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Databricks cofounders weren’t interested in starting a business (2021)
- based_karen 4y ago[flagged]
- Avshalom 4y agoright as if oops they just accidentally/on a whim filed all the paper work and hired HR and accountants... woke one day with a billion dollar company
- lazyasciiart 4y agoBoy wasn’t it fortunate that some of them had done all this paperwork and exec-ing before in successful tech startups! They might have really struggled without a shit-ton of business background!
- Avshalom 4y agoSuch a whacky coincidence!
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- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- toomanyrichies 4y agohttps://archive.ph/XTV5g https://archive.ph/XTV5g
- myroon5 4y agoIs this mostly just a story about Databricks? PayPal mafia refers to how many other companies they founded after PayPal, not the fact that they founded PayPal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal_Mafia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal_Mafia
- hbarka 4y ago+ Spark + Ray + Anyscale "How Ray, a Distributed AI Framework, Helps Power ChatGPT" https://thenewstack.io/how-ray-a-distributed-ai-framework-helps-power-chatgpt/ https://thenewstack.io/how-ray-a-distributed-ai-framework-he... New frameworks to new companies.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- whyage 4y agoAlso, Opaque Systems
- julianeon 4y agoTrue, but think of it this way: If 1 of these 7 Berkeley CS Ph.D.'s decides to leave to found his own company, now that they all have exec experience - what VC would turn them down? Every single one of them will have top tier startup experience, having been part of the founding team of a huge success story, AND the most technical of their first 10 hires at the same time.
- eddsh1994 4y agoBut will it be successful? The PayPal Mafia were successful in their other pursuits. And not just successful, but all founded their own companies valued > than databricks (I think, based on rough memory of their valuations).
- adventured 4y agoIt's a mixture, most have not been anywhere near as highly valued as Databricks. Databricks $28 billion SpaceX & Tesla (~$120 billion & $421 billion) LinkedIn sold for $26.5 billion Yelp $2 billion YouTube sold for $1.65 billion Those are the major companies. Most of the PayPal mafia went on to do angel investing or work for VC firms.
- toomanyrichies 4y ago> Down the line, $100 billion is not out of the question, Ghodsi says—and even that could be a conservative figure. It’s simple math: Enterprise AI is already a trillion-dollar market, and it’s certain to grow much larger. If the category leader grabs just 10% of the market, Ghodsi says, that’s revenues of “many, many hundred billions.” Um... isn't that the same fallacy they trotted out before the dot-com bubble of 2001? [1][2] 1. https://www.inc.com/erik-sherman/the-1-percent-fallacy-that-trips-many-entrepreneurs.html https://www.inc.com/erik-sherman/the-1-percent-fallacy-that-... 2. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-1-10-billion-100-million-chee-kai-chin https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-1-10-billion-100-million-...
- adventured 4y agoNaturally. They're trying to keep a deflating tire inflated. It's one of the worst con sales pitches you can ever see as an investor.
- mikestew 4y agoUpvote for the metaphor. Because how do you keep a deflating tire inflated? Pump, and pump, and pump some more. (Apologies if I'm overstating what might be obvious to everyone else.)
- toomanyrichies 4y agoI mean I know people have a short memory span, I guess I'm just surprised it's this short. I would have thought that most folks with even a cursory knowledge of Silicon Valley history know about the 1% fallacy. I'm not even a founder, and even I know what it refers to. This quote should have been a giant red flag for Kenrick Cai and Forbes. It should have single-handedly changed the angle of the story from puff piece to investigative. To see them both uncritically regurgitating something so thoroughly disproven is another depressing nail in the coffin of modern-day journalism.
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago> Enterprise AI is already a trillion-dollar market... It is? Source? Evidence? > ... and it’s certain to grow much larger. Same questions, with at least as much skepticism.
- prvc 4y ago>Accidental Billionaires: How Seven Academics Who Didn’t Want To Make A Cent Are Now Worth Billions We'll see for how long.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- sam_lowry_ 4y agoI worked for a competitor. This business is built on ignorance and exhuberance and is durable as egg shells.
- hahaxdxd123 4y agoCan you elaborate? I don't use Databricks, but it seems to me a like a bread and butter SaaS infrastructure offering.
- dwater 4y agoAs a data scientist, the greatest thing about Databricks is their marketing and sales departments. Not that they have a bad product, but they're not selling anything brilliantly unique.
- moneywoes 4y agoAnything they do so well? What’s their moat
- Kon-Peki 4y agoWe use Databricks on a data processing pipeline. I don't know of anyone in love with it. It is by far the number 1 source of problems on that pipeline. Just in the last week: * It deleted hundreds of log files without warning * We had a failure starting a cluster; the web UI listed the cluster, but in fact it no longer existed - we had to recreate it. * Log files that it didn't delete show that it is having problems pulling some internal metadata from an AWS IP address (we are on Azure). If the directive from on high came down that we are to rip it out and replace it with something else, nobody would be surprised, or care.
- pmdulaney 4y agoGo Bears!
- lazyasciiart 4y ago> “We would tell them, ‘Just take the software for free,’ and they would say ‘No, we have to give you $1 million.’ ” I’d bet that they actually said “no, we will have to spend $1million to get it ready for us to use”
- geodel 4y agoSo it is about single private company by founders of Apache Spark. Not sure I'd call it mafia. Further I see that a high performance distributed data processing system implemented in Rust is building up around Apache Arrow. So Databricks lead and hence valuations will be quite difficult to maintain.
- itisit 4y agoThis reads like a pre-IPO puff piece, nothing more. Without getting into how obnoxious the term is, there's no "mafia" here. And I'm not buying the altruism so vainly on display. Goes to show how modern tech journalism is basically commissioned.
- oxfordmale 4y agoDatabricks unique selling point is the scalable data lake. The AI functionality is used, however, is hyped with a lot of hot air in this article. I can't see Databricks hitting $100 billion anytime soon.
- legerdemain 4y ago> a best-of-breed piece of future predicting code called Spark You read it here first, folks: Apache Spark is software that predicts the future, not just a distributed job runner for in-memory datasets.
- geodel 4y agoYeah, lets see if it predicts Databricks future.
- mythhouse 4y agoYes it does and its bleak. I don't understand the valuation based on assumption that even the smallest startup will need to write some fancy map-reduce spark jobs to do analytics and AI. Most companies are best served by a warehouse like snowflake and a realtime layer for analytics. I don't understand the value add of databricks.
- jonahbenton 4y agoFWIW what we see are whole different categories of workloads. For primarily API-driven microservice workloads, ETL of data stores into Snowflake makes sense. But for primarily batch or stream workloads- implemented literally as batches or as data streams that have varying unit-of-work semantics, and where the target data model isn't read only analytics but read write operational- something like Spark can make a lot of sense.
- solidangle 4y agoBut you don't have to write map-reduce jobs at all? You can just write SQL queries or Pandas programs, and they automatically get parallelized by Databricks. Databricks is a data warehouse (just like Snowflake). https://www.databricks.com/product/databricks-sql https://www.databricks.com/product/databricks-sql
- legerdemain 4y agoIn a twist, pandas programs don't get parallelized on Spark. Someone had to go and write a parallel layer that duplicated the pandas API, because otherwise you ended up with the entire pandas program executing on a single executor.
- fdgsdfogijq 4y agoMy bet is that databricks will end up like MapR.
- solidangle 4y agoThis sounds like an interesting contrarian take. Would you care to elaborate?
- hackitup7 4y agoThe most interesting part of this article to me (from mid-2021) is the view of the world's most valuable startups: - ByteDance $140b - Stripe $95b - SpaceX $74b - Didi $62b - Instacart $39b - Klarna $31b - Epic Games $28.7b - Databricks $28b - Rivian $27.6b - Nubank $25b Times change...
- thundergolfer 4y agoThat's missing Canva, which at the time was $40B, putting it 5th on that list. Canva is now in the $20-24B range.
- ushakov 4y agowhat happened to their valuation?
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago> what happened to their valuation? Figma got acquired by an enterprise superpower, simultaneously creating a Kraken of a competitor and closing a path to exit. Canva are also one of the worse companies with shareholder liquidity, which I know in at least a few cases lead to fire-sale dispositions.
- urthor 4y agoDo those events change the fundamentals though? Canva's bottom line is still excellent. The previous valuation was just PE froth. Canva just raised money at the top of the market at an absurd valuation, but it's the cash flow that matters.
- thundergolfer 4y agoI really don't know what the person is on about. > Canva are also one of the worse companies with shareholder liquidity, which I know in at least a few cases lead to fire-sale dispositions. "dispositions"? Makes no sense in the context. I worked at Canva and got to sell 20% in 2020 and 2021, the latter at the $40B valuation. So as a shareholder I'm relatively happy with the amount of liquidity in the stock.
- mistrial9 4y agoyou mean this guy? https://www2.cs.uic.edu/~brents/cs494-cdcs/papers/pywren.pdf https://www2.cs.uic.edu/~brents/cs494-cdcs/papers/pywren.pdf
- chevman 4y agoSome weird stuff surrounding Databricks. I know multiple AE level folks who have left big cloud companies (ie Google, Amazon, SFDC, etc) for literal 7 figure pay packages at Databricks and then vaporized sometime there after. Lots of NDAs involved!
- btheshoe 4y agoWhat's ae level
- ewams 4y agoAccount executive. Aka Sales rep.
- curiousllama 4y agoAccount executive - very senior salesperson.
- sriram_sun 4y agoWhat do you mean vaporized? Never heard from them after they joined Databricks?
- pedalpete 4y agoI was hoping the article would dive into some deeper insight as to why they started the business if they weren't interested. I'm not "interested in starting a business" either. But I seem to keep doing it. I was wondering why the other day. My core interest isn't business, but I did enjoy my time as a software engineer and I like technology. I also have a background in design, and love that part. I've worked in marketing and PR, and enjoy that. Finance I'm a bit meh on, but I know how to put together a forecast, worked in accounting for a bit, so I can do the job. I've never worked in HR, but I've managed a few teams. Anybody else in a similar boat? What got you to start your business? Or why do you stick with it?
- nthngtshr 4y agoI feel similarly. My favorite things about running a business are: * The variety of problems I get to work on. I write code, I do sales calls, I manage people, I negotiate contracts, I do taxes, you get the idea. I really like learning things and I never get bored. * I like the intensity. I have to do everything as well as I possibly can, and so I feel like I'm running at close to 100% efficiency at all times. It is very satisfying to feel that you're putting your best work you could. Both of these things are rare at "normal" jobs. I was lucky enough to have similar experiences when I "worked for the man", but those experiences were never close in terms of quality or intensity.
- rohan_ 4y ago>Users feed in their data and the AI makes predictions about the future. John Deere, for example, installs sensors in its farm equipment to measure things like engine temperature and hours of use. Databricks uses this raw data to predict when a tractor is likely to break down. I'm pretty sure this is not what databricks does. Isn't databricks just a way to run queries on unstructured data? Or am I thinking of something else?
- FridgeSeal 4y agoUnless they have radically pivoted, databricks is just managed Spark, plus supporting features. By supporting features, I mean things like their storage functionality (data lake, delta lake, etc) and other libs + tooling.
- hocuspocus 4y agoYou can definitely compute predictions with Spark, for instance: https://www.databricks.com/blog/2020/11/16/how-to-train-xgboost-with-spark.html https://www.databricks.com/blog/2020/11/16/how-to-train-xgbo...
- adapa 4y ago[dead]
- nothrowaways 4y ago>They wanted to replicate what the big tech companies were doing with neural networks, without the complex interface. This is utterly wrong. What data bricks did has nothing to do with neural network. Probably Forbes wanted to mean Hadoop. I am happy for the team though.