, Arsalan, we're gonna go meet all these folks. And we went and met JP Morgan Chase, this back in like early 2016. And you know, we were meeting with like the risk management. And first of all, we show up, I get all these meetings like immediately and I'm like, what's going on? And I'm like, well, I have the creators of Spark. We show up and there'd be like a hundred people and they just want to take pictures with Mate. So it's hilarious. But anyway, they're like, we'll give you 10 million bucks to put this and at the time, we're less than a million like our whole first year targets, like 10 million. To put it on prem, and Ali was like, no way, we're not doing anything on prem. He couldn't get out of the meeting fast enough, right? 'Cause his vision, then the founders vision was all around cloud, open source, and data on AI, which in retrospect was amazing insight on where the market was going. And anyway, so he just passed on it. And JP Morgan was like, we'll never be in the cloud. And obviously now they're like one of our biggest customers. So they're massively in the cloud. We have Jamie Dimon talking at Data and AI Summit. But again, like that product market fit, I think building that playbook, if you can find the right sales person as a startup, you know, to help you do that, you should. But again, I believe in founder led sales, you gotta go meet with customers, you gotta understand what their needs are, how to develop the product, that product feedback loop of requirements and what's valuable to customers is incredibly important. - So we're at like 500K to 2 million in revenue say. And we're gonna hire that salesperson. What type of. of salesperson, do you like to hire in that stage? And if a founder is listening, do you recommend they hire? Is it the senior head of sales who's been there, done it? Is it the juniors? Who should we hire? I mean, if you're just hiring salespeople, find somebody who's smart, intellectually curious that you trust, you know, it's going to work their tail off. In the technical field, you got to have technical salespeople, right? Again, I always say salespeople teach they don't sell. They teach customers how to get value out of their technology, right? If you try to go for the senior, really senior folk, they're going to want to hire a bunch of people. So you got to make sure you got a bunch of funding to be able to do that. Otherwise, get like a great first-line manager. Somebody trusts, spend a lot of time with them. Because, again, salespeople are good at selling. So they're really good at interviewing. You got to know what you're getting. Do a lot of back channels, all that kind of stuff. But get somebody that gets their hands dirty. Take me back to that. It's an amazing moment. You're at 500K, whatever it is. And you join and you start the sales process with Databrace. What were your biggest lessons from that one to 10 million process with Databrace? Go talk to as many customers as you possibly can. Like we went and talked to hundreds of customers. Second, I hired probably 40 people, the first six months, some of the best salespeople from my network. And I was literally just go set up meetings and find out what people will pay for and get the brand out there. Are you teaching them the questions to ask? How do we engage with customers? Yeah, we're learning the discovery. Eventually, when you build a playbook, you want to know, okay, as you start to scale, what's the discovery guide look like? What questions do I want to ask? How do I position our solution? How do I position the value of it? The differentiators. But it's all about asking questions. Even when I interviewed for Databrace, they were like, "Hey, here's our pitch. Give us the pitch." And I was like, okay, so I looked at it and it was like a lot of technical stuff. I was like, "Well, you don't talk a lot about value. I talk more about time to value, innovation, all that kind of stuff." I'm like, "Okay, pitch us." And I said, "Okay, what kind of company are you?" And they said, "Okay, let's do that." I was like, "Okay, what are some of your challenges with data? Okay, what are you trying to do in the future for your business?" And I'm like, "Are you going to pitch us?" And I'm like, "I am." It's all about asking questions and trying to find where we can add value. And so then you build that into a system of repeatable plays and teach everyone, teach them exactly what's the profile we're going after at that time. It's like VP of analytics. We run prospecting day every Wednesday just to get meetings. We're trying to get meetings and activity and all those kind of things, which is kind of a cultural thing. You need to know I'm building pipeline all the time. And then here's our value and our differentiators. And you start to build up that customer base. So. Can you take me to prospecting day? Yeah. How do you structure it? What is lessons on how to do it while the founders this thing? Literally, we take the entire sales team. This is everyone, including me. I jump into the pit because we have a lot of younger sales people too. But every Wednesday, all we did was prospecting. Because if you tell a salesperson, "Hey, go prospect four to eight hours a week." Just not going to do it because it's painful. It's hard. But you learn so much. And if you do it as a team and you make it interesting, we do it in San Francisco where the company was founded. I'd get breakfast in the morning. We talk about, "Okay, today, you'd already have to show up with, okay, here are the three to five companies. I'm going to research for each salesperson. I'm going to try to get into these companies. He research their profiles." And then, "Okay, here's how we want to pitch at the time. It was like managed spark." So here are the differentiators. And we teach him how to pitch it. We go make phone calls, LinkedIn, emails, all that stuff. And you break for lunch. And I go, "Alright, who got meetings?" And then you share. Because the collective learning, the fast you can iterate, that's your secret weapon as a small company is. I can iterate super fast and pivot super fast versus a bigger company. That's how things change. But anyway, we'd say, "Okay." And I go, "I got this profile on LinkedIn. And I got them with this message. And you teach that to everybody, "Alright, everybody else starts trying." And so you start learning, "Okay, what are people interested in? How do I get meetings?" All that kind of stuff. And eventually, then, as you continue to scale that every Wednesday, it's just a muscle. Your building is going to the gym. And so I would have winter at the end. We'd either do a donation to their favorite charity, or someone might get a cowboy hat today, or a bottle whiskey, or something. And so, just make it fun and have the team work together. And eventually, they'll start doing on their own, you measure the activity. So what ACVZ selling at that point? 18 to 20 grand. I mean, when I can-- I can't even go out. Yeah, when I came in, it was tiny. But the first, say month, I was there, we probably did a million bucks. Because as an experienced salesperson, I could go in and say, "Okay, how are you using the technology? What's it worth to you?" We found some customers that I was like, "Oh, that's 250k opportunity." But at the time, all the deals were 18k. I was like, "No more deals, less than my Uber bill." Oh, dude, I like you. But there's a lot of founders who undersell, and they didn't realize that undersell. That was a percent. How would you advise them to make sure that they're not undersell, given the knowledge that you have? We spent a lot of time early days like debating how to do pricing. I actually think it was one of the smartest things we did at Databricks was we priced based on consumption. So you could start super small, but as you start to consume more, you could get super big. And then we'd expand it to multiple products, all that kind of thing. But if you think about data and AI, data is growing, the number of queries you're going to do or grows. So having a consumption based model is super smart. I see this mistake a lot. Like, people will be like, "Oh, I'm going to price on users." There's a cap on users. If the economy goes down, there's maybe less users. But if you can price based on what's your essence of value, then you can scale while we're sleeping, which is a big important part of, I think, how Databricks built its pricing model is based on consumption. If you use it and you get value out of it, great. I've not. You don't pay anything. Did you find in the early days that helped you to sell? Because people will like, "Oh, great. We're moving to the risk." Yeah, exactly. So we'll try it out. And actually, the one trigger that we did early on was traditional enterprise. You're always selling your services. We developed a thing called strategic customer program where we'd be like, "Hey, if you spend a hundred grand, we'll give you for resource." Because the biggest thing was like, there was a gap in talent and expertise. Like, our product was amazing, but you had to know how to use it. And so we would add a resource. What's a resource of person? Yeah, a person, like a smart technical person, to be able to set it up, show you the first couple of use cases, all that kind of thing. And then once they got enabled, they're like, "Oh, no, I get it. It's pretty cool, right?" At what level can you do that? Because I think we're in that stage again with a lot of AI tools where bunny enterprises are like, "I know it's valuable. I can see that, but I don't know how to implement it." And the integration process is actually much harder for traditional enterprises. At what stage can you do in FDs, fully deployed engineers? Yeah. It's like the hot word, "Past Palantir." Yeah, what price point can you do that? You know, again, early days, you just need logos. So it depends on your funding situation, but 50 or a hundred grand, say a hundred grand. Okay, you can be a hundred grand a year. We'll do this pilot. I'll give you a resource to do it. But again, you're trying to get those big logos. Because now, once I, you know, the enterprise market's very much a FOMO. You see, competitors, they're doing this with this company. "Oh, I better get on board and go fast to do that to compete." And so getting those big logos is so important early days. Like, you need to buy them, and you need to put resources in to make them successful. Should you discount together? Should you do anything to get those logos? How do you advise early stage companies on getting mega logos? I mean, first of all, like enterprise sales is different than selling to digital natives and those kind of companies. You have to realize, like, just the sales process is different who you sell to, how you sell, all that. But honestly, there's more money in enterprises, right? Because digital natives say like, "Building stuff." They're going to squeeze you for lower prices, right? Enterprises need expertise. They need help. You know, I don't know about just heavily discounting. But again, if you build a pricing model that scales that its base unit is based on your value, whatever that is, as a tech provider, then you can scale it. So start with this one team or this one department. You can scale down the scope of it to get inside. Like, the director has up to 100K. So, you know, find a champion that'll spend that amount of money, give the resources. Even if you just do a pilot, get that logo. You mentioned 18KACVs and then the same month, 250KACVs. So, were you doing like SMB and enterprise at the same time? How do you think about whether you need to be in one camp or the other? Early days when I got there, they were all in selling to SMB startups, digital natives, Silicon Valley, type folks, which again, like, we're like trying to convince someone to spend 25 grand and I'm like, it takes you two engineers. We made a big bet early on to invest in enterprise. And we did that early because, I mean, one, I thought that's where the money was. And two, long term sustainable for a company, you have to have an enterprise business. I think there's very few businesses that can just scale based on startups and digital natives. They go up, down, all over the place, right? So, you need to make that investment. It's going to take a little longer to pay off. The sales cycles are longer, but you're going to learn a ton too. You're going to learn about like, when we entered enterprise, again, you could learn all kinds of new requirements about security, how to navigate the organization, even your legal process. What should you do? What should you do? Founders know before they go into enterprise. Because it is a big decision. A couple of things. One, it's a common thing. conscious investment. It's a longer term investment. So you need some kind of sales expertise. They're experience number one. Number two, they're also going to try to push their custom requirements on you, right? So you have to be a little bit careful. Like the security stuff is really important because again, if you want to be a mainstream tech provider, you got to know about security and governance and all those things. No enterprise is just going to let them use some tech that doesn't have security. The risk is too big. So you're going to get a lot of that. But you're also going to need to be conscious. You don't want to build something that's just for one enterprise, right? You want to make sure whatever you're building is going to be applicable to 200 and you know, you get some of these big customers. They can they can wield a pretty big stick in terms of trying to do custom engineering. Should you have a do custom engineering? I wouldn't do it if it's just for one customer. Because again, as a small company, your number one asset of tech company is your engineers. And you want them innovating on how you build the market and grow the market. If you build something custom just for one customer and nobody else is going to buy it, you might distract your whole engineering team. You said you made a very conscious decision to invest in enterprise. What does that actually mean in reality? It's a decision that's the whole team, right? It's our lead, the founders. Hey, we're going to go after this segment. Does that mean you leave the SMB segment? We kept that going. We hired a first line leader that would just, you know, in Arsalan at the time, he was running sales. One of the founders, crazy smart technical, gregarious, great leader too, like one in a billion. And you know, he was like, okay, I'm going to keep the SMB DNBs going, which was kind of generating money as we kind of built out the enterprise segment. So we personally did both. It's a handful, but you know, I had done that before. Can you do by you can't do because I'm really worried when you see startups that are just going off to enterprise and you have like big ACVs, but nine to 12 month sales cycles. And then they slip. And suddenly you've got nothing. Well, I mean, it's hard. Like I said, it depends on what kind of funding you have, right? Because eventually your business has to have enterprise, but the digital native spent a lot of money, especially in the cloud, data and AI. And they're also going to be the Canadian and do enterprise before 10 million a.r.s day. We did in our first year, which I think we did 12 or 13 million a.r.r. We did two million dollar deals. We did 12 to 12 13 million now. Yeah. We did two million dollar deals with enterprise. So again, you have to know what you're doing though. I think it is smart to do product market fit because those smaller customers will educate you on the requirements of the future market. So again, the canary and the coal mine, they're always going to be the ones pressing the technology boundaries early days. Enterprises are going to adopt that as the next phase. But again, you got to remember, enterprises are going to have another set of requirements that the digital natives might not have around security and all those things. You need to learn about that stuff too. 12 to 13 million in random. Yeah. Your sales cycles are not that long then. If you're doing 12 to 13 in the first year, I think early days we had some pent up demand of just, you know, it was probably three to six months because they were basically free users. And we just had to sell them on why they needed to get more of our premium stuff by paying for it. You know, again, when I joined, we had hundreds of thousands of spark free users. I was like, if I can't sell them something, I suck at sales. Did you make mistakes in your hiring of your fast sales team? A lot of those early folks were people I knew. Like they were known quantities. Like I wanted smart, hungry, good at discovery, good at customer relationships, things of that nature. But of course, when you're. What are the big fuck-ups you see young founders or early stage companies making that one's 10 on building a sales team? Probably the biggest thing is a lot of founders think, oh, I hired my a salesperson, no, I don't need to do sales because a lot of technical founders, they don't really enjoy sales, right? So like, I need a salesperson to like take this off my plate. I want to focus more on the product and engineering. But ideally, you still need to be involved in sales because again, founder led sales requires you to hear about your product. No one's going to be more passionate about selling your product. You have to still be involved until you can kind of get that. Like I said, probably around five, 10 million bucks where you have kind of a, okay, I know what people are buying. I can build a first playbook. That's a biggest mistake. It's just don't delegate it to the sales person because they could mess that up and that sets you back at least 12 months. I don't see donating sales as a kind of a product market fit. I was like, oh, wow, they didn't sell. So it's that fault. And it's like, well, maybe you just don't have P.M.A. F.Y. Yeah. That's not all that's that fault. Or maybe listen to your customers, you know, two years one month. And then even today, good sales people ask good questions. Understand what the market wants from your product. I'm always struck by the dilemma between when you're in those early ones 10 phase, do you do horizontal, see what resonates with different customer bases, be it financial services, be it logistics, be it healthcare, you name the different sectors that we can sell into. Or do you go, no, we're going to sell to financial services with a verticalized sales team, very tight product marketing and a really hone sales process for financial services. Do you go horizontal and broad or verticalized? I mean, I think you have to start horizontal because you're again, learning what's your applicability to the different verticals. I didn't go vertical at Databricks till we were probably 500 million plus, right? 500 million. Yeah. Because like again, like you skipped a few steps there. We were at 13 of them. No, I 'm just saying like I think when you verticalize your sales team, there's a whole nother level of like resources and complexity that you're going to add, right? Because you're going to add industry experts. You need to add that vernacular, add that to your training, to your enable man, your customer stories, all that kind of stuff. Early days, maybe financial services, it's a place to go. Like what I learned was financial services isn't in the cloud yet. If we're going to be cloud, we're probably not going to sell financial services early days. Let's go sell to the folks that are in the cloud already. Do you agree that you don't want to educate your customers on the problem? And so like for me, I don't want to tell LPs that they should be investing in venture because it's two steps. Then I need to convince them to invest in venture and then to invest in me. You want people who know that the cloud is where they should be and then okay, Databricks. Not educating them that the cloud is good. It might be a little bit different now at the scale we're at, but like early days, if they weren't in the cloud, it was like bridge to door. Let the cloud folks convince them they need to be in the cloud because we need to generate customers and revenue. You spend a lot of time times your most precious commodity, right? Especially as a salesperson. So don't spend a bunch of time with people that are going to buy anything, right? You need to go find. So the whole world is our prospect at that point. Every customer is a potential new customer. One of our qualifying questions is, are you in the cloud? If you're not in the cloud, then you're not ready for Databricks. So let the cloud guys fight that out. So we're at 13 million in revenue now. Yeah. The whole deal horses on the 500. That's a shockingly late decision on that acquisition. I was like, very, a lot of companies are still horizontal. There still be horizontal, right? Like I think AWS just moved to verticals, right? Across the whole organization. They're a hundred billion. So like, I mean, again, I think that's another choice you have to make on your strategy when you've verticals. So the 13 million. Yeah. What starts to change when this sales team goes from one to 10 to now in that scaling to 50, 10 to 50 mode? Yeah. Now we have product market fit, right? We have some references. We've seen how customers buy, why they buy. Now we're starting to get into the scale function, right? Now we can start to build a real playbook, start to train more and more sales people. Don't know. When you say build a playbook, the tree created a dog of questions that they should ask. FAKs. Totally. Discovery guide. Here are the questions you start with. Here's the profile of the customer we're looking for. Here's the actual profile of the people in those customers. Then here's the questions we need to ask. Here's how we position it during the first pitch deck and then depending on your process, okay, we're going to run POC or pilot forum, depending on what you're trying to sell as an intuitive how to get value out of it, demonstrate value, and then try to, you know, close the customer. So you're building out that playbook, you're training everyone on it. They need to know how to do that so that you can rinse and repeat as fast as possible and gather the customers. I mean, this was the utmost of respect. If it's bluntly that codified, can we not just get some monkeys to do this? I mean, it's like here's the customer, here's the profile, here's the questions. Yeah. I mean, shit, let's just get an AI avatar. Yeah, I know. I mean, a lot of people say like, hey, can we replace sales with AI? And I think there are parts of sales. You can replace with AI, like maybe building a playbook, some of those things once you get those assets. But again, early days are creating that from scratch. That's all learned from something. Because if you think of like a playbook, create it integrated into GONG, you could analyze tone, changes in voice, words, semantics, which work, and then say, what are the best questions asked? You should be able to use AI to get way better at that early days. But the one thing that will always require humans to sell are if humans are buying. Because the buying process is an emotional process. You're trying to choose what problems do you want to solve? What are the most important problems to solve? How do I solve them amongst many different people? different options. And a lot of it gets down to, if the technologies are, okay, this one has some pros and cons, this one has some pros and cons. Who do I trust the most? Which organization do I think can get me there the fastest? If that's a person making a decision, it's not black or white. When bots are selling to bots, they don't need salespeople. But as long as humans are actually solving problems and buying stuff, you need humans to sell it. So going back to the 10 to 50, for you, what broke in that phase? When you're in this hyper scale phase, which I kind of see with some of the new AI companies, right? There's some great scaling AI companies is you have to start thinking like traditional business micro 20% year by year when you're doubling, tripling, my staffing and my leadership plan has to be what I need next year. So you can't be like, okay, I'm going to incrementally add reps or leaders. You have to be thinking, we're going to do 50 million next year. We're going to do, you know, we did a hundred or two 50 like, what is my orgy need to look at at 100, 250 million? And I need to do that now. So I need to go get those leaders. I need to sell them personally. Why this is a once in a lifetime opportunity to get even bigger leaders than I need today, because once I start building out the team and the leadership, now I can start scaling under my biggest advice is, you know, you need to look at least 12 months out. Because if you're just trying to iterate, you're not going to grow fast. Is it ever dangerous to hire a head of time? And what I mean by that is if you're hiring at 13 million an hour, and then you're bringing in people for like a year ahead of time, sometimes an org is not ready to digest current. Is that ever the case or is it actually just good to go to the media? No, I think you have to think about that, right? Like, what does it take for us? It's like, we're going to start to also have an impact on the culture of the company. Like Databricks is very engineering, even to this day, it's very engineering technical culture. When you start adding salespeople, they have kind of a different mindset, you know, so you have to think about how that culture fits into that. Do you think sales wraps the co-ion of prices? Not the best ones. I mean, listen, you go into sales because it has, you know, financial upside. The people I'm looking for, they don't ask like, how much do I make early on? You got to make sure they love the mission. Like, the most important thing is, you're building an army. They got to love the mission. They got to love the company first. Once they love the mission and the company, would you mind if I came and I just said, I am fucking hungry to make money and I will crush it and make sure I hit quota? I mean, I'd love, I love the grit and the energy, you know what I mean? But I also thinking like, okay, what happens when you don't, what happens when it gets tough? Are you going to go to the next company and no, I blame you. Overgrown. So I mean, I look on people's resumes, right? Like if they have a bunch of one or two year stints, they're not long for Databricks. I need people like when this, what do you like seeing a resume? Yeah. Again, I'm looking for grit, first of all, hardworking grit. Like I want somebody to tell me like, hey, I had some challenges here, but I worked through it. I worked my tail off and kick some ass, right? I look for technical, back in the suit, like I'm looking for specific company profiles because I know if I get a sales person that already has some data AI technical capabilities, they're going to ramp way faster than somebody who's brand new. They got to learn the entire technology space, right? What's more important, someone has sold an ACV size before a customer profile before, or they have the domain knowledge of the space. Really days, it's the domain knowledge. That's more important. Yeah, I think so. Why is that? Because again, you're trying to teach customers how to get value out of your technology. And if you don't add value, like especially in today's world, there's so many technical buyers, they don't really like sales people. Like the less than they want to do is talk to somebody who's like, hey, you want to go golf or whatever, like they actually want somebody that's going to help them solve problems. Do you know just tie that into the sales engineer? I mean, we had a great, we call field engineering, but in Arsalan runs that team. It's great team, right? But I think the salesperson themselves has to add value. In early days, it's technical. Now as you get bigger, like we have $100 million accounts, you need people that know the organization, can get access to the sea level, all that stuff. But early days, when you're just trying to get logos and early customers, you got to be able to add value, you got to be able to teach customers. So $100 million accounts. Yeah. God, I hope they got a customer success rep. They have lots of people. I'm sure they did. Yeah. I mean, that's it. $100 million accounts. Yeah, we just did one for 190 million actually. No, yeah, it's pretty good. That must feel pretty great. Yeah, it's pretty great. Do you put a slap message out? Especially when we're selling 18 grand. Yeah. Yeah. Not too bad. Back them by some Ubis. Yeah, not too bad. Okay, so we're going 13. We have this process. Where are we at the end of year two? 50? Yeah, 30 to 40. Something like that. We did a three to four X the next year. Yeah, somewhere around that. So we might have got to 50. Did the leadership team put pressure on you to hit targets? I mean, now Lee and I kind of built in the founders, the early days of the company. He basically built out the product and the engineering and helped me build out to go to market and stuff like that. At least one of those guys, he wants to set the target as high as possible. And early days, I'm trying to make sure, well, let's make sure people can make some money too. So there's always that tension. What are your biggest lessons on setting comp plans effectively? Because it is important people might money and feel like they're winning. Thousand percent. What are your big lessons? Early days, you've got to make sure that sales people are crushing their numbers and making money because that's going to be your best recruiting engine. When you're trying to sell a company that has small revenue, you need people to take a leap of fate. They got to hit the believe button. So I was like, who's going to be my first million dollar earner? And I would make sure that that person does that because you know what? The best reps I would try to hire, they go, as anybody made a million bucks and then they're like, can I meet them? And then they're going to determine is that possible to replicate early days. People have to be blown out their numbers and making tons of money in a great recruiting tool. Now as you set them deliberately low goals so they hit them and then they become low goals. But I want to make sure they're achievable goals. I want them to be stretch but achievable and I'm going to make the plans like pretty rich. And their plans are like four sets on or are you like, how do you think about setting in the face? I mean, the normal enterprise rep, you know, you're going to pay 300, 350K. So, you know, if they blow it out, you want them to make three X. In early days, we were doing big commit deals. I mean, like I said, I have one guy make a million bucks in the first year and then scale it. And you know, now we probably have 20 guys make a million bucks in the sales team. So you but you always have to have those big earners because it's part of the reason they're in sales. It's because they want to the big payday. Wow. 20 million dollars plus. Yeah. Have you ever lost a million dollar plus person? I mean, eventually people are like, can I want to go to the next startup and try to do that because we have great retention. But as you scale, you have to be a little bit smarter too on how you spend your commissions. What changes? You just get tighter. You know, we have 1400 reps now. We have 5,000 people in sales. So like, you know, there's a certain budget we have to have on commissions. So we'll schedule a plan. We know this many people are going to make 200%, 150. You know, you model it out. It's pretty sophisticated because now you have big numbers. It's not like you have 20 people. Do you ever look at it and go like, it's fucking nuts. Like 5,000 people. I remember when it was me and Ali selling 18 grand. Yeah. It's funny. It's fun. Yeah. It's fun. It's fun. It's fun. It's a amazing world. Yeah. It's awesome. Okay. And so we have that. We have those million dollar people. Great. When you look at them, say the 20, are there things where you were like, I see that non-conventional or unconventional trait in most of them, stash all of them. Yeah. Like I said, I talk a lot about grit and hard work. You know, my dad was a construction worker. My mom was a math teacher. They taught me like hard work over comes talent every single day. So I'm looking for that's the special quality I'm looking for is like, this person gonna put in the extra hours, have the extra grit. When times get tough, are they just gonna stay in the office longer, make more phone calls, that kind of thing. Do you think there's money sales people at that state? I am with dear friends with Jason Lampkin from Saster. I love the man. Really, my father and venture probably said, hey, I'm gonna say I'm his older brother, but you know, he's considerably older than me. And he's always like, no, Harry, sales reps don't want to work anymore. They don't want to work. They want to dial it in and like, go home. Do you find that the sales reps of this generation are not willing to work as hard as they used to? I mean, that won't work on my team. Again, like, that's the kind of culture that I try to build. And again, I think if you're a good salesperson, you ask me, like, did we lose any older breaksters? Like, eventually, like, somebody's like, hey, I'm a startup person. I like to work at startups. I don't want to work at a, you know, 9,000 person company or 10,000 person companies. So they go to a startup again. But at the end of the day, like, I think that's what we have to teach that next generation of sellers. Because it's going to get even more competitive. Work your ass off out hustle everyone. Does it get harder to hire the hustlers as data breaks becomes an incumbent? I think data breaks is a once in a lifetime type company. It will be a trillion dollar company. Somebody in that data and AI space will become a trillion dollar company. And we're the innovation leaders. I think we can do it, right? And so part of that, when you think about getting talent at this level of scale, because we kind of skipped a couple stages now, is we have to to become a D. destination company. People have to be like, I want go to Databricks because I can build my career there because someday I want to be a CRO or CEO or whatever and they're gonna teach me about how to do that in the right space better than anybody. I mean think about like Microsoft early days or Google early days like a big part of getting talent is you have to become a destination company and I think Databricks is doing a pretty good job in that. I love that in terms of being a destination company. How did the type of sales leaders that you needed to be change from 10 to 100 million in the air? Yeah, I mean a hundred million, you know now you got a lot more process, a lot more enablement, you know I don't know everyone. I can't just reach out and make sure I get involved in the deals and so a big part of it is how do you build that leadership team? Again, we talked a little bit about like what do you need in the next 12 to 24 months? So you need to build leaders so that they can effectively develop talent. My rule is like if you have the best team on the planet and you inspire, motivate, mentor them, you get to win. I mean we have a great product which is also a massive advantage for us, but that's the number one thing you can do is if I put the best team on the field and they're well-coached and inspired, I'm gonna win right? I've been your biggest lessons on building a successful leadership team with Databricks. Yeah, so I think a lot of it's like again the profile and cultural mix right? We talk a lot about first team, first team is the company. So sales leadership, the higher you go the more it's got to be about the company. You're not there to just make sure your people are successful or you know what I mean? It's got to be okay, here's our company mission. We're together. We're gonna do it. And so I think that camaraderie and how you build that team and how you build the culture is as important as anything else that you do in sales. People need to be feel like they're part of a special mission. When was the culture at Databricks to West and what went wrong? The worst. I thought we've always had a great culture honestly. I can't really say we had bad culture. When was that a challenging time? As you scale bigger and bigger, one of the keys I think is probably how do you keep that early day culture? It's such a huge advantage when you're like a gritty, innovative startup. I think we've done a good job actually at Databricks keeping that right? Like that's a big part of the founders is like we want to be the innovators that disruptors the cool nerdy kids. You know what I mean? Like that's what we want to be. And so keeping that culture where you have grit and all that and not becoming a big company. You know that's a challenge. Here's your scale. How do you keep that and not become a big company where people are just pure-cratic. It's process. It's you know all the management team versus the workers. So but I think we've done a pretty good job of that. I think our culture is second to none. It's a big part of why we're successful. In the zero to 500 million range which is a huge range. What did you not do with the benefit of hindsight you wish had done? I started to invest in the partner channel much bigger. Partners are interesting right like especially the big partners big SI partners. At that point we had already done Ali and I did the deal with Microsoft right which became kind of pretty historical I think in legend. And it's still you know Microsoft's our you know biggest partner. It's an amazing partner for us but like you know you got to start thinking through like channels and partner strategies. And when you're so small you're always thinking like how do I get these partners involved but you're too small. I like you know go away. But once you start getting scale you need to start investing early days and partners. So you didn't do that early enough? I think we could have done it earlier. Yeah absolutely. I think a lot of founders see channel partnerships as like the panacea. We're going to have a partnership with Salesforce and it's going to be like boom. Yeah well the seat early days that's hard to do like like I would say if you're less than 50 or 100 million like you need to build a strong direct sales channel and then you can build the partner channel. But at 500 million now we should be scaling moving stuff through channels right. Does it take to do partner channels really well? Good question because sometimes like partner leaders they're like sales leaders that didn't make it sometimes. So I try to actually hire VC's which is found as the I'd like to hire you know people that have strong sales acumen sales leadership. A lot of the same qualities that want to build out channels because again like you know me as a as a CRO I'm a sales leader but I also spend you know 30 40% of my time with partners because I want to build that channel right. And so it's a skill you need to learn when you're trying to build a massively scalable business. And so you know just getting a person that's always been in partnerships sometimes a little bit dicey. I'd rather find some of it's done some sales and done some partnerships that done it you know thoughtfully to build their career. So I mean I think that's important to do. Okay that's a fantastic one. So that's what you maybe didn't do that you wish had done earlier. What did you do that you wish you hadn't done? And what are there reflections on that? I think we did a lot of stuff right like I think when we expanded internationally I think we did it kind of the right time. When did you do that? We probably started to do that to Amia maybe 100 million plus 100 to 250 million and then we're an APJ probably you know about 250 million plus. You have to do that thoughtfully though. Any lessons on how to do it? It's not too bad. It's hard. Yeah it's hard because you know there's a lot of different things like you have to translate your culture your playbook you have to have leadership there that you trust. One of the big lessons I learned is you want to transplant some of your talent. So I literally like when we open Amia took four or five of my you know best young hungry sellers and said okay you're gonna go to Amia for a year. It's gonna be great experience for you. You need to help them build the muscle over there and build the culture over there right. And me personally too I'm you know I'm doing multiple trips want a quarter over there to get that going. Same thing with APJ like transports some existing talent helps build the culture all those kind of things. So what do you think of the big mistakes you see people doing when they go international? I think some do it too early because you know again it's gonna spread your focus to your sales leadership but it's also gonna spread your focus for your product like you're gonna see new requirements come up in Asia or new regulatory requirements depending on where you go. So I think the biggest mistake is people go early before they've really got that product market fit because they you know hey they have couple customers in Amia so let's go support them and now now again you got to think about like you know I've limited team you're constrained by your resources like where do you want to focus. So I think that's probably the biggest mistake I see. I find people go to early in enterprise and often and the hard thing I find with enterprise is the sales cycles mean it's tougher to determine success with reps because they're just longer before you have close. How do you think about measuring wrap effectiveness and what are your biggest lessons in what it takes to do well. How do you know if I'm good for enterprise or for any wrap. Does it differ? I think it does slide just based on the sales cycle but I think upfront I'm looking at pipeline and activity. The number one thing I'm gonna look at is this person getting the right meetings are they building the right pipeline I gotta make sure I'm inspecting that too so you know early stage sales later you're gonna want to go hey I'm in your territory this month for this week set up as many meetings as you have and if you got one or two meetings probably don't have a great salesperson right so and you're gonna see them in front of a customer to ask good questions as a customer want to buy from them. Is there a right amount of meetings I know it's really granny that but like we mentioned Dagnum before Dagnum was always like to me when you get to my age you know the memory goes but he said it's like six or eight I can't remember what it is but you can't do more than six or eight because you need to be researched you need to be informed six or eight is the max yeah do you agree with that. You know we just at the bar at like five a week is kind of the minimum so you know five to ten he's probably right and that's six to eight that's not a bad metric but again you do want to make sure you prepare it's just like any other sport. Okay so you have five years you're probably there's you have five a week 20 a month yeah you have like an expected close right. I'm building opportunities right so at least 25% of those should turn into some kind of opportunity and now I'm gonna work that opportunity and you know they're gonna close at different rates depending on that organization where how can I get budget this that makes you worry about setting goals that can be played and what I mean by that is you're like Harry I want 20 meetings I'm like okay 20 meetings yeah and like qualification process shit goes down how do you think about effective goals setting which can't be played. Eventually I'm gonna see pipeline enclosures but you're right there's a delay there's a six 12 maybe 18 month delay on that but that's why the first line manager and the sales leader is so important because I'm gonna go assess those meetings myself again if you think about it you need pictures and batters right so or catchers and batters I don't know what you know I guess for cricket here you need bolders and bouts yeah boulders and batters so we didn't play round as in this kind of case I know I know for this but I'm based well player so if you think about it the reps like when I was first there I was like just get me as many meetings as you can just put in there be like oh we're gonna deal with J&J so like who do you want to meet with I was like anyone would a J&J email address because I'll be able to assess like is that person got juice you know is there an opportunity how do I navigate the organization so again go take as many meetings as a leader that's are you will join that cool and let them run it. - Yep. - Okay, so you're You're not running that cool. Correct. And you sit in and you just listen. Yeah, as long as it's going well. OK. And if it's not going well, I'm going to step in and try to help. And where does it not go well? It depends on the rap. They're preparation. Are they asking questions? You know, when you think about what's a successful sales meeting, we're going to talk about that, like the basics of selling. It's like, have I generated some rapport? Do they trust me? Have I generated interest? Have I identified challenges? And have I driven to an objective? What was the objective of my meeting? Was it to get an x meeting? Was it to get a POC? Was it to get an introduction to somebody? So you need to have a game plan on all that. So you've had to have researched the company, the opportunity, the people you're talking to, their LinkedIn profiles. So a good meeting is somebody who really is prepared. Again, it's like any sport you practice 10x more at least than you play. So if you have one of our meetings, you should be preparing for it 10 hours. So funny, there's your same bullet in few, which is amazing. And he says I trained 10 years for nine seconds. Yeah, there you go. Exactly. Fuck me, that's a bad ratio. I'm really bad at it. I mean, think about the Olympics, right? These people train their whole lives and it's over in split second, right? So honestly, unbelievable. Going back to that, what it takes to a good meeting, I'm so glad you broke it down in that way. I know it's kind of fast-haul of me to ask, but what do you find works in building rapport? I mean, get to know somebody, right? Like be intellectually curious about their background. But I find it playbook. When I feel like someone's running a playbook on me, it doesn't build rapport. And so for me, my job as an interior is to build rapport too. But to make someone feel safe. And like, you know what? He's not here to get me. And he's open to-- I saw a talk about my mother having MS or anything like that because you're like, oh, I feel like I'm getting to know this guy. Yeah, be a little bit vulnerable. Yeah, exactly. Any lessons for you on how you build rapport all the night? Oh, where about you in the world? Oh, it's Rainy and London. [LAUGHS] I'm definitely not a weather talker. Normally, I usually talk about, where did you grow up? What are you interested in? What are your family? I mean, you got to start small. You can't be like, oh, do you have any cancers? We can talk about everything. Like-- Because of savage stuff. No, but again, it's like, how do you try to get to know somebody or make it to know about them? I think a lot of people are influenced by where they grow up, their families. Like, I like to ask about that because I think a lot of people are like, you know, family's super important thing. So I want to get to know about that. Do you find people lie about being a buyer? Because you want to know if they have budget and if they're the buyer. Do you find that people over and flat their own status within companies? I mean, listen, I'd never ask somebody do you have budget. I'm experiencing enough to know what's going to happen. I'm going to get that information eventually. But listen, everybody wants to be important. So let them be important. The reason they have in that position is because they have some decision authority. I've done literally billions of dollars of software deals and thousands of deals, right? I kind of know how organizations work. And I'm there to teach how to get value. And I'll ask questions like, oh, do you have to do a value case for this? How does that work? How does that process work? Who has to approve that? Who has buying authority? Like, once you've established rapport, you can get a lot more deeper on that kind of information on how to navigate the organization. But you can't really have that discussion into your vatted value. How does AI change the sales process, do you think? G's any AI tools today in the sales process. Oh, we do. Yeah, we use perplexity. We use glean. We actually built some of our own AI, like a sales AI assistant. Our sales AI assistant, if we're like, hey, how do I get funding for an on-prem migration from Microsoft? You can just ask, and it'll tell you the process on that. We use perplexity. We'll do a lot of our upfront account research. Tell me, how this customer uses data in AI. How would they get the most value out of data breaks? You get a lot of information on that. And then our sales assistant will actually take that data or take that conversational stuff along with our account data. Right? Like it'll say, oh, they've been growing here. They've been spending on this product. They're working on this initiative. Oh, I also see in the press. They're interested in cybersecurity stuff like that, right? So you can use AI to really accelerate all that research and get smarter. Because again, the smarter you are on that customer, the more interesting questions you're going to be able to ask to try to find an area you can add value. It takes content preparation, because that's versus-- In terms of outbound, will we see outbound not die, but be replaced by AI in terms of email outbound, literally, being done by AI? I don't know if it's completely replaced it, but certainly, I think outbound stuff, the AI is actually better at it than humans, in my opinion. Because it'll also learn what works faster. Right? That whole iteration process I did early on with, hey, everybody's going to do prospecting day. If I start setting up a bot to try to ping people to get meetings, it's going to learn what works and what doesn't work faster than I can get a team of humans together. Now, that being said, like you want to learn that, but it needs to be informed, right? I don't think you're going to completely replace humans there. Also, in a world of infinite outbound, does value of it not go down? If you know that you're being outreach by an AI, does the value of that not go down? I don't know. I haven't thought about it. It's still early days, but you're probably right. I mean, even now, how many emails and LinkedIn posts do you get? It's really thousands, right? So which ones go to the front of your box where you even take a meeting? A lot of us going to have to do with your brand and your message and what's happening in the market and how much you know about their company, right? Again, that's what I think AI can do is if I really know what's going on inside that person inside that company, you're right. You might need a human to actually put a human touch to it, but it's probably going to give you the content to get them potentially interested better, right? Will you have more or less sales reps in five years time? Again, as long as humans are buying software, I think you need humans to sell software. So we definitely use AI to become more efficient, but we're going to hire quite a few folks because we're going to go big. So-- [LAUGHS] So I answer that question. Yeah, you did. But brilliant. When you look at this different stages of the company, what was the hardest you can break it up into like 1,100, 100 billion billion and beyond, which was the hardest? They all have different challenges. The 0 to 10, for me, was probably the most fun. It was tough, but I was like, I can sell $10 million to something to literally anyone. All I have to do is figure out what they want to buy. That 10 to 100 million is a pretty tough scale, because now you got a little bit of product market fit, but now you really have to get into that enterprise motion, start getting referenceable customers, get them to speak about you. I really enjoyed that phase, for sure. Then the 100 to a billion. Now you're getting partners involved, distribution channels, your scaling the sales organization. So now you're getting into the scaling function. We just did $3 billion last year. I think we'll be $10 billion in a few years. So now you're in hyper scale and a different set of challenges. So each one I've enjoyed, because they're different. I think the 10 to 100 is one of the hardest things. Now, the hyper scalers and AI, they're like blowing through 100 million, right? Like some of these companies, they're crushing it. Which one of you most impressed by? I think curves are super impressive. I think they're growing crazy fast. I use AI for engineering coding. They're doing really well. So I mean, we'll see if they can sustain it. I hope they can, but it's super impressive what they're doing, for sure. You have been in a fight against snowflake. What are your biggest lessons on selling against competition? Everyone has competition. So it's one of the biggest things I've learnt today investing is that before you used to have two or three competitors, data-bracings, snowflakes, say, now there's 15 competitors for everything. What are your biggest lessons for founders on how to selling competitive market? So first of all, you need competition. Otherwise, you don't have a market, right? Especially days. If nobody else is selling into your market, like, you know, what's the point? I don't think there's 15 companies that'll survive. And you know, the traditional thing is there's three companies. There's three clouds. There'll be three AI players. You know, I think there'll only be one data and AI player, data-bracings, but they'll probably be three. Every other market, three, nine, one. One win, crush everyone. No, but I think, listen, in the biggest player, it gets 80% of the market, right? And the other ones, you know, with the rest. With the bad thing, consumer, that's the case. And enterprise, it tends to be the opposite. It tends to be much more distributed. I haven't seen that. I mean, look at Salesforce. Look at ServiceNow. I mean, you look at cloud and you're like AWS. Clouds a little bit more. Even distributed, although GCP, you'd still say it's kind of a distant third, right? But AWS and Azure kind of neck and neck. That's a big battle. Getting back to the competition snowflake question for us. Like, it's kind of good to have somebody that's trying to make it better. And I'm ultra competitive, right? Like, I'm an athlete. So like, the reason I do sales, 'cause I love competition, right? - How far behind are they? - Five plus years, in my opinion. You know, we bet on the future early days. We bet on AI. We bet on the lake house. We bet on open source. They're just dipping their toe into that. And if you look at it too, right? We're three times their growth rate. We've done 250 snowflake. The data breaks migration. Zeta, they're top 10. Like, you know, we're doing pretty well in that market. So I think we're the future. And the founders made some really smart investments and technology bets in our market. R&D to make sure we're well out of them. And so we'll continue to invest. It's great being private too, right? We get to, you know, over invest in R&D, over invest in sales. - Do you think you've benefited from being private in a way that they haven't had the luxury being massive? - Yeah, massive, right. We think it's early in the market, I see it's top of the second inning. And so if we can continue to pull money into innovation in R&D and, you know, sales and distribution, you know, we're gonna grab, you know, more market share and again, get further out of them. - So where have you not spent, or have not spent as much, that you would like to spend more of in the future? - Actually our brands gotten really good, no? So we started to spend more in brand. I think we should have done more that early. Marketing and brand. I want to press even more on partners, you know, we'll fund 200 million in projects to partners this year. But I've spent even more on partners and distribution. Training, we just started Databricks India Academy, you know, we'll train over a million people. - India Academy. - Yeah, Databricks India Academy. - Fuck me, that's niche. - Yeah, it's cool. - Wow. - Well, there's so many companies that, you know, have big IT and outsourcing in India. And so we built the whole academy there to train all the, you know, Indian partners, whipers and the emphasis and train a million people there. So. - What are your biggest lessons in what it takes to do President's Club well? If I'm an early stage founder, should I do President's Club, and what do I need to do to make it good? I mean, early day founders, what I've seen is, they'll do the whole company at an off site, but it's not a President's Club, right? What stage should you do President's Club? - When you have enough of a sales team where, 'cause President's Club is like 10, 15, maybe 20% of your people are going, but if that's only two people, it's not a President's Club, right? So you gotta have at least, I don't know, 50 or 100 people, at least in sales before a joint of President's Club, because it's also like if you're an engineering company, 'cause we bring MVPs to engineer side of it, it's gonna be like, well, sales going on, like a holiday for top performers, but if you think about the sales mentality, you're competitive, you wanna be one of the best, you wanna be one of the top 10, 15%. So it's usually kind of a slightly later stage thing, I would say you gotta be a hundred million plus to do it. You have to be smart about how you invest in it. And the whole idea is create a special experience for the salesperson and their spouse. Get that spouse where they're like, wow, Databricks is amazing company, and you gotta make sure you go next year. - I always say the power of Pillow Toolkit's side. - Yeah, totally. - And my sales team cares more about who goes to Club, or as much as who goes to Club as like, okay, what's the new commission plan, how does that work, all that kind of stuff? It's that important, like people will be like, trying to lobby for the people that are on the fence, and you create that culture where, you know, everybody wants to get there, and it becomes a really fun thing. So I'm just making a wish. - Just a couple of days. - Data breaks his sales good as shit. That's all real weekend. - Oh, it's every weekend. - Oh, it's fine, oh, it's fine. It's been a power of Pillow Toolkit, I think it's so valuable, 'cause when they come home and moan, I just not, but remember, we did have a great time, and Ron was so lovely to us. - Well, listen, we're, I asked for a lot, right? They're traveling all the time. - Does remote sales teams work? You said that about kind of being in the pipeline building, and prospecting data, being in person. - Yeah, we have the saying, comes from one of my leaders, Michael Harman, sell from your feet, not from your seat. If you have the opportunity to go meet a customer in person, go do it. If you have the opportunity to go do launch your dinner, or go do it, because again, we talk about that rapport, talk about that relationship with the customer. They want that relationship where they trust you, where they know they can count on you to solve problems for them, because a lot of times, they're making a decision, it may affect their career. Could catapult them way into the future or not? And so they're gonna make a decision, like the more time you can spend with them, spend with them in person, establish a rapport, crazy, - So these expensive state dinner, not done, 'cause a lot of people are like, oh, that's so last year. - It depends on the company. If you're going to sell to an enterprise company, and you can get executives out for two hours to do a state dinner, do it. It's worth it, 'cause now you'll have a relationship with those people that you wouldn't have had on 30 minutes over the phone, right? - Do you know what I miss? I miss golf days. (laughs) - I love the golf day. - I don't get to golf with the customers. - I love it four hours on a course. - Yeah, that's rare. - Oh, never told me that, but can you imagine if you had four of your biggest enterprise customers hanging out with each other, hanging out with you, shooting the shit, no phone. - Yeah, we try to do events like that. Recently we did spring training events. We had like 30 customers there. Actually, I got to throw out the first pitch for the Texas Rangers, and then-- - And then he goes, he five minutes, but-- (laughs) - Who wasn't that expensive, but then we went golf and then dinner, and you get to spend that kind of time. Now you have a different relationship with those customers. You got to make sure they're the right customers. So, hey, (laughs) he performed at your last president's club. (laughs) We said we weren't gonna talk about that. We know a lot of people about that. Yeah, no, I don't know if that's public or not. - We don't have to. - Maybe it is, I don't know. I mean, last year we had FlowRouted, it was awesome. - Yeah, it was fun. - It was really huge. - It was amazing. - I heard that Ali did a break dance to it. - He did that. - Oh, he did not. That was famous. - No, they did that. - Oh, he did that. He did that. That would be too good, though. - Although he is fun. - Dude, I love that. I've so enjoyed this. Can I do a quick fire with you? - Sure, let's do it. - Okay, there's so many places I can take this. Let's start with, what's the biggest misconception that people have about CRS? - The sales leader, most people think like, oh, you're in sales. The only people in sales they've had an interaction with is like a used car salesman. They're like, oh, you have to be slick. I don't think being a sales leader you have to be slick. Again, I think you have to be knowledgeable and trustworthy. You can be a mentor, right? You don't have to be tough. I'm a driver, but you know, mentor people inspire them. You have such a great voice as well. Oh, thanks. - You're like kind of like a husky, a Matthew McCormick. (laughing) - I appreciate that. I think I look just like them. - You know what? In 10 years, I'm chasing my hero. (laughing) I'm just talking to me wrong. There could be a meditation app. - Oh, yes. - Dude, where are you weakest as a sales leader today? What do you think you need to spend time? - I mean, I'm all in on Databricks. Like, I spend a lot of time on Databricks. My kids are out of the house, so travel time. Is that how to march? - I have great marriage. My wife's like, I mean, I wouldn't be able to do what I do without her. She takes care of everything while I'm here in London or career, Singapore or wherever. - Those two biggest born buffets that the most important decision you make in life is the partner you choose to spend your life with. - Yeah. - Got a lot of time. - What's your biggest advice to me on partner selection? - I told you at the beginning, you were like, how am I supposed to do that? - This is hilarious. - There you go. - That's funny. - No, for sure. I mean, depending on what your life goals are, they have to be in line with your partner's goals, right? Like, kids and what kind of work you're gonna do, all that kind of stuff. Like to me, when I look back at just life in general, like having kids is the best thing I ever did, get married, best thing I ever did. If you do those things right, then it allows you to put your mind and everything into other things. I put it into Databricks. Like, I'd make lots of sacrifices, but my family was always there to make sure I was on the right track. So I think balance is probably the biggest thing for me. You didn't really ask, but work wise. Like, certainly I'm sure there's a ton of stuff I can do better in terms of more patience and all that kind of stuff 'cause I'm a hard driver. Yeah, that's my biggest thing. You gotta have a little bit of balance too. - I never have much patience. It's like a little bit of the 20 minute VC. Are you kidding me? I am for this question, you're adopted son and I'm 23. I'm entering a sales org. First job, what's your biggest advice to me? Is a 23 year old entering sales for the first time, bright eyed? - Two things. One, going into industry that's growing and you're passionate about. Obviously, I think data in the eyes where it's at today, but if you're going into tech, I'd say, going into data in the eyes. So going to a market that's growing and I'd be passionate about it too. If you're like, "Oh, that's boring, don't go into that." Number two is go where you're gonna learn the most. A lot of people try to go, "Oh, I'm gonna get this amount "of money instead of that amount of money." No, go to where you like the people and they're gonna help mentor you and you're gonna learn the most because that's the whole thing about your first job or whatever is how do I learn and how do I grow as an adult, as a worker, as all those kind of things, right? Like that's what it's all about. - Penultimate one, you can go back to any day in the day to British journey. What day do you go back and read of? - Read what it is. - Oh wow, that's a great question. Thank you, I'm a podcast. - Yeah, there you go. - I had some time on this. - Yeah, they didn't even give me a heads up on this stuff. - I was on the TV saying to you, like, "Oh, that's a great sales process." You're like, "No, it was kinda my job." One day, you know what, I think when Ali and I got the first Microsoft deal signed was a pretty amazing day. So that was pretty game-changing. Looking back, do you remember where you were? - I remember when he told me, we were on the 13th floor, there was this little conference room. We would like, like, like, couch in there. It was like video games in there, whatever. So, in the database. - Yeah, in the office. - And they called you up in the like, congratulations, you have a partnership? - Well, no, no, I mean, we've been working on it for months and months and months, but when it finally got signed, we were like, You know me and Ali were like, oh great job. Good work. High five. - Did you do it at the like, - Back to, no. - Back to work. - You can put on any Taylor Swift. - Back to work. - Yeah. - So, - It's wet. - Shake it out. - Yeah, no. - Well, that's-- - I'm more of a rap guy anyway. - This is when you get a Tritiotate in front of the president's house. - She's expensive though. - She's pretty, especially, but a Tritiotate is quite a lot of money. - Totally. - That's a goal for you. - Totally. - I thought that was a pretty good day though. - Oh, that's a pretty great day. - Yeah, that's a cool day. - Yeah. - Okay. Tanya's time. Fun or one. Where is Databricks sent in your mind? - I think we're a trillion dollar company then. - In Tanya's. - Yeah. It's an iconic company. I mean, how many trillion dollars software or tech companies are? There's only seven or eight, I think. It's funny if you think back, like people at Databricks today, it's like Microsoft people, over they like back in 1985, or Google people back in 2000, you know, when they started. - It's a broken. - You are in that journey. - That's where we are. Yeah, we're early days. Like, you know, we've obviously doing well, but it's early days. So we got a lot of work to do, but we're excited about it. Like I said, I think Mark, it's amazing. We've made a lot of good bets. I think we continue to invest and innovate. We can get there. So I think it'll be one of those iconic companies. - This is Matthew McConaughey. It's been wonderful having you. - It's been great. - It's been great. - I wanna see, show you it's like this. - So why I love doing what it is so much. So seriously, thank you so much for being so open and this has been amazing. - Yeah, thanks for having me. I loved it. Dude, you are amazing. - I mean, are you kidding me? He has been the head of sales CRO from zero to five billion in revenue. What a hero. That was such a fantastic show to do. If you wanna see more, you can find it on Spotify. I'd so appreciate it. If you liked the episode and after review, it'd make a huge difference. But before we leave you today, is your finance team a cosenter, tied up in enforcing policies, bogged down by cumbersome processes and drowning in operational busy work? This is why leading global growth companies use Payhawk, the finance orchestration platform, that unifies global spam management with conversational AI to live a best user experience for everybody dealing with company spending. New AI agents for each finance role handle the busy work, acting with the same governance as your finance team, like having a small team of expert assistants that work 24/7, but also providing an exceptional user experience to your employees. 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As always, I so appreciate all your support and stay tuned for an incredible episode coming on Monday with Anton, founder of the fastest growing company in the world, Lovable, zero to 100 million in seven months.