00:00:00 · Ron Gabrisko, Guillaume Moubeche
[00:00:00] S0: It's all about trust and adding value. Right? I'm there to teach customers how to get value out of our product. What you wanna do is tie pricing to your most basic unit of value. And for us, that was consumption. Don't give your data to us. Don't give it to anyone because that's gonna be, like you said, your goal. That's your secret sauce. I mean, that's what I'm here to to help build. [00:00:21] S1: Today on BILLIONS, I'm sitting down with Ron Gabrisko, chief revenue officer at Databricks. In 2016, Ron joined the startup with less than 1,000,000 in annual recurring revenue, a product beloved by engineers who had never heard from a sales rep before. Ten years later, Databricks runs at 5,400,000,000 revenue run rate, growing 65% year on year at a $134,000,000,000 valuation. No CRO in SaaS history has built a revenue engine this fast from this early at a starting point. Ron, thanks a lot for being here. [00:00:59] S0: Yeah. Thanks for having me. Great to great to be here, Guillaume. [00:01:03] S1: Yeah. I'm super excited to get into, you know, like, the dirty details of what it takes to grow a company to that stage. So when you joined, you know, it was below 1,000,000 in ARR. How was it? And what is the first thing that you decided to do?
00:01:03 · Guillaume Moubeche, Ron Gabrisko
[00:01:03] S1: Yeah. I'm super excited to get into, you know, like, the dirty details of what it takes to grow a company to that stage. So when you joined, you know, it was below 1,000,000 in ARR. How was it? And what is the first thing that you decided to do? [00:01:20] S0: Yeah. It's... I mean, it's funny. You know, I was looking at kinda later stage companies at the time, and I met Ben Horowitz from a '16 z, and he's like, yeah, this little startup called Databricks, it's way earlier stage. They invented Spark. It's like the greatest piece of software on the planet and gave it away for free, and I wanna... I want someone to help him build a business from it. So, he's like, has more upside than any company in my whole portfolio. So, you know, I I jumped in the boat. We have seven PhD founders, and, yeah, it was it was basically, you know, how do you create a product? How do you create the monetization? How do you create the initial pitch deck? I mean, we had to build everything from scratch. So it was pretty fun. It was pretty exciting. So... [00:02:10] S1: So lesson one is when Ben says something, you listen, and you you go all in. [00:02:15] S0: Yeah. Exactly. He's he's done he's done pretty well, You know? So Indeed. Yeah. Exactly. So it was it was good advice for sure. [00:02:24] S1: And how did it look like at first, like, when you joined the company and you you... How exactly do you structure the the sales motion and the whole, like, revenue team from the start?
00:02:24 · Guillaume Moubeche, Ron Gabrisko
[00:02:24] S1: And how did it look like at first, like, when you joined the company and you you... How exactly do you structure the the sales motion and the whole, like, revenue team from the start? [00:02:35] S0: Yeah. I mean, I first joined, like, I mean, the company was mostly engineers. So I think we had probably 40 or 50 engineers, couple salespeople, But the initial thesis was like, go to all the Silicon Valley startups because they're gonna be the earliest adopters of new technology. And we were actually... The company was actually trying to do what they called zero touch. So it was like product led growth, but, you know, the product was pretty complex. And so, like, you know, if you have a product that's like intuitive, it's easy to try to do product led growth. In early days, it wasn't that intuitive. Right? It was fairly complex. So, you know, step one was, like, let's learn, you know, how everybody's using Spark, how, you know, open sources is being used, what people will pay for. So, you know, I hired the initial sales team just to go out and literally talk to all the open source users and say, how are you using it? What would you pay for? What are your challenges? And that's how we built our initial, you know, pricing models and initial pitch deck and all that kind of stuff. So not rocket science, but, you know, trying to find product market fit for sure.
00:03:50 · Guillaume Moubeche
[00:03:50] S1: And I'm quite curious because you mentioned, like, okay, you have your your sales team and you reach out to developers who are using an open source project. Mhmm. For me, there is something to unwrap here because how do you reach out to developers and get them to answer? Yeah. And especially, like, talk to sales rep. Totally. So... Yeah. So so what were, like, the the method you used, like, to get them to
00:04:12 · Ron Gabrisko, Guillaume Moubeche
[00:04:12] S0: I mean, listen, like, I think Databricks, and I've talked about this a little bit, but, you know, we're a very technical sales team. Right? Like, I I think, you know, kinda old school just relationship sales, you know, in this world, in a very technical world with technical products, it doesn't work. Right? So you have to have pretty technical salespeople, and the biggest thing we're doing is trying to offer to help. Right? If you have a challenge, you know, we'll bring a technical resource or we'll try to help, with it ourselves, and so that's the biggest thing I think when you sell to engineers. Of course, the... You know, they don't love salespeople. They don't necessarily trust salespeople, and, you know, for me, I've done sales for twenty five plus years. It's all about trust and adding value. Right? I'm there to teach customers how to get value out of our product, and, and that's the biggest thing, you know. It's, how do you break that myth of, you know, trying to sell used cars or something like that. Right? It's a it's a very professional discipline in sales, and so, you know, we took the approach, let's hire really technical sales folks to be able to add value to these engineers. So... [00:05:23] S1: And in your, like, outreach method, like, do you see something that helps you build trust a little bit faster? Is it like using people's jargon? Is it like, I don't know, being super specific about the problem that you can help them solve? Like, what are the things you've tried that allowed you to get like more replies and more meetings?
00:05:23 · Guillaume Moubeche, Ron Gabrisko
[00:05:23] S1: And in your, like, outreach method, like, do you see something that helps you build trust a little bit faster? Is it like using people's jargon? Is it like, I don't know, being super specific about the problem that you can help them solve? Like, what are the things you've tried that allowed you to get like more replies and more meetings? [00:05:43] S0: Yeah. I mean, originally, we had, you know, community edition, which is kinda like our free edition. Right? And people would sign up for that. We mostly would just reach out and say, hey, just, you know, saw you signed up, like, you know, is there anything we can help with? Are there any technical challenges? And so if they ran into, hey, can you help me configure this or set up this or, you know, I have a memory issue with this. I mean, you just add a little bit of value, you you gain trust. You know what I mean? Versus like, hey, can I come pitch you on why you should buy Databricks? And so very different approach is, you know, you gotta give to get back. And so that's what we started with, just, you know, very small, like, reach out to try to help folks, and, you know, that worked really, really well for us.