[HN Gopher] Databricks cofounders weren't interested in starting...
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Databricks cofounders weren't interested in starting a business
Author : hbarka
Score : 57 points
Date : 2023-01-20 19:53 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.forbes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.forbes.com)
| pmdulaney wrote:
| Go Bears!
| toomanyrichies wrote:
| https://archive.ph/XTV5g
| chevman wrote:
| Some 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!
| hackitup7 wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| That's missing Canva, which at the time was $40B, putting it
| 5th on that list. Canva is now in the $20-24B range.
| myroon5 wrote:
| Is 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
| hbarka wrote:
| + Spark
|
| + Ray
|
| + Anyscale
|
| "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]
| dang wrote:
| Submitted title from "There was PayPal mafia. Meet the Berkeley
| mafia". That broke the site guidelines (" _Please use the
| original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don 't
| editorialize._")
|
| Since the article's own title is also linkbait, I've replaced
| it with a representative phrase from the main text.
| julianeon wrote:
| True, 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 wrote:
| But 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 wrote:
| It'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.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| At least two of them _already_ had that background, though.
| They weren't blank slates: "billionaire startup alumni founds
| second billionaire startup with new colleagues" would be a
| perfectly accurate title.
|
| > Stoica was an exec at $300 million video streaming startup
| Conviva, while Shenker had been the first CEO at Nicira, a
| networking firm sold in 2012 to VMware for about $1.3 billion
| jefftk wrote:
| _> billionaire startup alumni_
|
| Only Stoica, Ghodsi, and Zaharia are listed on
| https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires and I don't
| think any of them were billionaires before Databricks? Exec
| at a $300M company or CEO overseeing a $1.3B exit means
| rich, yes, but not billionaire rich.
| pedalpete wrote:
| I 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?
| geodel wrote:
| So 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 wrote:
| This 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.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| you mean this guy?
|
| https://www2.cs.uic.edu/~brents/cs494-cdcs/papers/pywren.pdf
| toomanyrichies wrote:
| > 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-...
|
| 2.
| https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-1-10-billion-100-million-...
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| > 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.
| adventured wrote:
| Naturally. 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 wrote:
| Upvote 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.)
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| > "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"
| prvc wrote:
| >Accidental Billionaires: How Seven Academics Who Didn't Want To
| Make A Cent Are Now Worth Billions
|
| We'll see for how long.
| [deleted]
| sam_lowry_ wrote:
| I worked for a competitor. This business is built on ignorance
| and exhuberance and is durable as egg shells.
| hahaxdxd123 wrote:
| Can you elaborate? I don't use Databricks, but it seems to me
| a like a bread and butter SaaS infrastructure offering.
| 988747 wrote:
| Most use cases currently served by Apache Spark clusters
| would run 10x faster on a laptop with fast SSD (Macbook
| perhaps), and an ad hoc cat/grep/sed pipeline /s
| dwater wrote:
| As 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 wrote:
| Anything they do so well? What's their moat
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| We 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.
| legerdemain wrote:
| > 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.
| bsaul wrote:
| Damn, thanks for that comment. I was actually wondering if they
| were talking about the same "spark" i already knew.
| [deleted]
| geodel wrote:
| Yeah, lets see if it predicts Databricks future.
| mythhouse wrote:
| Yes 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.
| fdgsdfogijq wrote:
| My bet is that databricks will end up like MapR.
| based_karen wrote:
| [flagged]
| [deleted]
| Avshalom wrote:
| right 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 wrote:
| Boy 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 wrote:
| Such a whacky coincidence!
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