Databricks at $7B ARR growing 80%: Ali Ghodsi's CEO playbook revisited
thedealdirector · x · 2026-10-28
Infra Play #167 revisits Databricks and CEO Ali Ghodsi's management playbook.
- Databricks runs at a $7B ARR run rate, growing 80% a year — twice as fast as Snowflake with a run rate 30% higher.
- Ghodsi never wanted the CEO job: in 2015 the company had great open-source adoption but only $1.5M revenue, and the board was quietly interviewing other candidates behind his back. He got the seat as a trial run, without a CEO salary.
- His advice: find the single biggest bottleneck and put an absurd, disproportionate amount of attention on it for two or three years.
- He breaks down the playbook he ran against Snowflake and why great CEOs can't be conflict-averse.
- Databricks rejected the "playbook" sales approach in favor of a culture of top performance, technical customer focus and accountability.
Note: the full piece is behind a paywall; this is the public excerpt.
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