Ghodsi is a co-founder at Databricks, a software company based out of San Francisco. He is also the man behind the massive turnaround for a company that never made profits but now looks at $1 billion revenue in 2022. The confident CEO does not rule out a $100 billion revenue in future.
In February 2021, Databricks took the corporate world by storm and raised a funding of $1 billion to become one of the most valuable companies in the world at $28 billion (over Rs 2 lakh crore).
After founding the company in 2013, Ghodsi took over as CEO in 2016 and since then, Databricks has never looked back.
At 42, Ghodsi is today a hotshot but years back, he had no intention of building a multi-crore company. Instead, he was willing to give out his ground-breaking software free of cost. As he recently told a global business magazine, “We were a bunch of Berkeley hippies, and we just wanted to change the world. We would tell them, ‘Just take the software for free’, and they would say ‘No, we have to give you $1 million’.”
Databricks was founded by Ai Ghodsi and six other academics from the University of Berkeley. It employs pioneering technology and artificial intelligence to create wonders with data. In fact, the CEO has admitted that not everyone gets what Databricks does. He said, “There’s little mystery about how Databricks works: Simply feed massive amounts of data into algorithms to train AI models on how to analyse and make predictions with the data. It’s not like a deep secret sauce that no one knows about.”
As per Ghodsi, Databricks has only four rivals which includes three of the biggest brands of the world in Google, Amazon and Microsoft. Incidentally, all three of them have invested in the company.
Ali Ghodsi is an Iraq-Iran war refugee. He lived in Sweden before he got the opportunity to come to the US and be at the University of California Berkeley as a visiting scholar. The CEO now wants to take Databricks public in the near future.
