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.
00:05:43 · Ron Gabrisko, Guillaume Moubeche
[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. [00:06:28] S1: So... And to build up on what you're saying, I think, like, what you did very differently, it's like in 2017, I think, like, obviously, every SaaS company in the world were selling per seat and selling seats. You built basically a consumption model instead. Can you walk us through, like, how exactly did you build, like, that's like, consumption model, and how exactly did you choose where to price, what to keep free?
00:07:01 · Ron Gabrisko
[00:07:01] S0: Yeah. No. That's a great question, because I think one of the early... I mean, Databricks is a innovation machine, you know, in terms of product, but we innovated quite a bit on GTM too. Right? Like, I think we're the first pioneer to build a cloud service around Open Source, and that became, like, how you monetize Open Source, and so we kinda created that playbook, for the market. I think, you know, a lot of startups, and early stage companies, what you wanna do is tie pricing to your most basic unit of value, and for us that was consumption. You know, seats has limitations, especially, you know, there's so many people in an organization, but, you know, tying ourselves ourselves to consumption when data's growing, queries are growing, you know, AI is... And agents are gonna do even more queries, like like that was kind of a genius move that we did as a team, And the market, especially around cloud technologies, was kinda going that way, and so that's where we started, you know, our first kind of proprietary product was our data science notebooks. So we kinda created this entire category of data science, so, you know, we would enter in through kind of the machine learning and data science teams that were building these models to do predictions, and, you know, so we grew a lot from kind of bottoms up with that specific product, and so we would call it open source core, right, where we continue to put more and more in open source, but maybe keep some of the proprietary features so that we can continue to build a business, and then we keep putting those in open source, and so, you know, people have, you know, listen, the great part about open source is you're not locked in, you can move away if you need to, and so we kind of embrace that community and that interest, but also built a business around it with other things we thought had value. So...