Databricks’s CRO Ron Gabrisko talks leading a $100 billion sales strategy

Fierce competition in the data analytics space means there’s no resting on laurels, even for the most ubiquitous of platforms. Databricks could reasonably claim to be just that. One of the top tech startups to watch over the last few years, it was founded by the brains behind analytics engine Apache Spark and has a lengthy roster of partners that includes Microsoft, Google Cloud, Anthropic, and SAP. With a valuation of over $100 billion, Databricks has been on a tremendous path to growth spearheaded by CRO Ron Gabrisko, who has been leading the company’s sales strategy for the last 10 years.

This year alone, Databricks surpassed a $4 billion overall run rate in Q2 with 50% YoY growth, and its AI products also crossed the $1 billion revenue run rate. Add to this a $1 billion Series K, and it appears things have been moving along nicely for the business.

Revenue Brew sat down with Gabrisko to discuss his revenue strategy for the company and what’s been contributing to its success.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Why do you think Databricks has been so successful in the AI landscape?

This company is just an innovation factory. It’s an innovation machine, and that comes from the seven PhD co-founders, so it’s just crazy smart driving their vision of where the whole space is going. But, the biggest part is we have more access to enterprise data than any company on the planet. A lot of these companies, the value of AI for the company is going to be how do you use AI with that proprietary data? It’s not just publicly available data. That’s how these companies can make better decisions, provide better service, [or] launch new products. That’s probably the biggest trend: How do you connect that AI to your enterprise data? We’re at the center of that revolution.

Databricks raised a Series K this year. How have you been using the capital and how is that contributing to the growth?

It’s a lot of innovation. We’re hiring as many engineers as possible and a lot of go-to-market, so salespeople and pre-sales people. We think it’s still early in the game, like at the top of the second inning, so we’re stepping on the gas. We’re using that capital to continue to grow at a record-breaking pace as an enterprise company. We’ve also done some acquisitions very strategically, and we’ll continue to do that. Honestly I think this can be a trillion-dollar company.

Is that capital also going towards Databricks’s agentic initiative, Agent Bricks?

Yeah, exactly. A lot of the new innovations like Agent Bricks, Lakehouse, if you think about it, agents will transform a lot of tasks and automate a lot of the tasks inside these companies, so they need to learn about those processes. They need to learn about the data, so that innovation is pretty cool. It’s actually doing real production AI versus just ChatGPT-type stuff.

How have partnerships with companies like Microsoft, AWS, and others contributed to Databricks’s growth?

I think we’re the fastest-growing service of all time, maybe short of OpenAI on Azure. I think we’re the fastest-growing service of all time on AWS. We’re part of an overall ecosystem on data and AI, so we need cloud partners for infrastructure and other services. We need AI partners so we can bring models to your data. Those are all really important parts of how we build out solutions for customers.

What opportunities are you looking at in the AI space?

The biggest is how we build out agents with Agent Bricks, also, how people are transforming applications. I think AI will literally rewrite how people do SaaS, and so we release Databricks apps that allow our customers to do internal and external apps. It’s all AI-based. It’s all about talking to your data, like all our new products so you can democratize the ability to use data… That’s a huge effort for us: How do we democratize data and AI and make it simple for every single company?

I’m sure that comes with a lot of challenges.

Whenever you go into enterprise, the data is all over the place. Our core heritage was: How do you get your data and modernize your data, consolidate your data on Lakehouse, all the security, governance, and compliance. You’re not just making sure your data is secure, but now you have to secure your models. You have to make sure all your users are using those things correctly. You don’t leak any data. There’s lots of challenges and then just organizational challenges: How does that affect how people do different processes? How do they update those processes? How do you deal with change management? A lot of those things are really challenging.

What is your growth strategy as CRO, both internally with leading your team and driving the revenue for the company?

As CRO, I always believe if I get the best of the best on my team and I motivate them, inspire them, teach them, mentor them, that we’re going to win—great ideas and momentum come from everywhere. That’s my philosophy. We use AI in everything we do, so we do Databricks on Databricks. I run my business on Databricks. I can predict our revenue. I see everything customers are using in terms of products, what else can we sell them, how else can we help them, which customers can churn, all those kinds of things. We’re also using data and AI to understand what markets, where we should be investing more in terms of salespeople and rolling out our new products internationally. We try to use AI in everything we do in terms of growth.