I was like, maybe they're right.

Maybe we should just sell.

And I remember having that conversation with Ben, which is he said, hey, you can do whatever you want.

You can sell. You're going to make a lot of money. And you'll be super successful in life. But, you know, if you're like me, you're going to look back the rest of your life thinking, you know, I missed that one shot. That was the one thing. I should have taken it all the way. I'll never know how far I could have taken it.

It could have been.

So do you want to live with that?

Or do you want to just have the money?

You know, I'll support whatever you want to do. I really couldn't care of us. In 2016, when Data Bricks was on the brink, the board wanted a new CEO. Co-founder, Ali Gottzi, was ready to go back to academia. Instead of leaving, he took the job and turned an open-source project into a hundred billion dollar company.

On this episode, was ready to go back to academia. Instead of leaving, he took the job and turned an open-source project into a $100 billion company.

On this episode of Boss Talk, I'm joined by Databric's CEO, Ali Gotti, alongside Ben Horowitz and

Sarah Wang.

We unpacked the 2016 crisis, the Microsoft deal that changed everything, and how

Databricks built intensity without burnout.

We also talk about giving feedback that actually lands and why not selling might be the

boldest call a founder can make. Let's get into it.

Excited to bring back Boss Talk. This was a series that you guys did a few years ago on Clubhouse.

That was a big hit. Yeah, we had fun. It was Ben's idea. Yeah, excited to bring it back. So in the spirit of boss talk, let's talk about the first time that you became a boss in terms of running Databricks. Let's talk about the moment in 2016 when things weren't as smooth as perhaps they should have been, and we were looking for a new CEO and Ben you recommended Ali.

First of all, like, kudos to Jan for building the company originally and Ben investing

and believing in us. And then also I kind of couldn't have done the CEO job. Ben basically

babysat me the first couple of years. So I did know what was kind of wrong with the company

because I had been there for two, three years and I had seen from inside what we should change and what the issues were.

But we had an open source project that actually became very successful thanks to those first

...