How 7 academics became accidental billionaires:
list and could soon be headed for an IPO that ranks among the most lucrative in the history of software. Already, Ghodsi’s magic act has minted at least three billionaire founders—himself, Stoica, 56, and chief technologist Matei Zaharia, 36—all of whom, by Forbes’ estimation, own stakes between 5% and 6%, worth $1.4 billion or more.
Ghodsi says Databricks is ready to go public soon. It’s on track to near $1 billion in revenue next year, Sonsini notes. 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.
That obsession continued into college at Mid Sweden University, in the quiet industrial town of Sundsvall, where Ghodsi stayed an extra year to get master’s degrees in computer engineering and business administration. He then earned a place at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, the Swedish equivalent of MIT or CalTech, where he received a Ph.D. in computer science in 2006.
“Our group was one of the first to look at how to make it easy to work with very large data sets for people whose main interest in life is not software engineering,” Zaharia says. On a summer day at their new office space one block off Cal’s campus, the founders sat idly in their conference room, pondering how much money would be too much to turn down. An hour after their scheduled meeting time, Horowitz arrived. “Traffic is brutal to this Berkeley place,” he said, before cutting to the chase: “I’m not going to negotiate with you guys; I’m just going to give you an offer, so take it or leave it.” The offer: $14 million in capital at close to a $50 million valuation.
Within a year, the executive team was entirely new, filled with tech veterans who had helped steer successful exits at companies like AppDynamics and Alteryx. Ghodsi offered old executives the chance to stay on if they were willing to report to their replacement. “If people were smart enough, they put their egos aside,” he says. Only two of seven quit.
But competitors, slower to start, are often forced play catch-up on either data processing or artificial intelligence tools. “As academics, we were just thinking big and thinking: ‘Where does the future go?’ It was almost like sci-fi,” Ghodsi says. “Snowflake is obviously an unbelievable company in a great position, but they’ve got a professional CEO,” Horowitz says. “How much longer is he going to be there? Probably not much longer.” With a founding team that’s still fully engaged, “nobody in enterprise software is going to out-innovate Databricks.”
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